After Arthur screamed, he felt someone touch him, and then everything went dark.
Mary jolted awake from her son's screaming. She looked beside her—her husband Jack was nowhere to be found. Her heart hammering, she hurriedly got up to check on Arthur, to see if he was okay. When she left her room and walked toward where she thought the screaming had come from, there was nothing. She checked everywhere: the kitchen, the living room, his room. Every corner of their home yielded nothing. Arthur was gone.
Hurry soon transformed into absolute panic. Where was her son? And where was Jack? Her hands trembled as she moved through the house, calling their names into the silence.
She walked past one of the windows and froze. A man stood near it, watching her. He smiled—a cold, calculated smile—and gave her a wink. He mouthed something, but Mary couldn't hear him through the glass. The gesture felt like a threat wrapped in mockery.
She stumbled past the window, her skin crawling with terror. Was he going to take her next? Was he the one who took Jack and Arthur? Sweat formed on her forehead as she continued to search, but no results came. None. She tried calling for them again—nothing. She even searched around the outside of the house, but still couldn't find anything.
As she was checking to see if her husband and son were behind the house, she saw a door. It looked large enough for an adult to climb through. Her breath caught. She opened the door and crawled through the narrow space. When she stood up on the other side, she looked down. She was now standing on a platform in a large, open area. Stairs led down into darkness.
As she stared at the platform beneath her feet, she realized there was a considerable gap between her and the first step. Would she make it? She didn't know. Just in case she didn't—if she somehow fell and missed the step—she channeled magic into her legs. If this didn't work out, she would have to create a magical platform for herself, which would take a lot of her magic.
She leaped, holding her breath. She made it. She actually made it. She landed on the first step, wobbling and nearly falling off, but she held firm, not letting herself tumble off the ledge. There was no railing, and if she even stepped off the edge, she would fall. So she tried her best not to deviate, to keep her balance as she descended.
The stairs spiraled downward. After ten minutes of non-stop walking, she finally made it to the bottom. She stepped off the last stair and onto solid ground.
When she looked in front of her, there was another door—larger than the one she had crawled through—and it had a lock. She couldn't get in. But who said she had to use a lock? After all, her family was probably in there, and she wasn't going to take things lightly.
She walked forward, channeling as much magic as she could into her fist, and punched the door. The door splintered. She punched it again. Bam. The door cracked. Bam. The door busted open. Wooden shards flew across the entire space, sharpened wood landing on flesh. She heard a few screams from within.
She walked in. "What's going on here?" she said.
Before she could say anything else, her breath caught. Jack—her ever-loving husband—was standing over their seven-year-old child. Arthur was unconscious on the ground, and Jack held a blade in his hand.
"I don't know what to do," Jack muttered, his voice breaking. "This... this son. I thought... but I must. The deal. The deal asked for this. The deal has to happen. If I don't do this, we all die."
Around him, other figures stepped forward. All of them stepped up at once—it looked to be around five people. They all wore masks, and so did Jack now.
"Prepare to cut yourself," one of them said.
Before they could do anything, the door had already burst open, and Jack's eyes widened beneath his mask. No one could tell because of the covering, but his body language betrayed his shock. No. No. How is she here? How did she find out?
Mary didn't speak. She just stood in horror at what Jack was doing to her son.
The man who had looked at her through the window was standing right beside Jack. He turned around with a cold and expressionless look. "You know, Mary," he said, his voice smooth and familiar, "she was always better than one."
Her blood ran cold at that sentence. "Two was always better than one." That was something Jack's best friend always said when they were kids.
A memory flashed through her mind: Jack smiled as he ran across the field. "Hey, Laid! Come here!"
Laid walked toward Jack. "Come play," Jack said.
"Yeah," Laid smiled. "I guess I could. After all, two was always better than one."
They both laughed.
The memory quickly faded as Mary stood frozen. She hadn't been there when that memory occurred, but she had witnessed them—those two playing together. It was a phrase that Laid had always said. Now it was coming back to haunt her.
"I didn't want to involve you in this," Laid said, his tone almost apologetic. "You were good to Jack, and I liked you for that. But you saw something you weren't supposed to see." He raised the blade. "So how about you join your child, and we can end this? And please, Mary, don't put up a fight. I don't want to make things harder. I'm not going to hurt you, and I wasn't going to hurt your son either."
"Lies!" Mary yelled. "You're lying!"
Laid smiled. "I'm not lying. I'm telling the truth. I wasn't going to hurt him. I would never hurt him, and I would never kill him either. I was just going to give him something. I was going to make him stronger." He laughed, then laughed harder. "I was going to make him join me."
Mary was still too shocked to process this. This was supposed to be a normal day, a normal night for her—a normal night for all of them. But it turned out fate had other plans for her and for Arthur as well.
Arthur lay on the ground. He couldn't move. Chains were bound to his legs and arms, and a cloth covered his mouth. His eyes were covered with another cloth, meaning he couldn't see. But he could hear. He could hear everything.
He was hurt—not from many physical wounds, for he barely had any—but from the betrayal his father had inflicted upon him. His father, who had trained him his whole life. Well, for three years, exactly. His father, who had been the one to care for him when Mary wasn't around.
Arthur had existed in this body three years ago. The time before then, his body had been just a corpse, nothing more. But in those three years that he had lived with both Jack and Mary, he had loved them dearly. This betrayal—it hurt too much to bear.
Was this happening all along? Was Jack always planning this?
A tear trickled down his face, but it didn't make it far. It stuck to the cloth and eventually evaporated.
How could you do this? Arthur gritted his teeth. He wanted to yell so badly. He wanted to scream at his father. He wanted to hurt his father. He wanted to unleash everything—all his anger—all at once. But he was bound, and there was no way his young strength could do anything. After all, what could a physically seven-year-old body do to a grown man? Probably not much.
But he wasn't only angry at his father for betraying him. He was angry at his father for making his mother go through so much. And he knew—when he got out of this, when he would get out of these binds—he would tear his father to shreds.
In all his life, he had never experienced anger so deep, so primal. He had never experienced this amount of rage. But now the rage was practically boiling in his blood, cutting through his heart. His body began to heat up more and more as Arthur grew angrier and angrier.
No one had ever seen Arthur angry, and they couldn't now either. The cloth on his eyes and mouth prevented him from showing any facial emotion. But inside, he was seething.
Jack stepped forward. "Honey, it's not what it looks like. The deal—I had to do it for the deal. Remember?"
Jack had never told her about any deal.
"What deal are you talking about?" Mary yelled at him, stepping forward.
"The deal that if I make my son a part of the group—if I make my son a void child—then it will leave us alone. That's all I want. For us to be left alone. Sacrifices have to be made, you know."
Jack looked behind him and saw Laid standing with an emotionless expression. He was indifferent to all this.
"And sacrifices will be made," Laid said. "Don't get so upset over it. You want to be happy, don't you? You want a happy life, right? Otherwise, you'll never be able to see your son again. If you do, you won't like what he'll become afterward. And you're willing to risk that so you can have a happy life with your wife?" He paused, his gaze piercing. "After all, when you made the decision, your son was nothing but a corpse. He was worth nothing to you. So of course, making the decision was reasonable. But now that you've made it, you can't back out."
He turned to Jack. "If you do, we'll leave your son alone and we'll have to use you instead."
Laid's voice was so cold and different from what Jack remembered him as. Did he keep up a facade all this time? Jack's mind raced. His life was about to be ruined. There was nothing he could do after this. Mary probably wouldn't want to be with him anymore.
He didn't know what to do. Time was ticking. He had to make a choice: either sacrifice himself or sacrifice his only son—his son who was powerful, who was strong, who he had trained.
The decision lay in front of him. The timer was ticking.
"Jack," Laid said, his voice cutting through the silence. "Make your decision now, or forever have your son be lost to you. Make a choice. I'm giving you ten seconds."
The countdown had begun.