The thesis was seemingly unshakable. The longer he thought about it, the more he looped back around to the same conclusion, over and over again. There truly was no better feeling than when you were finally on the other end of the barrel, and the choice to pull the trigger was in your hands. It wasn’t like it was just him, either. If the burn-after-reading reports were true, then the whole world he knew was built on that kind of satisfaction. Under those circumstances, shouldn’t he feel just? Good?

It was a question that he never wanted to confront, and never thought that he would. With every mission, every target assigned to them, he thought it would have been his last. Dying righteously, knowing it was for the greater good or whatever comforting tale it was he told himself…now that would have been a curtain call. Some semblance of a happy ending he could have accepted. And yet real life was not so kind, and each death tore away at the fabric of what made him up, each unexpected survival ate away at the cruel conviction that had festered in him since that fateful day. It wasn’t fair, he knew. Bad things happened to good people all the time. The difference, he thought he knew, was what you did with it.

He still thought that as he stepped over the piles of bodies in the corridors of the ship, having fallen over each other in the desperate bid to escape, well, him. Him and the rest of the team, each taking a different path towards the hold in the centre of the ship to look for survivors. Needless to say, as he carefully planted his feet between the disfigured and eviscerated corpses, men and women alike, his radio crackled to life.

“That was a hell of a shot, Sirovsky,” said the man on the other side. “I think you got all of them.”

Darren pressed the transmit button with one hand. “Even all the way over there?”

“You bet. Now this is some fucking karma right here.”

“Just keep your eyes peeled. Over.”

It didn’t take him much longer to find the door to the hold. The damned thing hadn’t even closed properly thanks to the large man wedged halfway through the gap, his eyes gouged out and bleeding an inky black like all of the others. Darren took a moment to flip some optics down over his visor before pulling the door open, letting the obstructing body join the others on the floor.

The hold was absolutely filled with more dead. To the extent he didn’t expect. The bastards must have all crammed in there, because the way they were all spread out was almost arranged like the petals of some demented flower, falling over backwards from the object in the middle. There was nowhere to step, and so Darren quickly clambered onto the closest corpse, black-eyes and agape, and stood on the combined mass underneath it. He peered up at the ceiling where the projectile had punched through, seeing only a dark hole, and carefully hopped between the cadavers to the centre of the petals. Sticking unceremoniously out of the floor of the hold was a warhead lined with hinged flaps on the side, most flush closed but several still open, their motors having malfunctioned upon impact. It was a rather pesky bug they’d yet to iron out, but given the efficacy of the weapon itself, that allayed most of his concerns about the retrieval process. Making sure his overlaid lenses eclipsed his peripheral vision, he knelt down and peered under the still-open flaps. Inset into each slot was a twitching reptilian eye, moving to lock onto him, only orange and black by the lenses. There was just something about the amber-adjacent range of wavelength absorption that separated him from the wrath of the pseudo-basilisk inside the warhead, and for that, he was eternally grateful. Carefully, he forced each panel closed, and stepped back to radio it in. “Package is intact. We can move this no pro-”

Something skittered across the far wall of the hold, and Darren immediately brought his rifle up, blasting the flashlight in that direction and overpowering the flickering ceiling lights. The glossy black ichor and the eyeless stared back at him. There was nothing moving. “Castellan, come in,” he said again into the radio.

There was only static.

“Shit, Owen? If you can hear me I think there’s a straggler. Maybe not human, it was fast. You copy?”

The crackling static of his radio filled his earpiece. Darren took a step forwards, sweeping his flashlight beam side to side to try and find whatever it was. “Anybody? I need backup!”

Movement out of the peripheral of his eyes had him bring his weapon to bear, but this time he caught it. It wasn’t a single thing moving, but a wave. The pile of corpses was shifting under him, and this time he felt it, like the ground was going to give away directly underneath him. Darren had no time to figure out if it was some damage they had done to the gravity core or just the sheer weight of the dead people, but he wasn't waiting around to see the result. He stomped his way back towards the door he had come in through, only for one foot to be caught and almost twist if not for his boot. Still he fell face first onto the Writhing mass, flinching as their soggy flesh and empty sockets came right up to him. He pushed with both arms to get himself off the floor, but that was the moment he felt it.

He hadn’t tripped. There was a cold, hard grip around his ankle, then his leg, then his wrist as the dead began to swarm him, their gaping mouths gnashed at him. The ground tilted into the side if a pit, the warhead disappearing into pit black behind him. Darren pulled the trigger but it was impossible to tell if the bullets did anything. He did the only thing he could, and began to scream. Perhaps if one of the others was close, they could hear him-

More hands burst from the corpse-pit and thrust themselves upon his face, holding his mouth closed and slowly blotting out what little light he could see. He tried again to let out any noise, but the hands closed around his throat, dragging him down, down, down…

…and then Darren woke with a start, his limbs propelling him off of the futon and crashing against the wardrobe. He let out a cry as pain shot up his back, but after grasping at the area, he felt nothing permanent.

The door to the living room slid open and Toshiie rushed in, a concerned look plastered on his face. His eyes widened at Darren, and then the expression softened, set back into that half-scowl of his. “Are you-”

“I’m fine,” Darren spat quickly, defaulting to a breathing exercise to control his heart rate. “What…what time is it?” He glanced over at the window still covered in opaque tape.

“Almost ten in the morning.”

Almost ten. The ferry was due at noon. Darren nodded, and scrambled to his feet, stumbling over to the light switch and flicking it on, flooding his own senses with light. He threw open the wardrobe and quickly put on his blazer and trousers from inside, before staggering out to sit at the table with Toshiie.

The older man just stared at him, Darren’s tablet folded before them.

“You got what you wanted?” Darren asked, pulling the tablet closer to himself.

“I can see why you have bad dreams,” Toshiie said.

“Then you know why I chose to come here.”

Toshiie nodded. “Was it worth it?”

“For me or for you?”

“Both?”

“I don’t think people are going to disappear anymore. I destroyed the anchor for that thing. No more deaths, but also no more guardian deity.” His eyes shifted over to the open briefcase and the pistol lying inside it besides the special goggles.

“And for you?”

Darren sighed. “I was being cruel to the people who were cruel to me.”

“Your family…that wasn’t your fault.”

“I know it wasn’t. I think it was more like an excuse so I didn’t have to think about why I ran away.”

“The insurrection also wasn’t you.”

Darren scoffed. “What, the team? I really should have seen it coming. Was just too busy trying to compensate for something I didn’t do.”

“But you succeeded here right? You’re reinstated?”

He hung his head. “Not really for me to decide. Those…my friends, they’re still out there, doing gods know what. Because I couldn’t see.”

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Toshiie shifted in his seat. “Last night you said something. When you came back down.”

Darren looked up.

“You said something about your sister.”

He sucked in a deep breath. “It’s always a bad time when something like that gets inside your head. That’s what the training is for.”

“You saw her?”

“It wanted me to rewrite my memories. It wasn’t her, not really.”

“That’s what the infovore thing does?”

“It’s more like a natural disaster. A stroke of bad luck left over from whatever your Daimyo was fighting. It’s not really malicious. All it does is regurgitate.”

“But if it ate our protector…”

“In some messed up way, maybe it was trying to save you. Just maybe the idea of ‘saving’ wasn’t entirely there.”

“Then maybe it wasn’t trying to rewrite you.”

Darren said nothing.

“If anything remained of our kami-sama, maybe they were still trying to help.”

“You don’t even remember them.”

“I don’t. But I know you saw something.”

“I think I’d like to wait at the dock for my ride.”

Toshiie said nothing else, only getting up to grab his bike. Darren made sure to pack his raincoat into the suitcase and stepped outside onto the muddy ground. It had rained again, but that too had already passed.

As they rode wordlessly out the same way they had entered, Darren stole one last glance at the temple. There were drums and bells and chanting and singing in the distance, and that ever-present cloying incense that was so strong now even though it was so far away. In that moment he closed his eyes and once more, tried to pray. Not for salvation or success or anything like that. Cruelty just begot more cruelty, and around and around they would go.

He simply asked for the ability to forgive.