Chapter 1
“I see you weren’t lying when you said you don’t remember anything from your past life,” the entity said, showing a pile of images to a young man. Remember what happened.
The school year ended, and a lot of teenagers left high school happy; among the crowd was Jean, pushing the other students to get out quickly. The young man had only one thing in mind. A blond man also walked quickly through a pile of students in a school hallway, which looked like a New York street because of so many posters and advertisements pasted since the beginning of the year. He turned his head, looking both ways: only empty rooms with messy desks and papers on the white ceramic floor. He arrived at the entrance of the school.
Many students regrouped into small groups, talking about what they wanted for the summer or how their school year went. Jean was alone, staring at the front door, waiting for the blond man; their quarrels had been going on for two years. Every problem Jean got into was to get into a fight.
Jean was a young white man. The color of his eyes was black, his hair was black also, long tied in a small ponytail, and he had a black bandana tied to his head. And his forehead was covered by a long curtain of parted hair; upturned nose adorned with freckles, which crossed both cheeks. His height was 1.77. He wore a purple varsity sweatshirt on his torso with gray sleeves, denim shorts, and black tennis shoes.
The blond one was called Kevin and his height was 1.70. His skin was tanned, his nose straight. His hairstyle was pointed, pointing upwards thanks to the fact that he wore a red band that covered his ears. The color of his eyes is blue, he wears a denim jacket, black pants, and red tennis shoes. The typical clothing that you would see in a series of teenagers, where the bully on duty appears.
“I finally found you. Now no one is going to be able to stop a good fight,” Kevin said, running towards the freckled man.
Jean stepped back a little, grabbed a student from behind who, confused, could not get away from him, turned on himself to gain momentum, and threw him at Kevin. The blond was dragged a couple of meters, and the nerd was on his body. Later, he got rid of him by sending him flying against the entrance doors and rejoining to continue fighting.
The crowd put aside their business to focus on watching the showdown, surrounding the pair of young men. Kevin tapped Jean’s biceps with his fingertips. Both arms lost tension for a couple of seconds. The Australian continued to hit his opponent’s chest nerves with superhuman speed.
Jean tried to regain control of his body, but the blond did not let him get back up, attacking his chin with his right palm and moving him away several meters. The dark-haired man got up from the ground, taking momentum with his legs, as he was quite upset.
The freckled man ran, lowering his height, made a couple of movements with his legs in the air, kicking the blonde’s right side several times. He hit him with his right knee and began to punch him several times in the pit of his stomach and ribs; he wasn’t going to let his opponent rejoin either, but Kevin attacked his windpipe with two fingers to make Jean lose his breath.
Their rivalry lasted for years. Kevin enjoyed hitting weak students, but Jean wouldn’t let him disturb them. It wasn’t because he was a nobleman, but because he benefited from helping nerds, as he charged them to defend them. He learned to win from the bad things that always happened to other people and even used to play practical jokes on the other students, including Kevin.
In other words, they are the same type of person who can fall low and doesn’t care if, in the end, they will be victorious and all to aggrandize their ego. Kevin’s family wasn’t dysfunctional because he doesn’t have a family; He doesn’t remember anything at all, or that’s what he’s told his “friends,” so he doesn’t mind disappointing anyone with his actions.
They always found themselves fighting, as Jean liked to fight, and the money the nerds gave to him, he never said no when he had to stop Kevin’s abuse, so their squabbles were always a brutal sight to watch. This is how the other students were afraid of both, although Jean was easier to convince or live with due to his childish attitude; however, they still quickly distanced themselves from him because of how extremely tricky he was.
Generally, the freckled man threw balloons full of water, released the frogs in Science classes, causing chaos in his classroom; he damaged school computers by posting pornography or websites that had viruses; He almost always blamed someone else, which made him laugh a lot.
Kevin, on the other hand, was someone who was very serious and quite bitter. Since the death of one of his friends, he had changed drastically. He never laughed, and the few things he enjoyed were music; he took away his frustration by beating the weakest, and he was quite angry that Jean intervened in his affairs. In addition, he disliked his immature attitude.
In the distance, a man watched the fight as well. He was an experienced woodcutter who had been lost since the night before, and no one knew where he was. The police couldn’t do much, as it’s forbidden to go out at night due to the creatures that coexist with humans.
For as long as humanity has existed, various creatures and species have lived alongside it. If the nature of the human being is sinful and evil, that of some creatures is twice as sinful. On any other world, they are known as fantastic or mythological creatures, sometimes thought to have been born from a force of the earth to counteract or punish human beings, such as in the Middle Ages, an even darker time due to the existence of bestiary entities such as wyverns or lobizens.
But man found a way to defend himself against them, the Church decided to abandon the crusades and dedicate itself to fighting against the entities that, according to them, were opposed to the will of God. Although the pope still did not allow certain types of people who developed the ability to defend themselves against creatures. Thus, a three-sided fight was formed, with the third group being the smallest, but the most suitable for the fight.
One way that proved quite effective in helping the population was to surround towns and large cities with seals. When they wanted to unify them with roads and bridges, they first called someone capable of putting seals and eliminating the creatures of the night. That town in the state of Oregon was no exception.
The woodcutter had pale skin; you could tell he was weak. His eyes were abnormally crossed, but he could see perfectly, and both young men caught his attention. I would wait for the right moment to attack. He walked over to stand behind one of the school buses, but its stench would give him away if he stayed long. Both boys had their cheeks swollen from hitting each other so much. When a professor and the rector stopped the teenagers when they saw the crowd surrounding the fight.
“What the hell are you thinking about, you pair of brats?” said the rector.
“It’s a damn reckoning,” Kevin replied, shaking his head.
“I have nothing to adjust with this freak,” Jean lied. The reason they were fighting for the last time was because, in their last job, Jean smashed Kevin’s locker, forcing it open, breaking all his stuff, and writing on the walls and lockers “Kevin is a repressed freak”, causing the other students to enjoy seeing the bully receive another punishment from Jean.
“Keep talking, you’re going to bite the dust!” Kevin shouted, red with anger.
“No one is going to bite the dust!” The rector scolded, but hands came out of the crowd, seizing him by the neck and pulling him back with such force that he seemed to be only a rag doll. The man was dragged more than twenty meters. everyone looked with horror at the owner of the arms, which were almost black.
“That’s it...
“It’s not Donny!” The rector shouted in his last moments of life, for he seemed to know the lost woodcutter. The entity simply threw it into the air until it exceeded the height of the building. His body sounded like a gunshot when it hit the pavement, resulting in a viscous mass of blood and ground meat, while all the students looked on in terror.
The entity ran quickly in the direction of the two young men. The other students, seeing this, began to escape, crying for help. The two rivals ran alongside, while with each step the beast took, its human skin was peeled off and its real physical form was quickly revealed.
It was a black humanoid beast, with long and bony arms, with its face barely visible because of how black it was, and in which only the eyes and a large mouth were noticeable.
He jumped like a frog, propelling himself with his legs, and managed to crush the boys with his huge hands, letting out a raspy, guttural screech at the same time.
“I... The t... Be.. “Go,” said the beast as both young men screamed in terror, kicked and gasped, trying to get rid of their captor. The skinwalker brought his left hand, which held Jean, to what appeared to be his nose; the boy breathed in that putrid scent that emanated from the monster’s face. He was pale with fear, as well as sweaty.
“I can’t let this thing eat me,” Jean said in fright, and he managed to get a Swiss knife out of his right pocket. He waited for the right moment to bury it in the eye of the beast, which screamed in pain, furiously releasing both boys and slamming them to the ground to rub his wound as if it were a small child.
The two young men tried to stand up, but the pain did not allow them to move quickly. The monster took off the weapon when he realized that his prey was trying to escape and was about to catch them again when a cloud of dust covered his good eye, preventing him from seeing. He sneezed and moaned, irritated by the situation.
“What... Did? The skinwalker shouted, looking at Kevin. That confused Jean, since his opponent was stunned and could not be seen to be trying to fight. The monster punched him and sent him flying into a bus; Kevin felt a huge burn in his back as he bounced off the chassis of the machine.
“Run, Jean,” Kevin said with his last words, becoming unconscious.
Their troubles wouldn’t end here. More humanoid monsters came out of the forest. They had heard the skinwalker’s roar and were laughing maliciously. Their appearance was that of a human in a state of decomposition: they walked on all fours and were smaller than the skinwalker. Normally, they are enemies of the latter, but this case was special, since they would finally enter a town after centuries to feast with people.
"Wendigos!” Jean shouted, trying to wake Kevin. ``They are devouring the rector. ``.
The skinwalker kicked Jean in the stomach and held him on the ground, opened his mouth, letting out a long tongue, with which he licked the face of the freckled man, who was panting with pain.
The Wendigos began to scatter around the village looking for something else to hunt, but a small group stayed behind to protect their leader. The warning sirens began to sound; in a couple of minutes, the specialized forces would arrive against the beasts, and Jean knew it, but he did not believe that it would last until that point, and he did not even know why they were not yet dead from the blows of the beast.
The small group approached Kevin, grabbed him by the legs, and dragged him into the woods; in the last few seconds, he came to his senses, realizing the fate that awaited him once there. He screamed in fear, desperate to get out of the beasts, stretching out his left arm towards Jean, but one of the Wendigos cut it from his elbow with its sharp claws. Their screams of pain ceased to be heard as they entered the woods, and the sounds of weaving tearing drowned out their screams.
Jean was completely terrified and screamed in frustration, knowing that he was now alone with that demon. He was losing his breath. At last, he believed that the end of his torment would come: he was unconscious, looking at the street, but before closing his eyes, he saw a black car arrive a few meters from where he was.
“They are... “Here,” said the skinwalker.
Three people dressed in black got out of the black truck with a gear that consisted of a black helmet that covered the entire skull, with the part of the face similar to glass, also of a black tone, so that their faces could not be seen; their costume was expandex and was covered with black plates that resembled armor.
The Association itself is a military institution that was founded around 1700. It was the queen of that time who saw the potential of humans with supernatural abilities. He decreed a law that did not allow the execution of this type of person because they could be a help against magical beings, and for that reason, a lot of people offered their gifts to help the queen in her fight against mythological beings.
Thanks to this, family branches of people with skills and, in rare cases, surnames that were almost extinguished by the Inquisition emerged. They managed to survive, but something that good could not be real: they must cover their faces by a direct order from the queen. Having your face discovered while in a government institution becomes bad if something shady is discovered, and you will end up executed. It also serves to avoid being persecuted by any entity if the mission fails.
In the past, the members used their own techniques, trained themselves, and were mentally prepared to face the monsters. Currently, this has certain restrictions. A certain strength should be measured if you are in public; if a teammate is seriously injured by a carelessness of your carelessness, it will result in an execution for treason.
Church members may not interfere in the affairs of the organization or in the affairs of the country. If one were to break that agreement, one could either fight to the death against a “soldier” or settle the matter judicially, where he will lose his stay in the Church. Unfortunately, men with skills choose to assassinate them, as they waste less time and paperwork.
One of them was a woman. You could tell by the female figure of the costume. He had a throwing weapon in his hand; it was a large chacram. She didn’t need to turn it with her fingers, because with her skill she could make it levitate on her right hand. The weapon was fired at a high speed, becoming embedded in the monster’s neck; the skinwalker screamed in pain and ran towards the girl, while one of the men quickly made his way to Jean’s position.
This man was constantly firing two shotguns at the monster’s chest, so the skinwalker turned sharply to attack the man, using his long tongue and piercing his left arm to his shoulder. The arm was hard as a rock, and his veins protruded from the skin.
“Do it now,” the man ordered the woman.
The chakram spun like a saw around the monster’s neck, spinning several times until the skinwalker’s head fell to the ground dry. The man pulled his tongue hard, revealing a large hole in his lip. Because he was in enormous pain, his arm was kept hard to prevent bleeding. Nothing was supposed to be able to break through his magic armor, until now that he was fighting a high-level skinwalker.
“The hard part begins now. “D, take the boy and get away from here,” the other man ordered in a serious tone to the guy with the broken arm.
“Understood! D shouted. He took the young man unconscious and ran to the other end of the street.
The man who was the captain of the group was on the roof of the establishment. He carried no weapons with him, for he depended merely on his skill as full support. The Skinwalker’s body convulsed, standing up. Another head grew from his wound, but this time it was not humanoid, but similar to that of a deer. A green glow emanated from the inside of his mouth, as did from his elongated eyes. Its lower jaw was open up to 160 degrees, letting out three tentacle-like tongues. He attacked the woman by punching her in the stomach, moving her several meters away from him, and extended his tongue to try to kill her.
The chacram flew again in the direction of the beast, cut off all three tongues in one slit, and the beast’s green blood splattered on the ground; the weapon left a magnetic state in the wound, drawing the bus against the black body, crushing it against the walls of the establishment. The monster threw the truck angrily. The girl divided her chakram into three equal parts and directed them to quickly cut the monster’s body, making deep cuts to it. The skinwalker grabbed the woman and was about to devour her when something bit its arm.
A two-meter black frog amputated the limb, chewed the piece of the arm, and swallowed it in a “glup” way. The skinwalker roared in pain and attempted to kill the frog, which spat sticky slime around its much larger foe. At that moment, the woman tried to free herself from the member, which was tense: if the frog failed, she could die in that place.
Jean woke up by the noise of the fight that was taking place beyond. He tried to get up, but the pain did not allow him to do anything. D kept fighting a couple of wendigos. One of the monsters grabbed his face to blow it up, but failed to hurt him. D blew off his head with a shotgun, reloaded the weapon, charging it down to kill a wendigo who was going to attack him from below and who fell dead when his neck was crushed by the impact; he shot another enemy again and since he could not use his other arm to load the weapon, he decided to use it as a baton. Hitting three of them with a single attack and bursting their jaws.
“Stay behind me, kid,” D said as he broke the spine of a Wendigo who wanted to eat the boy by spreading out his rotten arms.
“How did these things come in?” Jean asked, trying to move his body away from the black blood that flooded the floor. The young man was making an attempt to remain calm in the face of the grotesque situation in which he was unfortunately abruptly involved. His pride was far greater than the beast that murdered the rector and probably ordered his rival to be eaten, so he wouldn’t allow himself to pee in his pants.
“I don’t know, and if I did, I wouldn’t be able to answer civilians about things they don’t understand. “It is impossible that the seals that surround the town could have been ruined out of nowhere,” replied D ``I also don’t know why you survived the attacks of your little friend over there. He pointed to the skinwalker, who was almost paralyzed below his hip from the black frog’s slime.
“Snaaatch!” cried the frog with a harsh, cavernous sound. He leapt at his enemy’s head by opening his jaws to bite his jugular with his three rows of fangs, but the skinwalker struck a direct punch to his jaws, and the arm pierced the back of Snaatch’s neck, and he fell dead.
The man on the roof dropped a pile of papers, which were seals to exorcise paranormal entities more easily, as they weakened them or even managed to eliminate them. They were stuck in Snaatch’s slime and, consequently, also in the body of his semi-anthropomorphic enemy. The Skinwalker counterattacked by sticking out six more tongues, which extended to the ceiling, trying to catch the man, who dodged it by twisting and running the six muscles with inhuman skill.
“From nothing I come, to nothing I go, and I have nothing, manifest yourself, holy spear,” said the subject. A six-foot-tall spear emerged from the ground with a thin tip, shining like gold. It was a pilum and came from the same place as Snaatch, a place where weapons and creatures that he tamed during previous missions can be stored.
He cut off three tentacles with the tip of the pilum that tightened in the direction of his thorax and disintegrated after being amputated. The rest of the affected tongues were writhing like worms about to die when white lines appeared and reached the body of the monster, which screamed in pain. He made a gesture with his left hand and then stabbed the rest of the tongues with the tip. A glowing sphere appeared in the place indicated by the spear and caused the muscles to fade as well.
The beast’s body shuddered as it was enveloped in a luminous aura. A strip that passed from the stomach to the head opened, letting out something black in the fetal position. When the monster completely disintegrated, that thing started to move silly. Humanoid in appearance and thin, she stood up completely furious. He sniffed the smell of D’s blood, which was impregnated in the air, maliciously opened his human mouth resembling a smile, and rose a couple of centimeters from the ground heading for Jean’s position.
“You have to move,” D ordered, looking at the skinwalker’s real body.
“Even if I wanted to, I can’t. Everything burns,” Jean replied, exhausted and breathing heavily.
“Then you’ll die here,” D said. “I won’t let that thing reincarnate in another body, and it’s not going to devour me. Maybe you thought that to save humans, we would be something similar to heroes, but it’s the opposite; We do whatever it takes to prevent these beasts from emerging, no matter what method we use. You’re going to die now.
``Jean remembered that phrase with anguish, the same threat from years ago. It happened when he was six years old and was in a similar situation. In those times, his older brother was an example to follow; he always took care of him in the face of any danger and stayed to play when the freckled man was bored. The oldest was in his second year of university, so his parents did not notice the change in attitude as a bad thing, since they blamed the stress suffered by university students. His brother had trouble paying the rent on his apartment at the same time as he was in school. He made the risky decision to get into the world of drugs to get more money, because his salary was quite bad and he did not have enough to get through the winter.
One day, when she was taking care of Jean, a man stood outside her house, circling her to enter the home. He was looking for his brother inside the house cautiously when he saw the young man and the boy in the living room. The university student owed money to his boss and had betrayed them for money, so he sent them to kill him.
His brother pushed the boy behind the sofa when he saw the gunman. Seconds later, he drew his gun to defend himself from danger, shooting his adversary in the chest; the enemy, at the same time, also pulled the trigger, giving him an accurate shot to the heart. Jean came out from behind the sofa dazed and frightened by the dry noise of gunfire, only hearing a high-pitched beep. It was then that she saw her brother on the ground, covered in blood, and the other man, who was already dead. The little boy was in shock for hours.
As the neighbors heard the commotion that occurred inside the building, they decided to take matters into their own hands, finding a child who did not react and two dead men. They called his parents in addition to 911, but, unfortunately, the police never managed to find the hitman’s boss and closed the case. However, for the Thompson family, that wound in their lives would not heal with time. The freckled man still has that trauma. His feelings were cooling down when he understood that his brother sought that lifestyle, having a weak will, and decided not to be like him, living no matter what.``
The skinwalker was closer, but the man on the roof summoned a fat toad with a wingspan of four meters, climbed on his familiar and ordered him to jump. The animal fell a couple of meters from the woman and then gave another impulse until it reached its enemy. The monster, noticing this, accelerated its movement and came behind D.
D was choking Jean, who was foaming for short of air, when the skinwalker stabbed him in the back, piercing his chest and killing him instantly. The freckled man fell to the ground, coughing as he caught his breath; D’s body twisted upright as he was enveloped in a black aura, all his bones crunching like thin branches. At last he obtained a new body, and the Voidman tried to skewer it with the sacred spear, but the monster’s back hardened, and the beast turned sharply, taking its hunter’s weapon; White lines appeared on his arm causing him the same burning pain as before, but thanks to his new ability he was able to resist more, broke the spear and threw the broken part.
“Fuck it!” shouted Void, leaping from the animal and summoning a pair of pointed daggers with the design of half of King David’s star. The skinwalker killed the toad by smashing its nose with a punch before it could do anything, and after that, it lunged, punching at Void. The soldier also delivered several blows, but none were lethal, as the entity covered its torso with both hardened arms, incapacitating the summoner with a punch to the chest.
Jean got up as best he could, almost hunched over, managing to lift the heavy tip of the pilum, which took effect against the young man, causing white lines to appear all over his body. The old man looked at the young man and took him by the neck to take pleasure in his smell. Four metal blades were embedded in the back of his neck, which gave the boy several seconds of advantage, leaving him unconscious, and the young man skewered the weapon into the enemy’s heart. From his chest emerged a sphere of light that grew with the seconds until it exploded, half of the monster, finally killing him.
The freckled man fell to the ground with his nose and mouth bleeding, just as he cried from the pain, becoming unconscious again. Void and the woman approached the teenager curiously.
“What are you, child?” asked Void.
“You’d better not do anything to him yet,” said a blond young man, coming out of the woods with his jacket sleeve torn and his arm amputated. He was as good as new and smiled proudly. ``I knew it. ``.
