Thank God for those counselors and their insight!
The thing was, I’d fought plenty of people before, and while they ran the entire gamut of emotion, they always had at leastsomesort of reaction. But not our assassin friend. There was no anger in response to the pain I knew I had just caused him, no shock. No dogged determination, no bewilderment, no sadness either. Justnothing.
It was the most alien and unnatural thing I’d experienced since I’d first started realizing my ability, and that was saying something considering I had witnessed a pig fly before I’d even turned twenty.Freshman year of college really was wild.Howdidwe manage to coax a sow onto a trampoline?If it weren’t for the slight recoil of the man below me, and the squint to his eyes, I would have thoughtI hadn’t just battered his ears with a whole bunch of concussive force all at once.
He lifted his arm, and I barely had the wherewithal to lean backward as a smaller blade popped out of the cuffs he had on his wrist and nearly sliced my nose off.
“Okay, Ezio Auditore!” I spat, reaching further into my bag of tricks. “Assassin’s Creedthis!”
I whipped forward, tucking myself right against him so we could have made out if we were so inclined (which we most certainly weren’t), then jammed my pointer finger and middle finger of my right hand into his eyes as hard as I could.
He jolted at that—finally, some sort of reaction—and it was such a forceful move that I was almost thrown. If my feet weren’t tucked around his massive thighs, I was sure I would have gone flying.
But once again, even though his body reacted, there wasn’t a single drop of emotion. It was like he was a robot, able to feel physical sensation but having no input in response to it. I felt blind in a way that made my skin crawl, and that reaction only increased in intensity when he grabbed the back of my shirt and began to rip me backward.
As I clung to him, I could feel the muscles of his abdomen bunching even through the layers of fabric between us, and I realized he was indeed getting the leverage to fully stand up. If he did manage to fully rise, I would be donezo. He was either gonna throw me down, run me through, squish me against the wall, or any number of grizzly ends that I really was not down to clown with.
Time to pull out the big guns.
Am I sure?I’ve never actually done this before!
I can do it! I can do it! I can do it!
What if nothing happens?
What if this guy doesn’t have any emotion to connect with?
I can’t do it.
I can do it!I don’t even know if it’s a real thing!Of course it’s a real thing!
Mom trained me for this!
Momtheorizedthat this was possible! She had no way of knowing it would work.
My mind would have kept going, but now the assassin was fully sitting up and I was in his lap, staring into those completely vacant eyes of his.
“Stop!” I ordered, putting every ounce of command I possessed into my voice, which really wasn’t all that much considering that the only beings I consistently ordered around were myself and a cat, and neither of us usually listened. So, I clapped both of my hands to his face again, but this time, instead of going for his ears, my palms connected with either of his cheeks, and I bent down so that our foreheads touched.“I said,stop!”
It had indeed been my mother’s theory that if I grew strong enough, I would be able to directly manipulate people’s emotions. I’d never been interested in the practice, because it seemed awfully invasive, but I put all my concentration into forcing my gift from my brain, down my arms, and through the point of contact I had with the monster who had killed two of Paul’s family members.
I had no idea what was going to happen, truly, but instead of him shuddering to a stop, or me feeling some sort of capitulation on his part, it was almost like my mind was fully sucked into his.
I gasped, or maybe it was more of a squeak, and then I was fully submerged in an overwhelming tempest of... of...
It took me a moment to get my bearings as the worst kind of over-stimulation I’d ever experienced set in, but once I did, I realized that the mass of roiling colors, explosions, and sheer chaos around me wasemotions. The assassin’s emotions.
I couldn’t discern any of them as they moved through time and space around me. It was like I was in an IMAX theater, but instead of seeing a full summer blockbuster, it was just an endless TikTok reel; the moment I locked onto anything, it instantly flashed to something else entirely.
Flashes of crimson agony consumed the world around me, thenboom,it was washed away in a flood of pitch-black mourning so deep that it felt utterly endless. Lightning bolts of fury. Gaseous clouds of unending sorrow. The bleak rain of hopelessness.
It was all-encompassing, and it was threatening to overtake my mind. It was the air around me, the floor under me, hell, it was eveninsideme. Somehow, in my effort to exude control over what the assassin was feeling, I was swallowed up instead.
Find your control.
You’re the empath, not him.
Emotions are your gift, use them!