A Prophet Reads the Old Testament

The camera feed showing Adam the first door in the series of puzzles to get to his location cut off abruptly, but not before he could make out what happened. His jaw legitimately dropped.

‘How on Earth…? That shouldn’t be physically possible!’

On the next camera feed, Elysia, expression unreadable, could be seen walking towards the second door. She glanced at the camera. When she did that, Adam suddenly felt an immeasurable pressure weighing down on him. Beyond staring directly through the lens and at Adam behind the screen, it almost felt as if she was looking into the void of his very being. While later camera recordings would disagree with his assessment, in that moment Adam was entirely certain that Elysia’s eyes were glowing in an intense blaze of red. Just before Elysia reached the door, she spoke, her voice holding the intensity of rushing waters.

“Have you heard the tale of Samson?”

Just as Adam was about to respond….

BOOM!

The metal door in front of Elysia was blown off its hinges with one strike. To be entirely fair, calling it a strike could be overstating the matter, as Elysia acted it out with a leisurely gesture.

‘What the hell is this?! No matter how heavily genetically modified you are, there must be a limit to the muscle strength you can have, right? With that much power she’s like a gorilla packed down into a human body!’

Indeed, Elysia’s body was not comparable to even the pinnacle of Mods. Perhaps if genetic modification technology had continued to progress, humans may have been able to surpass her, but that’s a meaningless counterfactual. The bottom line is this: Elysia could brute force her way through Adam’s test. Reaching the next door, she turned to the camera once more.

“After losing a wager against the men of a town through an underhanded trick, do you know what he did?”

Adam didn’t respond. He could only watch in dread as Elysia ploughed through the final doors. When she finally reached the final door, several of Adam’s subordinates standing outside the final door tried to stop Elysia’s approach.

“Wait a moment, miss. You-”

Not even sparing them a glance, she continued onwards. As she approached the door… it opened on its own. Adam looked at her from inside, his expression now significantly calmer. He sighed and gave a wry grin.

“Ellie, you know that property damage is a bit crude, right?”

Elysia entered, and the door closed behind her. Entirely ignoring Adam’s comment, he continued with her previous story.

“After losing that wager, Samson beat up every single one of the thirty men who had cheated against him.”

A cold sweat broke out across Adam’s body, but he maintained his expression. His blood was pumping with more vigour than he had ever experienced in his life. For the first time in his rather sheltered life, he felt that he was truly in danger.

‘It really does feel like I could die here….’

Fear. Fear is a truly primal emotion. Every baby is born fearful and screaming, and their life from that point is simply an escape from that fear until the moment that they once more return to nothingness. Nobody can escape fear, not even a Mod like Adam. Rather, him being a Mod made him all the more acutely aware of the menace before him, and consequently all the more afraid. The difference between Adam and a normal human being, however, was that where any other human might cower and weep… Adam grinned.

“So, you’re going to beat me up then, Ellie? I don’t thi-”

Before he could finish, Elysia was already out of his line of site. By the time he was aware of that fact….

Crack!

‘Oh, that didn’t sound good.’

Indeed, that crack was presumably the sound of his ribcage breaking as Elysia slammed him into the ground. Her hand gripped his collar, pressing him painfully further into the ground. She straddled him as she pinned him to the ground.

“Tag.”

The fire Adam had seen earlier in her eyes was still there. In fact, it had exponentially grown in intensity since that point. No matter how twisted his personality, his body still maintained its basic self-preservation instinct, and everything in his being was screaming at him to fight back. Perhaps he could escape if he caught her off guard; perhaps he could throw her off him if he used some of those martial arts lessons he remembered from his childhood. The what-ifs were endless. Nonetheless, Adam held firm. Beyond instinct, that almighty intuition that made him a genius even among Mods told him that, if he valued his safety, he could never fight back.

“Isn’t this what you wanted, Adam?”

“…”

Elysia’s expression was beginning to contort.

“Didn’t you want to compete using one’s ‘total capability’, Adam?”

“…”

Adam couldn’t respond. She was right. By his own standards, this was a valid means to victory. As he thought that, Elysia’s expression finished changing.

Elysia smiled as she raised her fist to hit him again.

To any objective observer, this would be considered an exceptionally stunning smile. However, that beauty itself was the origin of the dread it invoked in Adam. Staring at it almost felt dangerous in itself – as if one was looking at the light of the universe’s very genesis. The pure, innocent joy within that smile, contrasted with the unadulterated violence in Elysia’s eyes moments could only lead Adam to a single conclusion….

‘This woman, Elysia… she’s even more fucked up than me.’

===

Why did I feel that way? I didn’t quite understand what I was experiencing. I had felt anger before, but this transcended that. This wasn’t the same kind of suffocating frustration that I had felt when dealing with Mark, it was something else. I felt as if the very core of my being was rejecting Adam. My heart was racing. Every instinct in my body was telling me to bring down my then-raised fist. He wouldn’t be able to report me anyway, right? My very being was telling me to end him, now. I could cover it up, right?

“Elysia, above all you must be kind.”

But how am I supposed to do that when this thing in front of me is so….

“Be kind.”

How?! How can I do that?!

I hit him. Ah…. In that moment, I felt catharsis… and then it vanished. So, I hit him again. And again.

Crack!

Ah, I’ve done it now. I got caught up in that fleeting feeling of superiority – that feeling that I had won. I hadn’t even looked at Adam’s expression. He was still smiling, albeit the look was clearly strained from pain.

“So, you admit you lost then, Ellie?”

“… What?”

“You said it yourself, Samson lost to those townsfolk who won his wager through trickery.”

“….”

To the very end, that man… was insufferable. I raised my fist again.

“Be kind.”

But, Father… I can’t get rid of it…. This feeling….

Adam’s grin grew further.

“And don’t you remember what happened to Samson in the end?”

“…”

“Betrayed by the love of his life, he overestimated his own strength. He-”

Adam coughed from the strain of pushing out the words, but he continued as if nothing happened.

“He lost everything because of that superiority complex, Ellie.”

At the moment, I finally realised the emotion that I was feeling. Fear. I was scared of this man before me. Even as I had him pinned, and even when I could kill him in an instant… all I could feel when I looked at him was overwhelming, cumbersome fear. I lowered my fist. My desire to hurt him faded and made way for only overwhelming self-loathing. Abruptly, Adam’s grin twisted a little into pain as he seemingly tried to move his body.

“I… can’t move? Did you…?”

Fuck. I damaged his spinal cord. If I don’t do anything, he’ll be paralysed.

And then, time stopped. I don’t mean that figuratively. Time quite literally came to a standstill. I couldn’t move my body an inch, and I could only desperately move my eyes around the room. It didn’t take me long to see that standing on the floor in front of me was a pigeon with beady eyes, glowing blue. It stared at me. But before I could think too deeply about it, I could feel that it was communicating with me. I wasn’t sure through what means it was talking, but I understood what it was saying regardless.

“Is this really what you want?”

I wanted to scream at it. I wanted to cry. I wanted to apologise. But I couldn’t do any of that in this frozen realm. So, instead, I prayed. I called upon yet another miracle. I called upon the Lord to solve the problem I had myself caused. Though the pigeon itself did nothing but blink, I could almost feel it communicating a wordless nod. Suddenly, its eyes began to shine in a radiant blue. Is this the Spirit…? By the time I could process what had happened, time had started to move again, and the bird was gone.

I looked down at the pinned Adam below me. He was smiling back.