Infernal Devices | Vincent Valentine (Final Fantasy VII)

Chapter IV | Dream of Darkness

I love this gif ^^ Vincent looks so cute in the background ❤️

The air was thick with the smell of blood and gunpowder. Smoke burned your nostrils, scorched the lining of your lungs.

You could see the columns of smoke billowing a few streets over, fine grey wisps floating over the rooftops like ghosts. More gunshots rang out, leaving a sharp sting in the air, waking up the monster that lay dormant inside.

Ignoring the strange pull in the cavity of your chest, you took off in the opposite direction to everyone else - towards the fight - and threw yourself to the ground behind an overturned car as more bullets rained down from the tiers of the overhanging rooftops. A bullet hit the tyre and it began to deflate with a sharp hiss, but you remained unscathed, waiting for a break in the gunfire to peer over the underbelly of the car.

At least half a dozen troops clad in black and blue uniforms, glowing silver strips running down the front like braces, flanked a cowering civilian. Thick-bodied guns were trained on him.

Squinting through the smoke, you recognised the familiar WRO uniform he was donning, his red beret laying discarded on a pile of debris a few paces away.

It was the gunshot that set you off, broke the shackles. The man's knees buckled and he crumpled over, a small trickle of red pooling about his body, and you felt the chains snap inside, setting the demon free.

Then you were on the move.

The soldiers raised their guns when they saw you moving towards them, your movements fluid, effortless, evasive of every bullet they fired at you.

"Who are you?" One of them called, noticing your strange attire. Plain white, with a WRO jacket. Friend or foe? "Stop or we'll shoot."

You ignored them, sitting in the shadows of your consciousness to let the other being that occupied your body take over. You reached the soldiers in a matter of seconds, tossing them around like rag dolls, ripping their guns from their hands and snapping them over their own heads, one after the other dropping like petals from a dying rose.

Then you stopped, breathing heavily, bodies around your feet like offerings, sacrifices to a monster. Beneath their masks, eyes were wide, glossed over with terror, dulled and soulless.

Your mind was a haze. All you saw was red, anger, bloodlust, fire licking your veins, frenzy.

Rubble shifted and buildings stirred as people crawled out from their hiding places, staring at you with that same misty-eyed horror, stumbling away as if you were now the monster terrorising their streets.

A growl rumbled from the back of your throat, animalistic, guttural, inhuman. You refused to believe it had come from you, but that was the truth. The cold, daunting truth that haunted you like a ghost, the truth that you weren't really human anymore. You were a monster, a weapon, borne into something infernal and rotten, something destructive. And now you were the one they feared.

Those terrified stares made you want to cover your face with shame. They made you wish you had never woken up from your induced sleep, made you wish you'd stayed in that dream of darkness forever instead of waking up in a body you now loathed, feared.

More gunfire rattled your bones, bullets embedding into the ground around your feet, creating a clamour akin to thunder breaking across the skies. You rolled quickly to the side, facing the Deepground troops now approaching from behind. Beside them trotted two mechanical creatures that looked half-human, half-dog, more mutations, experiments, monsters.

The two beasts launched at you at the signal of one of the troops, their armoured limbs pounding the concrete as they ran on all-fours, snivelling and growling.