S Class Files: Glitter and Gold

“Prophecy is overrated, I was prophesied to never die to people born of women and then a C-section baby killed me!”

Hayden Xin ghosted through the slums, grasping hands reaching for him, but a flash of golden eyes stirred them away.

Not many here were in a position to mess with a Gifted.

He followed his eyes, walking a golden path only he could see. Beside him, the ghosts of times long past drifted at the edges of recognisable existence, only an exertion of will away from being viewed by the prophet.

But his path led elsewhere, deeper in, there were the ruins of a brick wall. Weathered and battered by the ages.

It was here his power had led him, the path it wanted him to take for the past month.

And he focused.

An obese old man lying with his back to a more complete, but still destitute building. He was filthy, wearing clothing dredged in old beer stains. His hair and beard hung in long, oily braided ropes and his large beer belly strained against his stretched shirt. Beside him was a crude spear, made from duct taping a kitchen knife onto a broken broom shaft, and two obese seagulls, covered in slick black paint who fought over a single chicken bone.

The man opened his eyes, revealing he only had one, the other socket was simply empty.

Hayden frowned, was this filthy hobo the object his power decided to lead him to?

“What are you looking at?” the old man spat.

Hayden glanced around, checking for other people in this memory.

“I’m talking to you dickhead!”

The prophet kept looking around, perhaps the old man had sensed a hidden entity. His power revealed information from past and future, but they could still be hidden.

“I’m talking about you! You glowy eyed fuck!” the old man yelled, spittle escaping his mouth.

Hayden paused, turning to look at the memory.

“You are talking to me?”

“Do you see anyone else?” the hobo asked, gesturing around with dramatic sarcasm.

“I have heard of this,” Hayden said, “when a postcog peers into the past and a precog peers into the future, both may be able to interact and share information.” Though it required the postcog to be a deterministic based prediction to fully work.

“La di da, the golden boy has half a brain.”

“Though I am curious,” Hayden began, “why did my power lead me to you?”

The man before him must be a postcog of some ability, to be able to speak to him after who knows how long. Which era he came from was questionable, his clothing appeared modern, likely around the time of the Apocalypse, when powers and Gates first started appearing.

The hobo scoffed, “Why are you asking me?”

“Generally my power leads me to things of great import and…” he glanced at the hobo’s general, well… everything.

The hobo simply laughed, “And who are you to believe you are superior to me?”

“I am Hayden Xin, Prophet and Tier Four Citizen of the great United States,” he answered, brandishing a tattoo of four stars and stripes on his arm.

Instead of appearing impressed, the hobo simply laughed louder, “Oh! How civilization has fallen if they call paupers like you prophets!”

Hayden’s eyes narrowed, waiting until the laughter died down before speaking, “You consider my ability weak? I am the product of centuries of selective marriages, perhaps my prophecies are not the most accurate, nor can I see the furthest, but I have the greatest range, and am capable of viewing the future as easily as the past.”

One of the seagulls began squawking and the hobo paused as if listening to it, before he began to laugh, his voice mocking as he spoke, “Indeed, an ability like yours would be enough to qualify as Tier Six Citizen in your country.”

Hayden’s expression froze.

“History does not repeat, but people love making rhymes of it!” the hobo spoke with a roar, “You are not a Tier Six Citizen because you’re so fucking inbred you can’t even fuck!”

“Oh, how I wish I could’ve seen their faces! The moment they’d been waiting for, the product and work of generations, only to come out defective! You have not even manifested a Name for your ability! That is why your name is not Albright!”

His eyes glowed a deep golden hue, yet Hayden took a deep breath, taunts, belittlements, he was used to this, he had his entire life to get used to it.

This time, Hayden spoke with slightly more respect, “You are able to see my exile?”

“The moment when you ran like a little girl?” the hobo asked with a wicked smile.

Hayden reassessed his perception of the other’s Gift. Anything of his history was hidden by a family of prophets who didn’t want the tale of their failure to be told. Naturally, it was guarded against information gathering abilities, shrouded in cognitohazards, memetics and memetic kill agents, to be able to traverse all of that must’ve meant either the memory’s ability was incredibly specialised or extremely powerful.

“Who are you?”

The hobo scoffed, “Maybe if you go looking, you’ll be able to find my name, but that isn’t important is it?”

He gestured around, “I am already dead by your time, my brother’s stupid fucking dog will end up mauling me to death, but you? Despite your lack of qualifications, you will be the next narrator of this epic.”

“A narrator?” he asked.

“I already told you,” the one-eyed hobo said. “History does not repeat, but people like to make it rhyme.”

The memory began dissipating, disappearing into the ether.

“All you need to do is go to Hell. I assume you are smart enough to know where it is?”

Hayden Xin stood amongst ruins.

It was an old nuclear fission facility, one of many ruined after the Opening. The radiation had been dealt with long ago, but still, it lingered in ways not physical.

A sight of men and women running out in panic. Of screams and cries as a man covered in burns tried to beg for help.

He cautiously entered the facility, dust had long settled in many areas of the place, documents, old and scattered, crumbling with the tiniest of winds caused by his movements.

A time when dust was cleaned and order maintained. Of people going about their day, watching the readings, writing reports in boredom.

The control room remained largely intact, overlooking the outside world on a large platform. Chairs were splayed out, a plastic cup dropped in a hurry, the stain of coffee still visible on the floor.

“The cores are going critical!”

“Are the failsafes working!”

“All the failsafes have failed!”

Around them, the numerous screens, dozens of displays, all of which would normally show the status of the facility, all were in chaos. All were fritzing out, showing nothing but blind static.

“Have we made contact outside yet?”

“None of our phones are working, internet is down as well! We have no communication outside!”

“Damnit does no one know what’s happening!”

Suddenly the door slammed open, a woman rushed in. Cradling in her arms an old radio, “I just managed contact!” she yelled. “We’re suffering Bleed!”

“Where’s the Gate then!” someone yelled back, “why haven’t the heroes fixed it yet! Jack! Where is he! Do they know what happens if we get blown!”

With a shaky voice, the woman put down the radio, “That’s the thing… the Gate… It’s in Britain.”

“Impossible!” someone yelled back, “we’re in…”

“Reon, Brasa Illa,” Hayden Xin finished, looking out the window. Seeing the ancient statue made of white concrete and soapstone. Its arms spread out as if preparing to embrace. Vines and greenery had long grown over the old thing, its face was damaged, showing no sign of what the man might have looked like.

He sighed, that hobo had led him here, yet there was little to be gleaned, except for how far the effect of the Eye spread.

Hayden Xin had travelled across the entire world, and everywhere there were memories like this.

Hayden Xin stood on a field of corpses. Bodies of men and devils alike covered this land, obscuring what it once looked like, if not of course, for his power.

Lines of trenches spread out like the roots of a tree. Hastily put up fortifications and machine-gun nests. A bloody red sky that enveloped all.

Soon it came.

The red sky was blotted out by a flying swarm of endlessly varied monstrosities. Like a plague of locusts that devoured the sky, the earth turned dark as devils flew overhead.

Anti-air machine guns roared to life, lighting up the sky with lines of blinding fire. Corpses began dropping like flies, overhead a massive dogfight between flying devils and human aircraft began.

On the ground, the first line of devils came, their mass blotted out the horizon, covered the hills and the fields, charging recklessly into the lines of trenches that roared to life with machine gunfire.

The first line of devils was decimated by machine guns, their bodies shredded into so many pieces none may ever remake them. Morale rose for a moment, a confirmation that these monsters weren’t invincible.

“But that isn’t their strength,” Hayden muttered.

Hope slowly dwindled every hour the armies of man fought. Across the trenches, their machine guns shredded through thousands of devils every second.

But there were millions.

The corpses began to pile up, pile up so high the machine gun nests were forced to aim upward, to the point where suddenly men found themselves fighting from low ground due to all the hills and mounds of devil corpses that had grown over the course of hours of fighting.

There was no rest, for the devils kept coming.

There was no parley, for the devils slaughtered without care.

And soon, there was no hope.

“We’re running out of supplies,” an army officer reported.

Hayden never took many history lessons of this era, so the memory’s rank was foggy to him, but the appearance of a man reporting to a superior was universal.

The superior sighed, “Any update on the artillery?”

The officer shuffled nervously, “Mam, they say the Bleed effect might be conceptual.”

“Meaning that it isn’t altered physics we’re dealing with, but an attack on the very concept of technology.”

A fist slammed into the table. “Damn it!” she grunted, gritting her teeth and holding back her anger, “What of our remaining supplies?”

“Logistics thought we had enough to last 6 months,” he grimly answered, “we’ve burned through half already. They say it’s not just the increased rate of consumption, since our food and water situation is still functional, but all things mechanical are requiring twice as much maintenance as normal to continue functioning, if we don’t resupply we would soon be fighting with our bare hands.”

“Is it feasible to resupply?”

The officer shook his head, passing her a file, “Reports say most supply lines are completely frozen, factories are suffering the Bleed effect, the trucks transporting them are also suffering the Bleed effect, even this report is four days old because we’ve been forced to regress to long-range telegram.”

“Pretty much everything is suffering isn’t it?”

“Some places that use metahumans in their line are still working fine, but overall our entire system seems to be paralysed…”

“The weapons from that age were based on such naive assumptions,” Hayden muttered, drifting away from the memory. “They were based on the assumption humans would be facing human armies.”

Armies that tired, armies that had families to go back to, armies that had morale to break, armies that would give up when the bodies of their compatriots covered the ground.

One month into the battle, there were very few human casualties, almost negligible, compared to the confirmed millions of devils that lay dead across a thousand battlefields.

But it slowly changed.

Once impenetrable fortifications were abandoned when supplies had run out. Armies began retreating when the very terrain changed against their favour due to all the mountains of corpses.

Devils were physically superior to humans in most ways, so when humans ran out of their tools and ammunition…

The results were bloody.

As Hayden continued to watch the battle unfold over the course of a month, he began to liken it less like two great armies facing against each other.

And more like a single one trying to fend off a tsunami by shooting the ocean.

What could such an opponent be called? An enemy that didn’t tire, that never rested until you were slain, that endlessly charged into certain death, that didn’t flinch at the massive casualties that literally buried continents?

What could they be, other than hellish?

Finally, the western front began to crumble. Human casualties were still minimal, but everyone could feel it.

The sword of Damocles that threatened to fall and consume the world.

The stream of devils never ended, never stopped or slowed. Enough devils were spewed from that Gate to bury the entire world twice over with their corpses, and those monsters were entirely willing to do so.

And so his eyes turned eastward, to a location so inextricably linked to this battlefield it came to his eyes unbidden despite the barrier of leagues.

An old courthouse, a massive, yet empty assembly room.

Hayden focused, and his power gave him his vision.

An assembly of officials, dressed in the apparel of their nations. Of them, stood the representatives of the EU, their appearance well-kempt despite the truth untold yet known.

Europe will fall.

Perhaps it had already fallen while they entered this assembly, perhaps it will in a few more hours, still, it was undeniable they were leaders and officials of dead or gone nations. Yet they were calm, only the slight redness of their eyes gave anything away.

The presiding chair spoke, “We gather here in Beijing to discuss the recent events of the Hell Gate, and to vote on the annulment of the Beijing Pact.”

The Beijing Pact, a miracle of diplomacy forged within those very walls. A treaty signed by every nation in the world, agreeing to the human rights of the Gifted as well as greatly limiting those nations’ ability to conscript or use metahumans in their militaries.

It was written and signed for a very simple reason, to prevent a massive arms race between global superpowers to weaponise the Gifted, the lessons of the Second Cold War were still fresh to these people, so they were disinclined to rush headlong into the next method of mutually assured destruction. And though the Gifted might on average have less power than a nuclear weapon, they appeared completely randomly, a third world country could be elevated to the level of global superpower overnight just with a few particularly powerful or old Gifted.

Tacked on almost as an afterthought, were clauses ensuring the human rights of the Gifted, outlawing inhuman experimentation and exploitation, to prevent the breeding factories that popped up in certain nations.

To prevent people like him.

It was all written for the sake of human decency and world peace.

And it died to the sound of thunderous applause.

Hayden glanced overhead, to the suddenly darkening skies.

The ink wasn’t even dry before the U.S. sent their first National Level Hero.

The skies roared and thundered, a blinding figure of pure electricity stood flickering wildly above the encroaching horde.

“AC/DC.”

Lightning fell like rain.

And the balance of the world changed at that very moment.

A man lounged lazily in a military tent, his hair was wild, shooting off in numerous directions as if electrified. He scrolled aimlessly on his smartphone, a rare commodity given the Bleed effect that engulfed the entire world.

An official cleared his throat and entered the tent.

“Sir,” he respectfully spoke, though his tone made it clear the disapproval he felt.

The wild-haired man only glanced up, barely acknowledging him.

“Are you going to join the battlefield?” the official asked.

“What’s the need?” the man replied, “All the other’s have got it cleared. You know the new hashtag that’s trending?”

“I do not,” the official stiffly said.

“It’s #whatsmykillcount,” the man replied, “there’s no need to bother, we’ll get back Britain in a flash.”

Indeed, at this moment in the past, heroes took off their capes and donned military uniforms, given official positions with militaries across the world. Their sudden arrival on numerous battlefields heralded a change in the war.

The man returned his attention to the phone, “Honestly if I headed out again I would just be stealing the thunder of-”

Suddenly, the phone was dropped, the screen cracking on the hard floor as the Gifted turned his head towards a certain direction.

“What the fuck is that?”

Another linked memory, the event that occurred so great it linked numerous other events all across the world.

All across the world, in coffee shops, in hidden alleys, in the depths of ancient cities and hidden temples.

All across the world, Gifted turned their head to stare in the same direction.

These were not the riff-raff, for even amongst the Gifted, they stood a step higher. Some were worshipped as living gods, some wielded the power to destroy nations, some stood at the centre of empires so great they made Alexander weep.

All of them turned and stared westward, to Britain, to the Eye, to the Gate to Hell.

All of them sensed the moment the balance of the world was changed.

The wild-haired man pushed aside the official, rushing out of the tent. Electricity lit up underneath his every step as he rushed towards the source. Soon his body became thunder itself as he flew across the sky at the speed of lightning.

The National Level Hero saw it, treading slow steps out of the inferno portal, the red clouds that shrouded the entire island in a malevolent red mist.

It was-

Hayden fell to the ground, vomiting, his entire body felt sick as if assaulted and beaten. Was this his limit? Was he not powerful enough to view the mere memory of the thing that passed here?

He gritted his teeth, and focused, resuming the vision.

It was hidden amongst millions of devils, yet its field, its very pull on reality marked it as something incomparable to them.

A bipedal figure, skin appearing rough and craggy like broken stone, it had large and bulky arms whose knuckles scraped the floor as it walked. It was headless, a neck stump that gave the thought it was roughly beheaded some eons past. From the stump flowed an endless stream of silvery water that wrapped around its body like a turtle shell, constantly shifting with the tortured faces and screams of lesser creatures.

The entity turned to the hero.

Hayden stiffened for a moment as both unleashed an attack.

Reality broke.

The heavens were torn apart with thunder, a great cacophony of shouts and screams that made lightning itself, the earth shattered as rain fell upwards, each droplet containing a screaming soul desperate for escape.

Between them, the ocean, earth and sky split apart.

The hero was forced back, retreating along the path he came. Even as he flew, he could see it, Gifted soldiers falling to their knees, vomiting and crying in despair as they began to sense the entity that came. The sheer wrongness of it, a terror that brought many past the brink of insanity.

“Order a retreat!” the man yelled as he finally returned amidst Gifted soldiers screaming and shaking in horror. The mere presence of the entity had rendered over half of all Gifted completely incapable of battle, some scarred so horrifically they would never be the same, many took their own lives.

“We need more National Level Heroes!” the man yelled, thunder itself carrying his voice.

The memory began to fade, leaving Hayden Xin alone.

“In the end, help didn’t come in time, so you tried to hold it back alone,” he muttered.

Thunder roared as the heavens cried in beat with his voice. Lightning fell with the frequency of rain and with the ferocity of winter, all onto a single target.

The earth wept in response as water seeped out and fell to the sky, each one stopping a lightning bolt in mid-air.

“Now look at you.”

In front of him was a dried and bisected corpse laid strewn on the ground.

Around him, an eternal storm raged, thunder roared and fell like rain, the earth rose in great spires of stalagmites as water seeped out of the ground and fell upwards. The thunder and rain striking each other halfway between them in an eternal repeat of their cataclysmic battle.

The clash of abilities here was so great, reality itself was forever scarred, the sky was covered by an eternal storm that spanned the breadth of three nations, whom in the old language were named Czech, Poland and Slovakia.

And in that power… it left imprints. Hayden could feel it on his tongue, desperate to be spoken, the Name.

“AC/DC.”

It still resided in the hero’s corpse, weakened, but it still could be claimed by another. Hayden almost reached out to touch the body but… he stilled as he stared at the sky above, where the thunder fell like rain.

There was no telling how the remnants of his ability would react to an attempt to claim it. In the end, Hayden put away his greed and simply bowed,

“Thank you for your service, Mr Young.”

But no matter how the man had tried, he could not kill the entity, he could not kill a Demon.

Hayden wasn’t sure where his ability was leading him now.

He was following a wounded man, the remnants of a destroyed division, as he fled, bleeding from a deep gash on his side.

He followed the tortured steps of the memory as he drifted blindly through the corpse-filled lands.

Soon Hayden stood in front of a cave.

The soldier entered, swaying to and fro, the blood loss from his wound had already killed him, it was just a matter of when he actually died. Yet still, he trudged deeper into the cave, finally falling in front of a figure seated by an ancient table.

Hayden narrowed his eyes, for he almost mistook the figure for a statue. So still did he sit, the dust long settled on his body like a second skin of grey. The old man had a red beard, so long it grew three times around the round table beside him, his eyes were lidded, half-closed but still seeing.

The figure raised his hand, “Tell me child, do the ravens still fly around the mountain?”

The soldier choked, bleeding on the ground, “Ravens? No… the devils have killed everything…”

And with that last gasp, the soldier died.

The figure’s eyes slowly opened, as if rising from a deep slumber. “Then my time has come.”

And Hayden felt it now, another change, another event so great it rippled across the entire and brought him visions.

On an island besides the corrupted Britain, a horn was blown thrice, silencing the armies of Hell as from the mountains came a rallying warcry.

In a land where thunder fell like rain and rain fell towards the sky, a fist of earth broke through the ground, stepping out was a figure whose forehead bore four letters of ancient script speaking a forgotten name.

In the depths of a forgotten cave, below broken gates of gold, a marble statue heard an angel’s cry and turned to face westward.

On the shores of an ancient sea tainted with blood, a singing voice could be heard as a figure arrived on a boat of copper.

His mind burned with visions of lands far and near, as ancient figures stepped out of their slumber, yet his power focused on one single figure.

A figure who-

-and carried a blade of pale, he stepped through corrupted lands underneath a red sky, until he reached a great and ancient oak tree.

One strike did the Sword sing, felling the great oak, revealing an old, wizened figure who walked out and greeted-

-like a friend.

Something was wrong, Hayden realised. Information was being obscured, hidden from his prophecy so that he could not see it. He could see a blade, he could see it being wielded, but he could not see by whose hand.

“Is this the path you have led me?” he asked.

But his ability did not answer, he simply saw the path he needed to take, towards the land where it began.

Brettonia, or, as once called in old tongues, Britain.

Hayden saw red skies, bloody rain and the smell of rot.

The channel was long since filled with corpses, the island forever obscured by its ancient mist.

Still, he walked where the shores once were, until he found a single, elderly man, sat feeding a pair of strange hounds in this land of corpses.

He wore a faded military uniform of a nation that no longer existed, and beside him was holstered an old but well cared for sniper rifle.

“Are you the Watcher of the Isles?”

The old man nodded.

“How much to enter Hell?”

“Three coins of gold, six if you want me to bring you back.”

Hayden nodded, taking out a poach that clinked pleasantly in the silence.

The Watcher took it, pocketing it before he picked up his sniper rifle.

Pointing it towards the Gate, he whispered,

“Highway to Hell.”

And fired, the bullet disappearing in midair as a pure black portal suddenly engulfed it.

“I will shoot again in an hour,” the Watcher said as he sat back down and returned to his hounds.

“Thank you,” Hayden answered as he stepped in.

He immediately felt the sense of wrongness intensify, as no longer did he stand within a Bleed affected zone, where his home reality mixed with an alien, but within an alternate dimension itself.

The feeling of Brim, the Hells’ version of Hume surrounded him, hostile, trying to expel him, the Invader, from this very reality. He could feel his strength dimming somewhat, before he invoked Reinforcement, the meta technique strengthening him enough to look around.

He stood on barren lands, grey and empty. The portal closed behind him, and he made sure to note where it was as he began looking around. The path his power led him pointed upwards…

A figure of-

-bearing the ancient blade of kings strode through the desolate hells, behind him stood the Knights of the Round. Assembled in their full armour and regalia.

The Sword was raised and pointed towards the horizon, where the skies were blotted out by swarms of devils, the earth covered in an endless horror.

The figure raised his Sword and spoke-

-and the Knights of the Round raised their weapons.

“To reclaim our home!”

Together they charged into the endless hordes. A tiny candle, flickering against the howling darkness.

They went forward like a charge of legends, culling devils as they went, the-

-was at the front, his Sword flickering like divine judgement. Every swing felled six-hundred and sixty-six horrors, every step stained the ground with new rivers of blood.

Every step they walked was another step of their stolen world reclaimed. Every step made Britain more whole.

Until a great horror came, so tall that when it stood the mountains only brushed at its thigh. So immense it darkened the sky by itself. A Demon of endless rope, covering its body were endless stone masks carved with ancient hands.

The-

-stepped forward, the Sword blazing in his hand.

Seven strikes did he swing.

First, he felled a single leg.

Second, he severed an arm the size of fortresses.

Third, he broke the mask that made the horror’s face.

Fourth, he shattered the attack before it reached him.

Fifth, he slashed the skies in two and forced the monster back.

Sixth, he severed the horror in half, each half writhing with unholy life.

And seventh was the killing blow as the Demon fell dead.

Now the-

-wielding the Sword stood alone, on a battlefield filled with corpses. The Knights Round had fallen a long time ago.

So with a heavy breath, he raised the Sword and plunged it into the earth.

The world screamed.

Hayden Xin screamed.

He felt it, the end of a legend. All across the world, a single name, a single tale, a single existence.

A legend told in a thousand different variations.

All were being blotted out, disappearing from reality itself in exchange for one final move.

Tears fell down his eyes, as he realised the immensity of what was happening, why his power gave no information on the man who wielded the Sword.

For there no longer existed any.

Looking up, Hayden saw what he needed to see.

The remains of a shattered planetoid, floating across space in a thousand different chunks. The very ground he stood on was just another one of countless.

At the centre of it all, was Hell’s molten core, exposed to the vastness of space, thrashing and waving like an ocean of fire.

And within this lake of fire, there was a Sword, stabbed deep within a great stone, waiting for a worthy King.

Words hung in his mouth, desperate to be released as Hayden realised why his power had led him on this quest.

He had walked through the valley of kings.

He had seen the shadow of men who sold their lives for a dream.

All across the world, there lay legacies, inheritances of ancient and indescribable power, unused, unawakened, left to simply rot as every day the world fell closer to doom because none knew to claim these legacies.

Not all were worthy, he knew, so Hayden needed to find those who were capable and guide them to seek out these legacies. The world was vast, and it would be a great undertaking, perhaps he could use a classification system to easily sort through those who were capable.

His mind drifted to the National Level Heroes of his country, yet that was a shallow classification and only applied to those employed by governments. He would need a new system that classified regardless of nationality or creed, and purely off their worthiness.

Perhaps one using letters.

This S Class report was authored by Hayley Xin the Scion.

Hayley Xin

My grandpa is cool you guys.