I knew it was pointless to argue. I could tell by a single glance that his hunger had consumed him. Back before I met Alyssa, I found myself driven only by destructive desire. Like many others in that overcrowded orphanage, I had no purpose. I had no direction until I met her. Many of us found ourselves addicted to vicious chemicals which served as a substitute for the love we were never given. Many of us found our purpose in the way the chemical reprogrammed our brains to only ever seek out more. I had wasted years of my life chasing that insatiable hunger; reality was slipping through my fingers even on the night I first found her. It was only with her help that I managed to overcome that destructive desire in the first place, but it is also only because of the chemicals that I also only understood the cruciality of her arrival. They enshrouded her image with light in my eyes. It was almost as if the chemicals had led me to the only thing that could break their hold.
But it was because I understood his insatiable hunger that I knew I could not possibly argue for my life. I steadied my sword with my shaking hands and threw myself backward, narrowly dodging the lunge of his blade. Without wasting a moment, the cannibal jerked his arm back and navigated his sword through a circular slash as he ran forward. I steeled my nerves and swung my own weapon; our silver swords slammed in the swirling sand and sent a scarlet spark into the air. His strength overpowered mine, and the impact sent me stumbling backward. The barbarian threw himself forward with another forceful slash, but I deflected his blade with a swing of my sword. Our weapons clashed again and shimmered beneath the light of the stars. His bloodshot eyes glared into mine with a ravenous hunger, but I struck him in the stomach with a sudden kick. He stumbled three paces backward on the plain, but he steadied his sword and prepared to strike again.
“You have no reason to fight; the plains will kill you in the end,” said the bloodied cannibal as he then attacked again.
But I yelled as I blocked his sword with a crash, “Life is pain for us all until the day we turn to ash. You can fend for your life with a slash and a crash, or a grunt and a clash, but all you can do is just helplessly thrash. For what reason do you fight your way through each day? No matter how much you kill, you have nothing to gain. Is a life really life if it exists for no purpose but staying alive?”
The swordsman said as he glared with bloodshot eyes, “Nature itself demands I stay alive. I can’t care about the cost, and I can’t care about the consequence. This is the biological imperative. I cannot waste my time worrying about justifying my own existence. I propagate my life for no reason other than that it’s the only thing I have left. I deserve to live because I was born into this world, and there’s nothing more to it than that. I don’t care what the laws of nature demand in exchange for my survival. If I have to kill the innocent, then so be it; that is the price. Nature itself declared that was the cost—not me. If I have to eat the hopeless humans who wander these plains, then so be it; that is the price. If I have to throw away my pride and run from the monsters who scour these sands, then so be it; that is the price. If I have to kill you and eat you, then so be it. That is the price.”
I faced him and said, “This world is unraveled, and you pulled the thread. You live like deep roots that feast on the dead.”
“If that is the case, then that is the price,” he said as if he spoke to the starlight.
I must admit I felt a respect for the swordsman who stood at a short distance. Even though he saw me as nothing more than an easy meal, I could sense that he and I were both bound by the same monomania. Our obsessions led us in different directions, but both demanded of us that we kill the other. So just as before, the barbarian bounded closer and barreled his blade at my throat, but I swung my own sword to deflect his strike. A lifetime of hardship had left his muscles sore, but I had done nothing but walk since the night I left Bones City to scour the sands. I easily deflected his slash and then attacked with my own, forcing him to throw himself backward with a clumsy stumble. The tip of my sword missed his skin by a hair. Years of chopping fish at the factory had left me familiar with a blade.
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He asked as our swords again loudly convened, “How much of this world have you actually seen? I always imagined that those in the city never saw anything outside the walls.”
I answered as I moved with a backward motion, “I lived my life between the walls and the ocean.”
“But life as we know it is bound to this world. If your city let fear trap its people in a corner, then the life you’ve lived is not a life worth living. I scoured these plains striving just to survive, and I have seen the world from which you had hidden yourself away. I have seen other cities and other oceans. I have seen towering treetops and a canyon with walls stained by black fire. I have seen the ruins of a long-dead city at the edge of the forest. I said before that I don’t dare to justify my existence because I was born into this world, but it’s also because this world is mine that I can sacrifice any part of it to preserve myself,” said the swordsman in a way I vicariously felt.
Just as he was willing to destroy anything to preserve himself, I also resolved to sacrifice anything to survive this aleatoric encounter. He fought for himself, and I fought to someday see Alyssa again. We were two men driven to fight in the shadows of this world by our own ambitions. We each imagined our ideal future and ran headlong toward it by sacrificing our sweat and soul. I used to see myself as docile and civilized, but I knew in that moment that I would sacrifice my civility for the strength to surpass the swordsman and steal his life. I would burn my morality and set fire to my soul if it meant the chance to see her one more time. We were both two optimists who could only see a single hope, both constrained by the unfortunate truth that we could only access this future by forcing it upon reality with our own fragile hands. But these futures for which we would pay any price could not coexist; our diverging dreams were forced to clash as if in wave function collapse. We could only keep one possible future, and the other would die with its dreamer in the dark desert.
The barbarian threw himself forward in a meteoric motion. I swung my blade to deflect his sword, and in the moment our weapons clashed, he struck me in the stomach with a powerful kick. The impact sent me tumbling to the ground, and I spun with the roll and landed on my knees—just in time to block his next slash. Our two blades crashed together just inches from my hair; the swords sent a scarlet spark sailing into the sandy air. The temporary light illuminated his scarred face, and the spark sailed until it struck my cheek with a sharp warmth. I then thundered through the sand with a clumsy tackle; I had barely stood upright in the moment I slammed against the swordsman. He stumbled backward and slashed his sword a second time, but I threw myself aside so that the blade harmlessly flew past me. I then lowered myself, steadied my sword, and launched myself forward with a slash.
The cannibal swordsman failed to escape my slash in time. He was so preoccupied with striking me that he forgot to protect himself. His sword missed by six centimeters as I darted past him, but it was already too late. The tip of my sword had torn through his left leg, shattering his shin as I shot past him. The swordsman stumbled and nearly collapsed, but he thrust his sword into the sand and used it as a quivering crutch, clinging to it for support. His blood splattered the ground beneath his body, but he winced as he slowly turned his gaze to face me. An ember of emergency ignited in his ambiguous eyes.