Sneaking past a small demon patrol, Mark crept into view of the isolated Maiden’s Tower. The Galata was too heavily-guarded for him to infiltrate, so Mark’s current plan was to go to other demon-infested sites in the city and see if they had anything to work with.
Over the course of the last six or so hours, Mark had hit every other place of interest in the city (at least those deemed places of interest by the brochure he’d looted from the airport). He’d actually found quite a bit in his various raids, from food stores to a small garage to a warehouse filled with improvised explosives. The Maiden’s Tower was the last one left.
Alone on an island about a ways away from the mainland, someone had constructed a shabby pontoon bridge connecting the island to the mainland, which demons used to ferry various animals across. Mark, on the other hand, had no such luxury. Hanging on to the side of the bridge, Mark crawled across to the island under the cover of darkness. It seemed like demons arrived at the tower in clusters, with roughly hour-long lulls in between said upticks. Mark waited for what was most likely the last arrival in the cluster to start heading across before diving.
Pulling himself up onto the island, Mark crawled to the wall next to the small door to the building. About the size of a house, the tower proper extended upwards about fifty feet. It was likely a trick of the night, but Mark thought he could see a dim blue light shining through a window on the top floor. Mark paid the light no mind, he would find out what was making it once he was inside.
He had seen the last demon head inside about a minute before Mark had arrived, and now Mark waited next to the door, shivering from his cold and wet clothes.
After about a minute of waiting, the door swung open and the demon exited the tower, followed by another confused-looking insectoid demon. Mark stayed as quiet as possible, hid behind the open door, and held it open as the two demons left. Once they were off the island, Mark snuck inside and closed the door.
Once inside the building, Mark pulled a table over to the door to form a makeshift barricade. Now, he didn’t need to worry about more demons coming up from behind.
Looking around, Mark saw that he was standing in what used to be a café, with upturned chairs and termite-infested tables littering the ground. A staircase spiralled up the building’s modest tower on the south wall. In the cold dark of the night, a dim blue light was visible up the stairwell. Mark pulled out a pistol and began creeping up the staircase, following the light. Five floors up, at the top of the tower, Mark found the source.
A luminous blue scroll covered in unintelligible, seemingly almost moving text hovered in the middle of the roughly circular room. The instant it came into view, Mark’s gaze locked onto the scroll and required some effort to look away from. Lounging in a ripped armchair behind the scroll was a sleepy-looking dog-headed demon reading a romance novel, a halberd leaning against the wall next to the chair. Without looking up, the demon huffed. “That was fast. Alright, bring ‘em…”
The demon put his book down and looked up. After quizzically looking Mark over for a split second, his eyes shot open and he bolted over the chair to grab his halberd. Reacting purely off of instinct, Mark raised his gun and fired, bringing the demon to the ground before he could arm himself.
Glancing around to make sure the two were alone, Mark rushed over to where the demon was curled up on the floor. Mark pinned the demon down with one foot and kicked the halberd away with the other before levelling his gun at the demon’s face. “What’s the deal with the floaty glowing paper?”
The demon covered his hands with his face. “Please don’t kill me! I’ll do anything!”
Mark sighed to himself and shifted his grip. “I won’t kill you if you just answer the question, that’s how interrogations work.”
The demon squirmed under Mark’s boot. “It’s the Scroll of Enlightenment, we use it to turn animals into more demons! Please don’t steal it, Erlani will have my head! Don’t shoot me! Again!”
“Alright.” Mark kicked the demon in the head, knocking him out. Mark stepped over to the scroll, examining it from a distance. Poking it with the blunt end of the demon’s halberd, he watched it lazily float across the room, before coming to a slow halt while still slowly spinning. Mark would rip it in half, but it looked like it would explode if damaged.
While Mark watched the scroll spin, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with the thing, he jumped out of his skin when a termite on the floor ballooned into a humanoid shape the size of a grown adult. The presumable new demon looked around confusedly before fixating on Mark. “Where am I? What am I?”
Mark facepalmed. “I’m trying to think, so you better get out of here before your second question can be answered with ‘a corpse’.
As the demon scuttled down, Mark made up his mind. That scroll was doing more harm than good no matter where it was, it’d have to go. Mark attempted to grab the scroll by the corners, but recoiled when the scroll violently shocked him upon contact. Right, that wouldn’t work.
Using the tip of the halberd, Mark pushed the scroll through an open window and let it calmly drift down into the ocean. The scroll sank beneath the waves, and its light disappeared into the inky depths. It wasn’t destroyed, but nobody was finding it any time soon. Close enough.
Mark stared out at the pitch-black view, trying to figure out what he had to do now. He heard the demon he’d knocked out get up and fail to sneak out of the building. Mark had to move, that demon would alert someone any minute now. But he didn’t move, he had nowhere to move.
“Nice work, pal.” Mark grimaced as he heard Rachna’s voice behind him. “You’ve completely wiped out any means for Thel’s army to bolster its ranks. Impressive work. So, what’s the plan now?”
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Mark began running back down the stairs, followed shortly by a floating Rachna. “Nothing. Is that what you wanted to hear? I’ve got nothing. The Galata is still impenetrable, and I’ve run out of other ideas. I can’t save Horan, not in one piece. You win. I give up.”
Rachna followed Mark out the door. “What have I won? I’ve been rooting for you to succeed here this whole time.”
Mark saw the dog demon running over the bridge and sped up, hoping to make it to the mainland before it was too late. “And yet you kept second-guessing me the whole time. But just… leave me alone. I’m done. Horan’s just gonna have to die.”
As Mark ran, Rachna floated parallel to him in a relaxed position. “What, you’re just going to give up that easy? What happened to that whole thing where you resolved to keep Horan around as a way to bolster your own sense of self-worth?”
Mark remained quiet as he ran back across to the mainland. As he slunk through the night to the sheltered alley his car was in, he heard about half a dozen demons rushing across the bridge. He climbed into the driver’s seat and gripped the wheel, hearing Rachna sit down behind him.
“…You aren’t real, are you?”
Rachna went silent for a moment. “And what do you mean by that?”
“You’re a hallucination. A figment of my imagination. You don’t actually exist. You can’t actually exist.”
Rachna spoke again, now in Mark’s voice. “Well, that’s indeed the most reasonable explanation for what I am. I’m certainly not a flesh and blood person, that’s for sure.”
Mark looked back to see himself, lounging in the backseat without a care in the world. He groaned and turned away. “Great. Awesome. I’m going insane. Best day of my life.”
“And what are you planning to do with that information?”
“…Nothing,” Mark sighed. “Getting inside the Galata was already impossible, and now I don’t even have the safety net of a Primus getting rid of Erlani for me. I… can’t. I can’t do this. Everything with Horan was pointless, I’m just a nobody with a car. Time to find a new employer somewhere.” He turned the ignition and drove out of the alley.
The figment that used to be Rachna, whatever exactly it was, was quiet for a while as Mark drove east. After a little while, it spoke again. “That’s you, alright. A nobody with a car. You. Mark. Marcus… something with a B. You’ll probably remember it if you think hard enough.”
Mark didn’t look away from the shadowy path ahead. “Just get on with it.”
“Right. You were born at the bottom of humanity’s barrel, and with nowhere to go but down. But you’ve kept yourself alive. Through active duty, through the streets, through the apocalypse. But why, exactly? Why have you forced yourself to keep going, when nothing has ever worked out for you?”
“Because… I don’t know. Because I keep hoping that if I keep going, I’ll finally find something that’ll turn my life around. It’s stupid, but I guess I can’t help believing it.”
“Well, you did find something like that. Him. You don’t show it, but I know what you’ve been thinking. It’s been nice having someone around, someone to talk about things with every once in a while. And sure, he’s an idiot, but he’s one who’s grown on you.”
“And now he’s gone.”
The figment stopped for a moment, grew a sadistic grin, and tutted. “No, you let him go. You’ve kept moving forward all these years waiting for him to show up, and now that you have to put the work in to keep him around, you give in and leave him to die. Typical, really. You’ve always just been in all this for yourself, but you barely even have a self to be in it for. How many people have you screwed over to keep yourself afloat? How many have you killed, enslaved, robbed, or looted? That’s right, you don’t even know. You’ve ruined the lives of all those people just so that you could continue your pointless existence, and Horan is no different.
You’ve kept him chained to you for weeks, just so you could sell him off for a little comfort. But that’s a lie, you know that’d never work these days. You’ve just been telling that to everyone, yourself included, because the truth is even worse. You’ve kept him with you so you could feel good about yourself, so you could entertain the idea that you could be a good person, that everything you’ve done to all those innocent people could be for something. It’s Francis all over again. You’ve kept yourself in the company of someone nice, as if simple association could reform you, all your life. But the second you’re backed up against the wall, by the time they’ve learned to depend on you to keep them safe, you turn tail and leave them to their fate.
When I first entered your head, you even went to the trouble of fabricating this elaborate ‘save the dude in distress’ plan with me, so you could feel like you were doing the right thing by saving Horan, your ‘friend’. But when you realize that you probably can’t do it, you just decide to run like a coward back to the life you’re familiar with.
Deus left you behind because he knew just as much as you. That you’re a horrible person, and you’ve stuck yourself into the role of ‘scum of the earth’ because you’re too much of a manipulative coward to actually risk your own safety for someone else. You deserve all the bad things that have happened to you, and you’ve always known it. Horan, Francis and everyone else were idiots to ever trust you.”
Mark brought the car to a halt just outside the ruins of the city. He sat there in darkness, silent as the grave. He soaked in everything the figment, now gone, had laid bare for him. And as it all came through, he couldn’t handle it anymore. He let go of the wheel and started sobbing in his hands at the weight of his own awfulness. He didn’t hold it back, he didn’t keep it quiet, he just let himself cry.
He pulled out his medal and held it in his hands in an attempt to comfort, but it only made him feel even worse. The figment leaned over his shoulder to look at the medal, leering malevolently.
“What, you think looking at that would cheer you up? The one thing the world felt generous enough to give you, compensating your misery with a reminder of the things you’ve done? It’s weird you even got a sense of comfort from it before. It’s nothing, just like you. You’ve only kept it around because you think that you can wrangle something more out of your existence. But why is that thing any indication? It’s just more baggage, slowing you down and making you wallow in self-pity even more. Pathetic, really.”
Still unable to keep himself under control, Mark shoved the medal back into his pocket. The figment snorted. “That’s what I thought. You just can’t bring yourself to let go of the one thing you’ve ever really earned.”
When he was done, feeling as empty as could be, he lay slumped over the dashboard with his eyes closed. It was a long time before he heard the figment’s voice again. Its voice seemed softer, as though the malice it had once had had vanished.
“You might not have any reason to keep going, but the same isn’t true for him.”