The last of the dust surrendered to gravity, settling like a shroud over the battlefield. The football pitch was gone, erased from existence. In its place gaped a monstrous, yawning crater, its edges raw and torn—the only testament to the cataclysmic clash between Bradley and the nurse.
Deep within the pit, two broken forms lay amidst the rubble.
One was a boy with hair as black as the void above and eyes to match. Now, his body was a canvas of suffering, crisscrossed with deep, weeping cuts from scalp to sole. He lay in a widening pool of his own blood, each ragged, tired breath a small victory against the crushing weight of his injuries.
Not far from him, the nurse lay sprawled, her own black hair fanned out around a face smeared with grime and gore.
Her crimson eyes, once burning with malice, were now unfocused and dull. She bled from a dozen wounds, her condition obscured by the settling dust, but Bradley knew. He felt it in his bones—she was finished.
A string of curses, low and guttural, spilled from his lips as he pushed through the blinding pain. Using his katana as a crutch, its blade sinking into the bloody earth, he forced himself to his feet.
Every movement was a fresh firestorm of agony. He staggered towards her, each step a monumental effort. When he reached her, his blood-slicked hand tangled in her hair and he pulled. A weak, pathetic groan was her only protest.
He began the slow, torturous ascent out of the hole, dragging her broken form up the shattered incline. His progress was a labored, painful slog.
When his boots finally found level ground, his body gave out. He didn't just fall; he collapsed, his legs buckling beneath him with the finality of a condemned building. He released his gruesome burden—the nurse's upper torso—which slid from his grip with a wet, sickening sound.
Everything from her ribs down was simply… gone. A slick, glistening trail of her own entrails painted a grotesque path across the pristine white snow, a vibrant, horrifying scarlet against the pure white. Shockingly, a faint, wet rattle still came from her throat. She was a sputtering candle in a hurricane. Her lips were a ruined mess, leaking pink-tinged foam with every shallow, desperate breath.
Huff. Still alive. That's the tenacity of an evil spirit, Bradley thought, his own body screaming in protest. Good thing I sent a second attack behind the first.
It had been a simple, brutal gambit. He'd let her focus all her power on deflecting his initial, overwhelming strike, and in that singular moment of commitment, he'd sent a second, thinner wave of energy slicing right behind it. It had cleaved her clean in two.
He was far from unscathed. Deep, ragged wounds crisscrossed his torso and arms, each one a stinging reminder of her final, desperate strike and the concussive blast that had followed.
"Fuck, it hurts..." he groaned. The voice was his own again, strained and human. The empowering fusion with his spirit was gone, leaving only the mortal shell and its chorus of pain.
He turned his head, the movement sending fresh jolts down his spine.
There she was: the nurse, laid open like a medical diagram from a nightmare. Her torso was nestled in a steaming, crimson hollow in the snow, her organs spilled around her in a grotesque still-life.
"F-fuck you..." she muttered, the words bubbling up through the blood.
He laughed then, a sudden, ragged sound that cracked the solemn silence of the night. "Hahaha, you literally have your guts strewn across the snow, and you still have the breath to curse me. You wicked woman."
She coughed, a thick, viscous stream of blood erupting past her lips. "You will pay for this... the others, they will find you..."
Bradley pushed himself up onto his knees, his dark eyes meeting hers. There was no mockery in his gaze now, no smugness. Just a chilling, unreadable void. And in that void, a dark thought took root.
She watched, a flicker of primal fear returning to her dull eyes, as his hand descended not towards her face, but towards the ruin of her lower body. "W-what... are you doing?" she pleaded, her voice a thin whisper of dread.
His fingers closed around a handful of her thick, slippery intestines. The sensation was revolting, cold and alien, but he didn't flinch. He pulled. Hard.
A shriek of pure, agonizing horror tore from her throat, a sound so raw it seemed to claw at the very air, desperate to escape the empty night.
He seized her head by the hair, yanking her face close to his. "Since you like eating intestines so much," he said, his voice as cold as the iron in his grip, "I might as well feed you—your own."
Her face went bone-white with sickening comprehension. "N-no, you wouldn't do that, that's too cruel—"
"Don't you dare tell me what's cruel," Bradley's voice was ice, freezing the very air between them. "You murdered and ate children alive. You listened to them beg. I think it's only fair you get a taste of your own medicine—for the last time."
He hauled the bloody rope of tissue toward her face. Instinct took over, and her remaining hands, trembling and weak, came up to fight him off.
Crack.
Bradley's heavy boot came down on her forearm with brutal finality, crushing the bones against the frozen earth. Her scream escalated, becoming a continuous, high-pitched wail.
Crack.
He stomped on the other arm, the sound a sickening echo of the first. Her wail hit a new, desperate pitch.
"P-please, I beg of you, sob, don't do this... I was just trying to survive," she whimpered, her defiance utterly broken.
Bradley pulled her face so close their noses almost touched, forcing their eyes to lock. "What about the kids who begged for their lives while you ate them? Did you spare them? They were trying to survive, too. Don't give me that self-pitying crap."
The last light of hope died in her eyes. She was a monster, and he was her executioner. In a final, futile act of defiance, she clamped her mouth shut, sealing her lips into a bloodless line.
"Open your mouth," he demanded.
She didn't budge.
"Come on," he joked, the cruelty almost theatrical, a stark contrast to the horror of the act. "The food plane is coming in for landing."
S-sickening bastard, she thought, the words echoing in her crumbling mind.
He jammed his fingers between her lips, prying her jaw open with brute force. She tried to bite down, but his grip was iron. He stuffed the sticky, internal tissue into her mouth. Disgust contorted her features into a mask of pure revulsion. He pressed it down, deep into her throat, forcing the mass past her gag reflex. Her screams were reduced to wet, gurgling, muffled chokes. If she still had legs, they would have been kicking in a frantic, desperate dance of death.
"Now chew it and swallow it." He gripped her jaw and began to move it for her, a grotesque, mechanical puppetry, forcing a horrific imitation of mastication. He wanted her to feel every second of it, to drown in the same terror and disgust her victims had. It was the only tribute he could offer to the stolen lives.
The awful ritual went on and on, a symphony of muffled gags and the sickening squelch of flesh. Her muted screams rose and fell until, finally, they stopped altogether, leaving only the harsh whistle of the wind.
He stood up, looking down at the wreckage he had created. He had made her swallow every last piece. Her eyes were wide, unfocused, and utterly vacant; her chest rose and fell in shallow, defeated hitches. The only word echoing in the ruined cathedral of her mind was monster.
[I would call you a sick bastard, but she did indeed deserve it.]
Spirit Bradley hovered beside him, his form shimmering and transparent, flickering like a dying candle.
[Now finish her off. I'm tired of looking at her. It is making me wanna throw up.]
"You can't even throw up," Bradley managed a weak, pained smile, shaking his head. He pulled his katana from the snow where it had fallen.
He lifted it high above his head. The nurse just stared at the sky with that same unfocused, empty gaze, already more corpse than creature.
Then the katana dropped. The blade sank into her chest with a soft, final thud. Just as the light in her crimson eyes guttered and died, she had one last, fleeting thought:
I can't believe I died by the hands of a kid...
She was dead.
Bradley knelt, the adrenaline fading, leaving a hollow, weary ache. He offered a small, exhausted prayer for the body's original owner. "I'm sorry for not being able to save you. I hope you can find peace now." He knew the grim reality; no evil spirit would willingly let their host live once they themselves were doomed.
The nurse's body began to rapidly disintegrate, crumbling into a fine, gray ash that the wind began to scatter.
Bradley looked around at the absolute devastation they had wrought: the churned earth of the crater, the shattered walls of the surrounding buildings, the snow painted in broad, abstract strokes of red.
Fahhhhh, this is definitely going to cost millions of pounds to renew, Bradley thought bitterly. I still wonder how the authorities have not come yet from the explosions and noises that our fight caused. He looked up at the silent, star-dusted sky and frowned. Is there some kind of barrier she made to avoid suspicion?
No matter how much he turned it over in his mind, it didn't add up. He shook his head, a gesture of pure fatigue, and used his katana to lever himself back onto his feet.
He staggered towards the skeletal remains of the school cafeteria. As he drew closer, the foul stench of death, coppery blood and something far worse assaulted his nostrils.
He still felt a wave of disgust, but it was a distant thing, buried under layers of exhaustion and resolve. It didn't stop him. He moved through the carnage, a ghost among ghosts, his eyes scanning the frozen, lifeless faces. He was looking for one person in particular.
He didn't find Josh among the dead.
A sigh of relief, sharp and painful, escaped him. But the momentary reprieve was instantly crushed by the heavy, suffocating guilt for all the other students. Their lives were a weight settling on his shoulders, a burden he knew he would carry forever.
He knelt once more, amidst the horror, and whispered prayers for each of them. Using the very last dregs of his residual energy, he summoned a purifying black flame.
It was a weak, flickering thing, but it was enough. The bodies and the blood began to burn away, not with the fire of destruction, but with the clean, silent fire of erasure, purging the scene of any supernatural trace.
"May you all find peace," he whispered into the chilling air. "I have avenged you."
He walked out the front gates, his mind reeling. "The school is a mess. How the hell am I going to explain the death of dozens of students and all this damage?"
[You burned their bodies, so they'll probably be deemed missing... and plus they do not know that we caused all of this.]
"Yeah, and they'll close the school for a while. Good thing that bitch destroyed all the cameras, or I would've been on tape."
He glanced at the guards' post. The guards were still out cold, slumped in their chairs, oblivious to the apocalypse that had unfolded just meters away. "They will get fired."
[Oh, they're cooked. Imagine waking up to this and not being able to explain a single thing.]
Bradley walked with a pronounced limp, each step sending a jolt of pain up his leg. He had managed to knit together some of the worst injuries, but his spirit energy was a dry well. He had nothing left to give.
As he emerged fully from the gate, he found his motorcycle right where he'd left it, leaning against the wall like a faithful steed.
He mounted the bike, the leather seat groaning under his weight, and kicked it to life. The engine rumbled, a familiar and comforting sound in the unnatural quiet.
He rode into the embrace of the night, taking a deserted back road that cut through a small, snow-laden forest—the most direct path to his home. The cold wind whipped at his face, a biting, cleansing sting.
As the skeletal trees closed in around him, a random, morbid thought popped into his head. Heh. I suddenly have the male urge to die in the snow while bleeding out inside a forest.
He checked his watch. The luminescent dials read [3:25 AM].
"Damn, isn't that the time in horror books when supernatural creatures are most active?" he asked the night, a reckless, tired grin playing on his lips.
[Yeah, but the difference is this isn't a book, and supernatural spirits are real. Don't jinx us. We can't fight a stiff breeze in our condition.]
Spirit Bradley's voice was laced with a genuine, urgent worry.
"Yeah, yeah, why so grumpy? I doubt we'll encounter any trouble."
Spirit Bradley only clicked his tongue in reply, the sound full of foreboding. [Your mouth will be the death of us all.]
Bradley kept riding at a steady, constant speed, the bike's headlight cutting a lonely path through the darkness.
He never saw the attack coming.
There was no warning whistle, no tell-tale shift in the air, no surge of hostile energy. His other self, usually a flawless early-warning system, sensed nothing. One moment he was on his bike, the next, his world simply ended in a silent, violent upheaval.
"Huh, what the hell?" Bradley muttered, more in confusion than fear.