Chapter one hundred and ten

I spent the rest of the night going around the city and stopping confrontations between panicky people wildly wielding powers unfamiliar to them and soldiers who were trying to do their best to subdue them without using a hail of bullets.

From my little jaunt around Munich , I learned that people manifesting these mysterious powers were thankfully few. Munich had more than a million inhabitants but only about a hundred or so people had shown signs of any supernatural powers. If this trend held true for the rest of the world then only about 0.01% of the human population were getting powers. This may seem like a small number but when applied to the world population then it translates to about 700,000 people having powers world wide.

Another thing I learned was that people with well defined powers like Elisabeth were rare. Elizabeth's powers were straightforward , she could make and control fire and she did it with devastating simplicity and efficiency, basically all she had to do was point and shoot but most of the people seemed to have very vague and undefined powers that seemed to operate on will alone. When I arrived at most of the locations , most of these people had some form of a 'shield' around them but weren't actually doing much against the soldiers surrounding them. When I looked at their souls I found that they had a large amount energy concentrated at their core but other than forming the shield, they weren't doing anything with it, all I really had to do in these situations was to calm them down and send the soldiers away.

A notable exception to this was a slightly chubby teenage boy with long black hair wearing too much eyeliner and had too many piercings and tattoos , a goth if I had ever seen one. Unlike most of the other people who surrounded themselves with a shield and cowered in fear, he was wielding the power like he had done it all his life. As I observed him flinging soldiers and policemen around with ease , I finally figured out the key to using the vague and undefined power. Through my soul sight I could see the energy in his soul coalesce into strange symbols before they crashed into the soldiers , catapulting them several meters away into cars and buildings.

The kid was gleeful forming another symbol when I casually walked in front of him like I didn't have a care in the world. He looked up from the symbol he was forming and stared at me with confusion, he was so surprised that I wasn't cowering like everybody else that he lost control of the symbol and it dissolved before he could use it. He frowned as he looked down at the disappearing symbol then shouted something at me in German.

I just smiled at the kid before saying, "Sorry kid. Can't speak German."

He angrily replied,"Who are you calling a kid? I an seventeen years old!"

"Well you are acting like a kid having a tantrum so I'm calling you a kid."

"How dare you disrespect me like this? Astarte has chosen me as his champion in the mortal realm. She has gifted me with powers that you cannot imagine!" His pudgy face contorted in fury as he tried to convey to me exactly how special and important he was.

"Astra who? Never heard of her. Is she some sort of god for goths?"

That seemed to piss him off even more. His face which was initially red with rage turned purple as more blood rushed to it,"I am not a goth! I am a Wiccan! And Astarte is the goddess of sexuality and war!"

I raised my eyebrows at that, "You think the goddess of sexuality chose you? Are you serious dude?"

He snapped. I could see the veins pop up on his forehead and begin to throb as he started to create another symbol out of the energy in his soul. This symbol was different from the symbol he was using to push the soldiers around. It was bigger and much more complex with sharp edges like a buzzsaw. I didn't wait for him to finish, I lazily waved my hands towards him and the symbol burst into countless motes of light before vanishing into thin air.

As I had discovered from my previous encounters , my powers were rather good at disrupting this new energy that was now flooding the world and I barely had to put any effort into disrupting whatever the goth kid was about to do.

The goth kid looked down at his hands as if they had betrayed him before he shook his head and started to make another symbol. I destroyed this one too. After three more tries he eventually figured out that it was I who was blocking his attempts to make symbols. He started to shout at me with spittle coming out of his mouth as his voice got progressively shriller,

"Stop doing that! I am the chosen one! I am the special one! You can't do this to me!" By the end of his rant his voice had gotten so shrill that I was sure that only dogs could hear him.

"Dude , calm down before I decide to let the military have you. Right now you are in big trouble but I have come to save your ass. Now you have two choices: you can do as I say and peacefully go back home after promising to never use your powers to hurt anybody ever again or you can continue to whine like a bitch which would piss me off and I would hand you over to the military trussed like a pig about to be slaughtered."

He was silent for a moment then he muttered, "I just wanted her to love me."

"You wanted who to love you?"

His face transformed into one of worship as he said , "Caroline. I became a wiccan to be with her but she was never interested in me," He pointed at a house across the street where a girl was staring out a window,"Maybe if she saw how powerful I was she would fall in love with me."

I walked towards the love sick boy until I was next to him then I swatted his head as hard as I could, "You idiot! All this destruction and all the people you have hurt and for what? A crush? What is wrong with you? You are lucky that nobody has gotten seriously hurt or killed! "

He looked around at what he had done and it seemed to have slowly sunk down into him that what he had done was wrong. Suddenly goth kid started to shiver and then he started to sob, "I'm sorry, oh goddess I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do this. I don't know what got into me."

I sighed in exasperation. This kid was a mess , from his fingernails which had painted black to his hair on which he used too much gel, this kid had some major issues. I surreptitiously wiped the gel that had gotten on my hand when I slapped his head while pretending to comfort him by patting his back, "Look kid, you might not be chosen by that goddess whats-her-name but you are still pretty special. You do have special powers but don't let it get to your head. And as for girls, with the power you have, if you play it smart, eventually I'm sure you will be spoiled for choice. Your future might actually be very bright with the gift you've been given, just don't mess it up by doing something stupid like you did today, okay?"

That seemed to cheer him up because he had a smile on his face as he almost skipped all the way to the end of the street where he got on a pink bike of all things and rode off into the night , happily ringing the bells on his bicycles.

As I watched him disappear around a corner to the cheerful chimes of his bicycle's bells, I couldn't help but think that the world was boned if people like him were the ones getting powers.