Once More Into The Fray: Part One

The Critic

Milo Larson stood over a dead body.

Dead bodies were nothing special. Lots of people died, all the time. Sometimes other people killed them. Other times they were killed by the monsters. The Golden Man killed more people than anything else ever, really. Almost scrubbed humanity from existence. That was boring. Just a flash and then no more you.

But sometimes, death was an art form.

Milo Larson knew from art. He had been drawing on the walls of his room since he was a little boy.

Then his notebooks. Then his homework. Then his skin.

He could look at a piece and determine if colors synergized, if meaning was carried, if there was a balance of minimal space and economy of form.

The so called artists of the world would keep dropping their pants and vomiting from their assholes onto the masses absorbent skulls.

There were so few true artists anymore.

Once upon a time there were nine of them. Glorious people, people of legend, who saw the world as their Slaughterhouse and the pigs around them as what they truly were.

The cutting man and his endless wit. Milo watched every video, every threat he made to the unenlightened swine beneath him. He idolized him. He craved the cutting man's everything. He carved his flesh with icons of his desire. He wanted to wear his very skin. He was an artist who used the mind as his canvas, painting little pictures in his disciples heads with the blood of the unworthy.

The empty man and his...his glorious woman. The feral and free one that had torn that BITCH'S EYE OUT.

He lusted after every inch of her naked, perfect form. Her art was beautiful and straightforward, a punch in the teeth that left you reeling and horny.

But of them, the one that remained was the prodigy. Such a gifted little girl, she was. The art she created...by god...it was the most beautiful thing Milo had ever seen in his life. He wanted to kiss the ground she had walked on. Taking frail, filthy little things and carving them and cutting them and sewing them into new angels and demons and elightened beings-

Milo found himself sweating again. The corpse beneath him softly bled, leaking the crimson paints with which he wrote his messages. This would be a gorgeous mural, truly it would be.

Damn. A thousand damnations. Curse the shit frothing forth from the oozing pustules on the dick of his mother in HELL.

Milo didn't know what to paint. The artist, the Critic, he knew not what images to draw forth.

But then Milo thought about his idols. He thought about the gift he had oh-so-recently been given. Milo's perceptions had been honed and accentuated after the Morning. After he saw the devastation and the creaking of a strained and broken world he could see where things were weak. He could find the darkest, most vulnerable place in you and take it and rape it with his words. He wondered if someday, he could make art like the masters of old.

Milo thought on what he must do. He dipped his hand into the crimson leaking from the streetwalker's skull after he buried his knife in her temple.

He reached onto the white-on-brick wall and wrote one little numeral. One little thing that would make the Critic into the next great hero amongst those who knew.

Milo reached onto the wall and painted a 9.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.