Crossbell Police Department
Flickering lights start to brighten and dampen the hallways of every interrogation room. Every door is shut, rooms vacant, and empty, and have no sound of speech coming from any of them. This silence was seemingly all over the place giving eerie vibes that nobody even bother to come out.
The emptiness, the lack of staff, can be accounted for by the empty containing paychecks of every officer in charge. You can't protect a city if you aren't paid for anything, you could do so, but you would die for nothing. While many do so to die in the name of honor, many quit for cowardly selfish reasons to boot. The fear erects when everything you fought to accomplish boils down to failure thanks to the higher-ups - the elite, that dictate people's lives incompetently and cruelly.
Nobody loves a cruel ruler. So why elect a horrendous president of Crossbell and enact policies which ruined the economy to the floor?
Yet, the West Zemuria Trade Federation had so many meetings to account, for that every one of them made the situation worst for all surrounding nations (states). Landscapes were no longer fertile to produce food for the poor, you can't make a solid business foundation out of it, there is no other agency for monetary growth, and everyone came destroying buildings once there was no value to them. It was all done in the name of Gehenna. Who felt that everybody in their right mind should be there in the afterlife.
Lloyd Bannings, the last employee of the Crossbell Police Department and the SSS division, witnessed it all in his eyes.
He was on a table, to the former detective Alex Dudley. He passed away after starving himself to death when all resources of food became scarce. Lloyd watched him die, but with no emotion because he had witnessed these deaths over and over again. He watched, one by one, his SSS companions die sometimes cruelly by the failures of humankind. The worst he ever witnessed with Elie Macdowell, Tio Plato, and Randy Orlando dying in the worst possible ways in the apocalypse.
They died for nothing. In a finger snap, happiness can vanish and only anarchy can triumph.
Grumbling and drinking a large glass bottle of moonshine. Lloyd rests his back on the chair and eyes throughout the empty workstations of the Crossbell Police Department. It was a ghost town, just like the whole independent nation he used to serve. A bitter taste of truth started to soil in his mind, growing cynically by the minute after pondering why this world turned into a hellish one. Everybody kept crying in the face of evil and injustice, but they earned their happy endings in the end.
Why reverse everything? The answer is, that despite our autonomy, anything is unpredictable. Fate is a strange concept after all. So why not wear a mask that doubts it until it takes it off?
"Fuck..." Llyod received a notification on his phone that his adoptive sister KeA Bannings was hungry. It's been years since Lloyd took her into his family after the Azure Tree incident. She hasn't been fed for many days.
Llyod kicks open the mini fridge door only to find nothing in it. He shuts it and sighs, resting his hands on the desk and putting his forehead on it. KeA had constantly texted Lloyd over and over again, but without spilling the awful truth, he doesn't reply. He would accept grief just like all the other close people he met in his life. They fade away in dust and their happy memories would remain as an infection until it's cured.
Crossbell City - Central Square
The "City of Sin" was quiet. Too fucking quiet. Rean Schwarzer was walking casually around the streets with a stoic expression plastered on his face. Seeing no life surrounding him as all buildings were either abandoned or closed to the public. He could easily see people, loved ones, buried underneath the concrete with a cross on it. If Rean had calculated this right, the Septian Church ran out of supplies for the poor folk of this city. So with nothing to give and nothing to lose, Rean might take this as a shining opportunity for him to take.
He walked into Central Square, and not a single person was in sight. What he does see are people being buried underneath layers of concrete to the ground. As if the cemetery was full and there were no bodybags left to cover the corpses once they became cadavers. Rean can nod, not showing a glint of remote nor sorrow for anyone that drifted into the afterlife. If anything, he would happy if they all burned in the depths of hell.
With no victims to target, Rean shrugs as he sighs stoically. "Huh, another walk in the park for me."
"Is it, you asshole?"
A familiar voice was heard right behind him. Rean turns around and can see Lloyd right there, standing in front of him with a burrowed frow on his face.
"...You picked a good place to die." Rean expression turned cold, with a stern glare staring right at Lloyd's face.
"Why should I care? After the world gone down the shit, you picked a death sentence for me?" He spat at him with a sneer. "You're full of shit, Rean. You always were. In fact, we all bullshitted you when we embarked on a quest to save this world. And you find it right to ruin it?"
"I never wanted to continue standing my boots on this ground." Rean continued staring coldly at Lloyd. "This world is weak and I'll let it suffer if it's the last thing I do."
"For what!?" Lloyd yells at him madly. "We were your family! Your loved ones! Your boyfriends and girlfriends, the people came to know and show affection to because they were human in their own right!"
He clenched his fists, gripping his teeth as he closed his in tears. "A-And you let them just suffer!? Are you that fucking dense? What happened to your sense of justice!? Why are you so full of megalomania!?"
Rean closes his eyes and clenched his teeth coldly. "Justice is passed behind us. It's dropped into the abyss and never risen for me because I didn't want to show love for humankind when its colors destroy themselves to oblivion." He opened his eyes as he coldly stares at Lloyd again. "I did all of this for an end we can be satisfied with and without knowing the consequences, I threw it all away when I faced my true emotions."
"It's what I do." Rean declared. "I never guaranteed myself anything."
"Y-You bastard." Lloyd growled at him, ready to draw his weapons. "I wish I never met you. I wish you had NEVER been given birth at all! Your creation was a fucking mistake and you must perish!"
Lloyd continued crying, and brief images of his dying adopted sister appeared. "You fucked up my city. You fucked up my friends. You even fucked up the only family that I had."
Rean didn't say anything as Lloyd would unearth his emotions in front of him, waiting for his first draw.
Lloyd shook his head full of disappointment and anguish. "Your actions represent the shit we all went after the disaster we caused! This inhospitable world based on our false values could all be blamed on you!"
"Therefore... I have one last request to the only light glimmering in the dark." Lloyd carefully draws out his Tonfa's slowly. "I'm... I'm ready to pass judgment."
"Then do it." Rean dares him as he stood there menacingly.
"RAAAAA-" Lloyd pulls out his dual Tonfa's, until Rean suddenly pulls out a orbal light machine gun and opens fire at Lloyd in a hail of bullets at his body before he can do anything. Lloyd was getting shot everywhere as Rean emptied his whole magazine on him. Making Lloyd collapse on the ground with gunshot wounds all over his body as he gasped for air, breathing in pain as his vision blurred.
Rean walks slowly to Lloyd's dying body, he was gasping for air a lot but he can see Rean approaching him.
"Any last words before I blow your brains to shit?" Rean aims a orbal pistol at Lloyd's face.
He could only look up at Rean, coughing blood out of his mouth, and looked at the barrel of his pistol aimed at his head. "G-Go back... To the depths of Gehenna, shithead."
Rean shook his head unimpressed at his final words, he fires a round directly at his forehead and leaves his corpse in the center of the city. Looking for new fresh meat to send to the slaughterhouse.
If Liberl has become a shadow of its former self, then Calvard might be next. Rean has heard many times that the entire county itself looks like a wasteland after a nuclear fallout. If there are people still living there, he might make a holocaust of survivors over there to show no one could survive a cruel inhospitable world made by failure.
He just can't wait to kill that bitch Aidios.
Suddenly, somebody tugged Rean's shoulder behind him, he turned around and aims the barrel of his LMG at his hooded figure's face. "Who the fuck are you?"
"Put your weapon down." The cloaked figure had no visible under his hood, speaking in a sly tone. "My name is Igor. I have a proposal to make."
"Talk." Rean kept his weapon right in front of his face. Ready to pull the trigger.
"We would like to invite you over to the Rejuvenators." Igor grinned.