AKAME ASSASINATION (43)
"Oh, it's just like back then."
Catherine's voice was flat, devoid of its usual theatrical flair. The scene before her—the screaming, the monstrous shapes moving through smoke, the smell of terror—was a direct, brutal echo of the night her own village died. Back then, she was already a ghost, powerless. Gil had shouldered the entire burden of survival and grief alone. Now, the roles were reversed, but the question was the same: Who would save them from this nightmare?
She sighed, an odd, grim seriousness settling over her features.
Nala didn't hesitate. She took off in a frantic sprint toward the village, her legs tangling once, twice, but she scrambled up each time, driven by a primal need to reach her father, her home. Catherine followed, her own aches forgotten in the adrenaline of the moment.
Seeing a winged void dive toward a cluster of fleeing children, Nala skidded to a halt. Her hands plunged into the rain-dampened grass at her feet.
TAWE: SHINING SPEAR OF LIFE!
Golden light erupted from the earth, coalescing in her grip into a flawless, radiant spear of woven grass and pure F.E. With a guttural cry she couldn't voice, she hurled it skyward. It became a streak of sun through the storm-gloom, piercing the flying creature's stomach with a sickening tear. The void shrieked, spiraling down to crash among the huts.
But it was one drop in a tidal wave of teeth and claws.
The battlefield—what was left of it—was a charnel house. The noble clash of tribes had been rendered absurd, a petty squabble swallowed by a force of nature that was anything but natural.
The Chief was a whirlwind of desperate violence, but he was fighting a tide. His machete, which could split a man's skull, screeched off the ashy hide of a bull-headed void, barely leaving a scratch. He dodged a swipe of claws that tore through the air where his neck had been.
'They just came out of nowhere. What are these things?!' His strategic mind, his hopes for peace, all were useless here. This was not war. It was consumption.
He risked a glance around. His force—the proud Massai warriors, the brave Pokot men now fighting back-to-back with them in shared terror—was being depleted. Not defeated, but erased. A void with a scorpion's tail impaled three men at once, lifting them writhing into the air. Another with a gaping, lamprey-like mouth swallowed a warrior whole with a single, grotesque gulp. Helplessness, a cold, familiar foe, wrapped around the Chief's heart and squeezed.
He turned.
And it was there.
A void stood silently, having slaughtered its way to him. It was lean, humanoid, crowned with a human skull whose empty sockets seemed to hold a knowing, terrible intelligence. It didn't attack. It just... loomed. Its eyes looked awfully, hauntingly human.
The Chief raised his machete, his arms trembling not from fatigue, but from a soul-deep fear.
Memories, unbidden and cruel, flooded the silence between heartbeats.
'The white man killed your daughter.' Zena's lie, a poison meant to break him.
And then, an older, more tender wound:
'Your mother... she's gone.' Having to shape those signs to a child's small, hopeful hands. The most heart-wrenching duty of his life.
'Will she come back to visit?' Nala had signed, her eyes wide.
'Probably not. But... maybe one day you can go and visit her.'
He had learned sign from the settlers, a tool for communication that became his greatest bond with his silent daughter. He had learned so much from the outside world. And now, that world had sent its true face to consume everything he loved.
He looked past the void, into the rain-lashed distance, and for some reason, he smiled. It was a smile of acceptance, of finality.
He was bleeding profusely from a gash in his side, his body a map of shallow cuts and deep bruises earned trying—and failing—to save his men. With the last of his strength, he lunged at the silent void, a final, defiant arc of his blade.
The creature moved with contemptuous ease, sidestepping and driving a clawed hand deep into the Chief's other side.
He coughed, a spray of blood misting the rain, but his momentum carried the machete through in a futile, beautiful arc.
"You are in terrible shape."
The voice was calm, familiar. The Chief blinked. He wasn't on the bloody field. He was back in his hut, sitting on his mat. The bound white-haired man, Akame, sat a few feet away.
"Maybe," the Chief rasped in the dream-space. "But you don't look too good either."
"I never look good," Akame replied, his green eyes steady. "That's the entire point."
The Chief leaned forward, curiosity piercing the dream-pain. "Tell me, what do you fight for, Akame?"
"Mh?"
"Is there something you want to fight for, out there?"
"You're asking the wrong question."
"Really?"
"The question should be... what is it you are living for?"
The Chief blinked. The hut dissolved.
He was on his back on the sodden, blood-churned earth, staring at the swirling, purple Eye of the storm. The cold rain mixed with the warmth leaking from his body.
"Was I... I was... dreaming."
He turned his head, a monumental effort. The battlefield was a silent fresco of carnage. Bodies—Massai, Pokot, things that were once both—were littered everywhere. The vibrant red of life was now just another color in the mud.
A human skull, clean and white, dropped from somewhere above, landing with a soft thud in his field of vision.
Then he heard it: the soft, deliberate shuffle of feet through the gore.
Black sandals with white socks. Black sweatpants. A white t-shirt under a thick, dark blue zip-up hoodie, zipped halfway. The figure stopped, looking down at him with emerald green eyes that held neither pity nor horror, just a deep, ancient calm. His hands were tucked into his pockets.
"That's the question you should be asking, Chief."
"Oh..." The Chief coughed, a bubble of blood bursting on his lips. He clutched at his ruined chest. "What... have I been living for? There is... nothing for any of us here. Whether we fought for justice, or for our right to this land, or even for our pride... we fought for nothing in the end."
"I would've come out sooner," Akame said, his gaze sweeping the slaughter. "But I needed to evacuate the women and children from the huts. They were... less than cooperative."
"You'd... do that? Even though we were charging you with murder?"
"People have a tendency of doing that. Besides, they'll probably die anyway if this storm doesn't clear up."
As if on cue, thunder tore the sky with a sound like the world breaking. The rain intensified, drenching Akame's white hair, plastering it to his forehead, washing the blood from his socks.
"My... my daughter..." the Chief whispered, his hand finding the strength to weakly tug at Akame's sodden pant leg. "You didn't kill her... right?"
"Nope."
A profound, shaky sigh escaped the dying man. "She's out there somewhere... I know it. She's out there... trying to do my job... a job I was too scared to do." His voice faded, then rallied with a final confession. "Maybe I came out here... wanting to die in some honorable way... rather than taking my own life... If I lost both the women I love... then..." He coughed again, a wet, final rattle. "What else... did I have to live for?"
"I guess so."
"Please... do what you will... with that information."
The light in the Chief's eyes dimmed, fading from a determined brown to a dull, dry slate. The faint, struggling beat of his heart under Akame's sharp hearing stuttered into silence.
Akame squatted. With a gentle, almost clinical motion, he closed the Chief's eyelids.
He looked up, rain streaming down his face, into the heart of the malevolent storm.
"Such noble goals and ambitions," he said to the roaring wind, his voice barely a murmur yet cutting through the din. "Sadly... I gave up on those so long ago."
He rose to his full height, his hands slipping from his pockets. Around him, the voids had finished their massacre and now turned, as one, sensing a new, immense concentration of fragments standing calmly in the center of the red ruin.
Akame's green eyes glinted in the storm-light.
TO BE CONTINUED!