User blog:Seieireppa/God Eater: The Butterfly Effect, chapter 8: Desolation

The place was already a mess by the time they arrived.

What had moments before been an idyllic suburban hideaway of a town was now engulfed in flames and chaos. Various small Aragami could be seen roaming the streets, searching out any remaining human survivors among what dwellings still remained, most of them reduced to naught but rubble amidst the destruction.

Whatever they were looking for… neither of them had any doubt that they’d find it here.

“Feldman’s gotta be here,” came the worried voice of Will, as he drew his God Arc and broke into a sprint. “If we don’t find him before the Aragami do, we might never discover the truth behind World Line Prime!”

Silas looked on as Will closed in on the nearest Aragami, an Ogretail, slicing it to pieces as he moved onto the next one.

“I’m not that fast, you know…” he lamented, as he broke into a light jog trying to keep up with Will.

It was not long afterwards that Will had singlehandedly eliminated every Aragami in the neighborhood. Fortunately, there had only been Ogretails, Dreadpikes, and the occasional Zygote—nothing too difficult for someone of Will’s caliber to take care of. Now came the matter of looking for Isaac Feldman among the wreckage. With any luck, he should still be alive, but…

“I’m scanning for any remaining Oracle signatures we may have missed,” called out Silas as he brought up a display on his watch. “You comb the area in search of— Hold on, wait!”

Will stopped in his tracks in response to Silas’ call. “What’s the matter?” he spoke over the sounds of chaos.

“There’s one remaining Oracle signature two blocks north of here. Whatever it is, it’s extremely small, but it’s still dangerous even if it is a small Aragami in a weakened state. Will, you go after it! I’ll catch up in a moment!”

Will nodded, breaking into a sprint once more as he headed towards the source of the signature, but what he found there defied all expectations.

It was a tiny Aragami, tinier than any other species that existed even in the future, that resembled a small floating piranha. Called an Abaddon, the Aragami was said to bring good luck, and Will could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d seen them in the wild.

But what surprised him the most wasn’t the Aragami’s presence.

No, it was the small boy who leapt at it from behind, latching onto it with all his might and skewering it repeatedly against the sharpened wooden end of a broken support beam. Within moments, the Abaddon was dead.

Will had never heard of a normal human killing an Aragami before, but it was true that Abaddons were the weakest species…

However, all speculation Will might have had was tossed to the wind when he saw what happened next.

The boy approached the dead Abaddon…

…and began to eat.

Bite by ravenous bite, he devoured the Abaddon in much the manner of a starving man tearing into a succulent steak. As if the boy hadn’t eaten in weeks, his voracious appetite was all too apparent as he took in every last bit of Oracle cell flesh the creature had to offer.

As he wiped his mouth after he had finished, his ears perked to attention as he swiftly turned his head in Will’s direction—however, by then the latter man was already out of sight, still in shock at what he had just witnessed.

But this bizarre day was far from over, for Will had not been the only one watching this little spectacle.

“Feldman…”

Will was snapped out of his daze by the voice of Silas from behind him. Whirling around, Will noticed the scientist staring blankly at something out of sight to the side of where Will stood…

…a “something” that quickly revealed itself to Will’s eyes as an address and nameplate.

“Feldman…” Will whispered, echoing Silas’ earlier vocalization as he gazed at the nameplate, which displayed, in very clear engraved lettering, the name “Feldman.”

“So, then…” Silas uttered, dumbstruck, “that child… is Isaac Feldman?”

Will could not respond. All he could do was watch in shock as the child underwent a metamorphosis, the Abaddon’s Oracle cells permeating his body as his skin took on a darkened hue and his hair turned stark silver, his eyes changing to a stark red color to match. A sight that rang all too clear in Willard Knox’s memories.

“No…  No…”

Nothing in the world could have prepared Will for this. Nothing could have readied him for the sight that now stood before him.

“Fa…ther…”

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