BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Gunshots shattered the silence of the seminar hall.
Every student and teacher flinched, instinctively covering their eyes, unwilling to witness Luna being executed at point-blank range.
Then –
"AHHHH!"
A scream tore through the hall. But it wasn't Luna's.
Heads lifted cautiously as eyes opened one by one. And what they saw didn't make sense.
Seven of the terrorists were lying on the floor, their eyes still wide open, their bodies twitching where they'd fallen. None of them had even managed to raise their weapons before someone had killed them.
The leader was alive… barely.
He was screaming, clutching the mangled stump of his right hand, the one that had been holding the gun against Luna's forehead a second ago.
"Brother!"
Luna's voice cut through the daze.
Every eye in the room followed her as she bolted toward the entrance, where a young man stood in the doorway, his school uniform soaked in blood, his crimson hair matted against his forehead, his gun still raised and pointed at the terrorist leader.
He was the one.
The realization rippled through the hall in slow and stunned silence.
Before anyone in the room could react, before the terrorists themselves had even finished falling, this bloodied boy had taken down eight armed men by himself.
****
[A few moments before]
Luna had been standing in front of the terrorist leader, waiting to die.
The cold muzzle of the rifle pressed against her forehead, steady and unmoving.
She could feel the barrel shaking slightly, not from the terrorist's nerves, but from the pressure of his finger tightening on the trigger.
Her thoughts drifted. Not to her parents or to her life, but to one person.
Her Brother.
Ever since Luna could remember, she had called him that. It was what he was and what he'd always been.
But somewhere along the way, quietly and embarrassingly, she'd started hating that word.
Brother.
It felt wrong in her mouth, too restrictive for what she actually felt when he smiled at her, or ruffled her hair, or held her hand when she was scared.
'I wonder where his real family is. Mom and Dad never really told us anything about where he came from…'
Damian had been adopted and Luna had always known. It hadn't changed anything for her when she'd first found out, she still loved him the same way she always had.
But as she'd grown older, a different kind of feeling had crept in. Something she couldn't name, something that made her flustered around him in ways a sister shouldn't feel.
She'd stopped trying to make sense of it a long time ago.
But yesterday morning, for the first time ever, she'd seen something different in him.
Her innate skill lets her see emotions as colors. Everyone she looked at was a soft wash of feelings – joy, irritation, love, curiosity – layered over them like a second skin only she could read.
It was the reason she always seemed to make the right choices, the right friends and the right decisions. She didn't need to trust words as she could see what was really underneath.
And yesterday, Damian had been drowning in red and black.
Negative emotions so thick she'd nearly stumbled the first time she looked at him properly. Grief, exhaustion and loneliness so deep it had physical weight.
And beneath it all was a cold, unfamiliar darkness that hadn't been there before.
But his love for their family hadn't dimmed at all. If anything, it had deepened. The warmth he felt for their parents and for her, it was even more intense than before, just buried beneath everything else.
She had understood, in that moment, that whatever had happened to him was real. That the boy she'd grown up with was carrying something enormous and terrible and was trying desperately not to let it show.
So when they'd finally been alone on the bike this morning, she hadn't been able to stop herself from hugging him… Not because she was being affectionate, but because she wanted him to feel, just for a few seconds, that he wasn't alone in whatever he was going through.
She'd meant to say something meaningful. Something that would actually help.
Instead, she'd ended up murmuring something embarrassing about how attractive he'd become.
'Thank God he didn't hear that part…'
Even now, pressed against the barrel of a gun, the memory made her cheeks warm.
The cold metal against her forehead pulled her back to reality.
She had stood up and confronted the terrorist leader for a reason. She'd seen the killing intent bleeding through his emotions, black and sharp, edged like a knife.
She had known, with the certainty her skill gave her, that he was about to execute someone… Anyone, just to prove a point.
So… she'd stood up to be the one.
She wasn't a hero and she didn't want to die. But everyone in this room, her teachers, her classmates and her friends, they were people she cared about.
And if someone had to go first to buy them another few minutes, she'd rather it be her than them.
'I don't want to die… but better me than anyone else.'
She closed her eyes, her body trembling, and waited for the end.
'I'm sorry, Damian…'
The gunshots rang out.
But… she didn't feel anything.
For a long second, she wondered if this was what dying felt like.
But there was no pain or impact, just a sudden silence and a strange awareness that her heart was still beating.
Slowly, she opened her eyes and saw…
The terrorists were on the ground, all of them. The two who'd been standing by the door were still falling, clutching their throats where deep red lines had opened across them.
And standing in the doorway, panting, his face streaked with blood –
Damian.
Her gun-holding brother, aiming directly past her head at the leader who was now screaming on the floor.
"Brother!"
Luna's voice broke as she ran to him.
She didn't slow down and didn't stop to think as she crashed into his chest with everything she had and buried her face against him, fingers twisting into the fabric of his bloody shirt.
Tears came in a flood, childlike sobs that she couldn't control. She could feel his heartbeat against her cheek, too fast, too hard, and the solid weight of his arm as it came up to hold her in place.
"It's alright," he said quietly. "I'm here now."
****
Damian held Luna against him for a few long seconds, letting himself feel the relief wash through his body.
She was alive!
The thought repeated in his head like a mantra he hadn't given himself permission to voice until now.
A few minutes ago, he had done the impossible. When he'd seen the terrorist leader raise his gun to Luna's head, something inside him had snapped, with the quiet, final click of a door locking shut.
Alessio's instincts had taken over completely.
He'd moved before conscious thought could catch up, kicked the door open. Cut the throats of the two terrorists stationed at the entrance in a single motion, left hand, right hand, both blades moving in the same heartbeat, then his gun had come up.
Six shots, fired faster than most people in his previous life could even draw.
Each bullet had found a head. The only shot that hadn't been lethal was the one he'd put through the leader's gun hand, specifically through the fingers and wrist, shattering the bones and tearing the gun out of his grip before he could pull the trigger.
He'd wanted that one alive.
Looking down now at the man still writhing and screaming on the floor, Damian slowly let go of Luna and took her hand instead.
"Come with me."
His voice was quiet and calm as he led her across the room, stepping over bodies without looking down, until he stood directly above the terrorist leader.
The man was curled into himself, cradling his mangled hand, blood and tears streaking his face through the torn fabric of his mask.
Damian knelt beside him, still holding Luna's hand.
Then he looked up at Luna.
"Close your eyes."
Luna hesitated. She could feel the darkness radiating off him in waves, the kind of emotion she'd only ever seen in the worst criminal records her father had once shown her.
But she trusted him, so she closed her eyes.
Damian turned back to the terrorist.
The rest of the seminar hall was silent and watching. The surviving teachers had already herded the younger students behind them.
They had already seen Damian kill seven men dead in less than three seconds. The bodies littered around the room told that story clearly enough.
But what came next was something different.
Damian's free hand closed around the terrorist's jaw, forcing his mouth open. His other hand, the one not holding Luna's, drove a knife into the man's mouth and began cutting.
"AHHH! NWOOHHH! UIZE SAAP! AHHH!"
The hoarse, wet sounds the terrorist made weren't screams. They were gurgles that were desperate and drowning noises that didn't belong to any language.
Damian tossed the severed tongue onto the floor without looking at it.
Several teachers turned away. One of the older students doubled over and vomited into his own hands.
Mrs. Ariel, Luna's homeroom teacher, had her arms wrapped around two younger girls, pressing their faces into her uniform to shield them, her own face ghost-white.
But… Damian didn't stop.
Crunch Crunch
He took the eyes next, both of them and crushed them beneath his heel when they hit the floor, because something about the crunch felt necessary.
Then the ears, slowly, one at a time, with the deliberate care of someone making sure his victim felt every second of it.
He cut the tendons in the remaining hand so the fingers would stop twitching and the man couldn't try to grab him. Then he started on the fingers themselves, removing them one joint at a time.
The terrorist didn't lose consciousness. His body was keeping him awake somehow, probably the adrenaline, probably the terror, probably whatever low rank awakening he'd possessed, and Damian welcomed it.
'Please… Don't die just yet... Hold on until I'm finished.'
The thought was so cold it didn't feel like it belonged to a fifteen-year-old.
Time seemed to stretch. The sounds of the terrorist's broken screams filled the seminar hall in waves that never quite stopped, the noises growing weaker and wetter as more of his body was taken apart.
The students and teachers had stopped making sound entirely. Most were staring at the floor and a few were staring at Damian like they couldn't look away even though they wanted to.
The leader now lay in an expanding pool of his own blood and urine with his eyes gone, tongue gone, ears gone and hands ruined.
And Damian was still not satisfied.
'He's still alive. Good! I can keep going–'
But… a small hand touched his shoulder.
He stopped and looked up.
Luna's eyes were still closed as her fingers trembled against the bloodied fabric of his uniform.
"Please," she whispered. "Let's stop. Please, brother…"
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Damian stared at her for a long moment.
Her face was pale and drained of color.
Thud
Then, slowly, he released the knife. It fell into the pool of blood with a soft, wet sound.
He stood up, wiped his hands on his already-ruined shirt, and took Luna's hand again.
It was only then that he looked around the hall properly.
Dozens of students and teachers... Some were still vomiting, some frozen and some crying silently into their hands.
And every single one of them was looking at him with an expression Damian had seen many times before, in a different life, on different faces.
Fear.
They were looking at him like he was some kind of a monster.
That fear… was more than what they had for the terrorists.
They were more afraid of the boy who had just saved them.