It was a rainy day, one that felt all too familiar.
The gloomy sky looked as if it were blanketed in leaden ash. Rain poured in torrents, and lightning flickered through the clouds.
Looking past the bird beak mask, Ke Mingwei stared blankly at the organs suspended from the ropes. His gaze slowly shifted, finally coming to rest on that severed head.
Beneath the Blue Pigeon helmet was a quiet, serene face.
It was his child.
Ke Mingwei stared at that solitary head hanging against the sky. He had rarely seen Ke Mingqing make a fuss, and even in the end, the boy had departed in total silence.
He seemed to see the boy as he was the year he arrived at their home at the age of ten. The child had quietly watched him through the crack of the door, but the moment Ke Mingwei turned around, the boy had already shut it.
In the end, every silent father in the world was like this. Only when their child was gone did they realize just how much they owed them.
Ke Mingwei sank to his knees in the pouring rain, splashing water as the downpour soaked him.
Saturnus bared its bloodstained teeth. It crouched in front of him, arms dangling loosely over its knees, and spoke in a faint, haunting voice:
"Let me think. You feel guilty toward Lin Yin, because Lin Yin is Grey Owl's father, and you got Grey Owl killed. So every time you go home and see your own child, you can't help but think of Lin Yin's face..."
Ke Mingwei squeezed his eyes shut, veins bulging on his forehead. He could barely speak.
"Shut up..." he rasped.
Saturnus reached out and grabbed his head, ripping off the Rain Crow mask. Staring straight into Ke Mingwei's exhausted, hollow eyes, it said unhurriedly, "So, you started to think. You got a child killed. You plunged a father into depression and self-loathing. After all that, did you still have the right to enjoy the happiness and joy of being a father yourself?
"That was why, in your cowardice, you distanced yourself from your child. You ignored him time and time again, burying yourself in your work as a superhero. Not out of vanity. Not to help others. You just wanted to numb yourself... because you were terrified of remembering Lin Yin's face. Terrified of remembering that poor boy whom Clock Maker dissected in public."
"Shut up..."
Ke Mingwei spat the words out weakly, his body trembling as he stared down at the ground.
Rain battered the earth, sending out rippling rings of water. In those ripples, the reflection of Ke Mingqing's past self seemed to faintly appear.
Saturnus toyed with the Rain Crow helmet, crushing it in its grip as it spoke.
"Some people need alcohol. Some need cigarettes. Some need pure violence to release themselves... You are that last type. But you're a massive hypocrite. You set up a 'no-kill rule' for yourself, yet you snap criminals' arms and shatter their bones, making sure they can never stand or straighten their backs again...
"That so-called rule only exists to keep your violent urges confined to a controllable range."
It paused, licking its bloodstained teeth. Leaning close to Ke Mingwei's face, it grabbed him by the hair and continued, "And for the sake of this stupid 'no-kill rule,' how many criminals did you let off the hook? Hell is empty, and the devils are all here. You sent the good people to hell, yet you let the evil spirits roam the mortal world."
"Shut up."
Saturnus looked at him with mock pity and slowly said, "It's time you admitted it. Out of guilt over Grey Owl, you neglected your own child. You neglected Blue Pigeon, who stepped up to defend you. You were blinded by hatred. You wanted to escape. You wanted to break the chains binding you to that madman...
"And in the end, you let your child become another Grey Owl. Oh, you let Blue Pigeon become a Grey Owl too... The funniest part is, by the time you realized those two were the exact same person, you had already lost any chance to save him."
Ke Mingwei threw his hand up and seized Saturnus by the throat, sheer brutality swirling in his eyes.
But the crows no longer answered his call. The entire world fell dead silent; only a few drenched feathers drifted down through the rain.
Amidst the curtain of rain, man and monster choked each other by the neck, locking eyes.
Suddenly, Saturnus tilted its head back slightly and curled its lip. A moment later, losing interest, it let go of Ke Mingwei's hair, leaving the aged man to collapse to his knees on the ground.
"I told you that you would kill your own child with your own hands, and you did it, Rain Crow... Isn't this what you wanted? You planned meticulously. You racked your brains. All just to deliver Blue Pigeon right to Clock Maker's dining table, turning that poor little bird into a side dish on his plate."
"Shut up—!"
Ke Mingwei threw his head back and roared, screaming until his internal organs felt like they were tearing apart. In that instant, his pupils and throat abruptly split open. Crows tore their way out from the fissures in his body, shrieking as they swarmed into the air.
Before the flock could even take to the sky, Saturnus snatched them out of the air and shoved them into its mouth.
"Anger is right. Anger is absolutely right. Anger will become my nourishment..." Saturnus whispered, chewing on the furious flock of crows.
It absorbed the nourishment from their flesh and bones. Its mouth was stuffed with bloodstained feathers, red down wedged tightly between its teeth. Its silhouette was growing increasingly massive.
By the time Ke Mingwei returned to his senses, Saturnus had grown as huge as a skyscraper. It crouched beside the building, casting a massive shadow that blotted out the sky.
"Whenever you need me, I am always right here..." Saturnus said. "I have never left."
It seized the suspended maintenance platform and crushed it in its grip. Blue Pigeon's organs and head tumbled from the sky, hitting the ground in a gruesome, tangled mess.
Countless organs drifted in the pooled rainwater, slowly circling Ke Mingwei like plates on a conveyor belt sushi line. He saw the boy's intestines. He saw his heart. He saw his severed arms.
Ke Mingwei watched numbly. He was still struggling to climb to his feet out of the darkness, desperately wanting to reach out and grasp that blood-red heart.
But right then, Ke Mingqing's head slipped free of the helmet. It rolled to a stop right in front of Ke Mingwei like a discarded pineapple, utterly motionless.
Blood wept from the boy's eyes, pooling beneath Ke Mingwei and dyeing the ground crimson.
Ke Mingwei's pupils shrank to pinpricks. His clenched teeth began to chatter, and it felt as if every cell in his body were wailing in violent agony.
A moment later, Ke Mingwei collapsed completely, falling to his hands and knees in the bloody water. He looked as if he wanted to bury his head deep into the earth. Every strand of his hair was soaked with Ke Mingqing's blood.
"A'Qing, I'm so sorry..."
Ke Mingwei murmured in a chillingly calm voice. With a sickening snap, he tore off his own right arm.
A crow, as if pulled by gravity a million times its normal strength, plummeted abruptly to the ground.
"It's all your old man's fault... I didn't protect you..."
His lips quivered. Gripping his severed arm, he drove the bone straight through his own chest.
Smack. Another crow dropped from the sky. The moment it hit the earth, the bird burst open like a blooming flower, turning into a gory spray of blood and bone that melted away into the flowing rainwater.
"If I had just spent a little more time with you... If I had just tried to understand you a little better... would none of this have happened?"
Ke Mingwei bit down hard enough to shatter the bone of his left arm, ripping his left hand off as well. Kneeling in a spray of his own blood, he jerked his head up with the wrath of a feral beast, locking his eyes onto Clock Maker's unmoving figure.
The heavy rain poured down without end. The flock of crows let out hoarse, weeping cries, while the violently disfigured man howled in silence. His muddy pupils were slowly overtaken by a wash of blood red.
One by one, the crows plummeted to the ground with sickening thuds. Eventually, the entire world fell still. The sound of the rain vanished. The howl of the wind disappeared. Only the heavy, wet thuds of falling bodies remained.
As if caught in a localized tornado, the crows plummeted from the air in droves. Their corpses piled up into a mountain, gradually burying his silhouette entirely.
The mountain of crows lay in total silence. A moment later, a strange humanoid figure slowly bulged upward from its peak.
Clock Maker narrowed his eyes, watching the scene with keen interest. "After all these years, have you finally shown a little growth?"
The figure rising from the pile was not Rain Crow. Instead, it was a slender humanoid shape baring bloodstained teeth. Its entire body was pitch black, save for those crimson fangs. Right now, this elongated figure was crawling atop the mountain of dead birds.
To be exact, its lower body was fused directly into Rain Crow's back.
Soon, Saturnus tore its way out of Ke Mingwei's spine in a shower of dripping blood. Using its slightly curled palms, it snatched up the dead crows and shoved them into its mouth, one after another.
Before long, the entire mountain of corpses had been devoured. It morphed into a massive, fifteen-meter-tall crow shadow.
But from start to finish, the black shadow remained clinging to Ke Mingwei's back, never detaching for even a second. From a distance, it looked exactly as if Ke Mingwei's own shadow had suddenly stood upright.
"What on earth is that... A shadow? No, it doesn't look like a shadow."
White Jack stared at Rain Crow's back from a distance, watching as a black-and-red super-human species panel slowly appeared as a Pop-up in his pupils.
[super-human species Codename: Rain Crow (God of Agriculture; Shadow of Saturnus)]
[Type: esper]
[Danger Rating: S-Class]
[Character Profile: Roundtable Heroes No. 7, Rain Crow. The "Shadow of the God of Agriculture" brought on by the secondary mutation of his esper ability grants Rain Crow the power of instantaneous prophecy. Moreover, the Shadow of the God of Agriculture transcends all laws of the world. It relies on devouring flocks of crows and emotional energy to grow stronger, thereby achieving limitless evolution.]
[Weakness: 1. As the price for this power, once he enters the Shadow of the God of Agriculture state, Rain Crow can no longer control his crows. The flock will only serve as food for the God of Agriculture.]
In the next instant, Rain Crow slowly pushed himself to his feet from the pool of blood.
He raised his head in the torrential rain and stared directly into Clock Maker's eyes, his own gaze burning as bright as a torch.
Separated by the curtain of rain, the two stared at each other in silence, while the monstrous black shadow shielded them from the falling water.
"Now that's more like it... After all, this is our final game."
Clock Maker licked his lips and adjusted his monocle. "If things never changed, that would just be too boring."