These lands run rampant with evil…

  Evil.

  What the fuck is that?

  In a world where blood runs like wine, they say “gods” stand within the boundaries.

  What a fucking joke.

  Trying to wash myself off myself in some clawfoot tub sitting in the middle of the room. Drinking from a glass bottle I found… stole, maybe; I don’t bloody know anymore. I've just been pouring my flask into the bottle, looking out this window to my left in the bathroom. (The window was this slim little Romanesque-style thing.) The moon was shameful this night, hiding itself with the cloud cover.

  In front of me on my right stood a wooden door. On my direct right hung a late medieval-type mirror. Underneath the mirror was a sink… which suggestions a form of plumbing… There's a toilet here... Was a plumber once sent to these lands. At least I had a gun; the best he had was a wrench and possibly a van.

  Babylon was a rather awful time; it smelled real foul as well. One of the problems probably came from their soap due to it being made from animal fats and wood ash. Feel like that would make someone smell worse, like brushing your teeth with horse manure. Actually, the original toothpaste would have been worse than mere horse shit with its crushed ox hooves, ashes, brunt eggshells and pumice.

  Man, the shit that's been “in my mouth.”

  What is mine?

  If I been every being… man, woman, Māhū, etc.

  Is I, me.

  Is the person, the individual, the self possible?

  Evil or bad or whatever the fuck Konran was using.

  Evil/bad is a rather subjective concept made up by man to make it easy to make other men out as enemies. Killing a man you despise is much easier than someone you think is human. Most people don’t think about the ants you step upon when walking to work. So Konran decided to throw in anything that can be seen as “evil”, even if it is only seen by one individual as foul.

  I took a large gulp from the bottle, taking the chance to look around once more.

  My shotgun lies on a stool arm's length away; my notebook is sitting next to the gun.

  The Bowie knife is now holstered across my chest.

  I raised my left hand to my hole of an eye and closed my right eye.

  There was nothing, just the abyss that, through this journey, I have grown long accustomed to.

  A place that holds no lies, one that tells no such lie that you are deserving of something.

  Life doesn’t owe anyone anything but for the actions they have committed.

  I take a good, long look at myself in the reflection of the water. What looked back was a five o’clock shadow, hair filled with little white strands, and a stygian blank.

  Looking at that nothingness filled my mind with the people I crossed upon this fucking journey.

  Wonder how those people I pulled out of that damn cave are doing.

  Whether Albert is still fighting the good fight to end slavery.

  If all those slaves that were fed have been living a worthy life.

  I have to think about those kids I met, the ones that slashed my stomach up. I hope they doing all right.

  I know for damn sure that Amaterasu is having a good time doing whatever she does, probably screwing with some poor bastard… God bless her.

  Gotta hope I didn’t bother those two witches' lives too much. Being there may have been the few times I was close to a form of joy in this world.

  Good old Osamu and his town better be doing well; one day I gotta go back there to see Faelon and those free from that basement.

  Akuma was once my partner, but he stole my eye... He's a good man; it's a damn shame he has to fight a war.

  I know how fucking Konran is doing that ratfucker.

  Keyser, that son of a bitch, always a step better than me. When we meet again, I’ll make sure he’ll die.

  The cult followers, for lack of a better word, were free from Joan's control.

  And there’s Joan, the last person I’ve killed for now. Someone my mind has been stewing upon, and I don’t know why.

  Those kids I've been teaching, they're all right.

  I can’t forget the kid; I mean Violet and Bear. Damn, what kind of world can do something like that to damn kid… Well, I know for a fact that Earth does… I took a drink from the bottle… All I could think was, fuck me.

  Of course there's Celeste. She's starting to make me think about myself when I was young, if I ever was. Poor bastard.

  Finally, there's good old Miyamoto. Miyamoto has most likely helped me survive for this. No other crazy bastard I would rather have by my side.

  I wish this damn bottle still did something to me, the first one out of all these I met in this shithole. Rather, an old friend of mine started fourteen years from now. Took up smoking as well; damn shocked that I still have lungs or a damn liver. At one point I was just trying to kill myself, even though I always thought that I would use the gun, but the bottle always made the most sense. Was it because of Conrad and Tsuki's crush and that poor fucking woman on that fucking barge? Looking around in this room in this tub filled with cold water with the moon being hidden from view, I could only think about whether death at my own hands would have been.

  …I’m going to kill myself one of these days.

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  I took a long, long drink from the bottle, and my mind crossed over to what lay within my notebook and that book Celeste had given me. The book that held a similar tongue to that of Joan’s was filled with code messages as well as two code names, Mr. Gold and Mr. Dirt. One of these messages that stayed with me during my studies: “When the sky becomes embroiled by red, the land will run with the blood of the damned.” It wasn’t something that I hadn’t heard before, but it stayed in my mind.

  The book itself was a discussion, history and theories about the so-called missing war, as the book called it. Back in that war Miyamoto and I were in for a bit, and he had brought the topic up. As they stay, as long as there are two men left, they will be trying to kill each other. You know good old men.

  Fucking men…

  fuck me…

  I could make this world so much better, but I don’t fucking care. Hundreds of corpses have my name scrawled across them, about a hundred billion if I consider actions that were not technically mine. But standing in a person's shoes committing the act of killing is that not mine. Bringing this thing up, this knowledge up so often, the one that Konron had thrown upon me, if there was any other, made me feel stuck in a M.C. Escher painting.

  Hm… Weren’t there two teachers named Mr. Nobunaga and Mr. Nishida?

  Where's my damn notebook?

  Right, it's on the stool.

  Christ.

  I dried off my hands and flipped to one of the pages.

  It said that two men with the last names Nobunaga and Nishida left the school only a week or so before we got here. Both just disappeared one night; before that night, these two were normal teachers.

  Now Nobunaga is in the ballpark of noble and so on, and gold is historically known for being related to the rich.

  And Nishida is wheat fields and dirt is used in farming… Man, these people must have been really fucking stupid. It would have taken anyone like five seconds to figure that out. Well, there is the historically unknown language and the book was hidden within a library with thousands of books with this book being far in the back… So I guess hiding the book was more important than elaborate code names in a language that seems to be the Latin of this world.

  I placed my notebook back upon the stool.

  Christ Almighty… Maybe I was never supposed to exist. Had this cat back in the day; it was this stray that would appear near my shitty little apartment. I would feed it anything that was healthy for one to eat, and she started to live in my apartment. Well, like anything, she died one day, and I just gave up completely. Conrad and Tsuki's funeral was on the fourteenth of December back in ‘97. Happen during the day. Then that fucking bridge shit happened around 10:30 or 11:00 the same day. Then my fucking cat I met when first moving back to fucking Japan just fucking died six months after meeting it.

  I loved that fucking cat.

  That damn night on that bridge replayed every single night when I dared to sleep. And now every time I close my eye, there some different images that are burned within that blackness.

  I just can’t sleep, and I don’t care anymore.

  “A candy-colored clown they call the sandman”

  Clouds began to break from the moon.

  “Tiptoes to my room every night”

  The light that broke from the disappearing clouds looks colored.

  “Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper”

  When the cloud finally fully broke, the bathroom was dip into a blood-like hue.

  “Go to sleep, everything is alright.” — In Dreams Song by Roy Orbison

  BAM!

  BAM!

  The bathroom door’s hinges were blown clean off with the sound of two rounds of buckshot.

  The door came clashing down, and a man came walking in with a single-barreled semi-automated shotgun.

  He discarded a shell, readying his aim.

  With mere seconds to do something.

  I grabbed my shotgun and went under.

  Large pellets flow centimeters over my skull.

  Destroying the tip of the back of the tub.

  I placed the barrel of the shotgun to the tip of the tub.

  Uncertainty was the only thing that run in my mind

  Rather anticlimactic end if it is.

  A person can never catch a fucking break here.

  An uncertain image of a man from above looks down to the table.

  Maybe to confirm the kill.

  But for a split second I could have sworn he stared at me and tipped his hat.

  CLICK.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Buckshot ripped through the skull of the man.

  Pieces of his brain were torn clean out of the back.

  Blood splatters on the ceiling to the tub.

  And I lay upon a tub with a back hole in it and half a man's skull.

  Looking upon the bottom half of the man's skull, I couldn’t recognize him.

  Could be due to half his head was missing.

  Or it's because I never got a clear view of him.

  But something's strange.

  Pulling myself up I look around for a hat.

  Nothing…

  Well, it doesn’t matter, because I should have been ripped apart by buckshot.

  But I guess the dice fall on my side.

  …Fuck me.

  The weapon that lay in the man’s arm was a Remington 870.

  So Keyser's shooting up a school.

  Fucking bastard.

  Jumping out of the bath, I hug the wall next to the blown-open door.

  Breaking open my shotgun, I replaced the spent round and began to check my corners.

  Boom!

  The walls and ground shook around me.

  Explosives too.

  What the fuck is happening

  Water dripped off me.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Gunfire starts to fill the halls

  After the gunfire, my closet started to move.

  Holding my fire, I start to creep to the closet’s doors.

  But before I could reach the doors, they started to creak open.

  Reviling Violet, grasping onto Bear, weeping into his fur.

  With great speed I jump out of view of Violet.

  “Violet, what are you doing in my room?”

  “V?”

  “Yeah, Violet, I’m just out of view. Just give me a second.”

  Grabbing my place from the edge of the bed I dry myself and put on my pants as quick as I can.

  I kneeled on one of my legs onto the ground and said, “All right, kid, get over here, kid.”

  Violet followed what I said and jumped onto me.

  I pulled out one of the few remaining earplugs. “All right, kid, you’re going to put those into your ears…” The inner debate between myself started to rage, trying to figure out whether I should take her with me or not.

  On one hand she would be safe just hiding within this room, but god forbid someone comes in; I don’t think the kid could fight back.

  But if I were to take her with me, then I would have to worry about both protecting her and not letting her see the horror of battle.

  “Okay, put those in, get on Bear, and close your eyes tight. Don’t you dare have me catch you opening them.”

  “Yes, V.”

  With a few teeth grin, I had to wonder…

  Why the fuck did the universe give me a kid…

  I don’t know how to do this.

  With the kid on the back of Bear, I had to ask her a quick question.

  “Violet, how come you were in the closet?”

  “There was a loud banging coming from the front door, so Bear and I hid in here.”

  Jesus Christ, I got caught with my cock out when he had to take down both doors.

  I’m fucking losing it… I look over to the floor, lying on the ground.

  How the fuck did I miss that?