• You may think of war as this: plans, strategies, all wrapped up in the sweet taste of victory. If you thought that, then you’d have been dead wrong.

    War is made through the sufferings of innocents, the blood of the enemy. That’s what it’s truly about. Trust me, I know. I really know.

    I’m laying here, face-down in the dirt. The sounds of bullets whizzing around my head force me to push myself deeper into the cold ground. With every fiber of my being I beg I wouldn’t get shot.

    All of the sudden, a piercing scream echoes through the battlefield. Whether it’s my side or the enemies, I can’t tell.

    This seems like a normal war, right? Wrong. We have no weapons, no armor, and no artillery. The enemy? They have all that and more. All we have is our minds, and I’m not talking about logic.

    You see, about twenty years ago, a plague hit Earth (my planet) in the year 9026. Unlike most diseases, this one only infected certain people. Only five-hundred people were diagnosed with it, but don’t let that fool you. This disease was worst than anything you can think of.

    Imagine walking through a city, everything ordinary, than a horrid skull-splitting pain rips through your head and mind. You grab at your head just because you think it will burst open if you don’t. All of a sudden, strange thing start happening. Chairs are flying around, glass starts smashing, and you don’t know why. It’s pretty freaky. If this kind of scene happens in public view, you get shipped off to The Academy.

    The Academy is a government-controlled facility used to take the people infected with this plague and turn them into solders. You know how humans don’t use sixty-percent of their brain? Well, that’s one thing that this disease does, it unlocks that other forty-percent. Things that were unimaginable, you can now just do. So I guess there’s an up side and a down side to the plague.

    I do see why the government would make The Academy. Super solders that don’t need weapons, bullets, none of that stuff. All they have to do is to think and destroy. The ultimate weapons.

    The thing about the “horrid skull-splitting pain” is that if your “powers” are developed, it will cause people around you to suffer. “The Releasing” is what we call these fits of pain. It’s at these times your power is the most powerful and the most uncontrollable. In fact, it was my seventeenth-birthday party that I had my first Releasing. Back then, I didn’t know I had the plague and because of my ignorance, some one died.

    His name was Justin. Justin something. I can’t remember. I went into the fit… and as the pain grew worse, so did my power. Windows shattered and tables flew across the room, smashing into anything that got into its way. I t was a piece of glass from the window that killed him. The glass had slit his throat. I remember the limp body of my once-was friend being cradled in the arms of his mother. She was a bit overprotective and came to make sure nothing happened to him. Sadly, her efforts were wasted. Justin’s mom screamed at me calling me a freak of nature, a spawn of Satan. She blamed me for the death of her child. And it was my fault. All my fault and I will never forget what I did to him.

    A bullet flew about three inches from my face, snapping me back to reality. Looking to the left, I see mussel-fire and the silhouette of an ALCANE solder (our enemy) in a sniper balcony on the other side of the battlefield. Time to use the only good thing from living with this plague.

    The rest of the world fades away as I focus on my target. Now I can see the black visor that covers his face and the AK-207 sniper rifle in his hands. Suddenly, the white flash of the ALCANE’s mussel-fire gleams through the dark night. Using all of the abilities I’ve mastered so far, the bullet stops. Slowly, the bullet turns around, facing his launcher. A strong constriction envelopes my head as the bullet flies full speed back to the ALCANE solder’s head. The bullet pierces his head as a gush of red blood spews from the wound. The shattered visor created bloody cuts on the man’s face as he fell to the hard ground. A sickening crunch emanates from the cold corpse slamming into the dirt. One down, three-million left to go.