Mama Bebop moved her blade to her mouth, pressing her tongue to the bottom side of the sword and dragging it across as if the military granny was licking the sword. However, as she moved the sword across her mouth, the violet flame that blazed around the blade was snuffed out, once again pouring inside the general's body and fueling her advanced age and dementia, demonstrating the need to find a new source to pour this sickness of aging into.
"Now, why would a cool cat like you let something get him down?" Mama Bebop leaned back with her legs crossed, relaxing significantly compared to her older stricter disposition when her mind was clearer. "It's always smelled like your people knew how to make their lives a groove. Seeing daddies gassing it up slipped inside their bird suits seems like the ginchiest way to feel hairy."
"My brother and I used to be soldiers. Good ones, the kind you sent to get things done. Neither of us particularly preferred the violent way of life. Still, it seemed like killing the right people at the right time and preventing greater bloodshed at the behest of our chieftains was simply the most righteous way to live," Andes said with his big brown eyes softening their glare and drowning his gaze in disappointment and profound sadness.
"That's kooky, Daddy-O!" Mama Bebop laughed out, waving her hand as if her companion was recounting some silly childhood story as opposed to opening up about the lifelong trauma of spending the days of his youth taking countless lives. "Would you rob yourself of a wail of a good long war? Me, personally, I'm all about that war, cool cat! I don't cherry tree about what a wail war is, Daddy-O. We're looking for reasons to have more war and for a good war to go on longer, Dad!"
"How can you say that? A war costs thousands of lives, it brings nothing but death and destruction!" Andes exclaimed at how openly and how early in their meeting Mama Bebop admitted to being an unadulterated war-monger.
"Thousands? Please, that's one lousy cheap creep of a war! I prefer ones that drop millions dead, you feel me?" Mama Bebop mocked Andes by waving the terror in his tone away with absolute indifference. "Let me tell you what, cat, war is the ultimate sanitizer, the unparalleled simplifier, and an all-around groovy wail in general. I've seen so many cubes write such square history for centuries, writing themselves into the grandest woods of cherry trees and bugging themselves and every living cat in the cave. Bending themselves in all the most painful, awkward corners and making dull sacrifices for the sake of avoiding war. Bah, I say. Have a little groovy war and settle all your differences, Daddy-O! No more dullsville, no more cubes. So simple and so effective! War is baptism. I'd wash every child clean right out of the womb until they either come out crazy cool and swinging beat, or stiff."
Andes stared off into the distance, almost as if he had left his body long ago. The pilot who introduced him to Mama Bebop looked stiff and was tapping his foot and patting his hand against the handle of his service saber hanging down his belt. It wasn't the concept of being too slow to intercept the Sky Warrior that terrified him, but the prospect of failing Mama Bebop and failing to prevent any harm coming to her, even if it meant the pilot's own sacrifice.
"That's usually when the fists start swinging…" Mama Bebop shot the silence dead like an old, washed-up mutt.
"I've long since stopped philosophizing and judging people's characters and lifestyles. The first and only time I thought I had the moral high ground, it ended up costing me everything I've ever loved and treasured, with the added bonus of a hundred and twenty-nine innocent lives. Much more, if you add up the people I killed lately on my Sky Walk…" Andes admitted.
"So, I'm guessing blasting the bulb, canning the lips, and starting falling on squares didn't exactly groove?" Mama Bebop leaned back in her chair of clockwork soldiers, dragging her index finger across her wrinkly chair that, despite its noticeable wear, hardly reflected the woman's actual age.
"It felt invigorating at first. Young men always have a lot of energy, and instead of using it all on meaningless loitering, we were putting it to good use. Or so it seemed at the time. Instead of beating up other folks around us, we sought to make a difference in the world by taking out people our chieftains pointed us at. I… I'm not a good person, I may have been "cherry-treeing" it, as you'd call it, but I don't anymore. Yesterday I saw a platoon of armed soldiers harassing a young girl and threatening to capture and torture her and I didn't interfere until I heard about the Great Red Dragon–the reason for my visit to the island," Andes said, increasingly growing sadder and sadder.
"Now you're losing me, Daddy-O. Why take the deal the fuzz gave you at all if you don't worry your groovy little head with the matters of the beat?" Mama Bebop scratched her head. "You sound like you'd have made a fine soldier from the get-go. Why make your life into a square graveyard when you could've been gassing it up with the groove of war, cool cat?"
"It sounded… Logical. I didn't much care about doing the right thing, but what the chieftain told us to do sure sounded like the right thing and so many people live their lives centered on doing the right thing that I just… Fooled myself into believing I could too. It's like when you're hunting and your brother says he's got the sights on a goose, you don't see the goose, but you pretend to give him the shot and you play along because you might eventually see the goose when it comes closer or just because you don't want to admit you just don't see it," the Sky Warrior sighed, sinking his head in the cradle of his hands.
"I never really heard a dad comparing groove to hunting geese, but… Whatever helps you feel hairy and high," Mama Bebop cracked a grin.
"My brother… He was all in on doing the right thing. He believed that if we snapped enough necks, and slit enough throats, suddenly the entire world will be singing and holding hands together. We'll only kill the right people, skipping out on all the civilian casualties that a war would've brought along. Hell, he almost made me believe I was a hero for bathing my feathers on the regular…" Andes found the strength to look up again. "I didn't much care about being some hero, but, if I can have the moral high ground I don't care about, or not have it, I'd rather have it, just in case one day the geese flew closer and I could actually see them this time, you know?"
"I feel you, even though you were one crazy cat, Daddy!" Mama Bebop nodded slowly with a full, smiling mouth of teeth, some still natural, some wooden, metallic, golden, or made of ivory. A gruesome smile of a whole periodic table in the hag's mouth.
"Maybe it's because he believed in the cause, what all those high and mighty chieftains told him, that his mind was the first to go. I might not care about doing the right thing, but I sure as hell know when someone's doing the exact opposite of it. It's a bit funny, actually… In an extremely twisted kind of way, it was my brother who I wanted to see teach me the virtue of doing good, but in the end, he taught me what evil looks like and made me do something about it…" Andes sighed again, unwilling to tell the story about how he killed his own brother, but, then again, it didn't feel like he truly had to. Even the drone wearing the white and red and patiently standing by for further orders looked like he understood the implications of Andes' words.
"See? That's why I prefer war myself. It's not uncommon for brothers, husbands and wives, fathers and sons to end up on different sides, but war… War sets it all straight. It's clear who wins the argument between two brothers who fought against each other in a war–it's the one that's still grooving, Daddy O!" Mama Bebop nodded to herself while raising her army boots off the ground. While she held them up, a meek clockwork soldier crawled under her boots, giving the woman the platform needed to put her feet on its back.
"With my brother's body by my feet, nothing but bodies behind me, and too much blood on my feathers to wash in a thousand lifetimes, I tore my bird suit apart and set out to become someone else, to find a new winged guide. I thought a Great Red Dragon sounded just right. A giant, powerful beast of fury that seeks the strongest challengers and destroys everything in sight. In my experience, the powerful are usually the ones in the most need of being burnt away. I'm not sure which side the argument goes: whether the wicked become the powerful, or power makes people wicked, and I don't care. I just know that a majestic dragon doesn't have to worry about the scattering ants, none of them have to suffer its flames. Only the strong… Only the tyrannical… Maybe some misguided folks like me and my brother too? Heck, I'm sure we deserved a good and thorough scorching. Anyway… What the heck do I know? I never even got to meet the damned thing," Andes finally waved the weight of his past, pressing down against his shoulders away, and offloaded the boulder on his back, leaving it down on the floor forever.
"That's a graveyard, Daddy-O," Mama Bebop finally stopped smiling and making a joke out of Andes' lifelong mistakes and despair. "You kicking the bucket would rid the world of one crazy soldier. Imagine all the war you could wage! You could fly right back home and burn those chieftains of yours off the face of the Earth, heck, crash the whole Land of Sky into the ocean, let's groove it, cool cat, whaddaya say?"
"I don't want to see the Land of Sky fall from the sky. That being said, there's one thing I'd like to obliterate from the face of the Earth. To experience this would-be simplicity of war compared to the subtlety of whatever the hell we were doing when we were young. I'd like to go back to that island, occupied by Kirigakure, and crush their forces utterly and completely. Set all of those people free and leave their fates up to them…" Andes stood up from the chair and stepped aside before turning back to Mama Bebop. "So… Where do we stand now?"
Mama Bebop stood up, drawing a long kunai dispenser from a pouch attached to her belt, opening her mouth, and firing into it. Andes stared in shock as blood poured out the army granny's mouth and ran all across the floor in a torrential splash. With a twisted smirk and a kunai knife sticking through the back of her head, the granny jerked her head back and glared at the Sky Warrior.
Sprawling and blooming like a majestic flower behind Mama Bebop's head was a ring of pitch-black flames, surrounded by a thin black outline, like a full solar eclipse. Pulling the kunai sticking out of her head out, the army granny dragged it across the air, collecting the malady she'd splattered all across her office and keeping it stuck to the blade like muck stuck to a napkin. With a flick, the woman opened the dispenser's drum and tossed the corrupted knife back in.
"That is for you to tell me," Mama Bebop said in a much more serious tone and a voice that didn't have the cheerful and goofy high pitch from before. With the curse of aging plaguing humanity and the corruption that dragged man to the grave in time spilling from her body and spirit, the immortal general and veteran of all the world's wars aimed her dispenser at Andes' face. "Will you accept my age, my sickness, my dementia, and my malady? In exchange for it, I offer you the best gift a lost man can get–war and lots of it."
"I will!" Andes declared with ironclad fortitude and determination.
"One last bit of warning. No living man or woman to accept this curse has survived. My malady carries inside the weight of centuries that I have seen no one being able to support. Most likely, you will die and it won't be as pleasant as being shot in the face with a kunai dispenser would have been," Mama Bebop wavered for a second, moving the barrel of her dispenser a tad to the right to get a good look into the determined eyes of the Sky Warrior.
"I've lived my life in safety and subtlety and seen people suffer for it. It's time I smashed subtlety, stopped running from war, and tried your way," Andes stated as if dictating a vow. "SHOOT!" he howled.
The shot made even the thoroughly indoctrinated pilot standing by and observing this unusual scene flinch. The knife burrowed into Andes' eye and almost within seconds, the corrupting rot of Mama's malady burrowed into his other eye socket, burning the other eye out and casting a hot beam of light through the empty socket. It was difficult to say if Andes could still hear his mad screams as the cursed energy ravaged his body like a flood filling cracks and riverbeds and spilling them over.
Casting the chair aside, Andes jumped to his feet, grumbling and growling, clawing and beating at his own treacherous flesh, as if punishing it for succumbing to the curse of aging. Perhaps it was for the better that Andes' eyes gave way first, for he couldn't see his arms and legs withering away with the legs thickening and turning to charred obsidian and the arms dissolving and scattering as black powder up to the elbow. Just as Mama Bebop tilted the barrel of her dispenser over her shoulder in intrigue, then sheathed it in disappointment, she heard a bestial roar and turned around to see the man she's already signed off to the same fate as the one that's fallen on countless of her other attempts demanding its fair share of blood and guts on its rigid, obsidian legs with a violet flare almost blinding Mama Bebop outright as it flared from the eyes of the newly awakened Cursed Warrior.
"Incredible!" the silver-haired burly pilot of Batsudoru gasped. "A humanoid Cursed Walker! It's never happened before! Only sheer mountains and gargantuan monuments could contain the energy of the curse of aging!"
"I suppose that's why they call men like this "mountains"…" Mama Bebop sighed and pulled her uniform jacket to hang tighter and neater over her body.
"It's so small though…" the pilot said in doubt over the destructive capabilities of this Cursed Warrior who couldn't even move on its own as its petrified legs had been thoroughly grown and molded into the floor. "Is it comparable in strength to the real deal?"
"We'll need to do something about those arms. Let's make a gold-tinted titanium cast. Also, work on those calves. I'm fine with this one being a brute, but let's not overdo it and make it be able to move on its own," Mama Bebop instructed the clockwork drones who flooded the newly transformed Cursed Warrior and dragged it away. "Settle down," the military granny instructed her newest piece of heavy infantry, but the Cursed Warrior continued to thrash, growl, and try biting at the drones dragging its rigid and imperfect body away.
"It… Didn't listen!" Batsudoru's pilot exclaimed in disbelief. "Since it's your malady that you pour into these colossi, usually they obey your every command. I've never seen one defy it!"
"Interesting. Pieces of its old personality must be shining through. It's never happened before because all of our earlier subjects were literal chunks of rock without memories, philosophies, and no history to speak of. Don't forget to install some cameras for its eyes! Seeing it try to find what to bite at was a sad sight for what will be a promising warrior," Mama Bebop instructed another clockwork drone who stood up and dashed after the rest into the room where the other military drones were working on polishing the transformation of man into a machine of war.
"While not needing a pilot is a noticeable advantage, do you truly believe this one to be comparable to the other Cursed Warriors? How can someone hosting the same amount of cursed energy be as strong as something forty times larger than them?" Batsudoru's pilot wondered.
"Thankfully for us, we have an excellent opportunity for a field test. Do we know of this island he mentioned in his story?" Mama Bebop wondered.
"It borders the mist over the Archipelago, four hundred kilometers from where we're hiding the Cursed Warriors," Batsudoru's pilot reported.
"And the enemy he mentioned… Kirigakure?" Mama Bebop raised an eyebrow over the shades on her crooked nose.
"A platoon of two thousand men with five hundred soldiers of fighting force, at best. It's a defenseless island filled with industrial sites and factories producing supplies, energy, and fuel for Kirigakure," Batsudoru's pilot reported.
"Hmm… I'd love to declare war on Kirigakure, but I don't believe the Lodge would approve of it. Oh well, given the current circumstances, it wouldn't make much of a war in any case. Three meek years and the entire country would be conquered. It isn't like me to kick Kirigakure when it's down anyway," Mama Bebop pushed one of her hands into the pocket of her uniform while the other fit into the gap between golden buttons. Looking and feeling regal and refreshed in all aspects except her physical appearance, the army grandma rested in her throne-like leather commander's chair and continued to oversee the covert military operations of her underground cabal.
The newly born and improved Cursed Warrior ripped into the island's shores like a cannonball, causing a raucous burst. The network of barbed wire did nothing but shriek and tear against the Cursed Warrior's adamantine skin which appeared human in places, but was tougher than obsidian that the hefty limbs of the walking weapon looked like. With ruthless efficiency, the Cursed Warrior ripped through the flooding men, taking no damage nor attempting to avoid it, it was like a great hornet tearing through a beehive. Slow, methodical, elegant, and beautiful in a very sadistic and messed-up sort of way.
Covered in puddles of frost and icicles sticking out from its body yet failing to slow down or harm the walking war machine, the Cursed Warrior grabbed the Kirigakure intelligence officer who previously subdued him with his ruthless tactics and ripped him apart by his right arm and left leg. Maimed, the man fell on his front, trying to crawl away with nothing but bitter resignation to his fate. With a sick and twisted scowl, the nexus of war stomped over the man's head, splattering the bones, blood, and brain matter across the beach with a handful of retreating cowards deciding to take their chances with the lurkers and the looters deeper in the ruined industrial towns of the island.
After bellowing in a longing shout for something the newly awakened Cursed Warrior could never have and the humanity it sacrificed, the monolith of destruction plunged his arm into the ground, sending ripples and quakes of pent-up cursed energy to cause a violent chain reaction of explosions that crumbled the underground facility and caused the entire beach to collapse over it in a shallow yet wide crater. The shockwaves and calamitous fissures connected to the other industrial sites on the island, causing widespread system and reactor failures and blowing up the power plants and factories, leaving the entire island as a grisly site of scorched earth.
"Incredible. Every bit as powerful as the colossal Cursed Warriors, but as precise as a scalpel with the application of that power!" a high-pitched feminine voice, altered by being transmitted through long distances over radio waves, reached Mama Bebop behind her control panels, observing the devastation from the crown of a Kraken-shaped Cursed Warrior.
"Beautiful, isn't it? My Curse Walker…" Mama Bebop burst into laughter, unable to contain herself and feeling just oh-so-giddy about this newest war machine of hers.
"Curse Walker? Doesn't exactly fit the naming scheme of the other Cursed Warriors…" one of the other pilots observed, transmitting their voice through the com links.
"Of course, my Curse Warrior is a special case, so it deserves a special name," Mama Bebop laughed out maniacally, observing the ashes and carnage ashore from a far enough distance to avoid suffering the consequences of the Curse Walker's calamitous rampage.
Thus, the Curse Walker was born. Kirigakure would later attempt to investigate the disappearance of an entire island worth of soldiers, scientists, and workers, but they'd find nothing but wreckage, blood, and carnage. Moreover, the magma flowing in rivers and the entire island's ecosystem being thoroughly obliterated and not a brick left standing atop another brick made the island completely uninhabitable and not even worth the investment into restoring the industrial site to being operational. It wasn't like Kirigakure even had the military strength to look into this incident thoroughly, what with it having recently begun to recover from having challenged the entire ninja world.