The clueless woman shrieking and spitting out blood had a mouse-like appearance from a tapered nose and outward jutting ears. Large black eyes, which added to this mousey impression, swept the scene with a further startlement, flitting about the mutilated bodies littering the cultist's camp, slumped, stacked, and rent open like the trees of a forest smashed by a hurricane.

  These horrors added to a pre-existing panic. Inside the caravan, her body had been stacked with several others that’d put their avatars into the dormant following mode while logged out. At some point during the battle she’d missed, they’d been clipped by a spell, which’d torn all of them apart except for herself given a nasty surprise as soon as she’d synced into Saana covered in obliterated remains.

  Bending over, she blew her nose. Thick crimson globs sprayed out of both nostrils. This blood from her airways was, unfortunately, not her own.

  She spat a couple more times.

  With a stronger constitution than many—borderline heroic—her panic began to ease as her ability to breathe returned, as she recognised from the others standing about idle that whatever force had wreaked this devastation was already gone. The one emotion quickly transitioned to curiosity, and she stumbled through the maze of bodies, spinning left and right, hopping over a familiar head, wincing as her boots squelched in a slush of frozen meat that seeped into her toes. With everyone in uniform, she summoned her own black-and-white priestess robes, which looked clean for only a moment before the blood on her skin seeped through.

  Multiple peculiarities struck her simultaneously. For one, she’d never seen human remains in Saana. The bodies were also abnormally isolated - the adjacent camps staring at them had been spared any attack, and the only corpses were their own, not a single enemy to be found.

  Had they done this to themselves, she wondered, had they succumbed to a plague of suicidal insanity? Those standing around the gore were certainly touched with some madness, swearing and gesticulating about something at someone vociferously.

  Most of them were gathered by the corral, where they raged over the slaughtered carcasses of their herd.

  Her horse…

  “My horse!” The mouse-like woman sprinted over in a panic. “No! No! No! Aw, no…crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!”

  Unable to get through a congested barrier, she climbed up the side of a caravan and squeezed in with several others on the roof tallying their losses.

  The scene was appalling, just layers and layers of mutilated animals wedging soldiers rigid in their poses of death. Most of their herd had been culled. A few spared in the corners shrieked and reared in panic, their hooves pasted with gore. Some of their owners tried to calm these down and drag them to the exit points, but the animals refused to step over the dead.

  None of those alive belonged to her. No, her horse lay somewhere in the tangle of meat and fur and intestines, as indistinguishable from the others as one strand of spaghetti in a bowl.

  In the corral’s centre, an Ankh-Bearer, one of their senior members, was cradling the head of a dead horse in his lap. Tears pouring from his eyes dribbled onto its still face and diluted some of the blood as he repeatedly whimpered the name ‘Nazeer’. Another member squatted beside this distraught fellow, holding his shoulders close and whispering oaths.

  The horse had been around since before the mousey woman’s initiation, surviving the campaigns to consolidate the various slums of Kanaru and their travels between them. Maybe this was cold of her, but she felt an instant sense of relief. In the Ankh-Bearer's extra acts of caring, in the campfire evenings platting its mane, she’d always sensed this looming inevitability. Now that it was done, they could all move on.

  Although not so attached to her own ride—which she’d never expected to survive the day—the early loss of it stuck hard. It would be a long while before they could get a replacement. Her calves were already beginning to ache under the tortures of the walking ahead.

  A nauseating odour hit her nose, the sweet, butchery scents of viscera mingling with the barnyard foulness of animal shit. She turned off her smell functions.

  On the ground below, a platoon of allies jogged past and pushed through the neighbouring camps still at their guard, shouting slogans of vengeance and calling on the powers of dark sister Nephthys. She gazed further along the trajectory of their travel, out across the sea of other caravans. To her astonishment, every single roof in sight was occupied by people, all facing in the exact same direction, like a crowd gathered to observe the once-in-a-millennium passage of a comet. Whatever they might be staring at, she couldn't see it beyond the dense curtain of bodies, not even when jumping.

  On the corral’s opposite side, two of her friends were leaning against a caravan, a male in a warrior’s armour, an enbie dressed in the robes of a priest. The two watched the scene with vacant eyes as they sucked from cigars and blew out thick puffs of a violet haze.

  A wave from her went unnoticed, as did a telepathic hello.

  She jumped from the roof and circled around the mess to learn from them in person what’d happened.

  “Fucked us hard,” explained the warrior after she tugged him by the elbow out of his reverie.

  Saying this, he extended the cigar with an arm that was bare up to a tattered shoulder. It must’ve regrown it from an amputation.

  The mousey woman refused out of habit. “Who?”

  “The enemy…yep, fucked us hard…we are fucked.”

  The enbie priest was more forthcoming with the details. They—in a biased retelling that omitted the critical monster element—explained how the ex-hero had blown them up alone, unassisted by his guild, just teleporting in with his unfair gear, slaughtering as he pleased, then teleporting off.

  The priest projected a map. It showed the blob of the host stretched across the land - the map, as another minor point of disorientation for the mousey woman, placed them already north of Suchi. A zig-zagging, segmented trail of red-dotted clusters marked the enemy’s passage through them, with a new cluster beginning to sprout a couple skips north-east of their position. Each dot signified a reported sighting.

  Highlighting one of the dots at random brought up a disorienting stream from a person hiding behind a barrel and watching as people stampeded in every direction. Some kept tripping on a layer of bodies underfoot, and the unluckiest, unable to get back up, shrieked and gurgled as they were trampled by others into the midden of carnage.

  There was no sign of the actual attacker.

  “So fucked…” said the warrior.

  The priest sorting through the footage was less gloomy. “According to my napkin math, he’ll be logged long before making a real dent. There are just too many of us.”

  “But that’s only solo…” said the mousey woman.

  The priest grinned. “Ah, right, it’s great news on that front! His guildies got the exit orders - Berby’s brought ahead the bonfires. Sticklers as always for the rules, they seem to be complying. With them out, it’ll just be the local frock-kissers and one reg of eunuchs. Maybe three divisions of volunteers from Central – pure meat. On paper, it’s favourable, especially if we flip the regiment.”

  The warrior exhaled a long, cynical stream of smoke. “Nah, we’re fucked. Always were.”

  “Stop being a defeatist!” growled the priest.

  The mousey woman, however, kind of agreed with the warrior, even without witnessing this slaughter. From her perspective, their side had started with no clear victory conditions. Even if they captured the territory, how would they expect to hold it? Nothing in the mannerisms of this psycho rampaging through them now suggested he would respond, ‘Ah drat, good sirs, you bested me! Please do with your stealings as you will!’

  The whole plan seemed a hysterical mass-suicide, one led by a child-eater who could not accept his fall from grace.

  But, as a mere grunt, it wasn’t her job to criticise…

  “Sisters curse him,” she said perfunctorily.

  “Sisters curse him,” the enbie priest repeated.

  By 'him', they continued to only place the blame on the ex-hero and not the monster he pursued. This was unfair, and the situation really needed somebody to point out the injustice and bring them back to the sensible realm of culpability and accurate attribution.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Luckily, such a daring corrector of falsity had just arrived.

  “Aherm, technically, the correct pronoun in this situation should be 'them' desu. ‘Sisters curse them’ - both the ex-hero-sensei and the kaiju, that is, although watashi would argue 95.73333% repeating of culpability should be allotted to the latter desu. Hehuuh!”

  The trio turned to the speaker, then blanched as if they’d seen a ghost.

  The person—on first glance—appeared to be the ex-hero. His avatar was identical, although he was not smeared in human filth, the only mess a weird blue sludge on the tip of his nose. His armament of weapons, on further inspection, was also not real, being made from a flaking papier-maché.

  In his hand, the stranger clutched with Bible-like devotion a copy of A Thousand Tools’ official training manual, as carried by any true-blue aficionado of the ex-hero.

  He gave a samurai-style bow of apology, his handy-craft weapons rustling and crinkling. “It’s daijoubu, friends, daijobu desu. Watashi is just a humble chuubou turned enthusiast desu. No, watashi could never possess such post-gigamaxpatrician, kaiju-pwning heroism, although—by apeing the sensei’s most subarashii example—there is always hope of us amounting to More desu. Hehehuhhuuh!”

  He sniffed dweebily, wiped his nose, and smeared some of the blue sludge on its tip.

  It was a disgusting fanboy, one of those recent know-it-all bandwagonners, a no-good, fart-huffing blue-noser.

  But, in such dark times, when the agents of chaos and obscurity lurked about leading the innocent astray, it took such societal bottomfeeders to set humanity back onto the clear path of fact.

  With a sketchy scan of the other cultists who’d yet to notice him, the fanboy ushered the trio into a nearby caravan with a drugdealer-esque discretion. Some of the papier-maché weapons jutting from his back snapped as he squeezed through the entrance. He introduced himself as Watashi-san - a funny coincidence, different kanji.

  Inside, the fanboy Watashi-san had the priest friend highlight some of the first nodes from their projected map. This brought up recordings from the ex-hero’s first encounters with the mob, which showed he’d initially been making his way through the gathering with stealthy non-violence in his hunt for the monster but he kept being caught by freak occurrences – a dog barking at him after chasing a blue frisbee, a group strolling past his earth concealments when it happened to crumble into blue jello, a blue-haired child following him around and, strangely, barking like the dog from the first incident. After each of these exposure events, the mob could be seen instantly attacking him, like a pack of zombies competing for the flesh of humanity’s last man.

  “There’s a strong theme of blue,” observed the mousey woman.

  Watashi-san waved dismissively. “Martially immaterial desu, hehuuh! The point, you anata plebbity unter-plebs, is that our immaculate ex-hero-sensei was never the aggressor here desu. He is practising The Way of Self-Defence, and it could be argued that, although he’s since thrown caution to the dogs and just started bushidoing you anata bonjins, that this is but a form of anticipatory retaliation, slapping down the hand that imagined it could slap him first desu. Do you anatas empirically deny this desu ka? Were you anata lower lifeforms—who so unfairly wish curses upon a tensei whose tensei-ness you anatas fail to comprehend—were you anatas not, in fact, intending to attack him first, to raise your anata insolent palms against heaven itself desu ka? Hehurm?!”

  When the trio gave no refutation, the fanboy started rambling about the correct plurality of antagonism here, about a supposed invisible kaiju that the ex-hero was hunting for, after the slaying of which he could return to his luxury retirement travels while the search continued for his heroic substitute, which could be anyone, even the three of them, but more likely the fanboy himself who’d read all the editions of all the strategy manuals front to back, nose to ass. If the trio were interested, the fanboy was quite eager to strategise with them a keikaku for defeating the kaiju and becoming heroes or, even better, The Hero Beyond The Hero, a.k.a. The Samurai (Samurai, to clarify, not emphasised but pronounced in authentic nihongo-ben - Sa-mu-ra-ii). He, who aspired to become such a samurai, had stolen from the ex-hero a nifty anatomical diagram of the kaiju and its vulnerabilities, which he was More than happy to share in exchange for them swearing fielty to his keikaku on pain of seppuku. Were they in desu ka? Would they join hands and strategies as nakama, desu ka?

  This commentary completely stumped the trio. What invisible kaijiu? Why was this blue-noser inventing a fictional third party? Why was he calling the guy just bullying them on his own with no other monster or anything else around an ex-hero? When had that killjoy, the only 'monster' here, ever been a hero?

  But the trio had, during this lecture, already figured out the true identity of the booty-guzzling fanboy. When he was done, they made no reply to his proposition but crassly asked him whose side he’d be taking in the battle. The ‘fanboy’, appalled that they weren’t even playing along, rolled his eyes in disgust.

  “Bakas desu!” He angrily stuffed his training manual into a pocket, the three no longer worthy of bearing witness to it. “As post-maximally expected - no subtlety, your anata generation desu! No soul desu! What shrunken, miserable normies desu! Ikuzo desu!”

  Leaping out a window and snapping a few papier-maché weapons, he was pulled into the earth by a mesh of sprouting vines, teleporting off to work his magic on some more deserving marks.

  No, these three indevious losers would never, ever be the replacement heroes. The end of their adventure was already drawing near desu.

  As the trio stepped outside, an Ankh-Bearer came by and growled at them to join an effort to drag out the horses and camels for butchering. They informed him of their odd encounter with the trickster god—what absolutely worthless snitches, no, not one bone of heroism, not one cell of heroism, not even one soul-pumping atom—to which the Ankh-Bearer replied dismissively, asking ‘who hadn’t?’ and showing off the back of his trousers hilariously coated in blue-coloured diarrhoea.

  Thus the three rejects, getting what they karmically deserved, were made to dig shoulder-deep in the mess, separating the animal parts and human. Some other cultists helped the earlier Ankh-Bearer to cart off the pieces of noble Nazeer for a separate cremation. As the trio lugged about the corpses, the priest friend tried to elevate the experience by connecting it to the goddesses that the cult worshipped and their ancient rituals of embalming. But this effort of sacralisation was ruined by a preponderance of animal scat, spread everywhere by their trampling through the ruptured horse and camel intestines.

  The mousey woman would explain as they laboured how she’d missed the action. Her notifications had been turned off as she tried to complete a paper for a supervisor too old to understand the weekend’s fuss. The last she’d seen had been the ex-hero’s spectacular battle-royale.

  “This was even more disorienting,” remarked her enbie priest friend. “I think he’s getting faster...”

  The warrior was more pessimistic. “It’s us that’s slower. Those other guys were the best of the best, and they got fucked. So, us? We’re…we’re just fucked fucked…”

  As for the bodies they were cleaning up, the priest recounted the random episode of the plague demoness and the ex-hero’s benevolent vanquishing of it. The priest showed off a patch of red bumps on their wrist where the demoness’s flies had laid their corpse-preserving larvae. The mousey woman, finding the same affliction on herself, frowned as her mind forecasted the disturbing consequences. Suddenly, the warrior’s defeatism made perfect sense.

  Her face contorted in repugnance. “Oh, this is going to make things…oh…”

  “The situation’s much more dire,” laughed the priest friend. “The little pricks accelerate the decomposition. Look.” Holding a human leg, they scraped away some other gore from its thigh, creating a window of skin large enough to notice that the skin already had patches of yellow – a keener eye than any of the trio’s would detect the movements of the maggots feasting beneath. “So, the siege, with everyone…stacked…it’s going to be…” They groaned, vaulting the leg into a nearby pile of body parts. “That’s if we even make it to the siege. He seems to be targeting the materiel we can’t replace.” They gesticulated at the slaughtered herd. “Picking off the bosses with the loot, as well. We’ll have to get riding—no, marching…ugh…we’ll have to get marching soon or we’ll arrive without supplies.”

  “Does that alter the plan?”

  “The plan!” The warrior laughed derisively, jabbing the tip of his shovel into something and raising it for exhibition - it was a decapitated human head, one that’d belonged to their cult's shotcaller. “This is the new plan. It’s just going to be this…endlessly…just fucking butchered…and left to clean up the shit…with no fucking water… “

  The eyes of the mousey woman, covered in gore and animal shit, glazed over. “No bath…”

  She hadn’t even contemplated the long-term hygiene issues…

  Her priest friend, hearing the word bath and accelerating to the same bleak conclusion, paused the sawing they’d begun on a camel’s leg. “Oh my god…”

  The warrior flicked the shovel and flung the head away. “And then butchered again…and for HOW long?!” He gave a sharp, rising cry. “For HOW long must we endure the cycle of defeat and decay? For days? For weeks? Forever?” His gaze flickered with panic. “And this…this was just one person. What the fuck happens when we meet the rest? This…this isn’t even the fucking speciality…this is just the parley…this is just him cruising out to inspect the vibes before the actual fuckening starts…” His panic continued to escalate, as the full realisation struck him, the warrior discovering that ominous black hand wrapped irremovably around their throats. “This is already fucking over. We are not these bots capable of being brainwashed into swallowing the lies and the SHIT forever…forever…forever, forever!” He shook with an impotent rage. “Forever! FOREVER! FOR-FUCKING-EVER! EVERY FUCKING ONE OF YOU WILL BREAK BEFORE THIS DAY EXPIRES!”

  In the last conversion to ‘you’, the warrior announced his resolve, completing his psychological divorce from the rest of these deceit-drunk morons. He threw down his shovel.

  He then raised his head and roared his submission with a weeping heart. “Arigato for the mercy, Cripple-kun!”

  One could almost see, from the sudden transition of his rage into a look of sublime relief, a beam of salvation descending from the starlit sky and whisking the warrior away to a land of honey and blossoming tulips.

  But, in actuality, as had happened to other defectors, he was swarmed. His neighbours cleaning the site trudged through the gore and bludgeoned his smiling figure to death.

  The mousey woman and her priest friend, stepping back, watched the mutilation in horror. Their friend, a moment earlier complaining, was scattered to the giblets around them, joining the chunks they would have to sort, separate, and carry off.

  The two shared a silent glance. They nodded. Then, cheeks reddening beneath the grime of blood, they repeated that refrain of heavenly submission.

  “Arigato for the mercy, Cripple-kun!”

  “Arigato for the mercy, Cripple-kun!"

  What losers. No heroic tenacity...no samurai soul...