Previously on Watcher of Infinite :
"My name is Johns. To the world, I am a beggar, but my life began in blood. It wasn't my doing—something inside me woke up one chilly night when I was twelve. I felt a thirst, not for water, but for life. My veins glowed black; my senses reached into the distance. My 'father,' Derrick, was a cruel, abusive man who beat my mother, Susana. One night, his hand stayed too long on her. The monster inside me broke his arm and threw him through the wall. But the hunger was blind. My mother tried to stop me, and in my rage, I took her life. I tore the heart from Derrick's chest and feasted. I fled that night, a monster in the eyes of my neighbors. Now, I must find my true people. I will start by saving the missing child."
[ SYSTEM INTERFACE: BIOMETRIC_RECALL ]
SUBJECT:Johns / Kennie
MEMORY_STATE:Trauma_Locked / High-Fidelity Retrieval
LOCATION:Outskirts of Old Nairobi (The Night of Awakening)
ATMOSPHERE:Chilly Highland Mist / Metallic Scent
STABILITY:38% (Critical Emotional Flux)
[BOOTING FLASHBACK...]
[|||||||||| 100%]
The air in the small corrugated iron shack was freezing, the kind of Kenyan highland chill that bites through the skin and settles in the marrow like ice. Twelve-year-old Johns lay beneath a thin, moth-eaten duvet that offered no protection against the draft whistling through the gaps in the rusted walls. His body was wracked with a fever that no herbal medicine or prayer could touch. He wasn't sweating; he was vibrating, his very molecules humming with a frequency that felt like a scream.
VISUAL: Dark, ink-like veins spiderwebbing across his forearms, pulsing with a rhythmic, violet light that seemed to eat the surrounding shadows. The glow cast flickering, ghost-like patterns on the iron sheets of the ceiling.
AUDIO: The roar of the wind outside, rattling the loose nails of the roof, and the louder, more terrifying roar of the man in the next room. Derrick's slurred, booming voice. "Where is my food, you bitch?"
SENSORY: The world had become too loud, too bright, too vivid. Johns could hear the termites gnawing on the wooden support beams at the corner of the room. He could hear the blood rushing through Derrick's carotid artery—a thick, rhythmic thump-thump that sounded like a heavy drum in a silent valley. It wasn't just a sound; it was a call. A dinner bell for a hunger he didn't understand.
"You never left any money behind for us to cook, Derrick," Susana's voice was a fragile whisper, trembling like a leaf in a storm. "How can I provide what you do not give? The charcoal is gone, the maize is finished."
"How dare you talk back to me!" Derrick roared.
Then came the sound. A slap like thunder. It wasn't just a hit; it was a blow that seemed to vibrate through the entire house, shaking the foundation and rattling the plastic cups on the table. Susana let out a muffled cry as she hit the floor.
Inside his room, Johns' eyes snapped open. They were no longer the warm brown of a Kenyan sunrise; they were the terrifying, bottomless purple of a dying nebula. He felt the hunger flare into a white-hot void. It wasn't the hunger for a meal; it was a physical hole in his soul that demanded the essence of life itself.
He threw the duvet aside. His bare feet didn't feel the cold dirt floor. He walked into the main room, his shadow stretching and warping as the violet light in his veins intensified. He stood like a statue between his mother, who was clutching her bruised face on the floor, and the man who called himself his father.
"Don't even dare lay a hand on her again," Johns said. The voice didn't sound like a twelve-year-old boy's. It sounded like a thousand years of tectonic plates grinding together in the deep earth.
Derrick laughed, a wet, drunken sound that smelled of stale beer. "Look at this bitch! Is this how you raise your child? He has no respect for me! He thinks he can stand up to me?"
Derrick lunged, throwing a heavy, clumsy fist meant to shatter a boy's jaw and put him back in his place.
But to Johns, the world had entered a state of liquid slow-motion. He saw the sweat flying off Derrick's brow in individual droplets. He saw the yellowing of his teeth and the frantic dilation of his pupils. Johns didn't dodge. He simply reached out and caught the massive fist in a palm that felt like reinforced steel.
"How did you do that?" Derrick gasped, his face twisting from drunken anger to sheer, sober confusion.
With a sickening snap-crunch of splintering radius and ulna, Johns broke Derrick's arm with a flick of his wrist. Before the man could even register the agony to scream, Johns struck him in the center of his chest. The force was astronomical—it sent Derrick flying backward, through the thin iron wall of the shack, and into the muddy dirt road ten feet away.
Susana grabbed Johns, crying hysterically, trying to pull him back from the hole in the wall. "My son! What is happening to you? Stop this! Please!"
But Johns was no longer himself. The "Humanity" protocol had been overwritten by a raw, predatory instinct. He saw her only as a hindrance, a blockage between him and the prey bleeding on the road. He raised his hand—the same hand she had held every morning as she walked him to the primary school gates—and closed it around her neck.
The crack of her neck was the finality of his innocence. She fell to the floor, her eyes still full of a mother's confused, undying love even as the light left them. She was the only person who had ever protected him, and now she was a lifeless heap because of the monster he had become.
Johns walked out to the road. Derrick lay helpless in the mud, gasping for air, his chest crushed and his pride gone. He looked into the boy's eyes and saw nothing but the abyss. He saw the fear he had inflicted on others mirrored back at him a thousandfold.
"You'll never hurt anyone ever again," Johns muttered. He plunged his hand into Derrick's chest as if the man were made of soft clay, his fingers closing around the frantic, drumming heart. He ripped it out and began to feast.
That was the night the neighbors learned he was a monster. They came with torches and machetes, their shouts of "Shetani!" echoing through the night. Johns had stood over the bodies, his face covered in blood, before he turned and vanished into the darkness.
[FLASHBACK FADE TO BLACK]
Reality: The Silver City
The memory shattered like glass, the shards piercing into his current consciousness as the reality of New Nairobi rushed back in. The scent of cheap liquor and iron-rich blood was replaced by the pungent, synthetic stench of the garlic-lime paste and the ozone-heavy air of the silver gates.
Johns stood in the center of the panicked square, his breath coming in ragged, shallow hitches. His heart hammered against his ribs, not with fear, but with the echoes of that twelve-year-old's hunger. He looked down at his hands—they were trembling, soot-stained, and calloused from years of begging for scraps of bread, but for a split second, he saw the black veins pulsing beneath the grime, just as they had that night.
Around him, the city was a vortex of absolute chaos. The vampire scout he had confronted—the one that had whimpered at his presence—was long gone, vanished into the thick, unnatural black mist that was currently swallowing the skyscrapers of the High-Sector. The silver gates had been bypassed, and the protective garlic was failing. The screams of the crowd were a deafening, unified wail that mirrored the screams in his own mind.
"What have I done?" he whispered to the ghost of Susana, his voice barely audible over the sirens. "I have hidden for so long... I lived like a dog to pay for what I did... but the hunger is still here. The monster is still here."
He snapped his head up, his senses suddenly razor-sharp, cutting through the panic like a knife. He could hear things no mortal should. He heard the heartbeats of the kidnapped children fading as they were carried north toward the Forbidden Zone. He could hear the Governor wailing on his balcony in the distance, the sound of a powerful man who had suddenly discovered he was nothing.
"MY CHILD IS MISSING!" the cry ripped through the air again, a thousand voices joining together in a chorus of grief.
Johns stayed frozen for a moment, his feet rooted to the silver-dusted stones of the plaza. Every instinct told him to run—to follow the scent of the vampires, to tear the black mist apart with his bare hands and rescue the stolen lives. But the weight of his past held him back like a heavy chain. He was a monster who had killed the only woman who loved him. He was the one who had eaten the heart of the man who raised him.
How could a monster be a savior? How could the hands that broke his mother's neck be the ones to save the city's children?
He looked toward the dark horizon, where the Castle of the Watcher waited in the distance, silhouetted against a sky that was turning the color of a bruise. The "Sun" in his chest flared—a violet, cosmic heat that burned through his burlap rags and warmed the cold air around him. The flashback was over, and the boy who lived in the shack was gone, but the prince who had been born in blood was waking up.
The neighbors were right, he thought, his eyes beginning to glow with that same terrifying violet. I am a monster. But maybe that's what this world needs right now.
He didn't move yet, but the beggar named Johns was dead. In the middle of the screaming city, the Son of Dracula stood still, staring into the heart of the coming war.
[ CHAPTER END ]