Artyom Dereschuk - Hate the Sin

There was a moment of hesitation. Then one of the soldiers raised his hand, like a schoolboy during a lesson: “I do, my General. I saw him in the village we raided a week ago. He was one of the men who tried to fight back when me and Undertaker tried to break into their house.” Puppy Slayer glanced at the soldier; his eyes were wide with terror and, for the first time, the boy felt an odd connection established with one of the adults. He could relate to what he was experiencing.

A wave of unrest rolled through the ranks of the soldiers; they had just received another confirmation that their attackers were the ones whom they had killed a week before.

“I see…” the General poked at the bullet wounds, as if trying to count them. He got to his feet and scratched his chin again. He was thinking.

“Get me a knife,” he finally said.

“What?” one of the soldiers standing closest to him asked.

“A knife!” The General exploded in anger. “Bring me the biggest machete we have, I’m going to carve this bastard open!”

He turned to the soldiers: “Don’t stand around gawking, move! What are you so afraid of? This thing is dead and I’ll prove it to you!”

The soldiers started moving around, and a few minutes later the General had a machete in his grip.

Just like with the old woman, he got on top of the creature and raised the machete high above himself. Looking at its face, he shifted around uneasily, before bringing the blade down.

“Oof,” Puppy Slayer heard somebody uncomfortably say. Even the grown soldiers, the men who had spent their lives fighting bloody wars and witnessing their General commit countless atrocities, were finding this sight in front of them to be disturbing. Some of them were stepping from one foot onto another, as if working out before a run. No doubt they were ready to make a beeline for the horizon as soon as anything went wrong.

The General was swinging the blade again and again, but it was obvious that he was having some trouble with his usual ritual. The blade kept on getting stuck inside the corpse’s rigid ribcage, and when he pulled it out, long ropes of some gelatin-like substance would get pulled along with it from the inside. Even in death, the avenging monster was not going to make it easy for the man.

“Some of you might have doubts whether what we did was right or wrong,” he said, making one systematic cut after another. “That we’re being punished by higher forces.”

He didn’t look up at his soldiers during his speech, and Puppy Slayer was grateful to the man for once. He didn’t want to see his scornful, judgmental gaze.

“You think that the priestess is in the right, and you’re not wrong,” the man continued, and Puppy Slayer’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. He could see that he wasn’t the only one startled by the man’s words, but no one dared to make a sound.

“She’s in the right because she has the power. And because of that, she gets to call the shots. History is written by victors. I can respect that.” He rose to his feet and pointed at the crowd with his bloodied blade: “What I don’t respect is hypocrisy.

“She thinks that she’s right because some divine power said so. Because she has morals on her side. But when you think about it, morals were established by warriors like us, long ago. There’s nothing divine in them. They are just a set of rules.”

He kneeled over the corpse and continued hacking away at it. His actions were becoming less and less refined as the man was droning on. His speech was consuming all of his focus.

“You see, she fails to see one simple thing. We didn’t attack their village because we had nothing better to do. We did that to exact vengeance. So when she comes at us with the same intent, hating us for what we had done… She’s a hypocrite.”

Puppy Slayer could see Desecrator quietly nodding in agreement, soaking in the man’s every word.

“Of course, she’s not aware that everything in this world operates on the ‘will to vengeance.’ Every living being in this world seeks power so that they could avenge something. She’s a part of this process, and yet she fails to see it. And yet that’s how the world was built. A bird needs power to protect its children from the snake—or to make it pay if the deed was done. One tribe wanted vengeance against another one, and they joined forces with an ally who had the same agenda. They became kingdoms, countries. We rode into wars on horses and drove out on tanks. Women don’t realize that the war is the most brilliant thing that could happen to mankind. Wars breed heroes. Wars breed progress. We need new ways to compete, to kill each other. And we always find them. So no matter how she rebels against it, war is a natural state of humanity. Just look around and you’ll see. Don’t you agree?”

There were a few sluggish responses, and the General, seeing that his preaching was falling on deaf ears, just waived his hand at them and carried on with the body.

A few minutes later, after the General had finally cut up the ribcage to the point where it could be opened up, he grabbed the ribs and pulled them aside, revealing what was inside.

“Ugh,” Puppy Slayer heard one of the men at the front of crowd say. “These things are as ugly on the inside as they are outside.”

The boy stood on his toes to get a glance. Indeed, the exterior was not the only thing that had undergone some changes; the insides of that man had gone through some drastic changes as well.

The boy could still make out its organs—the lungs and heart, already showing signs of decomposition, but undeniably human. Yet everything in between them was covered in black and yellow growths. If the boy was to say what they reminded him of, he’d say that they were like the underside of mushroom’s cap. And at the very center of the heart, a wicked flower of seven petals had spurted. Now all dried-up and crumbling, it seemed that it had passed on much more recently than the rest of the body.

The General examined the creature’s insides for a moment, moving the organs around with the tip of his blade.

“You know, in all of my years as a warrior I have never seen anything like it,” he said, looking at his soldiers. None of them replied; they wanted to know where he was heading with that thought. The General continued moving the organs around, carefully examining them. “And even before I walked the battlefield, I had some experience in mystical matters. I saw many strange things when I was a boy, and learned a lot as well. How to draw in good luck, how to get the support of the spirits, how to take away someone’s strength,” he finished that last sentence as he carefully poked the heart of the creature with his finger. “Yet never have I seen anything like it. The curse that the witch has placed on us, the one that makes the dead rise up from their graves… it’s not something I’m familiar with,” he concluded, raising the blade to his nose and carefully sniffing it.

He poked the heart again and rubbed his chin. His finger damaged one of the dried-up petals of the peculiar flower, and it fell off. The man shook his head: “And it seems that I won’t get any answers here. So,” he said, standing up, “we need to ask the locals. Gather up. We’re going back to the village. We’ll get our answers there.”

Silence was his reply, but the General didn’t seem like he expected anything else.

“Oh, man, not again.” Puppy Slayer heard Homewrecker sigh, then hold back his gag reflex.

They were on their way to the village, finding their way through the field of tall grass, when Homewrecker, who was going ahead of the younger boy, suddenly entered the clearing. Whatever he had seen there had made him uncomfortable enough.