The world paused again.
Light dimmed.
Colour drained.
Sound vanished.
A thin edge of panic touched him—then he heard a scratching noise and looked up.
The sky was being torn open.
A black lightning-bolt, thick as a dark finger, carved its way across the blue.
Colour fought at the edges.
Sound tried to slow it.
Something on the other side was forcing its way in.
It did not seem awake, yet its mere existence was enough to wound the world.
Shock froze him.
This was worse than any cloud.
It felt injured, confused, as though it did not know where it was or how to think.
The boy with green eyes glanced toward the red room below and recognised the familiar wrongness.
It was like that man.
Somehow the man had left a piece of himself behind.
The woman had failed.
Her life had not been enough to protect him.
No.
His eyes ignited with green light as he stared back at the rupture.
The woman might have failed in the end, but no one would ever know it.
He would rather die destroying this black remnant than allow her sacrifice, her death, her gift to be stained by failure.
She had not failed—not while he still had a voice.
For the first time in his existence, pure righteous anger filled him.
He opened every reserve he possessed.
Threads, ropes, cords—finally a solid beam of green light tore upward into the sky.
The beam shattered into countless invisible wisps that slipped into the darkness, mapping it, surrounding it with careful precision so the sleeping thing would not wake.
Thick ropes peeled the torn sky wider.
Heavy cords dragged the black mass inward.
It resembled an unconscious demon-child—twisted, tar-black, clearly unaware.
Its random thrashing tore deep wounds across the grass and sky; directed threads sealed them almost as quickly as they appeared.
The boy drew a slow breath, then guided a single green cord into his own eyes.
Suddenly he could see the creature’s internal lattice: a network of black, oozing light that felt twisted and cruel.
Even touching it with his pure green web left him feeling unclean, yet he knew the thing had to die.
Malice, rage, and other corrupted emotions leaked from it in constant waves.
Green eyes burning, he raised his right arm and wrapped it in cords that spun faster and faster until they formed a living drill.
The dark creature flailed helplessly in its bonds.
He hesitated only a moment.
Then he drove the arm straight through the monster’s skull.
An explosion of absolute blackness was the last thing he saw.
Pain.
He was hurt again.
His eyes opened, and the first clear thought was relief: he was still inside his mind.
The creature’s corpse lay at the bottom of a deep crater, the same crater from which the green-eyed boy had been thrown.
It was no longer moving.
That, at least, was good.
Black ooze leaked from the body, pooling into strange, gravity-defying shapes.
Slowly, carefully, he forced himself to sit.
A low groan escaped him.
The damage was extensive.
A ragged hole gaped in the sky.
The ground was cracked and scarred in every direction.
Several new clouds had already formed, including one large black mass still dripping with the same foul goo—almost certainly a record of what he had just done.
He pressed both hands to his head.
Everything had escalated far beyond what he intended.
All he had wanted was warmth and the chance to repair himself, to feel that soft living heat again.
He reviewed each step.
Most of them had made sense.
The final one, however… the overwhelming urge to kill, to destroy—that had not felt like him.
That had been something else.
He looked back at the black residue in the pit and extended a single cautious thread.
The moment it touched the ooze—
ANGER.
RAGE.
DEA—
He snapped the thread at once and left the corrupted end to dissolve in the muck.
The daemon-thing that had tried to force its way into his mind had been leaking pure, concentrated hatred.
A short, almost hysterical laugh escaped him as the stress of the last few moments finally caught up.
He had gone briefly, murderously insane because a dark parasite was poisoning his thoughts.
Those thoughts had succeeded—yet since the only available target had been the parasite itself, the whole episode had backfired in the most twisted way possible.
The goo could not be left to fester.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, the sore and exhausted boy shaped a glass bottle identical to the one the Loud Man kept on the mantelpiece—complete with a tiny ship inside.
He tried to summon the heavy cords, but only a handful of thin threads answered.
Control was badly damaged.
Still, it was enough.
Thread by thread he began drawing the black emotional residue into the bottle.
There.
A ship-in-a-bottle, half-filled with the black residue.
He shaped a glass cork with a flicker of light and sealed the nastiness away.
A small afterthought made him grin: he replaced the miniature ship with a cheerful rubber duck.
It simply felt right.
While he worked, the remaining threads had performed a quiet, partial healing.
Movement still hurt if he rushed, so he walked carefully back to the grass entrance—now edged with fresh scars—and descended the white wood stairs.
After a moment’s thought he turned left instead of right.
A wave of his hand revealed not another cupboard but a seamless metal door without a handle.
His fingertip brushed the surface and he passed through into a featureless metal chamber.
Inside he created a low table of thin, shining wires and set the Rubber-Ducky Bottle of Doom upon it.
Looking around the sterile room, he decided it would serve for the corpse as well.
He would have no reason to return here.
Back on the damaged grass fields—now more crater-and-grass than pure meadow—he lifted the twisted remains and compressed them until they were small enough to carry.
A final, quiet idea made him smile again.
When he left the metal room the second time, the rubber duck wore a solid black top hat—fashioned from what had once been an evil infant’s remains.
Under the stairs, green eyes opened.
He ached in most places, and his forehead felt sticky.
Wiping it with his sleeve left a smear of black, oily residue.
If he had seen a mirror in the last few years he would have known it came from the scar that never healed—the same irritated mark that had stayed raw no matter what.
After meeting the dark thing that had lived inside it, the constant pain no longer surprised him.
Something was different.
No—many things were different.
His body had not received the full warmth treatment his arm and part of his skull had undergone, yet he still felt altered.
A careful inventory showed that forcing the creature out had flooded him with residual light.
Dozens of small aches and stiffnesses had vanished.
The skin of his face, especially the area around the scar, felt almost new.
He had driven a great deal of power through that region; the improvement made sense.
His thoughts were clearer too.
There was no way to know how much brain damage the fight had repaired, but his eyes felt strange in a good way.
When he looked at his arm he froze for a moment.
Before, he had barely managed to glimpse a faint green glow.
Now he could see an entire network of wispy threads curling around skin, muscle, and bone.
The sensation was the same as before—only far more visible.
He glanced around the cupboard and realised how much he could actually see.