"What if I told you that I could take care of your ghost problem?"

After a minute of sombre silence, Scar finally spoke up. He steepled his fingers in front of him and leaned on his elbows, like he was some maniacal business man conducting a shady deal.

The drunken mayfly raised his head from the table, strings of saliva sticking to his cheek from the puddle that had rapidly formed on the table. He looked at Scar with half open eyes, frowning as if he was concentrating on stopping his vision from swimming around, before letting out a drunken laugh.

"Take care of it? Pfft... You think you're some kind of ghostbuster or something? I think you forgot your light up backpack at home. Or were you planning on going out there with a cross and waving some sage in their faces while they gut you."

He thrust his hand in Scar's face, waving invisible incense before breaking down into more laughter. However, after a few seconds the laughter faltered slowly before stopping all together.

Mayfly sat up straight, staring at Scar with an incredulous expression when he realised the man across from him had not said a single thing. He was still sitting stock straight, waiting for the penny to drop.

Although Mayfly couldn't see Scar's face, he could still see the piercing silver eyes peering at him through the eye-holes of the mask, and within them he could see nothing but absolute determination and confidence.

"Wait... You're not serious, are you?"

"Deadly serious."

"You... You could actually get rid of them?"

"Of course I can. Quite easily, in fact. I was actually already in the process of doing such a thing when I got caught up in your silly little loop. Had it not reset on my first day here, your pirate problem would have been solved.

Instead, you undid my hard work and now I need to do it all again. Something I am not happy about."

Mayfly stared at him silently, his eyelids blinking slowly one after the other, before he looked down at the dozens of empty beer glasses in front of him.

"I didn't know that. I'm sorry... I was just doing what I could to save these people."

"I'm fully aware of that, and I understand it. Now, If you would just turn off the loop, I could go take care of the pest problem right now. It should be approaching that time already."

Scar knocked on the table and slid out of the booth, smoothly rising to his feet and turning to leave, only to stop short when something tugged at his wrist. He turned, glancing at Mayfly's hand with annoyance as it held his wrist.

He could have easily kept on walking and dragged the man behind him without effort, but there was no need for that.

"Wait... N-not tonight. Can you please wait another day."

Scar raised an eyebrow, a slight hint of annoyance leaking into his voice, "And why, pray tell, would I do that? Why would I waste another day here, when I have much better things to do?"

"B-because there are things I need to fix before the night. People I need to help during the loop. I've learned a lot over this time, there are some things only I can fix. I can do it in a day, it just needs to be a fresh day.

So please... just give me one more. One more day to finally do something useful and not be a coward."

Scar narrowed his eyes, glaring at the hand still holding his wrist. Mayfly released him awkwardly, slumping back in his seat and letting out a heavy, depressed sigh, already assuming he knew Scar's answer.

As for Scar himself, he watched the man intently and suppressed a sigh of his own.

"Fine. You can have one day. You can use it to sober up. I'd rather not have you fuck this up because you're too drunk to use your own abilities."

Without bothering to look back, Scar turned his hand spiritual and let it slip out of Mayfly's grip before reforming it as he strolled out of the bar. It was probably for the best that he never looked back, as it meant that he didn't see the awkward, drunken dance Mayfly was currently doing in his excitement.

Scar made his way back to the building his group had 'borrowed' for their time in the loop. After a few loops, they had discovered this barren and abandoned store that had closed down at some point before the apocalypse.

Judging by small amounts of stock that were still scattered across the dust covered shelves, which mostly consisted of a few balls, tiny socks and teddy bears. It was either a shop for children or for pets.

In Scar's opinion, the socks definitely pointed towards children, but Cynthia had made a very compelling argument revolving around something called 'Kitten Mittens' and that some people liked to put socks on their pets.

Strange people, perhaps, but if there was a market for it why wouldn't a pet shop sell them?

When he returned home, Scar found a trail of blood leading from the door and moving deeper inside. However such a dreadful and ominous sight hardly stirred his heart in the slightest.

After all, only one person in this group actually bled and it was him. Not only was he perfectly fine, actually getting him to bleed would be a feat and a half for the mortals of this town.

With more curiosity than hurry, Scar followed the trail into the depths of the shop and into the backrooms in which they were using as their home base. The sound of crunching bones and smacking flesh already reached his ears.

He paused for a second, considering the different possibilities of what could be going on. There was no way that Alexandra and Cynthia were... no, of course not. What would that have to do with blood?

Shaking the dirty thoughts out of his mind, Scar rounded the corner and entered the room just in time to see Alexandra's fist cracking into Cratos' cheek once more. Blood splattered across the store floor as the man didn't let out so much as a grunt of pain.

His head simply snapped to the side before hanging limply, a trickle of blood mixed with saliva dripping from his massively swollen lips.

The powerful procrastinator was tied to a chair, that was sat in the middle of the dusty room. He had been stripped down to just his underwear, showing a body that was covered completely in bleeding cuts and bruises.

Every part of his face was swollen and purple from the torturous beating he had been given. Behind the swollen black eyes however, Scar noticed that something was mysteriously missing. Where there should have been white and red, there was simply nothing.

As if his eyes had been plucked from their sockets and left empty. He couldn't help but curiously glance at Cynthia.

The slimy suspect in question stood by the side watching on with a complicated expression, unaware of Scar's suspicious looks, while Alexandra loomed above the victim with a satisfied smile on her face. Blood dripped from her knuckles as she rolled her neck, as if torturing a man was making her stiff.

Thankfully, as he looked around the room, he couldn't find Daisy. It was probably for the best. Although the world was a hellscape, there was no need to expose her to this.

His past self would have been undoubtedly horrified, trying to pull them off the tortured soul and doing his best to stop them walking down a dark path. He was so full of hope and optimism back then, thinking that he could simply avoid killing and still be civilised.

Now, as he looked at the broken and beaten Cratos, Scar felt absolutely nothing. No guilt, no remorse, no entertainment or satisfaction. He simply looked at the man like he was nothing.

"If you're going to kill him, do it before midnight. You don't need to worry about him coming back to life, I have it on good authority that the loop doesn't do that with outsiders. Speaking of, we're getting out of here tomorrow.

So if you have any other business to attend to, other than this, I'd make sure to do it quickly."

He spoke like a disinterested father before sitting down and watching the beating with empty eyes. In the end, Alexandra took his advice in an odd way. It seemed that hearing that the loop wouldn't bring him back to life, in her mind, meant that so long as she kept him just barely alive, he would be fine tomorrow for more beatings.

That was the plan she ended up carrying out, long after Cynthia and Scar got bored of the horrific show. It went on long enough to make him wonder if they were starting to become bad people or if it was just the inevitable corruption of their horrific world on their personalities. If it was the second, was there even anything they could do to stop it or were they all destined to become monsters, no matter how they mutated?

By the time midnight came around and the loop reset for the final time, he still had yet to come to a conclusive answer to that very question.

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