๑『CorRUPted』๑

【Chapter Five: Four Years Difference】

【Chapter Five: Four Years Difference】

When the men had come charging at me, I’d resumed singing, letting the notes block out the different sounds of skin hitting skin - or concrete - and bones shattering from within. It wasn’t exactly the best thing because I was the one doing the fighting and feeling the impacts as I either threw their bodies or smashed their bones, but it worked for me some how. Three verses in, I had six of them down and groaning for help. Five verses in, I had the “leader” cornered, and by the sixth he was on the floor begging and pleading for forgiveness. 

Taking the metal bat that he’d left on the ground, I pushed it onto his throat and listened as his breath went thin in his throat and his eyes bulged from the lack of enough oxygen. Wheezes were followed after, and I watched him try to claw for something. For help, maybe. If I’d had my throwing knives right now, I’d have killed him that way. I’d have given him a quick death, but I did not have them. It was partially his fault anyway for bringing the bat.

“Killer! She’s a killer!”

“No, she’s a Corrector!” 

I glanced behind me to the injured teammates of the almost dead leader. They were bloody and bruised, much like I was, but the blood on my body didn’t belong to me. It never did. With a frown, I watched as one of them stood up and picked up a stranded pipe of another teammate. He swung it onto his shoulders and stumbled forward on unsteady legs, coming straight for me. Didn’t he know it was useless? That by killing their “leader” I’d spare them of death? 

It seemed not, because in another few seconds he was going at me at a slow gait that I easily manipulated, backing away from him at the last moment and grabbing his head by the hair. He cried out in obvious pain as the roots of his hair were pulled out and I smashed his face to the brick wall of an apartment complex. 

“If you want to live, I suggest you pack up and leave with all your little friends. I’ll spare you because you’re working under this man, but if you continue to try and fight me, I’ll take it as an act of hatred from you and not just an order from your leader, and I’ll have to kill you. I don’t want to kill anymore than I have to.” The man looked at me with brown eyes that were made black by the lack of light in the area, and then threw a quick look at his leader before looking behind me at his friends. A desperate attempt to pass the message that he needed help. “Time’s up. Make your choice.” I backed away from him, waiting for him to run away. 

A pipe slammed right into my waist. I should’ve expected it, seeing as idiots always died idiots, but I guess being down here, in the Ruined Cities was messing with my cold logic. When I’d lived down here, I’d been a warm, loving girl who’d had hopes and dreams, even in a dead world and with all the memories bombarding me… I’d gone back into my old self while preserving a few of the things that made me a Corrector. 

A few drops of blood ran down my lips from where I’d bitten them to keep myself from screaming as I rolled about on the ground. The man ran for me, screaming maniacally himself despite I being the one harmed, and raised his pipe up high once more for another attack. I hissed out a curse and pushed myself off the ground just in time to narrowly miss the pipe, and swung a kick at the man’s face, prepared for him to try and grab it. He did not, his mind still too sluggish to register what I was doing before my foot made contact with his nose. 

I heard the crunch of bones as they cracked inside of his nose and watched him fall back dead, knowing that one of the fragments had gone high enough and into his skull. The man was now dead. I took in a deep breath before pivoting to face the group of nine men behind me. They all still lay on the floor, but now there were seven faces staring at me incredulously; fearfully.