The man lifted Mary's arms above her head with his dirtied hands and directed her gaze towards the bloody scene that had just unfolded in front of her like a scene from her darkest nightmares.
"See all this? You can fix everything, have it just how you like it, if you let yourself harness the snakes and turn time back."
In the lifeless bodies of her entire new family, there was something familiar about it that she just couldn't place. Mary's breath died in her chest. There was something that she shouldn't know but she needed to know, like a word that she had forgotten but was next in her sentence. Think, think, she commanded herself.
Mary's tears dried. Her eyes grew wide as she remembered eons upon eons of meaningless bloodshed that she seemed powerless to stop. Seemed...
Mary muttered, "Rend."
Kuroha cursed as the palms of his hands split open, leaking warm red blood that dripped down onto his shoes and down Mary's arms. He dropped his hold on Mary reflexively.
He chuckled, "Interesting, little master, after all this time you still have secrets-"
A long ivory wing embedded itself into Kuroha's left shoulder, splintering bone and spraying blood into his face. He struggled against it and found that it pinned him to the wall. He pried at the edges with his other hand, but it didn't give and release him to land on his knees until Mary gestured for it to.
Kuroha slammed into Mary with his full strength to find that instead of crumbling, she rolled with his energy and slammed him into the ground just as hard. He laid there for a second too long, stunned that she could match his ability in any way.
"Did you really think-" Mary's leg slammed into his side, stealing his remaining breath, "That I would take all of this lying down?" Kuroha tried to regain his footing, but before he could crawl back onto his feet, he felt the weight of Mary's foot on his back keeping him down. "All of this horror and pain?"
Mary grabbed one of the long bone-like wings that hung at her back like servants waiting for their master's next command and Kuroha registered with alarm how sharp the edges on the thing were. One of her other wings hovered dutifully above his head as the weight of her foot pressed against him lessened. "If you move from that spot, my wing will plunge into your skull, okay?" Kuroha grimaced at the sight of the thing, knowing that (non-functioning) regenerative ability or not, if it were to smash his skull in and stay there, he wouldn't be able to reform from that.
Kuroha sucked in a surprised breath as something cold and sharp pressed lightly on the inside of his knee. "Remember what I said about not moving." The light weight of the wing against his skin quickly turned into a gnawing pain, sawing into the soft muscle of his inner knee. He pounded the ground with his fist to keep from screaming outright.
"I'll repay this all to you in full next time!" He half-growled, half-screamed. From behind him, Mary murmured, "If there is a next time," to herself like it was a particularly strange inside joke.
He ground his teeth to keep his attention from the sawing motion in his right knee, back and forth, the blade grinding and protesting against the femur. Kuroha mentally begged for the bone to give and snap in two so that the noise would finally stop and he could pass out from the blood loss. The sawing continued for what felt like an eternity to him until it finally gave way with a cathartic cracking noise and the blade hit muscle.
His leg's muscle gave way almost too quickly in comparison to his bones, the initial break through his femur tearing through much of the muscle faster than being stabbed. Kuroha whimpered before he could think to quiet himself. He would definitely not give Mary the satisfaction of seeing him scream in pain.
The newly disconnected sinew squished like gel against the blade. He tried to tear what was left of his upper leg away from his cooling calf but was only met with the feeling of Mary's cold hand clasping his thigh tight on the ground.
The wing scraped against his knee cap. Kuroha screamed.
Dizzy from pain, Kuroha almost didn't realize when the wing finished cutting through his kneecap, severing the lower half of his leg entirely, he could certainly still feel his foot even though Mary had removed it. She was wrapping something soft tightly around the stump. That was a joke, far too little too late.
He prepared to be left to die or have the timeline reset after all, Mary's little private joke finished, but after she finished trying to stem the bloodflow from his leg, she picked up the wing again and pushed hard on his other leg, severing most of the muscle in one blow.
Mary pulled the last connecting muscles out, fistful by fistful.
"What are you getting out of this?!" he yelped.
"What did you get out of killing my friends? This is my revenge for all of the times that you hurt them just to manipulate me." There was an eerie calm like the eye of a tornado in Mary's eyes despite her bangs dripping blood (his blood, Kuroha realized) that rolled down her cheeks like tears.
Kuroha barked out a laugh. "I don't care about your humans. After a while they're all interchangeable and have a lifespan like mayflies."
"Then you did all of this for something nothing to do with them, right?" Mary pursed her lips and looked at him the same way you would look at a particularly long lived cockroach.
"Of course! It's not like I totally disregarded your humans either, they played an important role in granting Kenjirou Tateyama's wish. He's together with his wife in death, get it?" The too-wide smile from earlier returned to Kuroha's face like he was recalling a joke someone had told him.
"Was it all worth it just to mindlessly preserve your own life?" Mary seemed unsurprised by the prospect.
"There's nothing mindless about it. I've thoroughly enjoyed orchestrating this puppet show and starting again is my reward." Kuroha giggled deliriously.
"...You may fancy yourself the one who pulls the strings, but I'm the true master of this tragedy." He braced himself for another incision as Mary lowered himself down to his eye level. "By repeating this series of events over and over again, you've only made my powers stronger."
"Is that how you negated my regenerative ability...?"
"That's right. You may be strong, but in the end this is my rodeo." Mary grabbed his chin and forced him to face her. She traced the outline of his right eye with her fingers. Her hands were mockingly soft from disuse despite all she had done to him already.
"There's a saying, what comes around goes around. Or in this case... Those who steal will be stolen from." Bright colors flashed in Kuroha's right eye as a pressure built in his skull before it gave a sickening squelching noise he could feel in his teeth, and his vision faded to nothing. He could feel two of her fingers explore the inside of his eye socket before she withdrew them and picked parts of his eye from underneath her fingernails.
He shuddered and scrambled back like a spider missing one of its legs before her attention could shift back to him, only to flinch as his hand hit the cold concrete wall behind them. "It'll be over much sooner if you don't struggle," she stated as Kuroha stared powerlessly at her fingers approaching his remaining eye. Incomprehensible pleas for his life escaped his lips one by one. She tisked and held his eyelids open while she dug his left eye out of it's socket as well. The same multi-colored display appeared in his other eye until it dissolved into mush and his field of vision plunged entirely into a merciful nothingness.
As soon as she dropped his face, he rubbed futilely at his eyes with his sleeve, which only streaked the blood and bits of his eyes sideways across his face. Kuroha realized dully how powerless he was without his eyesight, as if it made a difference after both of his legs were gone, and in the back of his mind, that he would be stuck like this if Mary didn't reset the timeline after all. His face felt hot, both from anger and from the humiliation of being made a victim. How dare she make a fool of him like this.
Mary leaned into towards him. Her hot breath against his skin made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Every one of his instincts screamed to strangle her or run, but instead here they stood, frozen like time had stopped. He cursed that he couldn't read her expression anymore. Mary cupped his face and wiped the blood from where his eyes were before speaking,
"You don't need to be afraid. Because I don't want to stoop down to your level, I won't kill you. I'll sew all your wounds shut and keep you safe from death. I won't let you die from the blood loss either. That's what you wanted, right? To live forever." Mary brushed his bangs from out of his face as he whimpered involuntarily.
Mary let go of him and he switched into even higher alert, having no way to tell where exactly she was other from fumbling blindly into the nothingness. Kuroha touched the rim of his eye socket and dry heaved despite himself at the sticky goo that had once been his eye. He tried to push himself up onto his knees and stifled a scream as the remnant of his femur scraped against the concrete, the ground slick with his blood. He fell back, his face against the dirty ground, too dizzy to even try crawling away from his waking nightmare.
"Won't that be great?"