--Welcome Sona Sitri~
A new voice welcomed me. Now it was almost total darkness, where I could only see a young man in front of me, but this was not Souji.
Short brown hair, light blue eyes, slightly oval face, dressed in a simple pair of ripped jeans and a dirty orange t-shirt, he stood barefoot in the middle of all the darkness.
--Who are you?
I asked while picking up a magic circle.
--I am Madness~ or the remnants of what I used to be~ Hyoudou Souji~ please call me Madness~
The young man in the middle of the darkness applauded and the light illuminated part of the space revealing a set of tea and cookies, the young man proceeded to sit down and invite me to sit next to him.
Come on, let's talk about these calmly.
--OK.
After sitting in the chair and receiving a cup from him, the young man began to speak.
--Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, I am the remains of someone who has already died and the base from which Hyoudou Souji arose... what you see now is nothing more than a memory... the knowledge and experiences were passed down, assimilated, mixed and forgotten with the experiences of the last 16 years... The Main Body has not noticed or simply stopped caring... but it is getting lost in its own mind.
Looking at the young man who called himself Madness, seeing his memories, feeling his instability and witnessing the darkness that surrounds us I can know that he is not lying and my tower is really bad.
--Schizophrenia?
--Close but not... It's pure and simple Dementia at its best, that magical point where you're so bad that you're good... let me tell you a story that the main body must have forgotten or are simply suppressing it.. our life, our origin, our karma.
Madness smiled and with a flick of her finger, everything around us changed and I couldn't move as if forced to see and listen, a movie screen formed in front of us.
--Enjoy the Sona Sitri projection.
***
A small house full of damp, moldy paint and a few bullet holes, a little boy read a thick book while solving or at least trying to solve a math exercise. The boy, no more than 6 years old, had brown hair and blue eyes. Nearby, an ordinary-looking young woman could be seen making a mixture of flour, eggs, sugar and butter, before putting it in the oven.
Soon the scene changed, the same boy was still reading the book, only now there was a large bloodstain on the wall behind him, but the boy continued reading while small tears formed in his eyes, along with the slight smell of burning that came from the oven. .
--Poor thing... without money... without power... it's a sin...
The boy muttered as he read, ignoring the chaos and blood around him, the boy continued to study.
The scene changed again, the musty and damp house had changed now it was in an orderly space filled with bunk beds in a uniform and symmetrical shape.
The boy with brown hair and blue eyes was now a teenager of 14 to 15 years old, he had some cuts on his arms and a small scar above his right eyebrow but it could only make him more handsome and fierce. The boy was reading a medical book while taking notes in a small notebook.
It would be a normal image if this was just a boarding school or specialized school but the gun hanging at the head of the bed negated that possibility.
--Ex-combatant, Post-traumatic stress disorder...
Sona watched the young man continue his studies until an alarm broke the stillness of the entire place, where the boy left the book on his bed and took the rifle over his head, loading and placing his finger on the trigger, ready to shoot.
The scene continued and the young demon saw the horror, a destroyed space, full of screams, curses and explosions, the brown-haired young man moved with the same agility as a beast while shooting with enough precision but the most incredible and worrying thing was the cold and utter calm in her eyes. Without mercy, mercy or disgust, using the corpses of allies and enemies as a shield, stealing and looting the weapons within her reach, Sona watched as the young brown-haired man fought to survive in the middle of the battlefield. She at some point began to cry, she was beginning to understand how broken and sick her tower was.
At the end of the battle, the young brown-haired man was lying on a pile of corpses bathed in his own blood and that of others, barely breathing, his eyes were empty but his lips continued to murmur a sentence while tears ran from his eyes.
--...survive...difficult...I want...a...cookie...mom...
Again there was a change of scene, the 15 year old was no longer in his place a man with brown hair and dark blue eyes in his late twenties dressed in a white coat with a creepy smile on his face. while walking through the halls of what appeared to be a hospital.
--Dr*-------*?!
The doctor title was called by a young girl whose face was too similar to her older sister Serafall Leviathan and the man responded with a smile, both Doctor and nurse walked to a place Sona couldn't rationalize after seeing her tower fight in a bloody war, together with the nurse and headed to the pediatric ward, where a dozen children smiled and rejoiced at the arrival of the gloomy Doctor.
The children were happy but all these children had something in common, wounds, all the children had some wound, burns, lacerations, fractures, amputations and so on, there was not a single unharmed child in this group. Sona cried seeing this group of children.
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--Good kids... who wants a cookie~
The Doctor said with his face forced into a terrifying smile to which the children responded with their own childish smiles. The man proceeded to pull a box of cookies out of his robe and hand out one to each child and even to the nurse and one for himself.
--Cookies are happiness~ kids~ there's nothing a cookie can't fix~
The Doctor pronounced as he threw a cookie into his mouth, the children nodded to the man's words as they carefully chewed the candy in their hands savoring each bite.
A little girl with ash blonde hair approached the doctor, she had half of her face bandaged up like her arm was in a cast.
-- Why does Dr... like cookies... ?
The man caressed the little girl's hair and said with a soft voice while his eyes were lost in his own memories.
--A long time ago, my mother used to prepare cookies for me when I did something good or was sad... but the war took my mother... she can't have any more cookies... then she didn't have the money or the strength to buy them, make them or get them, I was recruited by force and fought, but I still didn't get cookies, after peace, I studied, graduated and worked... and now I have cookies~ for me and for you... the cookies are a memory of my mother, a memory of when everything was happy, everything was simple... Enjoy these little moments, enjoy every little joy my children, thank god, the devil, whoever you want for these times of clamor, where you can eat something without fear of being robbed, without fear of a bullet tearing your head off, without fear of not waking up... they may be hurt, they may be alone but at least they have a cookie, right?
The Doctor spoke with a soft voice to the children who even at their young age had suffered great losses and understood the words of the man in the white coat.
Sona could only put her hands to her mouth and wipe away her tears, her Tower was really broken.
The scene changed and presented a new scene where the Doctor was reading not a book but a manga, while watching not a documentary but an anime with the same crooked smile.
--Children are good at recommending me this nonsense is fun.
The doctor enjoyed maga, anime, video games, light novels, web novels, everything he had not enjoyed in his childhood he lived now and with the passing of the scenes Sona only saw an otaku doctor in his thirties or forties, addicted cookies and a nurse too much like her eccentric sister was addicted to the doctor, an oddly nice couple, but one that left Sona a little worried.
--I must be careful when Souji meets Nee-sama
Too bad the next scene would be the last.
Fire, great streams of smoke and fire ran through the hospital, the scream of the patients and the rumble of the explosions, the doctor ran through the corridors while wielding a long tactical knife, his blue eyes were cold as he ran towards the pediatric ward.
After jumping over a wall of fire and stepping on a couple of corpses, he reached his destination where he did not find the happy children or their strange companion, he only saw the scattered bodies of the infants and his lover defending the only survivor of a group of subjects disguised with clown masks.
Sona could only close her eyes before one of the clowns shot the nurse, killing her.
*BANG*
--NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
A scream more like the roar of a predatory beast came from the mouth of the doctor who simply pounced like an animal on the clowns.
Ignoring the fire, smoke, and blood, he charged, ignoring the shots to his body, continued and lopped off the head of the first, stealing his gun and shot the other two, emptying the magazine into their bodies.
Coldly verifying the death of the clowns, putting a bullet in each of their heads, ignoring the blood that came out of her body, she ignored the girl's fear and took her in her arms, ignoring her kicking and her fear... like a broken machine, he walked slowly through the corridors while shooting anyone who wore a clown mask or was armed, in a couple of minutes the man had walked out of the burning hospital along with the unconscious girl in his arms, ignoring the calls Attention and stopped by the police, the man only walked up to a firefighter who handed the girl to him before collapsing on the floor to close his eyes forever.
Sona watched as the man fell after completing his mission but what surprised her even more were his last words which could barely gesticulate the name of her lover.
--“-------”
Her tower had a serious problem, the projection ended and once again she found herself sitting in the company of the young man called Madness... or it should be Dr. Madness.
***
--What did you think of the film?
"Apart from your obsession with cookies and how horrible your life was...
--Exact...
--They are insane, post-traumatic stress and trauma made them crazy but that doesn't explain why the current Hyoudou Souji is crazy.
--The problem is that we were crazy to begin with~ our mother died when we were 6 years old, we were taken over by our country's army at 10 and only made it out when the civil war ended at 17~18 years old, we spent 4 years living like stray dogs, after about 7 years as hounds and wolves for gangsters and other criminals we were able to study and graduate, get a decent job, the nurse was my wife, who was pregnant with our son, the girl was his niece whom We were adopted, I died and I really did not expect reincarnation, in fact I could not accept my death when they offered me this opportunity and I took it as one more crazy dream, I did not expect it to be real, I did not expect this world and I did not expect any of this, I hate this world, its premise, its system, its ideology, the main body grew from my emotions, experiences and part of my memories, after 16 years of distortions and the corrosion of time itself, the psyche diminished more than expected, our ability with Shadows allows us to do many things, including learning and absorbing the knowledge and experience of our victims, and we've been using that ability a lot to gain knowledge from street demons and increase our strength... too bad...
--Knowledge and experience, they also bring with them the emotions of those demons and are further corroding their already fragile psyche.
--Indeed~ we were born crazy, we grew up crazy but now we are getting closer and closer to collapse.
--Why are you telling me this?
--It was you who wanted to open the Pandora's box that we call the head~ be responsible, take the reins of the "Abyss" the main body separated the personal memories of their old life and locked them here with me as a security measure, but when "That ” activates, I will go out and maybe the main body will totally collapse, Consciousness and I are afraid that the Main will get out of control and destroy a city or two…
Sona paled at the mention of the destruction of a city but what terrified her the most was the certainty with which Madness spoke.
--What is “That” of which you speak?
--The Sacred Gear "Call Of Abyss" that the God of the Bible left in this body, I have prevented it from awakening but it is already unstoppable, since you joined your nobility I will give you Sona Sitri advice.
Sona looked at Madness doubtfully but soon changed to an expression of absolute seriousness.
-- Tell me, Madness.
--“Hold the reins of the beast of the Abyss and victory will be yours... Set it free and the world will know terror” Sona Sitri... The God of the Bible created the Sacred Gear as a weapon for humans to decide its own destiny but the one that is sealed inside this body is not for that function... One day the End will come and "That" monster will be released and "It" exists to stop that monster...
--Put out fire with fire?
--Indeed, I don't know what the hell the God of the Bible of this world was thinking when he created "It" but... this is the end of our conversation, Sona Sitri... please take care of the main body when "It" wakes up ...will remember our old life completely and maybe it will break more than it already is... I ask you please, if you can't hold those reins, kill us... give us rest... let us go where our beloved is .
--Souji's quest for death is...
--Yes... subconsciously he still remembers "Her", added to the dislike we feel for this world, it is not difficult to opt for suicide.
--Why haven't they become a serial killer?
--Conscience... it has avoided that with all its might, its reduced state is the sign of its wear, hope and optimism are locked here with me keeping "It" and our old memories under lock and key but not for long... like that that... we trust you. Goodbye... My Fair Lady.