What does it take to become who we've always needed to be? The child within us all blindly pulled and jerked through an older world until the grim realization dawns too late that the world we live in was a lie perpetuated by our own ignorance. The hand of the parent rarely a guide for the child, but a hand or fist that breaks their will and beats them into mental submission until the world we live in is no longer the world we thought it was and becomes the world we wish we could die to get out of.

What is reality? Who are we really? A moment? A thought? Are we merely a collection of tampered memories handed down to us by the generations of the abused and the abusers?

Can it be broken?

Can he be broken?

Ermac watched on as the blind swordsman drowned in a sea of the thoughts, none his own and his too little too late to sort and wade through to the surface.

A red linen cloth disguised his disability. Ermac peeled it from his flesh to reveal the man's true face. Eyes dissonant and wandered into their socks as he searched for a way out. Flesh scared to stand still and burned with regret for moving forward.

"What are you running from?" Ermac pondered.

He could see the fingers of the broken man reach for the sword Ermac had tossed far into the cavern behind him. Kenshi's knuckles cracked as dirt and pebbles formed a fleeting grip to hold tight to, but only for a moment until it withered like his strength to fight the entity.

"Were you abused as a child?" Ermac prodded further, "is this what made you into a serial killer?" It dawned him, and he dare echo it into the skull of his pupil. "Are you afraid that you will kill your wife and child with those blood stained hands?"

Nothing from the broken man.

"We are killers. We are the slain. We, Kenshi, you and I, are the dead." Ermac leaned in to focus only one voice into him. "A hundred voices live within you for the souls you have taken and the souls bound to your sword, a thousand within me. We are the same. We are many."

Nothing from the broken man.

"We have been awakened by the One Being. We know what it knows even things we do not know, we know, and you must know too."

Ermac leaned back and looked for the pain and the stir of life within Kenshi's eyes.

If his eyes were screens, black and white lines would scrape the blood that poured from his tear ducts instead of the tears he desired to shed.

Inside, the wall of sound pierced his heart like a sword and imploded within his mind until all he was could be boiled down into a sarcophagus of noise.

A void.

A black hole.

"Let it in." Ermac pulled the body from the wall, scraped like a corpse from the rioting streets. "Let your body be torn apart by it. Only then do we know the One Being. Only then do we know its power. Only then will you be able to learn mine."

As he watched and waited, even Ermac believed the body had become nothing more than a shell of humanity, an effigy to life and had begun to wane his power over Kenshi. Had the swordsman given up? Had he decided death was his gift to his family?

As Kenshi fell from the air Ermac held him from, his body slumped and his arms stretched.

Ermac waited.

Nothing.

"Fatality."

Silence befell the cavern and the entity ceased all control over Kenshi. It watched still, no desire to move, no need to. It waited for the souls to reach out, to be absorbed into the coffin of Ermac's being, but nothing crawled from the mass of flesh.

He waited.

In a flash of movement, Ermac felt steel slice cleanly through his body from shoulder to hip. The blade Sento returned to Kenshi's hand that gripped with the new life and pulled the awakened swordsman to his feet where he crossed the blade from the other shoulder down to slice the entity cleanly into fours.

The clothing adorned on the dead flesh fell to reveal the corpse beneath, but the blade could not kill what is already dead.

Ermac raised the clothing back onto his form, bound together and raised himself from the ground to gaze down on the creature he had broken.

"You cannot kill us." Ermac knew Kenshi could not see the cuts, nor the unharmed entity before him, but he could sense the power that radiated off of the corpse.

"No, but the sorcerer Shang Tsung can."

"Our sworn enemy."

"Teach me, and I will strike him down."

"We will."