Chapter 0: How the world goes round.
Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Murder. The act of taking lives with premeditation and purpose. Of course there are in the eyes of the powers that be (or were in this case) varying degrees of how and individual can extinguish a man but I find that kind of business pointless and unnecessary. Does it matter whether a man is strangled to death or butchered with a chainsaw? You have a corpse on your bloody hands and that's all that you can show for it, I admit the conditions of them would be different but it's like cars. They are in the end all the same except with aesthetic differences.. They all roll along and they all guzzle fuel. Same with dead men. They just sit there, they're souls evacuated via violence. It's a hideous and unholy act to everyone but the mad and the professionals' whose business it is to shun the mindset of horror at the act.
That's the common interpretation. There is no such thing as madness. If a madman were to call you mad you are likely to retort to his own mental conditioning. How can you be sure he feels the same when you name him? There are no mental plains of control, only different routes to which sense can be made by an individual, some more extreme or shallow than another person. That's the so called lame excused now what about the professionals? The soldiers and the hit men? Soldiers fight for a greater good, a purpose in which they see themselves pawns, pieces to be sacrificed in the pursuit of a tomorrow that their descendants can live in peacefully or prosperously. They are not shunned for dismissing the ease or possibly fun they achieve from their job as it is simply their job. They are paid with blood money for slaying in a national interest. No better than gladiators egged on by crowds eager for a beneficial result, they dirty their souls so others can stay clean. But do not the people who called for war have blood on their hands? Are their souls not dirtier for knowingly sending young men, boys, into a meat grinder? Yes, I think so. I know so.
Now we come to the contract killer. The man who willing admits to his employment and the apparently dark things he does. This kind of man sees life as cruel and that a Darwinian approach to the social strata is necessary for success, this therefore in their eyes condones their job. The weak for the strong. These kinds of people believe that the weak are there to be eliminated for the gain of others, like a small and potentially prosperous is snapped up by a corporate hunter in search of zero competition and X% profit. Their narrowness is their undoing. They commit themselves to a very limited point of success. Money gained and possibly pleasure from success. They are ruled by greed and need a system of hate and anger and envy in order to gain employment, goodwill reigns and the hit man dies out. So there we are. The soldier who sees himself as a tool for good and the hitman who sees only his own gain, both with their own sets of morality. Morality.
Out here in the pit I have learnt so much about the nature of killing and madness and above all else human nature. All peoples click to tune. They are programmed to see the world in a default shade and pick up cloned virtues from their interactions with others. The ability to distinguish good and evil, the sense of identity and ability to affiliate to a set of beliefs. All make up human nature. I have learnt much here. I have learnt the truth of good and evil for example.
He had thought me dead, I had been lying face down in but a rag after escaping the hellhole I had been trapped in. Covered in crap and ranking of filth I do not blame him for the assumption. He had kicked me a few times while I tried to grasp at the power to stand and defend myself from the foe. He had bent down and began to search me over for anything of value. He took my rags. Our country had lost everything. The most powerful nation on Earth had died and so had all its prestige, power and wealth. The abyss left behind coerced them to doing what no one who had faith in the American Dream believed would take place in this beautiful country. Of the 'free' and the 'brave'. Undressing the dead for rags. I don't know how but I found the resolve to get up as he strode off with his worthless booty. I ran to him and clubbed him down with a piece of rubble from the ruins of the bombed out town. He hadn't time to cry out in pain before he died. And that was the most bloody of my killings of the time.
The up closeness and the vividness of the sensations. The crunch of his skull and the crumple of his body. The spurt of blood and the dropping of all he had in his hands. The stopping of his chest. The stopping of his heart. I began to loot, just as he had done except that time I knew he was dead. I undressed him and left him naked in the dirt. I rummaged through his possessions and as I did so I pieced it together with all the other encounters of the war I had had. From the mind-bending pain to the relentless unyielding space of combat. To the squalid peace of where I had lived before to the roar for killing in the larger settlements that rose from people too cowardly to fight themselves. I had found the missing piece to my philosophical jigsaw. It was a letter from his mother in Houston. She was telling him how worried he was, how she hoped his foot sores were healing. How the cat had been run over the week before. How she felt after his best friend had been declared dead 2 days earlier. On the other side of the paper were his own jottings. A small tally headed up; Kills. A murderer who saw fit to take pleasure in his achievements.
Then it clicked. Not immediately but slowly. Good and Evil. What's Good? What Evil? There are no such things in this existence. The only truths are Actions and consequences. Choices made that have bearings on others. Categorising morality a pointless pursuit as in the end morality are just rules imposed by you. Why adhere to them? Authorities use your virtues and twist them to their own gain, spouting hypocritical shit as they go. Telling you to live free and say what you like but remember to not do this or that. Picturing themselves as 'civil' but willing to put men to death on the battlefield or in a prison in what they deem openly as 'uncivil'.
The only freedom one can possibly have is anarchy. Pure chaos. Pure destruction. Pure defiance of morality and inherited virtues and the lies of that life have meaning in the face of inevitable death. No cruelty, no murder, no war. Just actions and consequences. But why stop with myself? I could reshape the world. A wise man once said if an idea doesn't sound ridiculous at first it is doomed to fail. I agree and so I knew I had a chance of succeeding. The dogma of law, order and religion were age old but just a brittle as a snowflake; the only difference being peoples reluctance to touch. I had a target. I sought not to control but to dismantle. My weapons; fear and truth. My creed actions and consequences and the campaign to free mankind… with some spoils for me, after all do not all men seek power in all areas of their lives? That was one virtue I knew I could live with. And as my first act of unauthority; I forsook my name, my identity and my previous life. I crafted a mask, a mask of terror, liberation, freedom, madness or whatever else one wishes to see. I became anew person. I became an avatar for truth. I became myself, and the thing inside growled in delight…as I became an Alias.
Brought to you by Blazer Dude and Demon of RHS
A Yugioh 5D's Fan fiction
Yugioh 5D's: Terror Firma