"Quit toying with me boy!"
Bassi's swings were relentless, but so were Sanit's movements which seemed to be done as if he were in a daze.
Who's my friend?
Wait, first let me deal with this guy.
Why am I escaping...his movements are sluggish, borne of emotions.
He isn't calculative.
Sanit rolled on the floor to get closer and hit his ear to the ground as he smashed Bassi's forehead with a kick that he extended from his unusual position catching the man completely offguard.
The hammer didn't fall but it would soon enough.
Sanit took the moment to rise on his toes and in a flash grabbed Bassi's throat to pummel him to the wall, as he entered a battle to wrest away the hammer from his grip.
"Let go of me you..." Sanit didn't let the man finish as he smashed his head with his own, making him groan.
"You did something to a friend of mine, right? Who?"
Bassi seemed to struggle with the impact and Sanit's strength yet somewhere he found the energy to give a bloody grin, "oh yeah I did. That's what you get for being disloyal and untruthful to your word, boy."
This guy...
Sanit kneed him in the groin making him collapse and the hammer finally fell with a crash. Feeling heat from behind him Sanit turned to see flames spreading from the embers of the blast.
"I've never done this to a human before. The act of killing that is," Sanit looked down at his hands which were still foreign to his eyes yet bore his strength and a strange anger, "I have very little holding me back from testing it out on you, paji."
"His name is Akhil you dimwit," Bassi spat as he collapsed to the ground, "how the hell do you forget your friend's name? Are you human?"
Good question. What am I even? Spending so much time as an ignorant husk yet craving humanity as a drug.
"What happened to you in there?" Bassi spat blood as he tried to meet his gaze.
He then looked at his hammer which had lost its earlier glow and was simple again, "the last time you took a blow from my construct, it shattered every part of you and now you grin at being hit by it? How?"
Sanit stared at the defeated man whose disbelief mirrored his own to an extent. That he was here, right here and back again was quite surreal. He looked up and around and sighed.
"I'm not entirely sure either, but I...survived."
Sanit left him where he was, deciding it was time to leave, with the flames threatening to engulf the place.
As he passed by several stacks of burning and smoking shelves, he came to a stop as he saw two figures huddled in a heap. Both of them boys of his age. Murdered. With eyes open and hands joined. Dried blood caking their wounds.
A fate that he had probably escaped.
Their murderers were right here. One dead, two of them somewhere here and their leader injured, helpless.
A life of regret, huh?
A few meters away, in the same burning warehouse were the two members of whom one had defied Bassi's orders and ended up killing Banno.
They were hurriedly gathering their money including that of their employers when they heard a step behind them and immediately turned.
Besides the flickering of approaching flames and smoke they could see nothing.
"Fuck, lets get this over with." The tall and stubborn one said.
"Bhai, come now...we should be lucky we're even alive, lets go already..." his meeker buddy begged him to see reason.
"Shut the hell up! We worked our asses off for the slacking newbies workload, besides disposing off them. I ain't going empty handed."
"You both aren't going anywhere at all."
Sanit's voice boomed before he picked up one of them by the collar and smashed his head against the other.
Making sure they were both down, he proceeded to deliver successive blows with his bare hands to their faces.
After a while the warehouse exploded sending concrete and metal flying into the air, as a huge fireball erupted through the asbestos ceiling into the night sky.
A lone figure stumbled out, his body smoking as he patted down the flames sticking to the clothes he had borrowed from one of the workers he had beat and didn't look back as he made his way down the empty street. His way illuminated only by the blaze behind.
He hadn't gone a few feet ahead when the most insane headache ripped through his skull.
"Gaaahhhh!"
He exclaimed as he tried to sit somewhere, get a foothold anywhere but he fumbled and tripped, bringing down with him rubbish and discarded items on the street, clattering around him.
His mouth and eyes tried to stay open, both squeezing and shutting together as if in a duet.
Oh god, what is this? Its so much more irritating than painful.
But I have to move.
His bent over body slowly stood, his head looking from front at his back. The lights were approaching.
He stumbled his way through. The sidewalls of the alley his support.
He could sense things now. Faraway things. Things he shouldn't have been able to.
Random traffic, sounds of steps, voices, heartbeats, the environment settling in for the night.
Is this because of my time there? Why is this all happening?
Will it even stop?
He could feel it return briefly between indefinite intervals during the longest walk of his new life.
That demented bloodlust that had kept him going in the worst of the worst.
That goddamn thing that he had willingly let consume parts of him he should've never allowed it to.
What was it that the Gandharva called it? Ah, yeah. Raktabij.
An incessant want for violence had turned him into that there. And he had known, it wouldn't just leave him. It was here to stay.
Still eating. Still thriving.
Now it was paired up with all sorts of new sensations. His eyes tried to widen upon the realization but he winced at the sudden but simple effort.
That's it. That's what this is. My senses are being overwhelmed but this time without effort.
Back there he had to force himself when he would partially lose his senses to make out where the next assaults would fall. His inborn healing taking its sweet time to get him back to full capacity.
Everything has consequences. Whether unintended, I have brought much of myself back with me. Bloodlust and all.
My tools of survival will one day, in all probability, usher my doom.
He had warned me. And I had heard him.
So this is just fate then. Nothing to be done about it.