Aflein lay in smoking ruins.

  The city was known as the Stairway to Heaven due to the array at its centre. Seven high-rise buildings, each the colour of a rainbow's streak, were arranged in a spiralling staircase.

  It was a well-known hotel chain featuring all manner of entertainment, and it was standard practice, tradition even, for comers and goers to start at the lowest step and work their way up till they reached the final skyscraper whose top surpassed cloud nine.

  Now, it was no more. From eye-catcher to eyesore, reduced to a mountain of rubble. And atop it sat the one responsible for the unplanned renovation.

  On the edge, bathed in the night's darkness, was a fair-skinned young man whose eyes and hair were the colour of the Void. He sat and took in the disaster he wrought.

  The walkways and roads filled with thousands of innocents going about their content lives only minutes ago were now empty. Gone but not forgotten. The sound of their voices and the sight of their expressions as they recognised the danger before them replayed in his mind.

  Their panicked exodus brought forth the advance of the patrolling automatons, who moved to subdue the threat. None of the silver-skinned warriors proved a match and now lay littered on the floor, leaking sapphire blood and letting off cries that sounded like tasers going off.

  Contrasting the blue was bright red. Blood. Lit up by the flames, its acrylic scent was carried along the chilly breeze. Fresh and dried, and enough to fill a river, it flowed and painted the hill and its surroundings. It was a gruesome sight, one easy to misinterpret. Xyn welcomed the misinterpretation.

  I'm no hero, but I'm no villain either. How dreadfully boring. Is this to be my life? Till the very end?

  The listless expression became smeared with despair, and his mood sank further into the pits. He was nearing his limit. His train of dark thoughts was derailed as bright lights flashed in the distance.

  Another wave.

  And this time, they brought the 'big guns'.

  The guns were indeed big and pointed his way. A dozen 19th-generation Montrix Destroyers had warped in and encircled him, the lone terrorist. Defying gravity with no obvious propulsion and coated in a layer of blue, it aimed its blasters toward Xyn's position.

  A step behind was the latest batch of automatons. Their black exterior and gold engraving marked their status as high-end models, armed with the pinnacle of Espark technology. The soulless army droned forward as no human army could, fearlessly.

  In this way, they were superior to humanity, but that didn't make them stronger. The last batch to be teleported was a group of thirteen dressed in pristine white and blue uniforms: Psi Enforcers.

  Moving mountains and parting seas weren't mere metaphors when it came to this group. Just like Xyn, these individuals were psionics. Powerful ones, according to the masses. Xyn would strongly disagree, as his lax attitude suggested.

  Only one other psionic could be spoken in the same breath as him without Xyn scoffing, and she was sadly, long dead.

  Xyn shrugged off his disdain and rose to his feet, but not to the occasion. He had no fight in him. That is, until he regarded the looks the thirteen humans directed towards him.

  Some showed fear, most showed pity. To the thirteen, Xyn's current actions were the opposite of unexpected. It was an inevitability: a path he was destined to walk. Anyone who followed his story could have predicted this outcome.

  Anger filled the royal of the Void anew.

  He didn't care to continue his terrorising, but he had no intention of losing to this group.

  Pity...me? His hands clenched into fists, and his aura flared up. I'll show you who's truly pitiful. Come.

  ***

  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may rule, true, but at the same time, he is condemned to suffering, living alone with no one to share his vision.

  In this world, Xyn was that one-eyed man, metaphorically speaking, as instead of one, the youth currently had four eyes.

  Two eyes stared at the high white ceiling of the massive cubic space he called his prison cell. It had been a week since the Terror of Aflein incident, where he had ‘rampaged'.

  He had handily defeated the third wave, destroying the Destroyers, automatons and trouncing the psionics, but like true waves, they kept coming.

  And by the fifth one, he ran out of mana.

  The automatons secured him and brought him to this room.

  It was the centre of the White Pyramid, a facility which could entrap rampaging psionics. He was the lone prisoner, a testament to the rarity of psionics, but even more so the idyllic peace that the Rose Union enjoyed.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Xyn was -rightfully- vilified across all seventy-four planets under the multi-solar-system-conquering nation, portrayed as a great evil and an example of humanity’s yet-to-be fully tamed dark base impulses. He had no counterpoints to offer, save for one.

  At least I'm human, he would say.

  In the Year 1020 of the Rose Calendar, there were more humans than ever, a staggering one-point-three trillion. Yet to Xyn, there were fewer humans than ever, actual humans, those who could be distinguished from automatons and androids.

  He was, of course, one of the handful.

  Xyn blamed the plague he called peace, which was as deadly as it was innocuous. A millennium of it had thoroughly siphoned the spirit of humanity away until most humans were no different to mechanical lifeforms.

  It was a tragedy he often lamented.

  Another tragedy that was given a fair share of bandwidth in his head was the circumstance of his birth, and how he had been born at the wrong time.

  His power, skills and mindset were meant for times of war, not peace, yet here he was, in the thick of it.

  He relayed none of his personal philosophy to anyone. Xyn didn't care to say anything, which greatly troubled those in the know.

  The Grand Elder, Baron Keni'le, appeared before him not an hour after being taken into custody. He came, not in the traditional garbs but in bath robes of all things, seemingly fresh out of a shower.

  The middle-aged-looking man abandoned decor for efficiency, not even bothering to shape his white beard. Xyn was distracted by the upside-down fire. It resembled a flickering flame as Baron vibrated with agitation - trepidation. Baron didn't know everything, but he- and the other Grand Elders who ruled the Rose Union behind the scenes - knew enough to fear.

  Why? Why had he done what he had done? And what would he do now?

  The pale-faced Grand Elder's questions boiled down to the above.

  Xyn stayed silent. He was a stone statue - no, a better description would be a doll, a porcelain one, whose strings lay slack. The puppeteer who usually controlled was on strike. Tormenting the leader of the Rose Union did nothing for him. Frankly, the youth wanted to know the answers to these questions as well.

  When the top of the building came sliding down, he was just as shocked as anyone present. He had his speculations on the cause, but again, he had no intention to voice them.

  Not to others, and not to himself.

  Xyn dragged his gaze from light fixture to light fixture. After staring too long, he shifted his black sights to the cameras, which were embedded in the walls and ceilings.

  They were disabled.

  Usually, they were manned twenty-four-seven by a combination of humans and artificial intelligence.

  Baron had made sure to deactivate all security features. The mana-suppression field of the White Pyramid was shut off, and all personnel, human and automaton, were evacuated. Why they bothered to displace the latter could be found in Xyn's childhood.

  The White Pyramid was a prison in name only.

  He could walk out at any time.

  Xyn - White - had no intention of doing so. Of doing anything. Whatever happened, happened.

  In two weeks, he was scheduled to appear in court to face judge and jury. It was set to be a grand spectacle, broadcast throughout the galaxy-spanning empire.

  This was a rare event, after all.

  The Grand Elders wished to avoid drawing media attention to Xyn, but his actions in Alfein couldn't be smothered. The masses looked forward to it while the Grand Elders dreaded it. Stress was a terrible barber. Those on the Grand Council had their scalps grow more barren by the day. They expected the worst.

  Xyn couldn't say they were worrying for nothing.

  His anger waxed and waned like a pendulum; however, it never rose high enough to warrant their Grand Elders’ fears.

  What was far more troubling was his sense of hopelessness and resentment. It had only grown with time. Distractions had served to slow it down, but its progression was clear. It was great as is, and in time, in a not-too-distant future, Xyn could see himself thinking a genocide passed the smell test.

  Is that my role? The one to draw the curtains? How...pitiful.

  A storm visited the youth. Invisible tears were shed as he felt his chest tightening. Despair. More familiar than his mother or father, it hugged him as he lay on his side. Powerful beyond compare, yet helpless.

  White stared at the bright lights as his insides roiled. His emotional upheaval remained an internal affair. Xyn didn't rely on his control alone and forcefully robbed White of all but a puddle of mana by which to affect change.

  As for where the stolen mana went?

  To another Xyn, Black. Thousands of light-years away, well beyond the Rose Union's borders, the duplicate roamed a dwarf planet. There was nothing special about it, certainly nothing to see. Rocky and navy blue, it was a barren wasteland, devoid of fauna or flora.

  It had no official name. Nor an unofficial one. Xyn hadn't bothered to name it despite the year he had spent on it. Alone, he spent half the time trudging forward, walking without purpose, and the other half, idle as a statue.

  Black ground to a halt, blue dust drifting forward to surpass him. He had done a complete circuit. In other words, back to zero. The fact brought a bitter smile to his face. Humour bubbled within him, and he couldn't contain himself. Cocking his head back, he let it escape his lips as maddened laughter.

  The horseshoe theory.

  What seemed like opposites could be, in reality, far closer concepts. Case in point, laughter and tears were most common in both comedies and tragedies.

  Black exhausted himself before too long. Eyes wet and shining in mania, he stared at the starry heaven above.

  I'm near my breaking point, he thought. If something doesn't change soon, I...I don't know what I'll do.

  But what could he do?

  He had posed this question to himself countless times before, and time and time again, an answer had eluded him. Perhaps he needed to dig deeper. Perhaps, the answer couldn't be found within him, or maybe there was no solution to his problem, and he was in a forced mate sequence, trying to find an out that didn't exist.

  Xyn did not know, and the hope that there was an answer at all was growing dim in his mind, a candle nearly swallowed by an endless darkness.

  "This world wasn't meant for me."

  The words spoken with a note of despair were meant for the void alone.

  However...

  A high-pitched giggle around the psionic, startling him. Then, a disembodied voice spoke.

  "How about another then?"

  A mote of orange light appeared above his right shoulder, appearing inside Xyn's Soul Shroud. His consciousness briefly derailed at the invasion, and more lights materialised. Dozens, hundreds. The psionic was surrounded by the miniature stars. They twinkled and space warped.

  Alarmed at the happening, Xyn switched mental gears. He rallied his aura in defence, his expression turning desperate and dire. However, becoming serious didn’t change the result.

  Ah!?

  His all-out resistance was akin to a lit match before a tsunami. The orange energy overwhelmed him, making Xyn feel what he had never felt before: powerlessness.

  In the blink of an eye, the royal of the Void was spirited away. His next destination: the multiverse’s proverbial melting pot, residence to all but home to few, Machaeverosa.