Who walks the Red Road

[Llenne]

[NSFW. Trigger warning: gore, blood, violence, strong language, assisted suicide and disturbing imagery.]



Ahhhhhh, fuck. It hurts.

When I finally gather up enough energy to cough, I can feel the shards of my shattered ribs rattling around in my lungs. The copper taste sets my teeth on edge. My hand at my stomach holding my guts in - or so it feels - peels away from my shirt. I don't need to check to know it's stained with blood. At least not all of it is mine.

Anyone who believes in instant death hasn't been on their way to meet death. Sectors of my body are flickering then giving out. Dying feels a whole lot like getting fucked up the ass with barbed wire right about now.

The real fight is between whether I want to just keel over and die right here, drop this damnable sword and rest for a few thousand years or whether I'm angry enough to keep trying. There's a pile of Oni bodies surrounding myself and my opponent.

I suspect I'll be among them soon.

My opponent, an Oni that towers over me by a few feet remains immobile. His revenge is sworn, but apparently not without honor.

He's standing too far away for me to reach him without doing something stupid. My vision is blurring, going dark, dark, dark.

I guess this is it, then.

I'm down to my last five minutes.

God, are You listening?

My grip on my sword tightens suddenly. Good. Not everything has gone totally wrong yet. I still have one thing going for me. When my left hand ignites with a golden glow, strength gradually seeps back into my limbs. My opponent snarls. The other Oni at his back go silent, expectant.

By the time the golden light reaches my shoulders, the pain is gone.

There's something in his eyes – a cold, impersonal anger and indifferent cruelty, a hunger for something preternatural. More than death. Less than life.

I've seen that look in the mirror too many times not to recognize it now, even at the end of it all.

A hot, black shiver races up my spine.

The hatred and the anger that had shaded my vision crimson does so one more, throwing a veil over reason and logic. And then – a spray of blood, a roar of thunder sounding off far too close. The world roils up to meet me, one last colossal fuck you that has me snarling and cursing.

After a while, that stops too.

A part of me thinks that dying shouldn't take this long, but the song doesn't have much appeal to me anymore. The adrenaline that gave me strength wastes away in the space of a few breaths.

I'm not getting up this time.

The hot, insipid sting of tears finally hits me. It's foolish, and it's useless. My body doesn't care. My breath hitches. Ah, God.

I'm scared.


Mercifully, that comes to an end too.

 

[Llenne]

Had He given me the chance to skip this part, I would have. I wouldn't have forgotten, but that didn't mean I wanted to watch.

Lius was the hardest man I'd ever met. He was also one of my closest friends. So going back and seeing it...The fence-post of a sword buried in his guts, the tears on his face. More than this, he was crying. He was a big guy, Lius – maybe 6'7” and built like a shit brick house.

He couldn't move the sword. In fact, that it hadn't pulled it out was the only reason he was still alive. He wasn't thrashing anymore, just crying. It had him pinned to a wall. All he could do was slump forward and hurt himself more.

He couldn't reach his gun.

And I knelt beside him, covered in the blood and the piss and the shit of those that had done this to us. My hands were slick with it, but I picked up the gun. It took Lius a few seconds to reconnect to the world enough to try to speak.

Just hearing him like that all was almost enough to make me cry.

“D-don't...Don't tell...” His breath hitched and I loomed over him. “Th-that I...d-died like a bitch.”

I didn't bother telling him there wasn't actually anyone left to tell.

He was the hardest man I'd ever met, but his brains and blood decorated the wall like any other man's. He still had his eyes open. He had watched.

Braver than me by far.

The way his blood misted the air...

And then there's Ali and Vik. The sniper team. The way they'd begged me to save the other, to let their partner live for a week, a day, an hour. Five more minutes.

Even with the past few days of my life on replay, they still weren't in chronological order. Not that it mattered. Had they made me choose between Ali and Vik before I had killed Lius? Or after?

Maybe they had intended it to be an honor.

Vik had cried the hardest, begged the loudest, yelled to be heard over Ali with what little strength she had left. And she damned me, too.

“Why did you bargain your heart, Ari?”

My answer was a jumble, a slew of lies. I didn't even know why, but the anger lent her a few more minutes of strength so that I could watch her suffer a bit longer than she had to.

It was all so distant now. The way she cried and thrashed and screamed, screeching curses to me in Russian.

I chose to save Alisa, to send Viktoriya into the deeper circle of Hell. She died screaming. The Oni did Ali in with the swiftness of career killers.

Ali. Vik. Lius. Rob. Matt. Elliott.

I was the one that deserved a horrifying death the most.

So, of course, I didn't get it.

Looks like good guys finish first after-all.