Silk stormed across the street like a neon-streaked hurricane, her eyes locked on Marcy with pure anger. It was clear she was pissed due to Diaz’s condition.
The crowd in her way naturally parted instinctively as she made her way toward Marcy.
Whispers came from the onlookers as she passed through them, closing the distance between her and Marcy. You could literally hear her combat boots stomping against the pavement due to her quickened pace.
Her green highlights glowed under the midday sun, and her fists were already clenched tight.
“You little bitch!”
Silk shouted, her voice cutting through the murmurs like a knife.
“Is it true? Did you set that giant freak on Diaz? Tell me what the fuck happened, or I’ll beat it out of you right here!”
Marcy crossed her arms, her face twisting into a scoff. She glanced at the crumpled form of Diaz, still being tended to by the healer, then back at Silk with zero fear.
“I’m not obliged to answer shit to you. I don’t even know you well enough to care. Besides, that asshole deserves every bit of it. He tried to hit me… it’s only fair he gets hit back.”
Silk’s face contorted in rage.
Without another word, her hand whipped out in a sharp slap. The crack echoed like a gunshot. Marcy’s head snapped to the side, and she stumbled back, losing her balance and hitting the ground hard on her ass.
Pain bloomed across her cheek, hot and stinging, but she pushed herself up, fury overriding the shock.
“You… you fucking bitch…”
Marcy snarled, lunging forward with a wild punch aimed at Silk’s jaw.
Silk dodged effortlessly, her body flickering for a split second as she became intangible. Marcy’s entire hand and body fell right through Silk’s form, causing her to fall face-first onto the ground.
“Owww.”
Marcy said, holding her lip as she tried to get up.
But Marcy didn’t even have the time.
As soon as she got up, Silk went for a brutal punch straight to Marcy’s face. Her knuckles connected with a thud that split Marcy’s lip even further.
THUDDD!!
Blood trickled down her chin as she reeled, but Silk wasn’t done. She drove a knee into Marcy’s stomach, the impact folding her over like a ragdoll, air whooshing out of her chest in a pained gasp.
“Khaahahaawww!”
Marcy clutched her gut, trying to straighten up, her arms flailing in a desperate attempt to block or counter.
She swung again, a sloppy hook, but Silk weaved around it like it was nothing. Her superior speed and power turned the fight into a one-sided beatdown.
Another punch cracked against Marcy’s ribs, then a backhand that sent her sprawling onto the sidewalk.
SLAPP!!
“Get up, bitch. I’m not done with you yet.”
Silk loomed over her. All Marcy could do in this moment was fight back to the best of her abilities.
But Silk was as cold as she was cruel. In the next moment, she grabbed a fistful of Marcy’s hair and yanked her head up.
“Oh, you think you’re tough now, huh?”
Silk hissed, her voice dripping with mockery.
“Acting all high and mighty, like you didn’t spread your legs for Diaz dozens of times. Yeah, I know all about it. You moaning like a cheap whore in the back of that monster truck, begging him to fuck you harder, and yet you turned your back on your man at the first word. No wonder he was getting bored with you.”
Silk said with a menacing smile.
“What, you let him cum inside you every time too? Bet you loved swallowing his load too, didn’t you? Pathetic slut, thinking you can just walk away after using him like that.”
Marcy’s face burned with humiliation, the crowd’s gasps and whispers amplifying the embarrassment.
Tears stung her eyes, but she spat blood at Silk’s feet, trying to twist free.
“Shut your mouth, you jealous bitch. Besides, Diaz has yet to even fuck me properly. Don’t tell me that bastard has been spreading false rumors like that?”
Silk laughed, cold and cruel, raising her fist for another blow.
“Man, you really are a dumb bi…
But suddenly, her expression shifted.
A sharp pain lanced through her skull, like needles stabbing behind her eyes. She released Marcy’s hair, staggering back a step and clutching her head.
“What the… ahh! W-What is this!?”
Random flashes assaulted her eyes—snippets of visions that weren’t hers. A bird’s-eye view of the city skyline, spiraling down in dizzying loops.
But that wasn’t all. She was seeing multiple things at once in real time.
Deep in the sea, the distorted sight of a mantis shrimp was now hers as well. Colors of all kinds—even colors she had no idea existed—began exploding in impossible spectrums all at once. It was a sight no human brain could process without serious damage.
Yet, thanks to her Hesta physiology, she took the information better than a human could. She could still see clearly from her own eyes, yet through the eyes of others.
Whoever was doing this seemed to know this as well. For that reason, they began to attack with further senses, all through sight alone.
Seconds later, smells hit her too… rotting garbage from a dumpster blocks away, the metallic tang of blood from Diaz’s wounds, the acrid burn of exhaust from multiple passing cars in different areas.
Sounds layered over it all: distant sirens wailing, a child’s laughter from a nearby park, the wet crunch of bones breaking echoing in her ears.
A feat normally impossible for vision-based powers. However, Bella had refined her ability to the point that even in its current low evolution, it was like an attack from a newly born level 4—way weaker, of course, but in skill and effect, it was on that level.
With over a decade of power and practice, Silk experienced a visual and sensory hive mind overloading her synapses, turning her thoughts into a screaming whirlwind.
“HYAAAAAKHHHhaaaAaAaa!!…”
Thirty seconds had not even passed, yet Silk dropped to one knee, gasping. Her phasing ability flickered uncontrollably as her body tried to escape the intangible assault.
Pain like she had never experienced before hit her, and then a whisper came in her mind.
‘Mmmm, it hurts, doesn’t it?’
“Get… out of my head… you freak!”
Silk shouted. At this moment, blood began to leak from her nose and ears.
Bella stepped forward then, her single green eye glowing faintly with gaian energy, a sadistic smirk curling her lips.
She hadn’t even moved from her spot beside the Phantom, but the connection was already locked in. With a mere glance, anyone she looked at would be affected.
Ocular Mycelium was weaving into Silk’s vision like invisible and intangible threads.
‘Oh, honey, we’re just getting started. You think you can phase through anything, don’t you? Cute. But you can’t phase through your own mind.’
Silk forced herself up, snarling through the pain, and lunged at Bella. Her hand phased forward, intangible, aiming to pass through Bella’s chest and solidify inside—a lethal trick she had made to kill tougher foes.
But Bella’s eyes narrowed with boredom, and the overload intensified. Silk’s vision shattered into fragments that were way vaster than the first assault.
She saw herself from a dozen angles at once, through the eyes of bystanders, birds overhead, even the reflective windows of the Association building.
“AWWWWWWHHHHH!!”
Silk screamed in horrific pain as she began clawing into her own skull, pulling out her own hair. The vast amount of visual information, alongside the other senses passing through her eyes and into her mind, was ripping her sanity apart.
Disorientation hit like a truck. Her punch went wide, phasing harmlessly through empty space.
She tripped and fell right at Bella’s feet.
Bella saw this and laughed, her sadistic smile still present. Then she grabbed Silk by the throat with one hand, lifting her off the ground like she weighed nothing.
“I must say, this is quite the pathetic sight. You’re like a ghost who forgot how to haunt. It’s quite amusing, actually. Still, I hope you learned your lesson, little girl.”
Bella said as she squeezed her neck more and more, slowly, at a snail’s pace. The force was not enough to crush, but enough to make Silk choke as she felt the air slowly leave her body.
“GgHk…”
It also prevented her from talking. Silk dug her nails into Bella’s hand, but even for a level 2 Hesta, her durability was insane.
Silk was, after all, a Level 3, despite being freshly turned about a week ago.
It wasn’t long before Silk felt her strength draining. She was about to lose consciousness.
“Oh, are you passing out? No, no, we can’t have that now, can we? Still, I don’t think the minor punishment I’m giving you will stop you from your bad ways. Then there’s also the fact that you messed with that goth bitch there too. I get that I hate her as well, but she is still under the Featherburns’ protection. You’re lucky I was the one who stepped in. If the big guy over there did, I can’t guarantee you would’ve left this area with a human form. However, let’s make a perfect example out of you. That way you and your crew won’t have any stupid ideas later on.”
Bella said as she suddenly looked at Cinco, who was hiding behind a car a couple of meters away with his gun in hand.
When their eyes met, Cinco’s heart skipped a beat in fear.
“Eeeeehh.”
He screamed as he ducked behind the car, holding his chest. His hand was trembling as well.
“What a pussy.”
Nier said. He had seen Cinco long before Bella did.
However, Bella stayed true to her words. What she did next was something less heroic and more like a villain. Her golden eye began to glow and her power surged forward as Bella forced a new connection… borrowing the concept of sight from all the stray dogs within a 500-kilometer radius. This instantly overloaded Silk’s brain with canine vision. Blurry edges of so many different things pierced her brain with heightened motion detection, but twisted with human overload.
Silk’s eyes bulged and bloodshot at the same time as tears of blood began streaming down her face. Her world turned into a nauseating blur of grays and hyper-sensitive flickers.
“Stop… ahh, please!”
Silk gasped, her body phasing in and out, trying to slip free, but the mental assault kept her grounded. Her powers short-circuited under the strain.
Bella laughed, low and cruel, tossing Silk to the ground like discarded trash.
“Begging already? I thought you were tough, phasing bitch.”
She knelt down, pressing a knee into Silk’s head, and rammed her down further into the ground. The people didn’t know what was happening to Silk, but her reaction struck terror in them.
Right after, Bella’s voice echoed in Silk’s head again.
‘Well, this has been fun. However, this time I returned the same kind of pain you did to that goth bitch right back at you—and amped it up too.’
And true to her word, she linked Silk to the vision of Diaz himself. Unconscious, his world was a black void punctuated by flashes of pain and fragmented memories of being hit by something he did not know. The attack had been too fast when it hit him.
But Bella layered it with horrors of her own too: visions of rotting corpses and the smells of decay from both the nearest morgue and cemetery, the screams of horror in buildings hundreds of kilometers away, and even the screams coming from the Lunaris Asylum about four hundred kilometers away from here. All of this was connecting to Diaz, and Silk, who was being forced to connect to the unconscious Diaz, began to experience a horrific flooding of grotesque senses.
The sounds of screams of immense pain and physiological distress began echoing in her skull, and the smells of dead bodies, rotting or burning flesh or corpses hit her as well.
Silk convulsed, foaming and vomiting at the mouth. Her presence-erasing ability failed as her body solidified fully, vulnerable. Piss streamed from her legs, and blood poured from her eyes.
‘You like embarrassing people weaker than you, right? Let’s see how you like it. Look at the onlookers—they’re videotaping your embarrassing display.’
Bella said, her voice ice-cold. She then forced Silk to see through Marcy’s eyes moments ago—the humiliation of the berating, the crowd’s stares—then amplified it tenfold, making Silk relive Marcy’s own worst memories while being with Diaz… failed heists, Diaz cheating on her, every vulnerability exposed in vivid, looping detail.
Silk screamed, clawing at her eyes, trying to phase them out of her skull, but Bella wouldn’t let her.
“I could blind you permanently, you know. Pluck the concept of sight right out of your head. Or maybe overload you into a coma, let you rot in your own nightmares forever. But I’m not a complete cunt. I would rather see you mentally destroyed with my own eyes. I find great pleasure in seeing people I hate suffer, you know.”
Silk thrashed weakly, punching at Bella’s leg, but it was futile. Bella countered by kneeing her in the ribs, cracking bone with enhanced strength.
“Or I could just beat you the old-fashioned way.”
She said, helping her up before giving her another punch to the gut, causing her to vomit up blood. Naturally she fell on her stomach. At this point she gave up on Bella as she tried to claw away, however Bella stomped on Silk’s hand with her heels.
“AWWW!!”
The sound of her grinding the heel in until her fingers snapped one by one was loud, and Silk howled, her body arching in agony. The sensory overload turned every pain into a symphony of torment.
The crowd watched in stunned horror, phones recording, but no one dared intervene. Nier leaned against the Phantom, arms crossed, a faint smirk on his face. Marcy, wiping blood from her lip, stared wide-eyed at the violence this woman was displaying.
“Oh my god.”
She said in horror.
Nier, however, just watched this and said,
“…She is just like Mother when someone of the opposite sex talked to Father.”
Kaly, on the other hand, was amused more than anything else.
“The curse got stronger all of a sudden. How weird.”
“Hmmm!?”
“What do you mean!?”
“That child is that violent by nature, but not to that extent. It’s clear to me she is taking her frustration out on that girl because she can’t dominate you. However, the increase in violence fluctuates from time to time.”
“So you’re saying Ishtar’s curse is making them more violent because they can’t tame me!?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of hilarious. You’re like an antithesis to the yandere stereotypes. Usually yanderes are the ones in control, but what happens when they lose that control? What happens when their love—that is like an unstoppable force—meets something that is both an immovable object and an unstoppable force?”
“They crash out, if I had to guess.”
“Yes and no. The answer to my question is that they start to go mad or berserk. However, in Bella’s case, her violent tendencies have increased. Hah, good job, darling. You can say you’re the first Augustus male that is putting shame to Ishtar’s own power. If she was here, I am sure she would be fuming.”
“Here or not, it doesn’t change the fact I am weaker than her. But for now, I do like that yanderes are starting to become more tolerable in my eyes…”
But before Nier could speak, he felt his pocket vibrating.
It was his phone. Someone was calling him, and when he looked, his eyes opened wide.
“Who is it!?”
Kaly asked, and Nier responded.
“I don’t know, it’s an unknown number.”
“Well, are you going to answer?”
“Hmm, sure, why not.”
With that, Nier answered the phone and said,
“Hello, who is this?”
“Son of Circe, when you get home I need you to open your mother’s journal.”
In that moment, Nier got on edge as he asked,
“Ok, who the fuck are you, man!?”
“So barbaric. You know who I am.”
“This way of talking… Mnemosyne… Why the hell do you sound like a man now?”
“It’s one of my avatar’s bodies. That aside, you’re going to Corpse Mountain tonight, right?”
“Yeah… why do you ask?”
“It’s not safe. I know you can resurrect thanks to that thing keeping you forcefully alive. However, that place has recently had mimics spotted there, alongside someone rather troubling.”
“Mimics, you say. Well, I have recently heard of them, but who else is there that is worrying you so?”
“I don’t know. It’s not one of mine. However, like you, I can also sense something from the other side inside that man.”
“You don’t mean…
Nier said, and Mnemosyne answered.
“An outer god. Although it’s a low-level one, it’s not as strong as that thing attached to you. However, I don’t want my student to be in danger. I know I can’t stop you from taking Suldroxia’s trials.”
“However, as you are now… you can’t beat that man. I can also sense immutable magic of the darkest teachings on him. I think it’s someone from the Dark Church. But for as long as that thing is attached to him, my eyes can only see so much.”
“But him aside, I am also here to tell you that in your mother’s journal—I believe you have it—I don’t know what Circe made that horrific thing for. She did, however, tell me that if you need training to deal with things from the beyond, and quick, she said go to page 38. What’s there could help you deal with things like this guy. That aside, I must now go.”
Mnemosyne said as Nier could hear an angry customer in the background.
“Hey dude, are you even hearing me? I am trying to order some fried chicken here.”
“One moment, sir…”
She told the customer. From there, she put her attention back on Nier and said,
“I have to go back to work. I wish you well, Son of Circe.”
With that, she hung up, leaving Nier stunned for multiple various reasons.
