The words echoed like a devil’s last testant. But Max was not the one dying today. The ones who would fall were the elves. Nobody had called for this. Nobody had begged him to go this far, and nobody truly understood why Max had suddenly decided to act with such rciless brutality.
Their power disappeared too fast.
The elven armies did not even understand how it began, only that sothing inside their bodies had turned against them. Their mana was slowly stripped away, dragged out through their flesh, veins, and Magic Souls as if invisible claws had reached inside and begun pulling apart the very foundation of their power. Even the emperor could not fully resist the pull. His golden light flickered, weakened, and bent beneath Max’s pressure, as if the Dragon King’s power was disassembling his Magic Soul piece by piece, breaking it from within and stealing everything for himself.
Max felt lonely in that mont.
It was as if the world before him had vanished into an abyss, a place so dark and endless that it should have terrified him, yet sohow, it felt more like ho than anything else. The screams, the terror, the golden light being swallowed, all of it faded into the background while the void wrapped around him like sothing familiar. It was soothing in a way he could not explain, but that comfort only made the loneliness sharper.
Even standing above armies and emperors, he was still alone.
That feeling crawled out from his chest, slow and poisonous, making its way into his limbs and sinking into his magic. It did not rely strengthen the void. It twisted it with the emotions he had buried long ago, those ugly, abandoned things hidden deep inside him since he was still a boy, back when he learned that rcy was sothing the world gave to others but never to him.
---------
A punch ca flying out of nowhere, hitting six-year-old Max square in the nose and sending him down onto the cold concrete ground as blood spilled between his fingers.
"Hey, dork. I told you not to co back to the kindergarten, didn’t I?"
A fat kid, a whole head taller than Max, stood over him with a cruel smile on his face. He cracked his bruised knuckles slowly, his fist still clenched and ready, as if one punch had not been enough to satisfy whatever ugly thing lived inside him.
A group of kids surrounded them in a loose circle, laughing, pointing, whispering, their voices spinning around inside young Max’s head until the world felt smaller and smaller. None of them helped. None of them even looked like they wanted to. To them, this was just another ga, another normal day where Max beca the thing they could laugh at.
Max did not say anything at first.
This really was just a normal day for him. His whole body was already bruised from the abuse, every part of him aching in a way he had slowly started to accept as sothing that belonged to him. He pushed himself off the floor with shaking arms, wiping the bloody snot from his nose with the back of his hand.
"Piss off, Jason," he finally said, his fists clenching hard.
He had never been able to stand against this monster of a child. Jason was ten tis stronger than him, heavier and aner, and even if Max tried to run, the other kids would chase him like little dogs following their master, eventually catching him, laughing in his ear, and dragging him back to the fatso.
"What, are you going to tell on to your dad?" the fat kid laughed, and the children around him imdiately followed, their voices sharp and ugly as they echoed across the kindergarten yard.
The expression in Max’s eyes darkened. His vision watered, not only from the pain in his nose, but from the heavy pressure spreading through his chest.
"I heard his dad is a drunk," soone from the group mocked.
"I heard his dad killed sobody."
"Seriously? He’s the son of a killer? So scary. No wonder he has that weird look on his face all the ti. Maybe he wants to kill us too!"
"That’s not all. My mom told his dad was possessed by the devil."
Gasps rang out from the children, as if that single word had turned Max into sothing less human before their eyes. One after another, their small fingers pointed at him, and their voices began to rise in a circle.
"Son of the devil."
"Son of the devil."
"Son of the devil."
The words spun around him until the yard, the laughter, and the cold concrete beneath his feet all felt far away.
That day, sothing inside Max snapped.
That day, he murdered sobody.
It was the first ti his small hands had been soaked in blood, the first ti the thing buried deep inside his chest had crawled out and taken shape. After that day, he was no longer known only as the son of the devil. The town gave him a new na, one whispered by adults and repeated by children who no longer dared to stand too close.
A demon child.
A curse of the town.
A soft TV glow shone inside an old apartnt swallowed by darkness.
"The body of six-year-old Jason Woods was found lifeless this evening at Fairytale Kindergarten in Vinewood. Police say the child had suffered nurous wounds. Witnesses report seeing him with another child around his age earlier that evening. Police are currently searching for that child for questioning, and we will continue to report on the situation..."
A picture of young Max appeared on the TV screen.
A cup slipped from a young woman’s trembling hand and shattered across the floor, the sound cutting through the quiet apartnt like sothing breaking inside her chest.
She slowly turned her head, her face pale with terror.
A young boy sat beside her, watching the sa news with an expression far too calm for what had just appeared on the screen.
Max’s eyes looked almost hollow in that darkness, distant and empty, as if the boy sitting there had left part of himself behind sowhere else.
He did not move. He did not speak.
No "Sorry, Mom."
No "I didn’t do it."
Instead, he smiled, slowly, and that smile rose on his face like a flower blooming in spring. It was pure, happy, satisfied, and relieved, as if for the first ti in his short life, sothing inside him had finally gone quiet.
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