His breath came out in short, ragged gasps, mingling with the atmosphere.
Blood streamed from a gash across his brow, obscuring his vision. He clumsily rubbed at it, smearing it, disseminating it, emulating a morbid blush upon his visage.
Already, flecks and caked patches of similar crimson dotted his form.
He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his teeth, steeling himself against the harsh wind, the cacophony of heavy nothings burdening the air, being siphoned away into the sky.
Sword thrust jaggedly into the earth, him on his knees, dirt scuffing his once pristine armor, he blearily gazed all around him.
Bodies - hundreds, thousands - littered the field, surrounding him.
The hacked carcasses of pigs, their entrails splattered onto the cold ground. The dribbling puddles of green were all that remained of the slimes. Mushrooms, once blissfully bounding about, not a care in the world, their orange crowns now split open and deflated.
Wolves with pelts shorn off, the lifeless eyes of prone drakes, the lolling tongues of motionless yetis.
A stench permeated the air, securing an enclosed space of death and countless departed souls.
Trembling, he stood. Quavering, he drug his sword through the grime behind him as he trudged along back the way he came.
And for what?
For what, he asked himself. What purpose did this serve? This was...this ended up...what became of this is nothing more than-
Genocide.
Simply and utterly.
A mass slaughter-fest of no context, zero meaning, all encompassing a vague, frivolous goal. Corpses and cadavers and the putrid scent rotting the dense space around him, the weight of a thousand souls bearing down upon him. He felt the fear, the anguish of every life snuffed out by his blade. The sensations of blood squelched in between his fingers. How easily his blade slipped between ribs, how smoothly he dislodged the tip.
Appearance haggard, head pounding, spirit waning, he contemplated what he stood for.
All the righteousness of a Cygnus Knight. The justice of one pledged against the evilest of intentions, the darkest of cruelties.
He is sworn against malevolence. His light was supposed to purge it. His lustrous dawn locked, for eternities past, against the corrupt.
The entirety of his life has been devoted to halting the terrible ambitions of the Black Mage.
All he's been through, he's never wavered on whether he could discern right from wrong. His flesh and bones absolutely and wholeheartedly served only to eradicate what he has always known to be the ultimate evil.
But has he been blind to the evils closer to home?
Has his plight of clashing against the higher echelons of atrocity, of accomplishing his duty and visions for the greater good shrouded the sins occurring right in front of him? Day by day?
He didn't need to be a chosen knight to see that what was happening was morally defunct.
These creatures - these living, breathing entities - picked off like flies, now festering on the ground. Legions and legions of them tortured constantly, struggling against the inevitability of being hunted. Poached without a second glance.
Entire ecosystems ravaged and torn apart, families rend limb from figurative limb, each and every one of them toppling like dominoes. It was as if they existed solely to be prey. To be offered up as appeasements to satisfy the bloodlust that pervaded those like him.
It was a literal holocaust, and he couldn't do anything to stop it. Worse yet, he was a part of it. Adventurers proving their worth, fighters strutting proudly with their heads held high, even as speckles of red streaked across their armor. Their nonchalance echoing off each other.
And again, for what?
Why?
There must have been some meaning to it. Some reason to justify the ongoing senseless annihilation of billions. Just as the Black Mage must be destroyed because of his entrenched and all-consuming evil, so must there be some sort of vindication for the eradication - by his hand, he shuddered as he realized - of these beasts.
There must be some deep, encroaching, honorable need for such a deed. Otherwise, his feats of valor and ideals of virtue were nothing but smoky falsehoods.
A whirlwind of destruction with no meaning would make them no better than the Black Mage.
The odor of mortality wafted to his nostrils, and he grimaced.
Countless lives, being paid as tribute. Towards what purpose? Sacrificed for what objective?
Surely, surely, an answer existed somewhere, lingering just out of reach, dangling like a fruit from a towering tree.
They fought for justice. They prevailed over evil. They weren't murderers. He wasn't a murderer.
All this he considered as he trundled sluggishly back towards town.
He spotted his client, a kind old lady who had issued him the request. Her wooden cane wobbling, she hobbled towards him slowly, wearing a warm smile.
He tentatively smiled back.
All that he committed was not without meaning. Of course not. He lived for others. The citizens that he took up his sword for, that he would lay down his very life for, with unimaginable fervor. They were his impetus, his reason for being, for doing what he does.
The corners of the old woman's eyes crinkled affectionately.
"Did you gather the pelts, dearie? Oh, thank goodness! Winter's coming, you know, and my grandson's run himself ragged trying to find his scarf. This way, I can whip him up a new one in no time, all thanks to you!"
Her pruned hands shot out with surprising speed and snatched up the pelts he had gathered, before turning and going back the way she had come.
"Oh," she murmured, as if just remembering something. She craned her neck to look towards him once more.
"Could you be a dear and go kill...oh, say, precisely two hundred wild boars? I'm making soup tonight, you see, and their tusks- what's wrong?"
Left slack-jawed, he could only stare at her in silence.
Unperturbed, she glanced at the setting sun.
"Oh my. You'd better hurry, dearie," she said over her shoulder as she shuffled back towards her house.
She smiled at him once more.
"Those boars won't kill themselves, you know."
Author's Note: Don't ask me, I have no idea. The only reason I wrote something for Maplestory in the first place was because my sinister friend planted the notion of contributing to its fandom in my head. The weirdness of attributing tragedy to the deaths of monsters can pretty much be applied to several games and RPG's, but Maplestory is quite infamous for its excessive grinding and whatnot, so it seemed the perfect setting for my idea to take root. I'm sure there's already plenty of jokes about it anyway. This probably came off more serious than I wanted, (Humor is not my forte) and I'm not sure I like the result. But, well, here it is anyway. Greg, if you're reading, this is all your fault and you know it.
Random quotation of the day:
"NGHOOOOOOH!" -Miles Edgeworth
Or, um, something like that. Sue me if I don't have it correct to the letter. Get it? Because Phoenix Wright is about lawyers? ...I'll shut up now.