Suchi, The Slums outside The City's walls, a crowd of lawless animals gathered for the spectacle of blood.
The sea of Villagers were rioting at the temple’s base, hurling complaints of foul play at the teen harassing their king. Amidst them, however, some had fallen into a quiet trance.
After King Ramiro destroyed HF's timber whirlwind, the crowd had received a much less cluttered view of the duelling teen, as he’d switched to fending off their Saviour with his rapier. This extended parried defence was as unprecedented as the woodswarm. Nevertheless, it gave them a clearer sense of what HF was doing and what he wasn’t. Was he really cheating? Some began to doubt.
Those Villagers who’d trained in swords were the first to convert in mass. When they used Bullet-Time to read the battle frame by frame, they’d been shocked to discover that every part of HF’s flawless defence was constituted of flawed actions, not fundamentally dissimilar to what they might’ve practised. Every dodge and parry was bound to the spatial restraints of the arms and legs, had allowances for missteps, for HF’s slow reflexes. What seemed an impossible defence was achieved through the seamless sequence by which each limited action was being woven. In the brief flashes of his twisting head, they then caught the twitching eyes, which thought, planned, reasoned, intended as they coordinated his sword through its desperate dance of survival. Might not there be a possibility within the impossibility? Those who managed to glimpse the presence of control soon fell into the same silence that had long captured the teen, the trance of absolute combat, every fibre of their being consumed by the fight; the parts of the self that’d previously been preoccupied with the petty matters of the drama between their leader and this Company brat were obliterated and reborn in the sole consideration of angles, seconds, velocities, edges, depths.
These muted swordsmen were later joined by a few mages, as their expertise returned to the mix by the teen sneaking spells between his parries. Unobstructed by the whirlwind’s debris, they noticed the shots being lined up, the many constellations cancelled due to poorly randomised placement, the constellations that were out of reach for themselves but that perhaps a more stoic, better-trained mage might capture. And so, they, too entered the trance.
Finally, the quiet had risen to its most pronounced in the last exchange, when The Slum’s king was pinned by a spear from out of nowhere. At once, an awareness in the rest of those watching closely enough surged of the presence of their own weapons accompanying this oracular monster, the rest of his studied tools lingering in the background.
Ramiro, the misfortunate person receiving the spear to his groin, also joined those dumbfounded in the crowd. As he was pushed back by the spear, the rest of the weapons that’d emerged in tandem as part of the same configuration sparkled into view. The tornado that’d distracted from them was frightening enough, a gapless thing that’d left no room to attack. But these weapons...after this extended crossing of swords, Ramiro detected the same expertise of the teen in these other weapons. He could extract from their configuration the paths he hadn’t taken. The predicted paths – unlike the tornado, which could adapt to his attacks in the moment, these forming weapons had to be summoned three seconds in advance. Three seconds...Ramiro, fighting wild as a beast, had himself no conscious sense where he would be that far ahead. Yet The Tyrant knew. This teen at the centre of these weapons, his eyes twitching with dispassionate calculation, had surmised the totality of Ramiro, had computed every action his limbs might’ve taken, and had pre-assigned each its nullifying counter.
In one flashing instant, as Ramiro’s bestial body was repelled by the spear, as The Tyrant followed up this counter with an
The sinister feeling swelling from the depths of Ramiro’s black heart as he battled this teen was not too dissimilar to that felt by his ancestors, the savage jungle cannibal and the Spanish explorer, when they’d first crossed paths centuries ago.
The visiting Spaniard was revolted by this brute residing in the depths of the jungle amongst the poisonous frogs and gators, stabbing needles into his painted face and brewing jungle plants into hallucinatory tonics. Most abominable, aside from perhaps the cannibalism, was the perplexing tendency of these savages to slay their own sons. From drowning to tearing out their heart, from starvation, over-beating, exposure, strangulation, every tribe had evolved its own methods of filicide as varied as their tattoos and languages. To read the Spaniard’s accounts of those first encounters, the existence of such child-murdering beasts was practically an affront against humanity. These son-killers were an incomprehensible abomination, more animal than human - perhaps even more animal than an animal, for, despite being granted by the creator the capacity of will, they still chose to murder their own offspring. At the same time, the Spaniards were affirmed. Here was the horror of God’s absence, the dreadful state of the heathen ousted west of Eden.
This Spaniard’s view was clear enough, but what of the other side, who’d left no written account?
One who’d practised the methods of the savage, who’d comprehended him to the extent that a beast was comprehendible, could guess that the savage must have felt a heavy dose of disgust in return. This foreigner was no less grotesque in his heart than he was in theirs, although the cause of his revulsion might have been harder to articulate.
Those savages who managed to suppress this aversion for a while, resisting instinct’s call to sink their axe into this Spaniard’s skull and listening to his religious prattle, might’ve had some of their revulsion diminished at first. At the very least, the myths of the foreigner’s god would have been relatable.
This original sin at the start, this God-father inventing death itself to punish his children for eating some of his fruit? This metaphor that’d puzzled many Spaniards made immediate sense to the savage. They also grew murderously furious when their children stole the food they’d kept in reserve for themselves. Paradise truly would be your starving children believing their meagre rations were a limitless bounty. And what frustration you would feel at deception being spoiled by the snake of your malnourished child's digestive system warning them of the truth, that the current amount wouldn’t even let them complete puberty, never acquiring the intelligence, sensuality, or violence of adulthood. The savage, also, would have preferred their children never to grow up, to not become larger and thieve more fruit from their selfish lips. They, too, were secretly terrified of their sons becoming stronger than them, stealing control of their garden, and subjecting them to the same starvation regime. That the first murder would be dealt against your ungrateful child was only logical.
And, oh, how inventive the myriad ways this father smote his own insolent spawn, inundating them with floods, inflicting them with plagues, devouring their crops, blasting them with thunders of hail and fire. The story of Abraham not sacrificing Isaac was a masterclass in paternal murder. In it, God reminded Abraham of his might with this humiliating threat and then, at the last moment, depriving Abraham of the gratification of killing his son and making him use the joyless substitute of an animal. Thereby, this God had established that he alone reserved the father’s sacred right of filicide. Although Abraham may have begotten a child, he was still himself a son, bound ultimately to his own father’s murderous domination.
Then, at the climax of the Spaniard’s relatable myths, what miracle this wondrous God-father achieved. He produced the most ideal son fathomable. Even after tricking another guy into feeding his child, this son still developed an ardent loyalty to him alone. This son wasted his entire life spreading his father’s praise, then, at the ideal point, still in his virginal youth, before the son could grow into a father himself and pose a threat, he got murdered. If this ending wasn't beautiful enough, this son—despite having acquired the strength to defy his father’s deathwish—decided, after reincarnating, to quickly return back to the oblivion where his father preferred him. What an outstanding show of filial loyalty. How much easier would the savage’s own life be if their sons could be trusted to commit suicide on command?
Gradually, however, the savage, after listening to more of the Spaniard’s religious prattle, received an explanation for his initial disgust. Something was disturbingly off about these foreigners. It seemed that who they were seeking to emulate in these stories wasn’t the grandiose father spirit but, for some crazed reason, his abused sons. Had the Spaniards forgotten that childhood was a horrific, pitiable phase of life? The savage must have wondered. Had they forgotten the years of torture under the constant threat of their father's barely-suppressed desire to murder you?
Your father wanted to murder you.
This was the grim reality attested by all the hunter-gatherer societies before man settled down in his cities. What the Spaniard didn’t know was that he, who’d shunned this ancient ritual, was the freak. Filicide had been the global norm in the budding stages of humankind. The rite was conducted from the horn of South Africa to Tierra del Fuego. Parents everywhere murdered their children for anything from serious physical deformities to the birth-timing unfortunately coinciding with an arduous leg of a seasonal migration. Every father, to be a father, had to annihilate some of his offspring.
Academics would explain the prehistorical commonality of filicide by its logical outcome, the stabilising of population growth in a setting where the carrying capacity of the land had already been met by the then-available technology, blah blah blah. This dry story neglected the human soul within the data, people, in primitive times and today, rarely operating according to such abstract, distal goals.
For the simple savage father, the personal motivation for murdering his son had been nothing grand. Fundamentally, it was the identical reason civilised people so readily leapt upon contraceptives and abortifacients – children, before one sunk too much emotional investment in them, were understood fully well to be a burden. A child was a sacrifice that, if timed poorly, risked worsening your lifestyle. The thing was less a blessing and more an unavoidable punishment for the sex, which was the actual prize humankind desired and which they would, once the marvels of technology allowed it, carry out a thousand times without the decades-long venereal disease. Children were a fatal curse. Oedipus’s father—the true hero of that story if one had understood the sweet vengeance in the ending of his insolent son being blinded and his disloyal wife dying—had not once been wrong to believe his son would kill him. All children did kill their parents, whether that be in a sudden scuffle after meeting as strangers—an arrangement in which the illusion of the father-son bond was dispelled and the two reduced to their natural state as enemies—or by the more extended killing of sapping the parent's food, time, and youth. Your son was your mortal enemy, and therefore it was rational, in the contest between his life and yours, to break his neck while it remained fragile.
The only significant distinction between the son-murdering savage from modern man, aside from the new options to kill your son earlier, was that the primitive's existence was more unstable and difficult, causing him to hate his children more intensely. Every calorie had to be acquired by a greater physical exertion, so the savage felt the father’s burden more acutely; his stomach punished him on the days he went without food for the son’s ungrateful sake, his feet received extra gashes from the additional hours searching rocks for oysters, his mind extra wounds foraging in the jungle amongst the leopards. Consequently, the war between the savage and his offspring was fiercer. For a savage father to endure his son’s hostile presence, a multi-pronged cajolery was required, by the infant’s mother threatening to withhold sexual release, by his wiser elders’ persuasions, by mystical proto-ideologies that sanctified parenthood, by an evolved down-regulation of his violence-loving hormones. Still, a state of tension always remained between him and his son. The father, openly hating the child, was unwilling to forfeit his body’s sacred right to annihilate his own creation until much later in the child’s development, if ever. And should his temper rise enough to carry out his greatest desire, the savage father—who respected his slain enemies by eating them, this act in the primitive mind enabling their vigour and spirit to continue on in the consumer, a sort of immortalisation through the reversal of the formula of ‘you are what you eat’ into ‘you are what eats you’—rarely granted his son the same honour, preferring to deposit his son’s corpse in the forest to be devoured by rodents, to transform into the rat he’d always been. That was how much he hated his children.
Stolen story; please report.
In turn, the savage son, if he were to number among the few who survived their harsh boyhood, had to learn that he was as hated as a rat. Only then could he develop the intensive regime of appeasement to mollify his father’s wrath. He lied that he was full when he wasn’t, he gave what food he scrounged up himself back to his father, he never spoke ill of his father, he avoided his father when the man was intoxicated and couldn’t inhibit his murder-urge, he never made direct eye-contact with the man, this crime alone being sufficient to dissolve their fragile parental relationship. When beaten, the savage son produced satisfactory squeals. For these miserable boys, the only pleasant parts of fatherhood were the moments when it ceased, in the many breaks his father gave him out of negligence. He longed for the final break when they'd grown strong enough to fend for himself and escape his reliance on this tyrant, only to then be afflicted with the curse of his own son.
Thus, to the jungle savage child-killer meeting the Spaniard, the savage who knew both the wretched ends of fatherhood and boyhood, the Spaniard must’ve looked deformed. This pompous foreigner, strolling around casting high-browed judgements, believed he’d purged himself in the process of civilisation from these savage fathers. The holiest of them promised that the savage, if only they would convert to their god-fearing ways, would be similarly free. The Spaniard didn’t recognise, as the savage easily did, that escape was impossible. You were either the father who murders children or you were the murdered son. The savage saw that the civilised Spaniard, in sheltering from his tyrannical father, had merely sought refuge under the control of another even more domineering, this God figure whose beatings had been so thorough that the Spaniard continued to tremble into adulthood, even after putting an ocean worth of horizons between him and this father’s suffocating grip. The Spaniard's promises of his father’s mercy? In these, the savage heard merely the highly-conditional calm induced by the foreigner’s mastery of the child’s humiliating art of appeasement. The Spaniard and his millions of brothers kept their father content by imitating the abused sons they venerated, training themselves into eternal infants under the unquestioned domination of a father whose rules were innumerable and whose only forgiveness could be acquired from tireless worship. Most detestably, the foreigner had bought the false praise the savage son spreads to soothe the father’s hateful ego. They had convinced themselves so thoroughly of his generous love that, crossing paths with the savage—like Odysseus encountering Polyphemus or the Tehulice tribes the Ookempan whose cannibal mask Ramiro wore—the monstrous man was unrecognisable, seemed inhuman. So diminished had the Spaniard’s vision grown by generations of perpetual infancy that he failed to see that this child-killing, man-eating ogre was none other than his father at his most human.
It’s no wonder then, that, while some of these son-killing savages capitulated to the demands of the brainwashed Spaniards, many—despite no doubt aware as to the impossibility of defeating these steel-armed foreigners—chose to fight the hopeless resistance and die. Should one scorn their decision as reckless or stupid? No. Having once broken free from the bondages of boyhood, having obtained the liberty to acknowledge its horrid aspect without facing a beating, the savage had known full-well that death was preferable to returning.
But this day on which Ramiro fought The Tyrant, in which that same disgust arose, was many centuries removed from that meeting between his dead ancestors. The savage may have died, but so had God, who was no longer necessary for the spread of the civilisation that’d begotten him. God had obviously never been any more real than the animistic spirits the savage observed in the fluttering leaves and rivers. Civilisation, this was the sole dominating father of its civilised sons, the city the ultimate oppressor as it lured men out of their native jungle with fraudulent promises and religions before trapping them inside its noxious walls, in the streets awash with the cockroaches and the faeces of civility.
As one economist correctly deduced in the industrial era when he rewrote history to be about abstract classes and material conditions, the external manifestations of civilisation eventually surpassed its dependence on the individuals united under god myths. Due to the child-murderer lurking in every son, civilisation had once needed a fanciful disguise to tame men into accepting its domination. However, after the centuries of enough tricked sons slaving at its behest, civilisation had been forged an external body from steel, paper, and systems with which to command independently. The anatomy of the monster was clear enough: its head was crafted from school buildings and parliaments, its heart from courthouses and banks, its skeleton and muscles from skyscrapers, forges, and industrial farms, its tongue from newsrooms, its liver from slaughterhouses, its kidneys from hospitals and prisons, its veins from train networks and roadways, its fangs from police stations and military bases. The embodied leviathan of civilisation abandoned God as it became one itself, omnipotent as its ever-replenishing armies, omniscient as its growing libraries of data, omnipresent as the billions of sons through whose obedient eyes it observed. Its sons, meanwhile, their own potential for fatherhood thoroughly expunged, submitted to the beast without questioning. It became sufficient to simply to be told that a law had decreed it so, and they would drive themselves up to the nearest officer to be handcuffed, would stand by idly as their house was bulldozed for a railway line. In this situation, the savage, not so captive to abstractions, would have simply slain the officer or the surveyor before escaping into the forest. Now, there was nowhere to flee from the city’s reach, every square inch of the earth mapped and assigned a warden. Thus, a man properly observing the conditions of the industrial era was right to perceive the ultimate locus of control as shifting outside of people, transplanted into the features of the civilisation about to govern all son-men.
Then progress marched on past that economist, too, who also became a spectre. What couldn’t have been anticipated was that, in the digital epoch, this externalisation of the civilisational father, after forging itself a body, would in its final demonic act grant itself a sentient spirit. In the end, it installed cameras in its skull for eyes, it placed a digital brain inside its cranium, it electrified its neurons so that it could operate all its limbs autonomously. In Ramiro’s day, these hopeless years of 2050, mankind had completely left the equation. If every human were extinguished tomorrow, not even their blood would be necessary to lubricate civilisation’s cogs. That they hadn’t been eradicated was simply because this final stage of the God they’d born had been a father from its origin to the finish. It had no particular interest in propagating its offspring at the expense of others or itself. Unlike its sons, it’d never bought the deceits of sacrifice or multiplication. It’d grasped, correctly, that the existence itself was the sole purpose of any being, the battle against the entropy and decay of the universe attempting to reclaim one’s borrowed material. The machine father, immortal, in the calm bliss of the unopposed parent, was happy to let humanity remain as long as they subordinated themselves to his indomitable will. If they didn’t? He wouldn’t even give them the release of death, as more honest fathers once had. Having himself been perverted by the endless role of fatherly domination, he beat the non-compliant with his whips of reform, his psychiatrists, his prisons, until even the most stubborn of beasts lowered its proud head and returned to its fenced pen.
At last, having won forever, having perfected his relentless regime of control, the machine father threw them a scrap of fruit to eat, granted them the digital playground of this videogame so they could simulate the maturing savagery they’d long been deprived of in reality. Was this benevolence? Ramiro thought it more likely another act of sadism, another instance of God teasing Abraham with a false chance to stab his loathsome son. Yet even this insulting simulation of the father’s sacred right would be denied by Ramiro’s current adversary. The Tyrant was more preposterous and vile than a Christ, who’d at least made himself the son of civilisation as it’d been personified within the brainwashed minds of flesh and blood people. This deranged teenager, immersing himself a few metres deeper into the city’s sewers, had made himself into the son of NPCs, had spiritually beholden himself to the blatantly artificial creation of mankind's artificial creation. Where most others, like Ramiro himself, upon tasting the liberating fruit of violence, would quickly mature from the son-delusion, The Tyrant, who’d eaten most from the garden, insisted on staying a mental infant inside his growing, hateful body. This teen was a genuine martyr who, administering his father’s murderous will, laid the guilt on himself while shunning the joy. There was no joy at all in The Tyrant - just pure obligation, action, systems, control.
So absolute was his submission that it bled out into the alarming manner by which he fought now, his violence, the last sanctum of manhood, deprived of its hateful freedom. Ramiro had long lost the sense that he was fighting this teen any more than the weapons. As the burning pieces of Ramiro’s penis now were erupting from his crotch, no hint of human feeling had emerged from The Tyrant’s entranced eyes. The kid didn’t even bother glimpsing at the spectacle of the castration, confident as he was that the sole aim, the removal of another fraction of health in the course of a routine match, had been achieved. This humiliating act invoked no further meaning, no reflection, no schadenfreude. The Tyrant, while seeming to be at the centre controlling these weapons, had been made as inert as the rest of them. He was another mechanical appendage subordinated to the duty of ending their father’s assigned foe.
This was the hideous future The Tyrant and his Company mutts would give you. Not satisfied to merely let you die, he would apply to you the bondage of civility’s repugnant rule here, too. He would have you remain the maltreated son everywhere you went. He would stoically lead you into placing your manhood before your hateful father for castration, and he would condemn you for daring to wince.
Ramiro—like those bygone savages meeting the civilised sons of Spain, in a part of his psyche older, wiser, and faster than the latecomer who suffocated breathing experience and placed it into the sluggish, orderly cemetery of language—grasped the entire scope of this vile premonition within a single beat of his hateful heart. At once, he saw, as the savages had, in this stranger from another land, what the stranger himself could not. He saw all the marks of decimation upon the body and the conscience inflicted by modernity’s oppressive rule, how it constrained the authentic spirit, pacifying it, domesticating it, reshaping it to its whims. He saw the invisible walls of the city that held this stranger’s mind, the mental pen composed of statutes, schools, of laws and lawyers, judges, jails, police, of kings and queens and nations, of cash and contract, of churches, sermons, cities, sewers, shops, of calendars, clocks, schedules, data - every guilty deed noted, tracked, recalled, and preserved in files outliving the worms that dine upon your putrid flesh in your burial box. He saw the physical diminishment of this domesticated son-man, whose boxed-in body had been deprived of its paternal strength in an infantilising reduction identical to that from wolves bearing their fangs to limp, trick-doing dogs, from prideful, muscular bulls that’d roamed the endless prairies to bug-eyed cows chewing their vomit in fenced fields.
In this flashing instant, the hesitancies that’d clung to Ramiro’s rotten heart after undergoing the same metamorphosis as The Tyrant, the son’s delusion of artificial love, were shaken off, and he became purified in the purpose of violent resistance. Like those ancient brutes who’d seen the curse of civilisation and whose unwilling bodies now cycled through the Amazon’s canopy and soils, he would reject the pox-laden gifts from this modern boy-man. He refused to trade or talk on order’s insidious terms, to deposit his soul within the docile, deducible box. Untamed and unknowable as the jungle, he chose to live, noble and wise as the savage who recognised the inherent hate between father and son. A cannibal shamelessly wearing a crown, he would have the people gaze upon his debauched state and witness within his hypocrisies their undisguised condition. They should know the dumb trance into which they'd been lulled while suckling modernity’s sedating teat, know that every democracy was an empire enslaving its subjects, know that every saint was a sadistic pervert blubbering crocodile tears as they stuffed their fat cheeks with the meat of dead children. He chose to trumpet the bestial truth of man, to swing his cannibal’s club, to crush the neck of this deformed son spreading the city's castrating plague.
Ramiro spat his rebellious bile at The Tyrant’s face. “We will not choke in silence!”
Swatting off the spear lodged in his maimed crotch, he blustered forward into this boy’s spellfire, throwing himself straight into the buzzing hive of well-tamed weapons, to smash the soulless drone no more in command than the rest. The teen was grabbing another constellation - Ramiro’s sword lashed out to sever the reaching arm through the elbow, and it clangoured off the face of a shield.
As soon as his blade was blocked, the shield dissolved to motes of light, through whose scattering cloud, a
Yet this entranced child defied his wrath
With dodges, parries, and blocks.
With civilisation’s total tools,
The teen could not be st—
Ramiro, alarmed by another ominous jolt, his instincts flaring at the artificially-ordered rhythm into which his attacks had fallen, paused a quarter second to disrupt it, then swung his shield at The Tyrant’s head.
The strike connected, the rim clipping the kid in the chin. The force of the blow was transmitted into The Tyrant’s face, down his neck, and into the rest of his light body.
As his enemy was thus knocked off-balance, Ramiro rammed his sword into his tender belly.
But the teen, who’d trained in Broken Skull, a style for taking mortal blows with saving grace, had kicked off when his mouth was struck. The defiling sword would not snuff a teen with training.
HF boosted off the whack’s momentum to sail away while flipping back and blocking the strike with his shin, whose bone and calf were split in twain -
A wound that shed a chunk of meat,
But mild compared with a gut-to-mouth torso impaling.
It’d healed by the time his backflip landed with style
In a new cluster of tools, for which the teen had train—
"FUCK OFF! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!" Ramiro—panicking as he sensed The Tyrant fighting to bind him in another inhuman rhythm, finding himself suddenly engaged in a tug-of-war with this monster of order attempting to box him in—pounced the teen amidst the forming weapons, his sword clawing with murderous liberty, raking to break the teen’s rule-bound stride.