Deviant: No Longer Human

"Well… if you didn't kill him, and I can't kill him… and there's no one else here" Wang Xiao's brow creased, "then who the hell did?"

Yang Yuhuan's glared. "Didn't I just tell you? An Executioner must have killed him."

"…"

His face shifted, eyes narrowing as the thought hit him like a cold splash of water.

… An Executioner.

The word hit like a hammer to the ribs.

If that was true, then every step, every victory, every untouched moment… had been bait.

A possibility he'd never even considered...

What the fuck…?

Did he just get scammed by the very Executioner that was hunting him? Was that why it never once tried to stop him, never stepped in to block his path?

... Letting him strut around with a false sense of victory, feeding him that warm, delicious delusion, only to crush it at the end?

'The bastard's been fattening the prey before the slaughter.'

If that was true… then coming all the way back in time had been pointless.

No, not pointless. He looked at Yang Yuhuan again.

He was already marked for death. She was here. Which meant there were two Transcendents in this world. Remove himself from the count, and the list was her and Aegis. And if she was still alive in the future, it meant that here, right now, she was stuck, absorbing this flame, while the Executioner had her pinned in place.

Trapped her so she couldn't run home.

That way, he could finally complete his hunt, and kill Wang Xiao.

'Pretty little trophy case you're building, huh, you sick fuck…'

That made sense... All of it.

Except for one thing.

If there were two Transcendents here besides him… then another Executioner should have arrived... Someone meant to kill her. But instead, Aegis died.

It didn't fit.

No matter how he turned it over in his head, something in the sequence didn't line up...

Yang Yuhuan's eyes narrowed, then curved into a sudden chuckle. "Hm? What's with that look? Don't tell me… you're also a marked target for execution."

Wang Xiao didn't answer right away. Her tone wasn't mocking for fun, she'd just found a crack she could wedge a knife into.

The balance shifted the moment she laughed.

A second ago, Wang Xiao held the leash.

Now, it was around both their throats.

The truth about Transcendents is simple enough: they are not split into "past" and "future" selves. No duplicates, no alternate versions. One thread, pulled taut across all of time, stretch it too far, and something breaks.

He'd stretched his own band to come this far back. Snapped it, even. The connection to his future was gone, dangling somewhere out of reach, and to pull it back would cost more energy than most worlds were worth.

Hers was worse. Yang Yuhuan's future wasn't snapped, it was pinned. Clamped in place by something that refused to let go. Until that was released, she was locked in a chain, a living casualty of causality itself. She would keep replaying the same corner of existence until she fulfilled whatever had to happen there.

Wang Xiao's gaze stayed on her a second. There was a certain pleasure in knowing she was stretched like that, held between two points, unable to move. It wasn't unlike a lover held on the edge, trembling, knowing they'd break if you pushed too far… and yet unable to pull away.

It was the same tension that defined power: not in killing, but in holding something in that state for as long as you wanted, deciding when, or if, to release it.

"You have a way…?" Wang Xiao tilted his head, the smile slow and crooked. "If I go down, everything goes down with me."

He said it like he was discussing marriage, but the glint in his eyes said otherwise.

He shook his head, chuckling under his breath. He realized he'd been thinking too much about survival lately.

Not like him at all.

If... Death was his only fixed destination, so why live like a man who feared the last stop?

Courage wasn't in pretending the road was endless, it was in choosing your road, knowing it might lead nowhere.

It was in climbing a staircase with no top, simply because your hands refused to stay idle.

Better to bleed on the steps than sit at the bottom, rotting in the regret of what you could have been, what you could have done.

Yang Yuhuan's gaze sharpened. She shivered, not from fear, but from the shift in his attitude. "There's no way to survive once you're marked," she shrugged. Her voice was even, but there was a flicker of satisfaction there. If she didn't beg for her daughter's release, she'd still be freed the moment he died.

She could save the girl herself.

In the projection, her daughter looked older, far older than she'd left her. Stronger, too. If not for the familiar symbols, she might not have recognized her own blood.

"Go away," Yang Yuhuan said, turning her back on him. "Prepare your coffin. If there's anything left of that fragile shell you call a body… it's the weakest I've ever seen on a Lord." She yawned. The dismissal was deliberate. "Don't disturb me."

She sat cross-legged before the blue flame, the shawl slipping over her shoulder, revealing the slow, deliberate rise and fall of her breathing. The firelight kissed her lips as she licked them, already tasting the richness bleeding off the flame.

Wang Xiao stood there in silence. "Weakest body… weakest shell…" The words rattled in his head. Not an insult, an observation. And she was right. His soul still had the bad habit of slipping out of his body, not because of some mystical quirk, but because his body simply couldn't contain it. The problem had never been fixed. He'd only gotten better at hiding the timing.

Two days passed... He barely moved, eyes occasionally flicking toward her under the guise of thought. If someone walked in right then, they'd think he'd been staring at her the whole time... And maybe he had.

He wanted to utterly trample her, her body, her confidence, her calm. Wanted her stretched between agony and pain until she forgot she'd ever been alive. But everything he'd planned here had failed, and the bitter taste of that loss sat sharp on his tongue.

BANG!

Abruptly, a sound like the sky shattering split the cavern, wang Xiao's head snapped up. Far off, light flared, jagged and violent.

Was the Executioner finally here?

If it was here for her, why the hell had Aegis died instead of her?

Without another glance at Yang Yuhuan, he stepped outside to see.

_______

Far away, the sky above the mountains was screaming.

KRRAA...BOOOM!

The clouds split open as if something had hooked its fingers into them and torn downward. Space itself flexed and cracked, fissures bleeding molten gold, every time the rift widened, reality made a sound like metal shearing, and the sun's light warped into violent, shifting hues.

In that storm, a shiloutte attacked like a storm given form.

SHHHRRAANG!

His spear teared through, leaving burning lines of warped light that refused to fade. Every thrust detonated a shockwave, sending rings of compressed air blasting outward, shredding what remained of the clouds.

Another shiloutte on the other side barely moved.

On the other side, another figure barely moved.

As it came into focus, you could see it wasn't exactly male or female, more like some molten-gold statue brought to life, all smooth curves and a slim, almost feminine frame, but with no real features or hair to soften it.

Its armor was a mix of blackened steel and mirror-silver veins, the plates layered like the hide of some ancient beast. From behind a faceplate of dark, obsidian glass, a pale white glow pulsed slowly… steady, patient, like the heartbeat of something that had all the time in the world.