A furious scream vibrated through the torrid desert air.
Zheus heard the scream in the exact moment he found cover behind a pile of green wooden boxes full of extravagant plumed clothing. Duking down, he thought about the strange behavior of his enemy and furrowed his brows trying to think what he was after.
- What was that? Incantation seals? Is this shit for real?
The more he thought about it, the more stupid it seemed. Zheus thought at how he even ducked down behind a shield of wooden containers and his mouth twitched a couple of time. Yes, what he was even thinking? What if this was really a magic world and not some elaborate simulation that was trying to mess with his sanity. A couple wooden planks and some feathered clothes wouldn't be able to stop any type of magic.
Some random ninjutsu could even pulverize stones and create seas of fire, what would be the point of using some box of merchandise as a defense?
He calmed his breathing, trying to think about a plan to follow in the strange situation he was in.
It was then that he realized that there was something like an invisible grip on his neck. It wasn't painful, nor it blocked or even tried to block him from breathing. It was an eerie sensation, a ghost hand stamped around his troth that seemed to slowly travel upwards.
He immediately thought of the seals done by the young man with fiery red hair. His hand ran to his own neck but thankfully found no trace of the entity that his mind was telling him was crawling on his skin.
- Ghost feeling... I'm getting influenced by that lunatic. Fuck, is this some new form of psychological torture? Wait, why somebody would want to torture me?
A sense of frustration could be seen on his face while his brain continued to suggest the presence of the hand no matter how much his rationale tried to reassure him that it was only an illusion.
At the same time that he was trying to make sense of that creepy sensation, Zheus heard something heavy falling on the soft sand. When he glanced between the planks that were before to control what was happening, he saw the body of the red-headed maniac on the ground. Apparently, he lost his senses and blacked out.
The blue-clad young man laid with half face pressed on the sand, with an expression of hate stamped on the visible portion of it. He was breathing heavily, causing the sand before his face to fly around at each rough breath.
Looking at him, instead of feeling reassured that his crazy attacker had now blacked out, Zheus felt a strange but deep sensation of impending doom. It was a feeling of danger that he never before got from someone who clearly wasn't in the position to do any kind of damage to anyone. However, he trusted his senses as they were honed by decades of having to deal with dangerous situations. There had been many times when he only survived by following a gut decision.
So, with a cold look in his eyes, Zheus started to distance himself from an apparently senseless body. While doing that, his hand unconsciously ran towards his neck again, making sure that there really wasn't anything around it. Once more he found nothing.
Nonetheless the sensation of danger that he was feeling was only growing stronger and stronger no matter how much distance he put between himself and the body. Same could be said of that phantom weight he felt on his neck, that now expanded halfway to his face.
The image of a blonde girl with blue eyes in a weird position appeared for a second in his mind. The similarities were incredibly striking.
- What the hell I'm I thinking... that's a fucking cartoon... this is just an illusion
Hidden between a huge quantity of merchandise, having retreated almost back to the little metal structure in which he had woken up not too much ago, Zheus smiled while shaking his head.
However, his smile died in his mouth when the invisible hand suddenly revealed itself to be much more than a simple illusory feeling caused by the stress. Without any warning, it began to burrow itself deep inside of Zheus, causing him pain that he had experienced only once in his whole life: when he woke up in this hellish place.
His eyes turned white, as his whole muscles contracted in a spasm. He fell to the ground, but he didn't feel the impact because all that filled his mind was an endless excruciating agony.
An echoey sound began to resound in his mind, first so feeble that it was completely impossible to hear, then so thundering that wasn't possible to ignore.
- Disgusting pervert! Shameless! You killed them! You killed HER!!
Zheus didn't understand what was happening, but he immediately recognized the voice of the mad red-haired young man. He was screaming inside his head, while a hellish torment was tearing him apart from the inside.
The pain was so extreme that only after a while he did realize that the words of these screams weren't spoken in any of the languages that he knew. Still, he was so overwhelmed that the detail didn't matter too much to him at the moment.
He tried to resist as much as he could, but before long he was beginning to lose his senses. What seemed his last moment was spent in self-mockery.
- Well, I guess that this isn't a simulation after all...
It was in that moment, while his body lied stiff on a carriage under the scorching kiss of the desert's sun, that a churning power emerged from inside him. He was already losing his grip on life, but then the seething power immediately made him feel better. He could feel it moving inside him, like a starved predator waiting in the dark for its prey.
Almost unconsciously, the young man tried to push his senses in the same direction he was perceiving that energy.
Immediately, he found himself in a strange space: all around him was darkness, except for two radiant figures in the distance. One was a giant foggy hand, that was viciously hitting and digging inside a second more defined luminous figure: a giant humanoid shape that closely resembled Zheus.
It didn't resemble the body that he was now inhabiting, but the real him: the body that Zheus had before, the one he was born with. Yet there were some differences that he immediately was able to detect: the figure was clearly more robust and well shaped. The details on his face also appeared to make him somehow more handsome and heroic. Finally and most eye-catching... the piece between his leg was just obscenely exaggerated.
- What the actual fuck...