Ajax considers how he thinks about this place he’s in. Omicron. He has not for one moment considered this place as anything more than a temporary residence. A place to be until either he or Shaula can figure out how to get home and never return here.
So, he never had to seriously bother with the lives of these people around him. He certainly became interested, like with Angelidis, Dzan, their friends, their chums. But, he never had to be diligent, he never had to face setbacks, hardship or failure when dealing with situations around him.
So he had gotten himself involved in situations that he wasn’t prepared for, thinking that his near-divine power could bridge the gap between his actual preparedness to deal with a given situation and what was actually required. It was his lack of diligence, his unserious, half baked attitude as well…
And… this is the result, huh. This… is my fault. No, I can’t just think that. It’s not my fault, not just my fault. It’s their fault. Whoever those people were, the terrorists. But, it’s… it’s my fault too.
Ajax grits his teeth in anger and sadness. His eyes become sharp, while slightly wavering in frustration at his own impotence.
Then, he considers someone who doesn’t have his attitude, someone who gives their all when confronting the world. Not Shaula. As much as he would like to admit it, she is lacking diligence herself as well. Though, she is much more prepared than he is naturally. Her instincts concerning the world around her are sharper.
No, instead, Ajax considers the new person he’s met, Prisca. He had hoped to one day call her a friend, but with what he’s let happen today, he feels unworthy.
He had watched Prisca help people with her whole heart. He had considered her heroic and just when he was leading her towards people she could help. He even knew that if he wasn’t there, she would simply have done things the hard way, walking up and down Maz square, looking for people to heal, growing more and more tired until she collapsed.
Have I ever had that much dedication in my entire life? At least… I haven’t had that kind of dedication here.
Ajax considers how a lot of the things he’s been doing have been out of curiosity. It’s like he’s a guy hitting a ball with a bat suddenly being called up to the majors. He couldn’t hack it. He wasn’t dedicated enough. He had no goal in mind, no vision, no heart.
He was a man given power that he definitely didn’t deserve. He found himself in a situation where he could have prevented the deaths of sixty more people. If only he had gotten to the second bomb in time. If only he had been razor sharp, focused, diligent.
Couldn’t he have pulled up the power to grab that man right then and there? Couldn’t he have stopped sixty lives from being snuffed out?
Where did all those forty lives go? They were snuffed out… so easily. As if they were nothing. It makes me nauseous.
Ajax holds himself back from vomiting right then and there. Such senseless death. He wonders what his mother and father would say to him in this situation. Would they tell him that those who died are in a better place right now? His parents are both Christians, and he was born and raised to be one. They believe in a heavenly afterlife.
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But, he doesn't.
Ajax wishes that he was a Christian at this moment. If he was, he could believe that the people he failed to save would reach their deserved afterlife. Perhaps some of the people here would make it to heaven. Perhaps more would fall into hell.
Perhaps, they’d actually make it somewhere else, somewhere different where they could be changed into better people. Isn’t there a god in this world? Osva? Isn’t he making sure humans go to their proper afterlife? Isn’t he?
However, Ajax doesn’t believe it so easily, even if this world has a god. So, he can only go back to his own conception of the afterlife. Nothing. He considers what he believes, that when a person dies, that’s it. When he realized that this was likely the case in his early teens, he became much more afraid of death, much more conscious of it.
Whenever he considered someone dying due to an accident, senselessly, tragically, he often felt sick. Hundreds have probably slipped in the bathroom, hitting their heads against bathtubs and died that way. How many thousands in Western Britannia die in idiotic traffic accidents?
His parents could die as senselessly, his sister as well. They could die in places where he would not be there to see, to help them, to protect them. Where he would not be there at all. Everything happens randomly, as all things in this universe are. There are no true closed ends, no conclusions that are meaningful for most people.
And here… these people, some of them parents, some of them young even… they came out here expecting nothing to go wrong… nothing happening that would end their minds for the rest of eternity. They went back to how things were before they were born.
Terror creeps into Ajax’s heart. His mistakes, misjudgments and negligence caused this outcome for over sixty people. His eyes tremble at the thought.
How can he atone for this? Should he tear his skin off? Should he gouge his eyes out? Should he just die? Shouldn’t he just die?
But… he cannot die. Not yet. There is something else, something that almost slipped his mind.
The purpose of the attack itself.
That woman. She was there to get me to focus, to disregard my surroundings. She was trying to make me enraged on purpose. Why? Why did she do all that? She was a human supremacist. Did she just do that for a false flag?
Ajax considers whether that nameless woman’s plan was to kill herself and have her terrorist attack against human supremacists, her allies, be blamed against demihumans. It wasn’t impossible. After all, the man who successfully destroyed himself did not leave any remains. Not a single bone fragment was left over proving that he was the source of the explosion.
All of it was converted into that flammable substance and went to set the heads of human supremacists on fire. Wouldn’t that be the perfect false flag attack to blame and further persecute the demihumans of this city?
No, that doesn’t make sense. Why would they have been trying to bring the human supremacists out there then? Couldn’t they have just done the attack in Maz square? It’s a lot more crowded there and the guards would have seen them too. They would have obviously blamed it on a demihuman, wouldn’t that have accomplished the exact same thing?
Would the city guards have witnessed a suicide bombing with their own eyes and let anyone believe that it wasn’t a demihuman who did it? Ajax could never believe that, not for a second. Those corrupt pricks would have used a suicide attack like this to crack down even harder on demihumans than ever before. It would only serve to feed their narrative.
I honestly don’t think it was just a false flag. Didn’t that woman… didn’t she say she was doing this because of me? Because I had gotten involved? Then whoever she was working with, the people wearing the rings, they had some kind of greater plan, right?
Ajax tries to figure out what this is all about. What was their greater plan? What were they actually trying to accomplish? He racks his brain trying to figure it out, but cannot. Too much information is missing.
He decides to put away his thoughts for now. He can see Dzan and Sigvor coming over to him. He wonders what exactly they want.