Mineral Wars Chapter 3

I waited there, like a deer in headlights, for what felt like an eternity. My body seemed to move in accordance with primal instincts rather than my brain as although I was screaming at each and every nerve in my body to move, I was utterly paralysed, glued where I stood, awaiting my cruel and imminent demise. Why isn't he moving? The words I thought to myself as the spindly man, ever quiet and unsettling in nature, began to experience the side effects of distortion V. To say I had never seen such a grotesque and bizarre transformation would be an understatement. This was no transformation - it was a metamorphosis of the human body into something... not of this world. It began with his lower body, a jet-black, husky sort of mass trickled upwards, reaching almost desperately to consume the man entirely. Almost the exact moment the mass enveloped him, what were once human appendages were replaced by what can only be described as eldritch creations, almost as if they were a manifestation of a child's grotesque nightmare. Behind what once used to be the man, I could see the sun rising, perforating the clouds which had ruled the skies just a moment ago. They turned pink, bowing down to the omnipotent star, ever-present and ever-powerful. In that small, fleeting snapshot in time, I almost felt overwhelmed by it all. I was just a normal person, doing normal things, thinking normal thoughts and dreaming normal dreams. Yet, I carried the weight of being born into this world on my back, and it was not a small burden to bear. My eyes couldn't help but fill with the salty liquid we call tears. My vision blurred and I cursed my own feeling of futility. Although my eyes were filled with them I did not allow even one tear to fall from my eyes.

The "man" from just a second ago was no longer of this world, he could be described as "alien": something completely unknown to mankind. My first instinct was to make a desperate attempt at escape, yet I did not try. I had succumbed to my own fate. "This is what God intends for me". I no longer held onto hope. I no longer knew if God was with mankind anymore, perhaps he was also erased by King's god-given ability. Opening its mouth to reveal its fatal jaws, I became hyper-aware of my surroundings - an effect which comes as a side dish of the main course - impending doom. Its fangs were crystalline, jagged and truly terrifying. Sharp. Razor sharp. Lowering its eyes to glare at me, I glared back, my heart jumping out of my chest and my skin red hot, searing from my blazing emotions. I did not notice even a semblance of humanity in its eyes and in my mind, I entertained the idea of begging for forgiveness. But I vowed never to do so in the face of defeat. My resolve was forged in that moment and it was a fine blade, tempered in the flames of my final moments. This was it. Erupting forth, it accelerated towards me. I did not look at it anymore. I decided I wanted my life to be extinguished while looking at the sun on the horizon. Seemingly so far away now, I yearned for it to come to me, hold my hand and put me at ease. It never moved, not even a fraction of an inch. A tingling sensation gripped my heart, it felt almost comforting, and I believed that this was the sweet release people claim to have felt before death. I closed my eyes and allowed the feeling to wash over me...

"The scarlet sun commences its dance unto this world, the flow of time breathes its last breath"

Thinking back, perhaps God truly was with me that day. My vision was filled with nothing but a brilliant light, almost as bright as the sun itself and yet it did not pain me to stare into it, the scene burning into my memory as I stood there, still frozen but slowly beginning to recover control of my senses. After what felt like millennia but was only mere seconds, the light faded away to reveal to me the true scale of the carnage dealt by my mysterious saviour. The very first thing I noticed was that my attacker had indeed been utterly annihilated as I had presumed. However, and perhaps more gut-wrenching, the apartment complexes which previously peppered the surrounding area had similarly to the monster, been all but wiped out, including my own home. People lived in those buildings. Families. I even knew some of them by name and was even considered a "friend" to others. If I knew this was the cost of saving my life, thousands of deaths for one insignificant spec in a sea of people, I would have preferred to die that day. I trudged through the newly created wasteland that was my home, looking for any trace of the figure who killed the monster, looking for even the smallest hint as to who they may have been. A sudden glint caught my eye as the sun reflected its radiant light off of a small, intricate piece of medallion in the midst of the rubble. I quickly began making my way towards it to get a closer look, but not before I stumbled, and was cut in the stomach by an oddly shaped piece of metal jutting out from the ground. The wound was not deep but it felt almost as though I had been entirely impaled by the strange object. I walked carefully now, avoiding any potential risks to myself and observing even more closely my surroundings. Now that I was close enough to see the medallion up close, I noticed that it was made from platinum, something only the new world government had access to. This was it. I knew now who my saviour was. I had heard rumours of an elite team formed within the new world government, supposedly each member had been hand-picked and selected by King based on their abilities and strength. Nobody knew how many members they contained, nor did they know of the rankings of each member, and perhaps most worryingly, they didn't know why such an elite and secretive group needed to be formed in the first place. Now, I realised that this "Distortion V incident" was not even the first, but only a small incident occurring out of the millions of monster outbreaks due to this ultra-drug. A gut feeling began to swirl inside me, filling me with dread as I thought about what lengths the government would go to just to suppress the monsters, seemingly the deaths of thousands were but a small price to pay for the extermination of one. Another gut feeling revealed itself to me, even more alarming than the first. The area where I had been cut by the strange metal was beginning to pulsate, even emitting a violet light which did no service in calming my now panicked mind. Almost instinctively, my hand reached down to pull something from within the cut. I did not move my hand of my own will but by something more primal, something more than even I knew to be of this world. A cosmic sort of gravitation towards the unknown. excruciating pain turned to dull aching once I had removed the object from my cut. Had the pain not faded away, I believe I still would not have noticed, for in my hand lay a small, ice-cold shard of Gallium, a metal I had scarcely heard of even in the wildest of fairy tales. In that moment, I knew that if I held onto this element and attempted to use it, I had two possible fates ahead of me. One, to die as just another casualty in the ever-growing number of deaths in this new world, or two, live to rewrite history as one of the chosen few, even though I was still clueless as to the reason for this sudden twist in my otherwise mundane and conformed life. I simply could not let this one-in-a-billion golden opportunity slip from my grasp. Contemplating no further, my mind was made up.