Khepri M

I stopped.  The reactions, the calls of alarm and the occasional shriek, they extended beyond the ring of people that surrounded me.

It wasn’t right.  The chaos beyond this one group, it should have left people blind to what was going on here.  They shouldn’t have been able to turn their backs on the others.

I was- it was parsing wrong.  Didn’t connect.

In that riot, that mob, there was no blood.  The girl I’d cut wasn’t bleeding, the people in the crowd weren’t dying… only the hands and arm, held out for the knife to slash, were weeping with blood, only the older injuries, from a short time ago.

People wrapped their arms around one another, but bones weren’t broken, limbs weren’t disjointed.  The shouting and screaming wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, nor were the powers that were actively being thrown around.  There were tears, but those same people were smiling.

I hadn’t counted on having to deal with this many people.

Too many with powers I wasn’t familiar with.  The ones closest to me?  The ones I’d just been controlling?  I had a grip on them.  But the mob beyond was something else.

I felt a moment of trepidation.

My senses… I was more disabled than I’d thought.  I couldn’t make sense of what was going on beyond my swarm, could barely make sense of what was happening here.

Speck 30.7