Kevin Durant, unhappy with the way his season had ended, was going to pay LeBron a visit. Not a pleasant visit it would be, for the guest that LeBron would be greeting was no longer fully human.
Floating above the city of Miami, silent as a whisper, Kevin could go as fast or slow as he wanted. In an instant, he was at LeBron’s doorstep. He pondered ringing the doorbell, which would have strictly been for etiquette’s sake, then decided better of it and passed effortlessly through the solid mahogany of the door.
Kevin was fully invisible; the only sign of his being was a slight distortion of the light where it refracted off his minimal presence in the matter-bound world of the living. He did not yet revert back to his human form; the element of surprise was just too appealing.
LeBron was watching a cartoon with his son in the grandly-furnished living room. Not wanting to permanently damage the child’s fragile mental state, Kevin waited patiently until his mother came and took him shopping for clothes. Then, LeBron was alone, and it was time for all to be revealed.
“Hello, LeBron,” Kevin said, faux-friendliness thick in his voice.
Startled, LeBron whipped his head around. “Durant? How did you get in here? I’m calling the cops!”
Kevin’s voice was perfectly calm and level. “There will be no need for that, LeBron. I just want to have a chat.”
“This is breaking and entering!” LeBron shouted back. “You could have just called, man!”
Already, the banality of human conversation made Kevin weary with boredom. He wanted to get to the fun part. “You would find the police to be horribly ineffective in situations such as the one you are about to find yourself in.”
As a credit to LeBron, this threat did not faze him at all. “Stop talking this crazy talk. If you’re thinking about a fight, your skinny ass would get dropped in three seconds flat.”
“There will be no fight,” Kevin clarified. “Although you might find this much more damaging in the long run.” Lifting up his arms, Kevin incanted the ritual words as his startled rival looked on with wide eyes. Then, Kevin pointed his palms at LeBron and carefully began to draw out a blue, shimmering substance, the essence of LeBron’s humanity.
“Yo, what are you doing?” LeBron asked with pleading in his voice, watching the cloudy mass exit uninhibited through his skin and clothes, a pale shroud of unimaginable importance.
“Reaping your soul,” Kevin answered simply. LeBron looked ready to retort, but as the last shred of his soul exited his body, his eyes lost all emotion and his limbs went slack.
The soul of LeBron now in his possession, Kevin stashed it in his soul-chamber for later consumption. When he reverted back to his invisible state, his sudden disappearance did not evoke any reaction in the zombie-like LeBron, who had already, unthinkingly, turned his attention back to the television.
“It was nice chatting with you,” Kevin taunted, laughing. Then, he was gone, off to his next target.
———————-
Kevin looked down at Lil B’s house with derision. Such a large residence for such a small man.
This beef was about to get serious.
Rather than toying with his prey, Kevin was more direct this time. Brazenly reconstructing his human form in front of Lil B’s eyes shattered the rapper’s sanity so thoroughly that his soul might even be too damaged to collect properly. That concern turned out to be unfounded, though, as the green haze of Lil B’s soul was withdrawn with almost no resistance whatsoever.
Logging on to Twitter, Kevin tweeted, “@LILBTHEBASEDGOD aint so based anymore”. The timing of this tweet would surely implicate him in Lil B’s new status as a vegetable, but this did not concern Kevin, as he had fully transcended human restrictions such as laws and governments.
“How poetic,” Kevin thought to himself, “that the one who called himself a ‘based god’, now resides permanently within the one who can call himself a true god?”
———————-
There would be more victims that day, all of them left without emotion, trapped in a machine-like existence for the rest of their lives. With each harvested soul, Kevin’s power grew more robust, and he began to gain control over both the flow of time and the composition of molecules.
But Kevin was not his true name.
He was the Slim Reaper.