Your Eyes Have Seen More Death Than Life

[Ryn]

((Figured Ryn needed an excerpt to establish the kinda shit she does and by it's nature it's a bit fucked up. Normally stuff doesn't need it but I feel like this could probably use a Content Warning just in case: Implied Abduction, Stalking, Torture and Murder; Gruesome Injuries; Claustrophobia))


It does not take Ryn long to know she's in the right place. A rot hangs in the air that can only stem from the coalescing of a newly 'born' asura. Disappearances, at least one gruesome murder, witness accounts of a monster. Ryn had barely listened to the briefing. This smell that permeates the town tells her everything she needs to know. The monster is not the cause but the result of atrocities committed by human hands. She breaks into a sprint, scales a garden wall and from it leaps to the roof. Like a shadow she moves through the night as if the darkness carries and the aftertaste of suffering beckons her on. They'd given her addresses of victims, shown her a map that gave her a vague sense of where to go. From there she can smell it. A foul blade dragged across the city.

She recognizes the paths and patterns of someone following their prey. Along the same routes over and over, lingering near a school. On a roof looking down at a dance studio. On a bench in a park next to some kind of arena of geometric dirt patterns in the lawn. Stalking, finding the right moment to strike and reveling in the anticipation. A soul fully rotten and giving rise to an asura with every despicable act. It'd be weak still. It would nest where it can indulge in it's defilements. The agency had tried to explain serial killers and their mementos to her as if they were somehow new. They sought to feed the rot inside with reminders, sustain themselves on suffering by giving it shape long past the flesh of their victims giving in.

Across the city she follows, tracing the tendrils of corruption, spurred on by the flames in her chest stoked with every step, every heartbeat that brings her closer to her quarry. She whips off her sunglasses. Blue flame dances in the night and in her wake she leaves nightmares of blood and darkness in the minds of sleepers. She almost misses it. The trails diffuse around a couple blocks of houses and still no sign of the monster's lair. Until a startled scream stabs through her heart. No ears can hear but this close and with the high of the hunt coursing through her Ryn cannot miss the plea of the abused. A begging for mercy so desperate it invites death.

A hatch in the ground, overgrown and forgotten. Ryn pulls on it but metal bolts seal it tight and though they groan ever so slightly, her elbows and shoulders are what threaten to give in first and she stops. Panting through gritted teeth she jerks her body forward and joints settle back, tendons unlock. Another way then. Several yards away, a vent buried in thick bushes, sucking in the slightest breeze of air. The grate tears off easily, revealing an opening barely a foot wide. She sticks her head inside, then twists one arm and shoulder forward and exhales. She may be a deva but even she has to breathe to live. Two minutes, maybe three with no air. She slides herself fully into the duct. She pushes through the dark, twisting herself around a bend that wrenches one hip from it's socket.

She's close. Fingers clench around a filter set into the duct and twist it free until it clatters along ahead of her. Her lungs are burning and force her to stop every couple feet when they try to gasp for air and lock her in place until she can force herself to exhale even that little scrap of oxygen. Stars are dancing before her eyes by the time she reaches another grate. It takes three excruciating shoves for it to come loose and fall into the tiny room of mostly empty shelves. Ryn follows soon after, headfirst she rolls to a stop, one foot arresting her motion, the other one less cooperative until she reaches down and sets it against her hip properly. Her other hand pulls her up on one of the shelves and with a suppressed grunt of pain lets her body weight force her thigh bone back into it's socket.

She can hear them now. The barely audible whimper and the slimy gurgle of laughter beyond the door in front of her. The pain in her hip doesn't matter now. Only her quarry. Silent as a ghost she turns the door handle and pushes the metal door open a crack. The room in front of her is brightly lit with weak yellow-orange neon light, in it's center a sturdy wooden table. The walls are lined with tool racks. On the table a naked woman is not even twisting in her restraints anymore. Next to her is what used to be a man. Asura warp the body they ride and this one was not a clean birth. Shoulders too wide for their chest, spine too long but curved forward. A tongue long enough to lash out and briefly land on his shoulder before slipping off in a trail of saliva. The whirring sound of an electric drill.

And then darkness as Ryn's fist sinks into the breaker box next to the door. A confused grunt at the stilling of his tool. A sobbing scream from his victim. A whisper in the darkness. "I have come for you." Deliverance to one, ill omen for the other, a promise either way. Ryn is already into the room, slipping up along the wall when her quarry whirls around towards the door. "Who's there!" drawls past disgusting lips. "You'll have to wait your turn." a giggle bursts forth like a boil as blue eyes burn in the dark like twin embers of hell.

Ryn's flattened hand strikes, fingertips first, parting skin. Again. And again. Three satisfying cracks tell her each rib struck is broken and the sound sates the fire raging in her chest as much as it stokes it. A wet slap strikes her cheek and her skin boils at the touch. She's moving again. Underneath the table, her fingers dig around an achilles tendon, tear it free, forcing the monster to catch itself on the table with a gurgling scream. In her other hand a knife from a tool-rack strikes out and sinks deep into a kidney before a sweeping arm hits her like a tree trunk and sends her crashing into a row of chairs against the wall. She doesn't bother to take stock of any injuries. A kick sends a chair skidding, into the way of the monster limping towards her. She's already up. Before the man can untangle his leg from those of the chair she twists it taut and a well-placed kick snaps femur in two.

Her blood is singing in her ears, the itching rooted deep in her teeth soothed with every satisfying wail of the man. She could keep going for hours. Repay him for every misery, every defilement he inflicted on his victims. But the whimpers of his latest victim and her irises blown wide with fear and pain don't let her. She won't draw out her suffering any longer than she already has. Worse, her bearing witness, even in the dark, makes her think of Katarina and the look on her face if she ever saw Ryn's handiwork.

"What are you!?" the man wails as he tries to prop himself up on the table, slipping and having to readjust. Asura hate pain as much as some of them love inflicting it. "A reckoning." Ryn snarls and the quaver in her voice startles her. Her hands find the long spiraling shape of a drill-bit as long as her arm. In passing she tears the knife from his side and it clatters to the floor amid spurts of blood as she alights onto the table, feet finding space between the shaking limbs of the man's victim. "A malediction." She rears her arms back above her head and slams the drill-bit down through eye-socket, past thin layer of bone and into the twitching fatty folds that dreamed this profanity into existence. Flesh slackens and Ryn recognizes her mistake too late. The Asura leaves the man and with it Ryn's sight. "Whatever you are, I will repay you in kind." the voice of pure spirit giggles, reassured by having escaped the pain of flesh and bone. Ryn's hand clenches into a claw and rakes across the air where the voice was coming from and it's giggle dies in the proverbial throat as nails cut the intangible Asura as easily as they'd parted flesh. "H-how..." it glugs as it flees like a wounded animal. Ryn's claws rake the air again and again but the asura is gone.


Later a teenage woman draped in a blanket collapses on the grass outside, shivering. Sirens wail in the distance and behind her a figure barely more than a shadow in the night ignites a match in her hand that reflects of her glasses. As she walks away she drops it into the forgotten nuclear shelter, sucking blood and scraps of muscle from her teeth. Below, the deformed corpse with the torn open chest and missing heart is drowned in gasoline along with the rest of the horrors, spilling forth from the slashed tank of an old generator. As it ignites the opening spews a column of flame high into the night sky.