Death Becomes Her

Vast, mountainous structures loomed heavily over the skyline as visible from Typhon’s office. The cool, luminescent blue colour scheme of the office with its polished surfaces and careful lines stood in stark contrast to the ashen gray of the city outside the window. Embedded beneath the blue ceramic floor, three conduits for psychic energy ran the length of the room, their pink light rendered by the blue lens into a deep, pulsing purple. Typhon sat with his back to the window, business-suit clad, reading over the most recent file to have come across his desk.

Though he was more mentally disciplined than most, his thoughts rang out loud and clear to those who had both the power and ability to perceive them, and despite the concentration she needed to devote to the task of slipping noiselessly out of the air vent in the ceiling, Rei had both in spades.

‘So this is what they have to show for the last seventeen years we’ve been funding this project? A handful of unstable children well on their way to becoming unstable adults?’ Typhon tossed a photograph of a teenaged girl with red eyes, pale skin, and off-white hair on top of four other photographs. She wasn't an albino - there was some pigment there. Just not much. Each of the other photos displayed another teenager, some pale, some dark, some male, some female, all attractive, and all sharing one common feature.

‘Why do they all have red eyes?’ he wondered absently. No matter. Objectively, he had to admit that they were promising. The power they had displayed from such an early age was nothing short of, well, exactly what they were looking for. That was the problem, though: it was exactly what they were looking for. It would take years and years and years of expensive research followed by years and years and years of equally expensive development to produce a superior soldier. These children, for all their difficulties, made the results of his own project look like yesterday’s trash. How was he going to explain to his investors, that their scheme for the release of a slightly improved soldier every decade or so, and each one only noticeably (but not dramatically) superior to the one that had come before, was just plain obsolete compared to these... freaks? No, the best thing to do was to burn the whole complex to the ground, fill in the remains with concrete, and pretend that those children had never existed. He tossed the rest of the file on top of the photos. With the slightest concentration, he drew upon the power that lay within him: the file and all the photos beneath went up in a brief, intense flame, utterly consumed within seconds.

No, he wouldn’t let these children stand between him and his goals.

A bright pink blade blossomed out from his throat.

A moment later, Rei dropped noiselessly to the floor. She was clad in a black, skin-tight combat suit, her white hair tied back in a neat, functional ponytail, and her red eyes carefully surveyed her target. Good. A direct hit. His thoughts were racing now, and she winced at their intensity. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to kill them all. He would see the whole world burn if it would grant him another few seconds to live. The enervating effect of the knife was growing stronger. His awareness was fading, and yet, if he could just summon his power, he would make her...

But in that moment he could no more surprise her than he could surprise himself. An intense burst of flame flared violently against Rei’s telekinetic shield, rolling across its surface like a living thing. Fire roiling around her, Rei met Typhon’s panicked gaze.

“You will not be allowed to interfere with the project,” she said, her voice betraying none of the emotions that raged within her mind: his emotions.

Desperation mixed with fear and hate in equal parts. He couldn’t die like this. Not like this! It wasn’t right! He was Typhon! Even the other executives feared him! He couldn’t be killed by someone’s pathetic toy of an assassin!

She waited and watched, confident in her knife’s ability to do its work, allowing his thoughts to pass over her and through her as she had been taught, knowing that contrary to her instinct on the matter, they were not her thoughts. She was not Typhon, no matter how much that here, standing before him with his thoughts rolling through her mind, she felt that she was.

A few seconds later, he lost consciousness. A minute after that, he was dead.

Even as her target died and his last thoughts were stilled, Rei smiled and permitted herself a contented sigh. There it was: silence.