I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 60: Doubt

Damn it! She’s smart. Far too smart! I screamed inwardly. Eva was a sniper, and a sniper lives by noticing details others overlook.

She had analyzed the scene in seconds.

"I... I don’t know what you’re talking about!" I backed away, feigning extreme panic, my voice trembling pathetically.

"I was hiding! I swear to you! I almost died! Vargas fell because he was stupid and tripped, and the monster... Commander Valisera is the one who killed it! She admitted it! Are you calling the commander a liar?!"

Eva pressed the dagger’s blade further, slicing a shallow layer of my skin.

A warm drop of blood ran down my neck.

"Don’t hide behind Valisera," Eva said fiercely.

"You are not a G-rank recruit. There is something cursed about you. And you... you remind me of him."

"Of... of who?" I asked, trying not to smile sadistically in this dangerous moment.

"That bastard," Eva whispered, her free hand instinctively moving to touch her abdomen.

"The Black Joker. You have the same sick scent. The same way of hiding in the shadows. Tell me the truth now—who are you, and what is your connection to the Joker, or I will rip out one of your crimson eyes and feed it to the rats here!"

"Eva! Stop!"

Damian’s booming voice shattered the suffocating tension.

He stepped forward with heavy strides and grabbed Eva’s wrist holding the dagger, forcibly pulling it away from my neck.

"What the hell are you doing?!" Damian shouted, pushing her back slightly.

"Have you lost your mind?! We are fugitives wanted by justice, sitting at the bottom of the sewers, and you want to slaughter the only recruit who brought us this hideout?!"

"He’s not a recruit!"

Eva shouted, pointing at me with trembling hands.

"He’s hiding something! He’s the reason the monster fell! He has hidden abilities! We need to interrogate him, Damian! He might be a spy for the Voliders, or connected to that damned Joker!"

"You’ve completely lost it, Eva," Aiden said, stepping closer while nervously wiping his glasses.

"The Voliders sent monstrosities to kill us, and Kyle was on their execution list. If he has a hidden ability and saved our lives, we should thank him, not butcher him!

You’re suffering from psychological trauma because of your supposed injury from the Joker, and you’ve started seeing ghosts everywhere!"

"I am not crazy!" Eva roared, but she took a step back, her black eyes shifting between her teammates who had begun looking at her with pity.

Pity was killing her.

"Eva, please," Damian said in a calmer voice, trying to contain the situation.

"Sit down. Rest. All of our minds are exhausted. Don’t let paranoia destroy what’s left of this squad. We need each other."

Eva shot me one last look.

A look that carried an unbreakable promise—that she would continue watching me, and that she would uncover my secret even if it cost her life.

Then she turned sharply and walked toward the other side of the station to sit alone in the darkness.

I exhaled in relief, trembling, pretending to cry.

"Th... thank you, Damian. She almost killed me."

"It’s alright, kid," Damian sighed, gently patting my uninjured shoulder.

"Eva is living a nightmare. Don’t take it personally. Try to rest."

Damian left me and returned to his place.

I sat there, my mind working at a manic speed despite the physical pain.

Eva is smart, but impulsive. Her suspicions are extremely dangerous. If she keeps focusing on me, she’ll uncover my ability soon. I need to be more careful from now on. I must not use the Forgotten Blade or Shadow Rend unless my death is certain... especially since the sword is trying to devour me alive.

I looked at my arm.

The black veins had calmed slightly, no longer pulsing violently, as if the sword had temporarily been satiated by my life energy—or perhaps it had entered a dormant state to digest what it consumed. But the exhaustion was crushing me.

And then... I noticed something.

"Valisera."

She wasn’t with them.

She hadn’t intervened in my clash with Eva.

She hadn’t given an order.

She hadn’t mocked our weakness.

I looked around the wide pumping station hall.

I didn’t see her blood-stained white coat.

She wasn’t among the exhausted squad.

Where was she?

Instinct pushed me to move again. Ignoring my body’s screaming warnings, I dragged myself slowly, crawling through the darkness away from the sleeping squad.

I followed a faint trail of glowing crimson droplets of water and blood on the steel floor.

The trail led me toward a side corridor, deeper and darker, behind the main water turbine.

The smell here was different.

The scent of burnt ozone, boiling blood, and a fluctuating atmospheric pressure that made you feel nauseous.

I slipped forward like a phantom, using every shadow cast by the massive pipes, until I reached a point where I could see without being exposed.

And there... in a spot lit only by the faint glow of a phosphorescent fungus growing on the damp wall... I saw her.

"Valisera."

She was kneeling in a shallow pool of stagnant water.

Her white coat had been carelessly thrown aside, leaving her in a torn black silk shirt that revealed the grotesque, twisted, deformed scar along her waist—where she had used her power to fold space and stitch her torn flesh back together.

But she wasn’t treating her wounds.

She wasn’t resting.

She was waging a war.

From the outside, from the perspective of any normal person watching her now, Valisera looked completely insane.

She looked like a madwoman who had escaped from some horrific asylum in the lower sectors, sitting alone in the dark, talking to the air.

But the words slipping from her trembling lips, and the expressions twisting her angelic features, revealed a terror far beyond ordinary madness.

"Get... out... of... my head..." Valisera growled, her voice coming out as a choked rasp, as if she were suffocating on barbed wires.

She struck the sides of her head with both hands, her fingers digging into her silver hair, pulling hard enough to almost tear it from the roots. Her body arched forward and backward in violent, sick spasms.

"I told you to get out! Don’t interfere with my command!" she screamed, then fell silent for a second, her crimson eyes widening with horror and rage, as if listening to a reply only she could hear.

Her expression twisted into sadistic ferocity, and she spat a lump of bloodied saliva into the filthy water.

"Weak? I’m weak?!" she hissed sharply, madness spilling from her eyes.

"If it weren’t for my body, for my endurance, you would be nothing but cosmic dust fading into the void! You’re the one who needs me! You’re the parasite living off the scraps of my will in this filthy world!"

Another silence.

Her body trembled even more violently, and she bent forward abruptly as if struck physically in the stomach, making her cough harshly.

"Don’t call me by that name!" Valisera roared, hot tears—tears of pure fury and helplessness—gathering in her eyes.

"I am not a vessel! I am not your servant or the servant of your dead masters you keep talking about! I am Valisera! I am the one who controls gravity! I am the one who tears spacetime apart with my own hands—not you!"

I watched her from behind the mesh of pipes, my breath trapped in my chest until my lungs nearly burst.

Terror... pure, cosmic, philosophical terror froze the blood in my veins.

I had always suspected. I had always felt there was something unnatural about her power and her sick aura.

A teenage girl breaking into S-rank? Manipulating the fundamental laws of physics as if molding clay? Inspiring fear in the rulers of the world and speaking to the Supremes as an equal?

Now, my suspicions were confirmed in the most horrific way possible.

Valisera had not awakened this monstrous power through training or inheritance.

Valisera was a "host."

There was an entity... something ancient, dark, perhaps from the same abyss that birthed the Forgotten Blade, dwelling inside her skull.

Something feeding on her, granting her this terrifying power as "rent" for using her body.

And now it was rebelling against her, exploiting her physical weakness after the brutal battle against the hunting hounds and her severe bleeding, trying to impose its control and take over.

I saw what it was doing to her in that moment.

The entity wasn’t content with speaking and threatening inside her mind.

It was punishing her physically from within!

Suddenly, without Valisera moving a finger or chanting a spell, a small "spacetime rift," black as the void, opened in the flesh of her intact left shoulder!

"AAAAAGH!"

Valisera let out a muffled scream of agony, biting down on her wrist hard enough to draw blood to keep her voice from reaching the rest of the squad in the adjacent hall.

The rift was tearing her muscles from the inside out, as if an unseen, filthy, dark hand was trying to carve its way out of her physical body!

You are nothing but a subordinate, you wretch! I imagined—or perhaps felt—the echo of the entity’s voice resounding in her mind, based on her next words that came out broken, shattered, dripping with wounded pride and absolute refusal to submit.