Chapter three: The Massacre
Exorcize, absorb, repeat.
"Why?"
Exorcize, absorb. Repeat. Nobody understands what it's like.
"No…" Hot blood splatters across the shrine wall. "No!"
"Stop! Please…!" One of the lit, sacred candles blows out, extinguishing the blue flame. Blood pools from underneath a sliding door. "Nooo!"
"Wait!" The scum scream at him, and they object, but Suguru was never listening in the first place. They barter, they beg, they wail, and they plead upon entirely deaf ears. "Why?"
"You wouldn't understand." He tells them. Suguru stares down his nose at the streets of his childhood village run red with blood, and grinds the heel of his sandal into the back of a dying, gasping villager. "None of you could possibly understand."
Things have been busy this summer. Exorcize, absorb, repeat.
Nobody understands what it's like to absorb a curse. Nobody else knows what cursed spirits taste like. How it's like swallowing a dirty rag that's been used to clean up shit and vomit. How it settles in the gut like dread, like rotten fruit and garbage.
Exorcize, absorb, repeat.
"Help me! Somebody!" His unleashed curses run rampant as they feast upon the helpless villagers, and they mangle, and they dismember and eat and Suguru- "Please!"
Suguru looks on blankly.
"Nooo!"
"Stop!"
"Why?!"
Why? Suguru stares. Why? Why, it's simply because I hate you all.
"NOOO!" I hate you. I hate you. I hate you more than anything I've ever hated before. "PLEASE-!"
Exorcize, absorb-
"SOMEBODY-!"
Nobody comes to stop him, nobody comes to save them.
The mid-summer breeze is warm as it drifts by, carrying the stench of curses and the dead.
Eventually the applause, the hundreds of hands clapping, the screaming, it all, stops. An eeriness settles over the village, a stark quiet. A stallment, a stillness that almost seems to freeze time in place and all Suguru can do is pant and catch his breath.
Nobody else may understand what it's like, but for the first time in a long time Suguru's thoughts are blessedly quiet. He feels like he's finally coming up for air, he can finally breathe, after drowning for so, so long-
Things were busy that summer.
