The intrusive thought slowed Joaquim’s jump into a sprint towards Ameen.

  Despite the markings of questionable sanity on the walls, the white marble floor with sprinkles of muted colors below the two boys was out of place in these ruins. Its mundanity and dull ceiling lights were better suited to a school.

  An orphanage.

  A hospital.

  A rehab.

  A detention center.

  An asylum.

  Now that Joaquim's thrust sneaker had yet to hit the aforementioned floor, the intrusive thought did not seem so random anymore. Ameen was powerful enough to cancel his training all across space and time, and it had been rumored in No Man's Land that the messiah could end a life before the thought of harming him could fire. By that metric, perhaps this was Joaquim's mind slowing time before his demise.

  Yet, there was unrecognizable hesitation present in Ameen. As a messianic adult he had been indifferent as to who he had been standing behind him, but up until now he made sure his back was never turned to Joaquim. The most subtle intensity came from each blink Ameen permitted, almost as if he was spacing them out as much as he humanely could. He had pressed the cold barrel of a gun on Joaquim’s back earlier.

  However, a bloody trough opened on Ameen’s flat face, it having started in the center of his scalp and reaching to the center of his collar bone in less than a second. His entire countenance opened like a proscenium stage, except its proverbial red curtains were inverted inwards as flesh and blood, and inside the opened skull pink matter writhed out with nerves twisting together to form tendril-like limbs of nerve endings and bioelectricity.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Maybe the way Farouq had meant that time is relative did apply sometimes, because the time difference in Joaquim's mind between the very first step of his run, compared to all the flux-induced steps he took to reach Ameen’s exiting brain was beyond stark. He had been frozen in time while starting to run with trepidation, and now Ameen's jumping brain was within his grasp.

  However, without knowing whether it was an illusion or not, the flying brain either left behind afterimages or cloned itself a handful of times. The reality around Joaquim destabilized like it did back Iker’s levitating home, and he was still unable to tell if the replicating afterimages of the white walls were real or imagined. Despite the floors disappearing to reveal metallic and runic chasms that could have gone all the way to the Earth's core, Joaquim did not fall as the wall replicas collapsed into four walls again like a plastic deck at the end of a riffle shuffle. The floor below returned after being translucent for less than a second, and the black markings that had been notes coalesced.

  Ameen's original body was nowhere to be found, causing Joaquim to halt and back pedal in fear.

  After the reality stabilized, Joaquim caught a glimpse of the circle all the ink in the white room formed before it burst into repeating names, never exiting the two-dimensional confines of the walls’ surfaces.

  Ameen

  Ameen

  Prophet Muhammad

  Ameen

  Palestine.place

  Muhammad.anagram

  Israel

  Aisrel

  00000000

  Baphomet

  Ameen

  Ameen

  Ameen

  There were more names, but the ones Joaquim gleaned over were already rendering out of the walls and into adult silhouettes of Ameen. Joaquim's heartbeat accelerated as fast as he fluxjumped out of the eerie room, tearing through a large chunk of its threshold. The ruins shook.

  Back in the ruin’s darkness Joaquim, unconsciously, had made the conclusion that the adult versions of Ameen spawning were made of flesh until a very fresh memory told him otherwise. He would have missed it if he blinked at the wrong time upon fleeing, however there was no mistaking the shiny and silver skeleton that also manifested in one of the translucent silhouettes.