"He fell like a star out of the sky,

a corpse into hell."

Once again, he was running through the barren field of burning flames and infernos. The smoke formed a cloud around his head that seemed to do two things—confuse his mind and suffocate his every breath, forcing him to breathe as deeply as he could, utilising every last of his might.

But he was unstoppable.

There were the child-like shrieks coming from adults around him. From every direction. North. South. East. West. One would think that he was going crazy, that he was slipping from his weak grasp of reality. But of course, he wasn't. They were merely mistaken.

"The war has begun. Pack up. Evacuate as soon as possible." He could hear the announcement on the City's evacuation speakers, in the distance amongst the once busy streets and roads. The more he crossed the field and neared his destination, the louder the announcement became.

"Evacuate. Pack up. Leave. Evacuate! The war has begun!" The speakers seemed to scream—blending in with the ominous shrieks. The towering skyscrapers that once stood glorious and majestic, lining the skyline of the city of Gytha, now were cowards, weak and retreating into the ground. As if waiting for death to come and swoop down and save them.

That wasn't going to happen to him, though. As much as the smoke caused his eyes to water, and forced him to choke repeatedly on his strained breaths, nothing could stop him. He was born—made by the very great scientists that carved him, bred him cell-by-cell from the infallible instructions in their laboratories. He stood a chance, unlike many others.

He was practically immortal. Unfazed by anything. He would suffer in this war, as his father—scientist Rector Hale once reminded him—but he would not die. If he managed to conceal his secret, that was. A secret birthed by a mistake.

Like they said, you are only as strong as your weakest link.

But what if people couldn't see your weakest link? Then that link would merely not exist, perhaps? And thus, he had to keep his secret safe for his own wellbeing. For his own safety.

Oh, because if they found out...

There was another explosion that rocked the ground like a mother rocking a baby's cradle. The power of anger and bitter hatred radiated from it like heat.

When he reached the annihilated, unrecognisable streets that he once called home, he felt a pang of sadness in his chest. He moved stealthily between overturned, flaming cars and bare bones of the once lively city.

What happens when your home is destroyed? Where do you truly belong? Where do your loyalties lie?

If the city were to drown in the flames, who was he answering to? His maker, his father, Rector, had already disintegrated into dust. Without a piece of information or instruction in his wake. Archer knew that this was the first time he felt truly lost and aimless, like a lost sheep.

Archer knew there was one way—the only way that could possibly save his life.

He reached the foot of the State Tower, which was one of the only buildings that remained standing like concrete ghosts in the city. He put his hands on one of the cracks on the side and hauled himself upwards, scaling the building. It was an edifice shooting up like hands reaching out into the sky from the dying Earth. It tried to touch the sun, which was shielded behind a large blanket of fog and cloud. Every year, the government would add an extra level to it. Every year he'd seen a new level added. And currently, he'd seen seventeen levels added.

But now, the tower was beginning to feel the impact of war. The impact of human hatred and the capabilities of these monsters. In war, men weren't men anymore. They were below that. During war, men morphed—limb by limb, cell by cell—into bloodthirsty, unrecognisable monsters. He learnt that the hard way.

He reached the top after scraping his hands and legs on the shattered glass a few times. However, he healed in almost the blink of an eye, and was as fine as he had been before. There, he felt the gales wind whipping around him. He almost got the feeling that he would be blown off if he wasn't careful.

Taking a deep breath, he looked around, inching towards the edge as he yearned for a better view of the City.

When he finally saw the place he once—and still—called home, just one sentence formed in his mind. His brain was too overwhelmed to process anything else.

It was in ruins.

Smoke billowed upwards in the direction of the wind from several hotspots, impairing the vision of anything else that was going on on the ground. If he closed his eyes, he could almost pretend that it was actually the smoke from the afternoon tea that Rector Hale used to make for him. He could pretend that the war didn't exist.

But then again, he couldn't.

And the Science Towers. The towers that were his home. His one and only home. He recalled that they used to be fit snugly between the Empire Building and the Government Building.

But now, between the remains of those two buildings, was an empty, unfillable gap.

That was when he saw the two men. They were hanging treacherously on a rope suspended over two buildings opposite of him, and they seemed to have hooked themselves on so as to not end up tunnelling down into the descent that would definitely lead to their untimely deaths.

They were pointing at him.

"He's one of them! He's one of the products of that cursed experiment! He's one of them!" Though their voices were fighting with the whooshing of the howling wind, he could still hear them.

He shook his head slowly, registering what they were saying as he stood there, hundreds of metres above the ground. Each word the rebels said was like a cold, hard slap stinging with bitter venom.

I'm not evil, he thought, his mind beginning to spin, I'm not one of them. I never wanted the war to begin.

But the rebels took that as a sign of weakness. A sign that he was a lost cause.

They raised their snipers.

And that was when he began to feel the pain. His mind processed the pain quicker than the explosion of the gunshot.

Pain was a sensation he rarely felt. In fact, he'd rarely felt true pain, as Father Hale called it. All he ever felt was, apparently, 'pure discomfort'. Now, he felt like he'd been slammed into a speeding needle, with a pain that lacerated his heel.

His heel. The pain came from his heel.

In horror, his gaze slowly moved downwards to the origin of the pinprick of searing pain. With a heavy heart, he pulled up the base of his trousers. He prayed that his suspicions wouldn't be confirmed in his head. His eyes scanned the skyline once again for the source of the bullet—and he stared at the windows of the other buildings, trying to make out if there were any silhouettes slinking about. But now the wind was blowing into the City, and he couldn't see the rope that held the two rebels anymore.

They couldn't have been that precise, right?

Or at least, he hoped.

As soon as he lifted up the trousers, he noticed a wet, sticky feeling that accompanied the searing pain like inseparable best friends. He looked at his hands.

They were scarlet red.

No.

And in his heel—a bullet lodged right into the fine area of his Achilles tendon.

No, no, no.

He didn't want the war to start. He didn't know that the government was planning this. He was just an innocent bystander. He did not know why it started. He wanted the war to stop. He wanted the rebellion to stop. He wanted everything to go back to normal.

But it was then he realised that even through his denial, there was a bubble of thought floating around his mind. And it was that the right were not always right. And the wrong were not always wrong. Especially in war.

He was on the ledge of the tower, and when his blood-streaked hands reached up to touch his tear-streaked cheek.

He collapsed forwards.

Realisation was an uneasiness swelling in his stomach as he fell. Down and down and down into the dark abyss of war-worn streets that lay below—unwelcoming and abandoned. He fell like a star out of the sky. A corpse into hell. The icy wind blew against him in his descent, and the ground neared.

I am Archer, he thought, holding on to that phrase for what little life he had left in him. I am Archer.

And even the immortal perish sometimes.

That was the last he saw of the mortal world before the ground hit.

~~~

 A/N: hey cuties, i'm nearly done with my exams, and i'm procrastinating so bad now so i decided to pull up this story that was written last year. it's not edited much, and i decided to keep it really raw and uneven because i think that's how it should be :) specifically for this story, though. so please excuse the very unedited stuff :)!I've got a lot on my plate in the coming weeks after exams in terms of writing, and a lot of them come in the form of short stories and poems and stuff so I guess I'll post some of them up here!

clairee x