Devon peered again through the crack in the broken door, the wood barely held together by rusted hinges. He blinked twice, making sure his mind wasn't playing tricks on him after the time skip — but no. It was her.
In his past life, she had been one of the two women he truly held close. This life changed nothing.
Even as a boy of ten, when she was murdered on her way home from work, he knew she was no sinner. His father spat the same words again and again — *whore, traitor, disgrace* — but Devon saw through them. That was a weak man hiding from his own grief.
He never had a bad memory of her. Even in the chaos of his lives, that warmth stayed untarnished. And maybe that was what set him apart — something pure that refused to rot with the rest.
Life had broken him piece by piece — betrayal, beatings, imprisonment, humiliation. Men hated him for his face. Women hated him because he treated them like equals, not fantasies. But none of that mattered anymore.
His journey from mortal to something greater — to a deity of his own making — wasn't a response to the world's cruelty. The world could burn for all he cared.
But she wouldn't let him.
"If the world burns," she'd once said, "where would we — you, me, and perhaps our kids live?"
He promised her then. And even promises made across lifetimes still hold their weight.
Now he stood before the door again. The steady knocking pulled him back from his thoughts.
He locked it quietly. The echo of the bolt sliding home sounded like punctuation — the end of one life, the beginning of what came next.
There was one thing left to do.
The sound of footsteps circled the house. His mother found her way in through the back door. The overhead light flickered, then steadied.
Her breath caught.
What she saw would stay with her until her final heartbeat.
Her husband Devon's father lay in pieces. His body shredded, organs torn open and spilling across the room.
Devon stood beside him, blood seeping from a hole in his chest, his head split open, crimson dripping from his hair to the floorboards.
He didn't look panicked. He was thinking.
The wound wasn't real — not entirely. He had made it himself. A small, deadly-looking hole, crafted by his own power. He had twenty minutes before his Nexus connection faded, before even he couldn't heal it.
To anyone else, it would look like another brutal casualty. He'd made sure of it.
Just before she went through the back door he walked calmly to the table, picked up the heavy vase, and swung it down. Bone cracked. Blood spattered. His own skull collapsed in a final, grotesque punctuation mark.The perfect deceit, who would suspect a fourteen year old
teenager,to do something so gruesome and macabre in nature.
Silence.
He studied the scene. Perfect. Even the angles of the blood spray matched his intent.
His mother hurried forward, tears streaking down her face. She knelt beside Devon, trembling, her hands shaking as she pressed her fingers against his throat.
There — faint, but steady. A pulse.
Relief flooded her features. She screamed something, words blurred by panic. Ambulance. Help. Anything.
Devon didn't open his eyes, but he heard all of it. Fifteen minutes left. Enough to make it look real, then heal what needed healing.
To any mortal, this injury was fatal. But he wasn't mortal anymore.
Then he felt it — her eyes on him. Something in her stare burned through the stillness.
Using his perception, he reached outward without moving, sensing the room not with his eyes but with his essence — the Nexus sight, the way he felt the world when he no longer trusted his fragile body.
He turned that perception toward her gaze — and froze.
He saw what she was seeing.
He had already fucked up.