The moment I saw the elder's vision… I was moving. I didn’t need words… I didn’t need an explanation… I just needed to move. Left then right, left then right. Just as it had always been.

  I could feel him… that disgusting pile of writhing shit; he had a relic of Hunger… and I could feel that piece of Primeval power resonating from somewhere in the city. The resonance struck like a chord in the back of my mind, and I knew I had him dead to fucking rights! Even if he was physically far away.

  Yet as I advanced through the familiar night of St. Louis, something felt different. I felt a new… control. A whisper of independence that I had never felt before while chasing down a target. I was no longer the hollow, obedient extension of Death’s will I had once been. Before, I’d felt nothing but murderous intent that demanded absolute obedience to enacting the will of Death… to fill my own need for the extinguishing of a specific life. No thought, no hesitation, only the relentless drive to kill.

  But now, there was space, flexibility, and a sliver of choice that made every motion feel more… my own, than ever before.

  I could feel things… subtle shifts in the world around me. The longer I took to meet with the elder, the more the angles of approach changed. Not fading or closing off, but shifting as if reality itself was bending and rewriting based on my choices. It was probably a lot of Death’s unseen hand moving far beyond me from out in the fields to keep me on track. He wouldn’t let me waste this opportunity, no matter how much I veered from the path. The relics of Hunger would fall, starting with Ushumgal-Etemmu... a name of someone way beyond their time. He should have died thousands of times over by now, yet he still claimed a foothold in this world.

  He was just like all the rest I had slain for Death. His time was up long ago, but he did things in secret to prolong his life. The things he did had a more Primeval flavor, which just made him fit into this more exotic side of life than the others before. But when I really thought about it, I guess all of the targets Death had sent me for were Primeval flavored in nature. I just didn’t know it at the time.

  As I recalled previous kills, I knew they were tied to the Unseen. Most of them were, at least. I knew that some were tied to different entities; however, they were all tied to some kind of Primeval in the grander scheme of things. I had cut a lot of strings that led back to the Unseen and his realm of power in my large gap of time that I had spent away from the Chasse family. That motherfucker never saw it coming. One of his own, Peter Grimwood, let me right in and locked the door behind him, trapping me with his Primeval patron. Little did either of them know that I wasn't trapped in there with him… he was trapped in there with me… Annihilation and Death.

  It was then that I began to understand the magnitude of what stood behind me. The true weapon was not strength… it was deception and surprise. These elders, these Primevals, believed I was one of their own, some forgotten shadow crawling back from the void. They were wrong. I was the second Destroyer, the one sent to clean the slate after they had slaughtered their ordained Annihilation. Death was the darkness that draped the universe itself: invisible, unheard, yet ever present. They couldn’t account for him because they didn’t know him back in their era. They thought themselves the peak. They couldn’t predict him… Death was alien to the Primevals because he came after Annihilation.

  Wherever I met the elders, they would be unprepared. The same fate would come for the Primevals, though perhaps not by my hand. My part was only one link in a long, unending chain that stretched across time itself. But this was my moment… my link… and it burned like a fire in my heart.

  I was still three miles out when I began to flow through the city streets and alleys. The night was thick, the air was chilled, yet heavy, and I moved through it like a specter. I wasn’t flying, not truly… but each leap from rooftop to rooftop felt like tearing away from gravity’s grasp. When the rooftops ended, I descended into the veins of shadow along the street, slipping through the cracks between streetlights, alleys, and silence. I became the darkness between the living and the supernatural world. I was the shadow, threading through the seams of the waking world toward my target.

  I existed for one purpose: to cut down. To take away the things that had lingered in this world beyond their time. I was Annihilation… I was Death’s hand.

  Even from miles away, I could feel the pull. It led to one place… Forest Park. That was where the elder now stood, shrouded in his own delusion of safety. I knew that surely he had to have felt the death of Hunger… but his movements didn’t seem panicked. Beneath the silver wash of the moon, I could sense his mind working, blissfully unaware and continuing his ongoing plans. He thought himself in control, directing his twisted influence across the city. There was an air about the way he moved, like he was finally free to move without Hunger’s intervention or input.

  As I felt him moving around a small area of the city, it reminded me of a teenager who had just gotten their driver's license. He moved in quick bursts, staying in one place for only a few minutes before moving on and meeting others. Like his license to drive gave him the only excuse he needed to visit every friend and convenience store along his route home. He had no idea what was watching or moving toward him. He was oblivious… and I was inevitable.

  I stopped moving once I got on top of a hill that overlooked a large open field. There wasn’t a single human insight. There might have been one or two at the fringes of the park, stumbling around town, drunk from the nightlife they so craved. But there wasn't anyone in the near vicinity where the Persian-looking man lingered. However, the screams that would soon flow out from here might be heard as they reached back out into the city. I knew my plans… and the screams would come.

  My eyes shifted to pitch black, and my teeth shifted and sliced into position as features of Myordrakien punctuated my face as my power primed itself. From within the veil, I could feel Death’s blade thrumming with his signature power as it fed into me and my own unquenchable hunger to end lives. The feeling I got as I felt this process was indescribable. It was transcending as I felt myself, the Primeval, and Death in a synchronous loop as we prepared to descend. It felt… fated. Like this was meant to happen… the universe demanded it, and I was the tool to see it out.

  I clenched my teeth, feeling the faint burn of teeth still extending as I rose from my crouched position among the trees. The night air was damp and chilled, brushing against my skin with that inescapable bite that follows movement through winter. Ahead of me, the Middle Eastern-looking elder drifted through the park’s clearing like a phantom. His gait was measured, deliberate as if he were listening for something unseen. Not me… he had no idea of me. In his mind… I was dead.

  That’s when I saw her. A shape stirred at the edge of the dark pond, rippling water parting with a faint slosh, and a woman crawled out from its depths. She was completely naked, her pale body glistening under the dim light that crawled across Forest Park from the distant moon. Her blonde hair clung wetly to her back, her blue eyes sharp and distant, yet unfocused, as if she had just been born from the water itself. I realized, with quiet fascination, that her skin was… shifting. It rippled across her limbs and torso in subtle, unsettling waves like her flesh was still deciding what shape to take. It reminded me, uncomfortably, of my own transformations.

  Then the scent hit me. It was faint, distinct, and unforgettable. My lips curled in mild amusement as the memory from my senses clicked into place. It was the smell of that spider that had disappeared from this very park. The one who left the water and left a trail of small human feet on that walkway.

  “So, all things do come full circle,” I murmured to myself, voice only audible to myself.

  This was the spider… that first spider. The one I’d tangled with here before. I’d assumed she’d vanished back into whatever pit she’d crawled from, buried beneath the filth of the pits. For a while, I even wondered if she had been one of the elders herself. That changed, though, once I’d seen what true power looked like. Compared to the spiders I’d already killed down there, this creature was nothing… a pale imitation. A runt.

  Still, I felt no real hatred for her. She was just another monster in a long list of abominations that I just so happened to have on my radar. But she had chosen her side, whether she realized it or not… she was with those from the pits. Sure, she’d killed that psychotic vampire in the blue dress, the one I’d stopped from killing that poor college guy, but then she’d turned on me, too. As far as she knew, I was just an average Joe.

  After our brief encounter and even briefer exchange of blows, she’d fled. Maybe she’d never killed a human being before. Maybe she’d tried to stay out of the pits for a reason. But I wasn’t taking chances. Tonight, I’d make sure she stayed buried for good… so I filed her away in the “guilty-by-association” category.

  The elder spoke, his voice low and resonant, carrying easily across the open space as he talked. He thought they were alone.

  “Everyone grows stronger now,” he said fervently. “The hunger rises in us all. This is a new age…” he flexed his fist as he could feel what he spoke about within his own body.

  His tone had weight… too much weight for a man who’d supposedly just lost his patron. His conviction wasn’t grief. It was a revelation that he was trying to convey to the spider-woman.

  Then, without a sound, I began to move. I stepped from the cover of the trees and into the open field, where shadows slid over the grass in shifting waves beneath the dim moonlight. Forest Park lay silent under the night sky, but there was a pulse in the air, faint, like the world itself was holding its breath. Like it knew I was here… and I was about to make a move.

  My boots made almost no sound on the earth as I walked, steady and unhurried. There was no anger in me. No warmth. Just cold inevitability. Left then right… left then right… just as always.

  I closed the distance, thirty feet, maybe, and stopped. That was when the elder stiffened. His head tilted slightly, and his gaze turned toward the trees I’d just stepped from. He couldn’t see me. Not yet. But he felt me. He felt the murderous intent that rolled off me like promised carnage and chaos.

  The elder, whom I now knew to be Ushumgal-Etemmu, connected eyes with me. There was no posturing or even surprise. He expected me. Maybe not me… but whoever had killed Hunger. He fully turned to face me, lifting a hand to motion the naked woman to stop.

  I hadn’t really noticed it at the time, but she was startled for sure, and was stumbling backward as her skin started to shift and pull like she was going to transform into her spider shape. They both tried to play it off, but these monsters had been startled… startled by something they could neither detect nor understand. Not until it was too late.

  The elder stopped her with a wave and gestured for her to come stand near him in a consolidated force. He was calm, but that was a show. He wanted to seem in control.

  “I know what you have done. We all know… the rest of the brethren. Even your red-haired cohort could feel the moment our mother was cut off from us. Her power remains in us, but only so.” The dark hair hung long over his shoulders, and a full, well-kept beard decorated his face. He looked slightly different than he did when I first saw him down in the pits, but he resembled an image of him I saw in the vision from way back in the day.

  He motioned to the naked woman, and with the flick of his wrist, flung off what looked like red gore and oily black slime from his fingertips, and it impacted the woman’s body.

  “Please… cover yourself. Show some decorum,” the prime elder said with what almost sounded like a sigh of annoyance.

  Not under her own power or ability, the biological material he flung onto her spread over her body quickly, covering her from toes to neck, and a sheen of gore slowly shifted into what almost looked like fabric. Then that strange material ironed out more details, and in an instant, she was wearing some form of clothing. It wasn’t anything modern, but more like the things I saw of the villagers in the vision. It was clothing from back in his time. Back in those ancient villages and societies in Mesopotamia, or wherever the fuck that was. The woman didn’t flinch, but bowed her head almost meekly as she accepted his offering.

  “Pardon my kin here, she is only so much. She lacks the same… adaptability that the rest of us have.” The elder returned his gaze to meet mine and really focused on my black eyes. “To see you truly returned from the dead… not just a reanimation but true resurrection… It’s exciting. It raises a lot of questions for me that I thought were answered. Our mother,” he motioned between him and the still unnamed spider-woman, “was not very informative over the many years of service. She told us what she wanted us to know. She even used us… She… corrupted us in ways we couldn’t control, especially in our early years. However, towards the end of our time, she spoke of something that was coming.” He motioned toward me with a hand gesture. “Something she feared, and that's saying something. After all this time, I felt that was something that she… Hunger… an aspect of the world itself… would be unable to feel.” His words were very theatrical, and punctuated the important parts to make this all seem more to me… like it would make a difference.

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  I glanced over to the woman, who looked terrified beyond words in her coarse brown robes. She wasn’t just scared of me, but she looked even scared to be standing there in front of this elder. It was like watching a rabbit tossed into a cage between two hungry lions.

  “Pardon my friend here, she’s still shaken from losing her mother. It’s always been hard for her to deal with us elders, let alone a being that not only returns from death… but has the power to kill a Primeval.”

  I felt a swell of annoyance from my human side surging up, which surprised me. I didn’t expect it, but it came up all the same. Before I realized it… I was speaking out loud to the elder.

  “What is it you think is about to happen here?” I asked the elder. That’s when I realized this was the first time I’d ever spoken to a target after receiving their vision. Usually, it was all chaos, carnage, “rip and tear until it was done” kind of stuff. But I knew that it was this new union I shared with Death and Myordrakien that made this clarity possible. It was the only reason I was able to slow down like this.

  “For starters, let me introduce myself. You can call me Shal,” he said his chosen name with a smile that told me there was some sort of inside joke to it. “I think it’s only fair we should introduce ourselves, don’t you?”

  There was a moment… just a single second that I started preparing to hear what he had to say. But before I could go down that path… I saw what this was. This was a ploy. This was survival. He knew he had “killed” me once before. He didn’t know how to put me down… so he was trying to gather information.

  Not on my watch! Death said that the mystery of my secret would be one of my greatest strengths, I had literally just thought about it… and I couldn’t botch that now. I had already fucked up so much shit from indecision, or second-guessing myself, or situations. I had to learn from my mistakes. It was time to start learning from my past… changing the way my mind worked as I continued in this life. I wasn't human anymore… so when the cards were on the table, it was time to rely on the truth. I was a fucking monster… so it was time to start acting like it.

  I knew that Death had a plan, and I knew that I could fuck it up. But that also meant that my decisions could affect his plans. He could plan around the decisions I made. So… what if I made better decisions that helped me and mine, that also got him what he needed?

  Would it work…? Fuck if I knew… but I was going to try. No more bullshit. No more questions. Now was the time… for brutal decisiveness.

  I reached for Death’s blade, feeling my hand slip between this world… and somewhere else. The air crackled as my hand slipped in there to find it… the power rolled through me… thick, overwhelming, and alive. The veil rippled, shuddering as the blade tore free from it like a wound opening to allow something into this world; something that didn’t belong. It appeared in my right hand like a shimmering heat haze. That vibration… it rattled through the bones in my fist, wrist, and arm. It was the hungry need to consume life thrumming and howling through my body, burning through my nerves, feeding into my chest like fuel for the Primeval heartbeat that wasn’t solely my own. Every ounce of it wanted to be used, to end something. I craved that power… and I felt sated; drunk even… the power was there, and it was great.

  I didn’t hold it back.

  The ground buckled beneath me as I launched forward. One heartbeat, I was standing still; the next, I was there… right in front of the elder. His form shifted slightly; that wet, writhing mess of flesh and slime appeared over his form momentarily in response. I had to admit that he was fast, and he recoiled instinctively.

  I saw the flicker of recognition in his eyes before he shifted. It was pure fear. He didn’t know what I was… what I carried with me. He knew his games were over. No words would stop me.

  He flailed, grotesque limbs dragging through the muck as his mass became something that didn’t resemble human, his face… or what passed for one, distorting as he shrieked in a mix of rage and survival. But instead of fighting, he reached for the spider-woman. His clawed hand-tendril sank into her abdomen with no regard for her life. He lifted her as if she were nothing and flung her at me. She screamed once before her voice was cut off by the force of the throw. To him… she was trash, only meant to be used to further his own life.

  She sailed through the air between us, limbs tangled, eyes wide in horror as she was airborne. She wasn’t a fighter in this situation… she was a distraction… bait. I could see the realization in her face as she rushed toward me in an involuntary motion. The one she came to meet, the elder whom she thought she could trust, had sent her to her death.

  My hand was already moving. The blade thrumming in my grip cut through the space like a flash of black light. It met her chest with a sound that wasn’t just metal piercing flesh… it was the sound of something ending. A hollow thud, then a deep, vibrating echo sounded out as the weapon connected with her. Not just to her body, but to her soul… or whatever equated to that for her.

  Her breath caught, her eyes widened, and in that second, everything went still. I surged Death’s power through her, raw and unfiltered. The power didn’t pour out of me. It tore from the blade and savaged its way through her… devouring her life. Her skin shriveled, bones snapping inward as the life was sucked out all at once. Her very short scream broke into a gurgle of unalive meat loosening its grip on breath… and then silence.

  When I pulled the blade free from her body, she was nothing… just a collapsed heap of brittle, gray flesh and bones, scattered across the ground of Forest Park.

  I looked up. The elder was already retreating. He was moving away from me, sliding in his too-quick movements, dragging himself backward through the dead grass, leaving a trail of slime and panic in his wake. His form stuttered between shapes, as if he couldn’t decide what to be: man, monster, big ole’ ball of shit. His limbs churned through the sludge as he tried to vanish into the cracks of the ground or the pavement near the road. But I could feel him. His fear stained the air like blood in water, and there was no escape from me now.

  He was running. No longer aiming to posture like he was the strongest thing in existence… he was running to save himself. If only that would be enough.

  I moved again, the world warping around me as if it couldn’t keep up. The air bent, the ground shattered under my steps, and the veil screamed as it tried to recall its blade. I tore through the distance between us to stay on him. Every pulse of power in my body urged me forward… don’t let him go. We were here to claim him… to balance the scales back to the direction they needed to go.

  The elder’s shriek rang out before me, desperate, wild. His voice scraped through the darkness. “Take her! Feed on her and be sated! This is a new world… one without the great Hunger to keep us controlled. We can make something new…”

  But I wasn’t interested in bargains. Not anymore.

  He’d thrown her life away to save his own… and that cowardice only made the need to kill inside me stronger. He thought he was at the top. He thought he was strong. If he were… he wouldn’t have needed to pull such a pathetic maneuver. He was just like the rest: the drug dealers, the murderers, the rapists, all of them. When the cards were on the table, he was a bitch. He couldn’t face down his own death like a fucking man. He would use anyone and everything to try and flee from it… just to prolong his own life.

  I pressed forward, black eyes fixed on his fleeing, shifting form. My grip tightened on the blade, the hum in my veins turning to a steady roar. There was no stopping now. Not an ounce of hesitation was in me as the fire of Annihilation burned through my veins.

  He ran in his semi-human form… but that wouldn’t be enough to escape me. I moved just as always… left then right… and then I was there… standing in front of him. It was instinctual, felt more than thought, but I had moved through the veil instinctively. Stepping in and then back out of the hidden realm just adjacent to the living world to get around him. I didn’t even think about doing it. I just thought that I had to get in front of him… and it worked.

  His face was in obvious rage and fear. He couldn’t explain what I had just done. It wasn’t something from his world… maybe the Unseen’s world… but not Hunger’s. He stutter-stepped, and then he backed up. The dark-haired man clenched his teeth and then gathered his resolve. He shook off the fearful look across his face and donned a more resolved look.

  “You will not stop me here, beast. This new world needs a shepherd… all of my family will need someone to guide them through this harsh time of change. I cannot be felled by you,” the elder said with conviction so true that I almost stopped my assault. He was so believable in his convictions.

  Almost…

  I kept stepping towards him and raised my hand, aiming the point of Death’s blade directly at him. Then, just as I raised my hand, I saw him change.

  In one moment, there stood a man… an elder. The next… a mountain of gore spilled out from a human-shaped object. Slop, meat, and blood spilled out in all directions. It was so much that it actually hit me in the chest. I was basically standing in a chest-high pool of gore that spread out in all directions by about fifty feet.

  Images of that old movie “The Blob” came into my mind. Piles and piles of goo just swarmed me, and I couldn’t do shit. I slammed the blade down into the gore over and over in an attempt to end this thing here and now, but it didn’t meet flesh. It hit the mass of carnage, but it didn’t stab anything. It just submerged into the disgusting pile of shit as an inert and useless hunk of metal.

  Before I could think, the gore swallowed me, and I was inside of it. I felt the moonlight cut off from me, and there was nothing else I could do. I was inside this thing… this elder. I felt like I could still transform into the monster, but would that do me any good? It would still just swallow me, based on the size of this thing. I felt cut off from the living world, and I had a moment that could be summed up in one phrase, “Oh shit!”

  I wasn't too worried because I felt the power of the blade still feeding me, so I knew I wasn’t going to be killed by suffocation or anything like that. The blade sustained me with the only thing I craved… Death. So I had all the time in the world to figure…

  Death… that’s what I needed!

  I shook my head. How could I be so fucking slow sometimes?

  The very thing I knew would keep me alive and fighting was the same thing I needed to use. I just needed to start thinking in different terms than I normally did. I had a whole new aspect of power that I wasn't used to. Death’s power was not based on claws, talons, teeth, or muscle. Death was a force… and I had that power at my fingertips now. I just had to use it.

  So, without any other thoughts that would just waste time, I felt the thrumming power of the blade that filled me. I focused on it, felt it flowing from the blade and into me. It sated the unending hunger I felt to end lives, thanks to the Primeval, Myordrakien. So now… I stopped taking it in and started letting the blade leak out. It was immediate.

  Within seconds, the ocean of gore around me started to congeal and curdle. The crimson hues started turning more black than anything else. Then, in a burst of force, the slimy substance pulled back into a single entity. I was no longer floating in a living, sentient slime; I was standing on the grass of Forest Park.

  The elder, now a solid singular person, looked at me with fading and desiccating flesh. “How… what are you?” He begged to know… not just to save himself, but to know a truth before he died.

  He knew he would die. He could feel the undeniable certainty in his body now. The power of Death that was already claiming his strange and amorphous body.

  “What have you done?” the elder spat out black bile as he spoke, stumbling around in his panic.

  I slowly paced towards him, slinging the nasty residue off my arms and body as best I could. It was fucking disgusting. After this was over… even if another vision came, I was going to take a shower.

  “No words… no plans… nothing!” I told him simply. “You… and all like you… will die. We all die… even you, Ushumgal-Etemmu!”

  The moment his name left my mouth, his eyes went wide. He couldn’t believe that he had just heard his true name come out of my mouth. I had said it… but he didn’t understand how I knew it. Just like Mercy… just like all of them. I knew their secrets… I was the undeniable end.

  I stepped forward just enough to easily slide my blade into his chest, staring into his eyes as the blade of Death himself parted flesh. I flooded his concentrated mass with as much of Death’s power as could flow in the few seconds, and I left it embedded in him. Before it totally swarmed his concentrated mass from countless generations of victims… he spoke again.

  “What are you?” he was barely able to get out before falling limply on the grass of the darkened park.

  I laughed to myself as his life force died out. That question… it was the same question I had asked myself for so long. It was the same question I saw in countless people's eyes over the years, human and monster alike. I had that answer now… but the evil of this world wouldn’t know what I was… not until their life was spilling out from them. Even then, they would only know one thing about me. I was the true monster of this world.

  Then… there was silence. Our scuffle was actually pretty brief, but even with the intensity, it was not that loud. Even if there were others in the vicinity of the park’s borders… I wasn't sure if anyone would have heard us. But for the time being, it didn’t seem like anyone had heard us.

  However, now I was realizing that I had a larger problem. This guy was not a vampire. What would happen when the sun came up, life returned to normal, and civilians found some massive piece of shit, dead on the lawn of Forest Park? Even if he was a vampire, the amount of gore that was spreading out from him was growing. Now that he was dead, he was like one massive pile of melting ice cream. He just kept spreading out slowly as a sluggish wave of blood and guts. He was covering an area of about a couple of hundred square feet around me. If it kept growing at this rate, that much material would be hard to ignore. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be like a vampire… that’d be bad.

  For safety’s sake, let's hope that he just didn’t burn up.

  “Well... shit!”

  Just then… a crimson shard of power slowly floated up from his corpse. It hovered in the air with shimmering power… presenting itself to the world once again. I stared into it and felt myself clamp down on the blade again.

  I raised my hand and leveled the blade against the relic of Hunger just like I had done once before. I gripped the hilt of the blade and forced power out of Death's weapon. It went straight into the relic with little to no actual input… like it knew what to do without me. Maybe Death had a hand in that moment right there… I was unsure. However, the effect was the same as before. The relic was killed, faded, and dropped back to the ground in the same place the elder lay dead.

  In one quick series of events, another elder lay dead at my feet. Some might call this underwhelming, or unceremonious… but it was just clockwork. This was what I was meant to do. This was the righting of a wrong that had been long past due. Death was here to collect… and what power did any of these dickheads have against the Grim-fucking-Reaper?

  Death comes for us all… and what power do any of us have to cheat him? Not even these elders… or Primevals could hide from him for long. I just happen to be the one with my finger on the trigger.