The Price of Vengeance :
Fear overtook the man all at once.
He stumbled back, collapsing onto the ground, his hands trembling violently. His voice, which had been so confident only moments before, choked in his throat.
"Forgive us… please!"
Kobi didn't answer right away.
He moved forward.
One step.
Then another.
His legs were barely shaking. Not from fear — from exhaustion. His body was screaming for him to stop, but he pressed on, driven by something far more potent than pain.
"Now, you beg for forgiveness… because you are afraid," he said, his voice low, hard, and cutting. "Just a moment ago, you were the one who wanted to see me fall. You were the one who wanted to crush me without hesitation."
He spat out a trail of blood but did not stop.
"Look at yourself. The roles have changed, but you haven't. You didn't want justice. You only wanted to win."
He stopped directly in front of him.
The dark energy still vibrated around him — unstable, spent — like a beast that no longer had the strength to bite but refused to back down.
"Forgiveness isn't claimed through fear," he continued. "It is earned. And you? You offered nothing but violence. I am neither your mercy nor your salvation."
He leaned in slightly, his bloodied face inches from the man's mask.
"Today, you will find no pity… and no turning back."
The man swallowed hard.
The silence grew heavy.
Then, something shifted in the man's gaze. Fear gave way to something more primitive — not logic, not calculation, but pure instinct. His body decided before his mind could.
He bolted, lunging through the crowd and shoving bodies aside in his panic. Screams erupted. People scrambled out of the way. Chaos began to tear open around him.
Kobe moved to follow.
He took one more step.
Ah…
Then his legs gave out.
All at once.
Without warning.
All the strength he had ripped from his very soul turned against him. His breath hitched. His chest tightened. It felt as though the air was being torn from his lungs. His body — still only that of a ten-year-old child — had nothing left to give.
He fell.
The dark energy dispersed like a dying shadow.
Kobe collapsed onto the cold floor.
But even then, he didn't stop. With a stubbornness that was almost animalistic, he began to crawl.
His fingers clawed at the stone. His nails cracked. His blood left smears across the ground. His eye burned, and his vision blurred in waves. Before him, there was nothing but his mother's grey shawl, motionless amidst the tumult.
She was there.
Still there.
Sitting, empty, with no idea who he was.
Kobe crawled to her feet. Exhausted. Broken. Shaking.
"Mama… you were right…" he sobbed, his voice already fading. "I'm sorry… I couldn't be there for you…"
Alma looked down at him.
The woman without a memory looked at this blood-soaked child without recognizing him, yet something in her seemed to hesitate.
Something ancient and instinctive, like a forgotten footprint at the bottom of a void.
With a slow, almost mechanical gesture, she placed her hand on Kobe's head.
Kobe felt that cold hand.
He closed his eyes.
His tears mingled with the blood still trickling down his cheek.
And then, finally, everything cut to black.
His head fell onto the lap of the woman who no longer knew his name.
He lost consciousness.
In a dark corner of the hall, hidden behind the columns, someone had seen it all.
He hadn't moved.
Not a single muscle. Not a single breath too many.
From the shadows of the columns, tucked into the dead angle of the square, he had absorbed everything. Every detail. Every second. With the patience of someone who had long understood that moving too soon cost far more than doing nothing at all.
On the left shoulder of his dark jacket, a symbol was embroidered in off-white thread.
Discreet. Almost invisible to anyone who didn't know what to look for — a long-necked bird, its neck twisted backward, head turned completely over its own back, eyes fixed on what it had left behind. As if it refused to move forward without first understanding where it had come from.
He always knew what to look for.
His gaze slowly swept across the devastated scene. The bodies collapsed on the cobblestones. The cracks running through the stone like shattered veins. The trails of blood that traced a path from the center of the square all the way to the feet of a woman sitting motionless, as though the world around her had ceased to exist.
He noted everything.
He forgot nothing.
His eyes returned to the unconscious child.
A silence passed.
"What a kid…"
He stopped short.
No. That word was too small.
"…monstrous."
He tilted his head slightly, eyes half-closed, as if recalculating something he thought he had already understood long ago.
He had seen things in his life. Things most people only witness once — and that's enough to break them forever. Scenes worse than this one. Far more bodies. Powers that would have made anyone else retreat.
But this…
A child. Ten years old at most, perhaps less. Knees on the ground. A broken leg. Blood streaming from one eye down his cheek.
And yet — he hadn't hesitated. Not even once.
The two men hadn't had time to understand. The energy had surged, enveloped them, and they had collapsed as if something essential had been ripped from deep inside them. He had seen their faces hollow out. He had recognized exactly what that meant.
That kind of power wasn't supposed to appear out of nowhere.
Then his gaze slid to the ground where the other man had stumbled — the one wearing the mask. He had spotted the insignia right from the start. Engraved on the lapel of his jacket — several perfect concentric circles, one inside the other, radiating from a single center like ripples on still water. The Adinkrahene. A symbol not granted to just anyone. Whoever wore it possessed rank, authority, and enough power that others stepped aside without him even needing to ask.
That man had fled.
He had bolted like a trapped animal and vanished into the crowd, abandoning all dignity behind him.
Because of a child crawling on the stone.
His lips barely moved.
"No mark. No visible lineage."
He observed the way the child had crawled all the way to the end — nails broken, blood on his cheek, fingers clawing at the stone.
Even at his limit. Even exhausted.
He hadn't let go.
What this child had unleashed tonight — that darkness, that hunger in the energy, the way it sought and seized — it resembled nothing he had ever catalogued. Not in the archives. Not in the field reports.
It resembled nothing known.
And in his line of work, the unknown was either the most dangerous…
…or the most precious.
He peeled himself away from the wall.
The last witnesses still standing stepped aside without knowing why. Something in the air had shifted the moment he moved. Something heavy.
Indefinable. As if the city itself were holding its breath.
He advanced toward the child.
And everything stopped.
Then, slowly, he smiled.