Dying hurts. But not like this. Never before had death felt so painful; the process was burning within him, through him. Each individual layer of him was peeling itself away from him as if it were skin being rent from his bones. Every cell in his body was on fire, splitting and bursting and going supernova and trying to fix themselves together as if they were jigsaw pieces from different sets, scraping viciously against each other like continents. No two parts of him made any sort of sense together. There was only conflict and rage. But then he felt something inside him; a force plunging inside his mess of a body and trying to mould it into something resembling sanity, using his rage as a guiding light. It was difficult, like shaping liquid metal into a sculpture using only your bare hands, but like metal, he was using it, forging himself a suit of armour from all the anger and the guilt and the violence of the war. Slowly, there formed a sense of order. Hands came forth; callous hands, like gauntlets, straggly hairs bursting forth across his face and dark, empty eyes. The mind, however, was a different matter. He couldn't rebuild a splintering mind like he did the last seven times- all he could do was build a crude cage. Everything unnecessary, everything there was no place for in his new philosophy was trapped there, crushed under the weight of his trauma. He no longer had the luxury of taking prisoners. He gasped and suddenly the molten metal inside him cooled, setting into the image of a man. The regeneration energy erupted off him and in this fire, he was born. Death was born.