When I woke up, I wasn't expecting the sight of a burning city. The sheer panic that went through my mind was pretty noteworthy, as I tried to figure out how I had wound up in the middle of some kind of shady neighborhood garbed in… Nazi regalia!?
I panicked until I thought,"I'm in my house, it was a dream, it's all a dream--"when I promptly found myself back in my home. Strangely, it was almost unrecognizable, with furniture, books, paraphernalia all mismatched or in different places. Most disturbingly, there was another me sleeping in my bed.
He was still sleeping, so I tiptoed to the bathroom to examine myself. I wasn't imagining anything, I was still wearing a Nazi uniform, and had apparently regressed to a child just entering adolescence. I also had cat ears?
I repressed a second panic attack, and reached into the strangely familiar pocket inside my uniform to pull out a blade that read My Honour is Loyalty.
I was Schrodinger from Hellsing!
I unfortunately had no idea where the fuck I was now though. Judging by the sleeping other me, I wasn't in my actual home anymore. This was a dimensional twin, someone who existed in a timeline after some sort of divergence event. Well, who better to ask questions to then myself?
I concentrated real hard on other-me's dreams, about being there.
Suddenly, I was in the middle of a busy street. Overhead, the sun and the moon both hung in a cloudless sky. The buildings and cars were all blurry, passing as normal at a cursory glance but all empty and false on closer examination. Crowds of faceless individuals, sometimes identical, brushed by me as I beheld the center of this strange world. The person I remembered being, the one person with a far too familiar face walking alongside the hordes of illusions.
"Why hello there," I tried to say, except it came out more as, "Vy hello zere." Oh yeah, a throat unused to English would do that. Was that really how German accents sounded?
"You are dreaming right now," I continued. "I have a few questions to ask you."
Other me looked at me with a dead expression on his face after he took in the unreality of his world.
"Sure I'm dreaming right now. Just like how part of brain has chosen to manifest itself in some sort of catboy? girl? Nazi which has come to guilt trip me into probably quitting the online forums."
Man, other-me was a self-centered dick just like me.
"Alternatively, you could actually be a member of Gesellschaft or Empire 88 I just realized," he said, sounding slightly more concerned. What a lovely oh-fuck-me face he was making right now.
I think I made a similar face too, because Gesellschaft and Empire 88? Well didn't those names sound perfectly oh-fuck-inducing.
"Vait a second," I said, raising a finger. How to check if this was actually the Wormverse… I paused for a moment then settled on a destination. I was there. Fuck.
The shimmering shielded oil rig in Brockton Bay scorned my rapidly-crumbling belief that I wasn't in the grimderp of the Wormverse. Well at least I didn't have to ask myself anymore questions. There were bigger things to worry about. On the one hand the whole world was probably better off without me considering the Butterfly effect and the absolutely ridiculous chain of events that led to victory in Worm canon. On the other hand billions of people stretched across a few worlds perished, not to mention the bullshit the entire Endbringer scenario had been.
Well shit, that wasn't pressuring at all.
After awkwardly standing on the rooftop awhile staring at the Rig, I came to a decision. The cool night air was wonderful for thinking, as were the sounds of the city below.
Fuck canon, fuck Cauldron, fuck it all. You could either care about an unsure shitty future or work towards an less certain one. Was it absolutely selfish and monstrous to do so? Absolutely, though it was equally monstrous to ignore the preventable suffering as well. It wasn't like humans couldn't manage to self-immolate in the future either considering how close the Cold War got to getting hot. So I hefted the oddly familiar blade and changed locations.
The back of a disheveled mad man greeted me. He had killed hundreds, maybe thousands and would go on to kill more. Lifting the knife towards his neck, I tensed, closed my eyes and stabbed. I kept on stabbing, didn't stop until I was forcibly stopped by sudden death. Yet before the burst of pain that had come with cessation of all vitals, I was back, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing. I was killed yet again, head vanished from existence with a desperate strike. It was too late though. I died three times more before the miserable man had finally died.
What was left of the man known as William Manton to few, Siberian to most, slumped in the front seat of the van I sat in. It had been crumpled, contorted by his projection trying to escape with him, stopped only by my incessant stabbing. I had killed him, killed a living thinking breathing human. Perhaps he could have redeemed himself, perhaps he needed help, perhaps he was also a victim. I had taken all that away, all the choices he had and worst of all I didn't feel anything. No remorse, no sympathy, no emotion other than brutal satisfaction. He had needed to die and I had killed him. Rather, I wanted wanted him to die and I had killed him. There wasn't a true need other than convenience.
To kill the unkillable, you solve the issue as you would any other. In steps.
Not only that, I had died, multiple times. I had felt the pain, the horrible agony after the Siberian had realized crippling blows lasted until I died again. It was distant, meaningless just like the death of William Manton.
Instead of having a crisis though, I simply changed locations once more, this time to a darkened room. Lights flickered on but I had already grabbed what I needed before vanishing once more. I pulled, far more difficult than I expected, then began mentally counting after throwing the projectile I had picked up.One, two, three, four, five….
I repeated the action once more to check the timing, and smiled when the grenade exploded at the exact same time as before. Placing four of the round explosives under my feet, I pulled all the rings at once. I picked up the grenades, counting the seconds in my head.
My hands were slick with nervous sweat that all vanished when I changed location. After all, I wanted to look confident and therefore I did. Jack Slash had one second to react to the suicide-bomber hug I was giving. His eyes widened and I smiled. Even as the knife separated my head from my neck, I continued to smile.
All four grenades held in my limp dead arms began to drop in the same second before they exploded. Four grenades held as close to Jack Slash's head as possible exploded in a shower of gore and shrapnel.
Yet the horribly disfigured figure with a knife still lived, flesh blown away to reveal the artificial scaffolding created by Bonesaw. An issue I rectified by reappearing with an entire armful of explosives.
I had only one thing to say.
"Auf Wiedersehen!"