Bruel Jackets swarmed around Nithos like an electric blanket shocking whatever human flesh he had left they hadn't zapped yet. His skin had burnt spots all over. They looked like track marks leading nowhere and somewhere at the same time. He'd forgotten how long he'd been here. He remembered serving in the Korean War until its end in 1953. He had his stainless steel dog tags with the tooth notch to prove it. He wore them on a chain around his neck. Tilting them to catch the charge, it bounced off the metal and reflected it back to the Bruel jackets. The charge pinged on their quadruple, hexagonal-shaped thoraxes. He ducked lying close to the acid rain damaged ground as it boomeranged back at him.

But not before the charge sent them into a tizzy fit or struck them dead on the spot. After an hour they'd resurrect themselves and he'd have to fight this battle all over again.

Bruel Jackets, electric blue in color look like prehistoric almost dinosaur-like wasps. They are part yellow jacket, mosquito, dung beetle, wasps and water moccasin with fangs of a cobra and eyes of a goldfish cracker. They are the most hilarious-looking and deadly insects known to man, lest of all this man.

He went another twelve rounds with them and finally they left him alone. He was so exhausted. He'd been fighting them and the elements for the past decade. He plunked his head against an Aesop tree, sweating profusely and breathing hard, wheezing in between breaths.

His body ran cold from the strain emitting a spectrum of light flooding into an electromagnetic field, oozing from his seared pores.

His body had absorbed the Bruel Jackets electricity over the years. His skin turned into a shocking white light and by sunset he'd become white hot yet mauve in color.

His stem cells rejuvenated. He had a decade taken off his age. He closed his eyes and rubbed his dog tags as if they were rosary beads. They kept him strong as the excruciating process of his metamorphism continued. He opened his eyes feebly. His eyes had become invisible. But in a cosmic strangeness, he could still see like that of an out of body experience. Visually everything looked like a mirage incorporated into a menagerie.

The terrain turned harsher to maneuver in the dusky dark. Reign sat in the center, still and alert of the echoes of the forest.

"I wish I had my electric guitar right now. I'd be playin' a few tunes by Johnny Cash to keep myself sane through these years being stuck in who knows wherever." He murmured to himself. He hummed Johnny Cash's hit "I Walk the Line."

He made the chick-a-boom sound with his mouth and kept time slapping his hand on his knee back and forth on the ground. He slapped his hand on his knee not breaking the rhythm and using his other hand to steady the beat as the pitches changed several times to keep the pace of the song intact and authentic. He continued these mannerisms until the end of the song.

Despite Reign's hippie lifestyle, he was a big fan of rockabilly music. He had a rockabilly quiff hairstyle. He had ashy reddish-blond hair and purple-gold-gray cat-like eyes. He played a few more Johnny Cash songs in his head until he could only stand silence, which didn't seem easy to come by in these parts.

The denseness of astringent fog spangled the paradise out of his senses. His witch powers had dwindled over the past three years, since he wasn't in his tent in the mountains of Colorfed where the nexus of his power lied.

Colorfed had a lot less magical power, since the biological plight that uncolored the town and its people. It was why he stayed in the mountains to keep away from the aftereffects of this plague on his powers or color. But only that small section of earth in the mountains is where he'd stayed safely unaffected.

The shadow in the distance he looked at was like a rerun on television. He wanted to look away due to boredom, but the train wreck it'd become wouldn't let him distract himself with something of lesser interest. The spindly thing exhibited behavior like Mister Ed with a pacemaker, hopped up on steroids. Reign somewhat found this amusing, but a nuisance at the same time. He'd explored this forest many times and it was an enigma. He couldn't get out. The forest was drenched in the strongest dark magic.

Reign tapped into his own soul, activated his locator powers, illuminating the magic in the forest. The dark magic encompassed the forest like a hula hoop spinning around and around. He looked upward and raised a brow at the glass ceiling of magic. He used shadow magic by drawing from the darkness of the magic surrounding the forest landscape.

The power shot from him like spigots faster than he could draw its power. For a few moments, he resembled a pin cushion. His blood shifted from one side of his body to the other and he felt like a stuffed animal left to sit in the washer after the rinse cycle ended.

His heart split into halves and the power trickled its way between and sealed itself inside the chambers. He made no sound as his body became mummified.

He smelled fresh donuts from the oven. He tried to keep thinking of them how they tasted, their warmth as his energy formed paradoxically and his state normalized. Reign teeter-tottered from la-la land to perdition, his mind spinning around like a merry-go-round too inadequate to break free and too willful to succumb.

The glass ceiling of magic overhead broke into shards. But the shards suspended in motion and still barred the way out moving closer and closer to each other threatening to slice and dice any escapee.

The forest could match the Amazon rainforest in wealth of size, wondrous uncertainty and infinity. So, the way out through the forest the hard way was a total bust. He swallowed the sea salt taste in his throat. The strike of the cold burning aftertaste shivered through him to the bone marrow. His core tightened with excitement and the nausea of disappointing discernment.

He had all this new power. He didn't know how long he'd have it and couldn't do anything with it. Hell seemed definitely adjacent, and it had a sadistic sense of humor. His head felt like one of those papier-mâché bobblehead dolls he used to sell to the novelty shops. But mostly to the old ladies and fanatics on the streets of Colorfed, before everyone looked like fleshy snow.

Reign looked up. He realized how those fireflies feel when they're stuck in a jar with the lid on. Shining their light helplessly and probably beating themselves up inside because they flew into a trap because it was open. He saw something fall from the sky and he squinted as he watched it fall. He felt it hit his forehead and stream down his face like a raindrop. He wiped it off his face with the palm of his hand. He looked down at his palm and it was blood, sizzling hot but his pain reflex didn't react. He stared at the blood until it evaporated as if his hand were a skillet. His pain stimulus seemed to be gone.

He started to panic not because he couldn't feel pain but because his fear stimuli hurt with abandon like a pulse that wouldn't stop racing. The fear of someone else out there who somehow reached the magical ceiling and injured themselves to get out, failed and could be in danger of bleeding to death, or the possibility of them perchance by survival, getting out and leaving him; another poor soul behind. The devastation was desolate. His eyes desperately searched around for an oasis. Reign tried to grasp calmness, but it escaped him. His nerves stuck in overdrive.

Nithos had become skittish like a cat, both exhausted from and excited by the pain during the metamorphosis that he nimbly glided almost gained full speed in the air. His head hit the glass ceiling and shattered it before he came crashing down.

Reign smelled the blood in the air. The alkaline in it burnt the inside of his nostrils and had an opium effect. He knew he was walking although the ground seemed to disappear underneath his bare feet. He followed the scent like a bloodhound. But it led him to a dead end.

The silence echoed in his eardrum and his sense of smell seemed to stop without warning. Reign ventured further and back again to the spot that led him there in the first place. The lapse in time seemed to be like a tape delay; a bleep in the broadcast of activity in this forested world.

"In war, you learn to adapt to your surroundings or you die," Nithos said emerging from the tree startling Reign causing him to fall backward from the shock. Blood dripped from the laceration in Nithos's head sizzling like the sun, slowly searing itself closed.

"What if you adapt to your surroundings and you still die?" Reign stood up dusting himself off.

Nithos cocked his head to the side looking upward. He raised a furrowed brow.

"Then you go down fighting!" He shouted as shards of glass teemed down on them. The sound rang like a thousand wind chimes all at once. The shards from the glass shower sliced Reign's shoulder blade, wrist and earlobe as he tried to dodge them.

Nithos covered his ears. The noise was so deafening he drowned in its reverberation. His body frizzled as the pieces of glass cut through him vertically. But he kept healing each episode slower than before as his sinewy muscles extracted each bit. He giggled a little almost giddy as the glass malaligned like ice inside him.

An insane resonance trapped itself in Reign's inner ear, jump roping about until his psyche separated itself to escape it, to the point of a total psychosis. His limbs were foreign to him. His molecular structure changed and he became ether.