Chapter 662: The Street Boy

A solid and well-aimed punch followed right after and sent Sekhmet’s body flying backward at high speed until she crashed into a weak house, the force of the impact collapsing the entire structure down around her in a cloud of dust.

Sekhmet was buried beneath a pile of splintered wood and shattered clay.

Both of his hands connected hard at the exact same time against each of Zanya’s cheeks, making her eyes go completely dead and unfocused for a full second while a thin but steady line of blood began trickling slowly down from her nose.

Her sword fell from her hand and her knees buckled, but she caught herself before she fell.

Zuri was set fully ablaze in a sudden rush of blue fire, and then thrown hard aside so that she would have to figure out how to quench the flames that refused to die easily.

The fire clung to her clothes and her hair. It burned blue at the edges and white at the center, and no matter how she rolled or beat at herself with her hands, it would not go out.

"Huh...?" Hawthorne muttered in clear confusion as he tried to understand what his eyes were showing him.

His voice was thick. His words came out slow and slurred, as though he were speaking through a mouth full of wool. His head turned from side to side. His eyes could not settle on any one thing.

What actually happened? The Apex Girls could all see Benjamin running toward them from a small but closing distance—his feet striking the ground in a steady rhythm, his arms pumping at his sides, his face set in an expression of calm determination—but at the exact same time another Benjamin was already standing right in front of them and sharing out pain like it was nothing more than rations.

This Benjamin had not been there a moment ago, and he was not a clone. Their brains simply did not know how to react to the impossible sight, so they froze.

"What... just happened?" Zuri muttered once she had finally managed to put out the last of the flames, her breathing still ragged and uneven from the effort.

Her clothes were scorched black. Her hair was singed and smoking. Her hands trembled at her sides.

"That was a small warning," Benjamin said with a calm smile as he carefully set a weak and completely limp Hawthorne against a nearby wall.

The larger man’s head lolled to one side. His eyes were still unstable and unfocused from whatever unseen attack he had just received.

"If I wanted to, I would walk straight to you and kill you. And you won’t be able to tell what happened. That’s a threat, so you better let me touch you." Saying those words out loud, Benjamin turned fully toward Hawthorne and let his hand settle firmly against the center of the man’s chest.

***

Once more Benjamin found himself sent into a pure white space, and this time he felt a bit giddy at the chance to peer into someone else’s private memories without permission.

The white light pressed in on him from every side.

[Wait, you’re still using that embarrassing form, Sys? Is that how you imagine yourself?]

{We have arrived inside the individual Hawthorne’s mind. The link is complete, shall we proceed to scrapping the memories?}

[...Right.]

And with that agreement Benjamin and Sys became nothing more than silent ghosts floating inside the reality of a memory that began to play itself out all around them.

The white space bled away. Color rushed in. Then sound rushed in. The world took shape around them.

But except for the later years when Hawthorne finally grew into a full adult man, Benjamin basically spent the entire time looking at a pretty and petite brunette.

The same soft face, large eyes, slender hands. Benjamin watched the boy grow from a child into a young man.

One memorable day, the sun was low, the shadows were long, and a cart moved slowly along the road, drawn by a single tired horse.

A man sat on the driver’s seat and a woman sat beside him. Three boys sat in the back of the cart among sacks of grain and bundles of cloth. The youngest boy was small, slender, and had hair that fell across his face in soft brown waves.

He could not have been more than ten years old.

Hawthorne and his family.

They had been caught up with a group of bandits while they were traveling along a lonely road, and both his father and his brothers were killed in the attack without mercy.

Benjamin watched it happen. He watched the arrows come out of the trees. He watched the father fall from the driver’s seat with three shafts in his chest. He watched the brothers try to run and be cut down from behind.

He watched the mother scream and be dragged from the cart. He also watched Hawthorne, small and trembling, be dragged after her.

Hawthorne and his mother were then violated by the same bandits and then left to die in the middle of a dangerous forest with no help in sight.

He was very young at that time, and he was completely dependent on his very traumatized mother who was already almost dead inside from everything that had been done.

When the both of them finally spotted a merchant traveling with a small group of companions, his mother quickly handed him over to the strangers and then walked away without looking back, leaving the merchant with the certainty that she was going to end her own life once she was alone.

Reaching the next kingdom, however, the merchant simply dumped young Hawthorne onto the street and told him to pray for the grace of the goddess before he went on with his own business.

The street was crowded and loud. The boy stood in the middle of it with nothing but the clothes on his back and watched the merchant’s cart disappear around a corner.