Chereads / Mania: The Beginning of All / Chapter 57 - Press

Chapter 57 - Press

Today is the last day I'll have spent in this cottage.

What has now become nearly exactly two years wasted with the manifestations of all the evil this world can think of will finally come to an end, and my freedom will be returned to me after it was removed hundreds of days prior.

I had been packing my things in secret ever since I came back from the trip with Karamazov, I had gotten a bundle full of food that would last me long enough to find some lifestyle to support me until I went to whatever school she wanted me to attend.

I still have the slip of paper she handed me when we came back to the house, but it feels meaningless since she gave one to Koyo as well. She was talking about how I needed to escape him, so why would she then go and make sure he'll be in the same place as me in the future? 

Maybe she's doing it to avoid suspicion from the teacher. If he did actually write to her asking for her to "fix" me, then he would probably take action if he knew that she had told me to leave the house and survive on my own. She didn't give me any details about what I should do, just that she trusted me. It sounded like an excuse so she didn't have to make sure I wouldn't get myself killed.

The sun was about to set, and I laid on my bed in wait for Koyo to enter his room. The teacher liked to sit in the living room talking to himself, so he wouldn't notice if I snuck out the window, which was my current plan. Unless I broke a bone on the way down, there was no way he could hear me. He told me once how he made sure that no sound could come in or out of the house because he had trouble sleeping when there were noises, something about how he was afraid of the dark.

The red sun once again painted the entire room its color, and I stared out the window at the fields where I would fight Koyo every day. I wonder how much of my blood has been absorbed by the soil. I wonder how many flowers we've stomped on while he taunted me for not being able to hit him. I wonder how many times I thought about what would happen if I just killed him in his sleep.

Someone like him deserves a fate worse than death, that's too easy. It's a way out to just pass away and not live to see the consequences of your horrible actions, and I'd much rather wait ten years to walk in on him battered and beaten in a jail cell after he tried to do what he does here anywhere on this content. The realization of how truly horrible he is will harm him far more than any cruel way I could imagine to deliver him a painful death.

In my perfect future, he drives himself insane. Thinking himself eternally correct, he will come to be proven wrong at every end, and will slowly start to crack when forced to confront the fact that he has existed in a bubble of a man who so happens to be the most powerful in this world supporting his delusions. What if the teacher knew what he was doing? That would be even more perfect, for him to realize that he has been completely manipulated into a fate that is undoubtedly the worst for him.

I hope that after years of suffering, years of consistently acting as though he is the smartest in the room, and that act landing him beaten, maimed, and dejected by every single person he will ever meet. I hope that the entire world will look at him with disgust and that children will spit at him as he crawls by, his entire body reduced to a meaningless husk.

He will come to hate himself as I hate him, he will come to understand that his life is nothing but a waste to the world, that in no time will he be anything but an issue for every single thing on this planet. I hope that when he ties a rope around the ceiling of whatever cell he's confined in, and when he makes the one choice he will ever make to help this world he does so in agony.

I will not wait for his rest and end his life myself, it is not my place to deliver this horrible fate to him, however, I must live to witness it. I will see how he looks when witnessing what the suffering he tries so hard to imitate truly is, and I'll find it hard to hold back my laughter as he cries to be put out of his misery.

The sun finally dipped under the trees on the horizon and I took the opportunity to jump out of the window in my room and onto the fields I would walk through for the last time. Maybe I'd come back here if this is the place where Koyo would kill himself, but that would be the only real reason.

As I walked through the trees I noticed that the forest was strangely silent. Usually, you'd hear the loud insects use their time when no human was there to burn them to chirp or hum, or you'd maybe be interrupted by the howling of whatever wolf-like beast decided to hunt that night, but the only sound that came with me was the occasional stick broken, or the shifting of the dirt underneath me.

It was too quiet, I knew it was too quiet, and my suspicions that there was some sort of plan, some sort of thing going on that I didn't know about until it was too late. I walked into a sort of open area there shouldn't be right in the middle of a dense forest to find that the bastard I'd hoped to only see again with a rope around his neck standing in front of me with his sword drawn. I can't believe I have to listen to his voice again.

"What are you doing, Erik?"

"Stop asking those kinds of questions I am so clearly trying to leave you and your little pet behind at that damn cottage."

"It was rhetorica-"

"Yes, I know it was rhetor-whatever the fuck. An excuse for you to continue to be an asshole while you're here presumably to try and convince me to not run as far away as I can."

"I was actually here to get back the food you stole."

I sighed and shook my head at him. "I am amazed that every single time I think "yeah he's bad, but there's probably worse" you go on to become exactly what "worse" is. Couldn't even pretend to be here for me?"

"I thought you didn't like liars."

Who the hell had told him?

"So you know why I'm leaving."

"Y'know, you make a good point. I could just take the food back from you and let you rough it until we meet again, but how about I just take you back to the house after beating the shit out of you again and you can whine all about how I'm being unfair."

"I thought you didn't like roasted eikmar."

"You shouldn't do this, Erik."

"Stop saying my name. You don't get to say my name after making me lose confidence in myself. All you had to do was tell me the truth at any time and we wouldn't be here right now. Maybe if you dropped the act of an obnoxious noble who thinks he knows everything about the world we could be training for whatever school Karamazov wants us to go to."

"You call her 'Karamazov'?"

"Are you dumb or deaf?"

"You're really fun, you know that? Maybe it doesn't seem that way to you because you keep losing, but you are a really fun person. I think if we switched places you'd think the same thing."

"If we switched places I'd slit my own throat."

"Always exaggerating too. A lot of people like to sugarcoat things, they tell these little lies that they think don't matter much because they're afraid of being honest. You aren't afraid of honesty, you constantly say what you're thinking, I think you'll continue to do that even if it gets you killed."

"Why'd you keep it a secret?"

"I just talked about how you didn't sugarcoat things and now you're going to be touchy about the thing you're actually upset about?"

"Why'd you hide your fucking POWERS Koyo?"

"I love it when you scream like that, it's exhilarating. Did I put on a good show back in the forest the other day? Were you convinced?"

"Fuck you."

"Some things, really, you're better off not knowing. See I could never be like you, and that's why I think you're so fun. I admire it, really, not caring about what you say, not caring about who hears. I think I'd be a lot happier if I could be like that."

He had been walking around while taunting me, he must be waiting for me to swing at him.

"If you're just going to stand there and talk about things that don't mean anything to me, I'll be going on my way."

"I can't let you leave, Erik." His voice changed to a more serious tone.

"Really? After torturing me for two years you decide to keep me? Just wait a couple months, I'm sure you'll find a kid who's too stupid to realize that you're a monster."

"I understand that you're always upse-"

"You don't understand a thing. You want to act like you know everything because you couldn't live if you were forced to accept that you're more idiotic than any person around you."

"Why do you even care? What reason is there for you to care about what I do when I'm not beating you in every fight we've ever had? If you leave now, who's to say that you get better at all? When we meet at the new school Alena is making, who's to say that you don't lose, that you won't continue to lose?"

"You're horrible at acting like you care for me." I started to walk past him, but as I went right by him he stuck his arm out preventing me from going any further.

I immediately unsheathed my blade and swung at his arm. He had already dashed backward and pulled out his blade.

Every single movement was the same, the same cuts that he used on the dummy, except I was more careful. I wouldn't swing randomly, I wouldn't complete a swing if it was going to hit him. He never caught my blade, and if he got close I would swing it away fast enough that he'd get hit if he tried.

Swing after swing, block after block, neither of us had the opportunity to land an actual hit on the other. Back and forth, swing to block, block to swing, and back to another block. My blade was chipped from countless fights but he always liked to keep his in the best condition, yet I knew that he wouldn't be able to get rid of the damage this time.

We darted around the small area we had, at least he wasn't so cowardly that he would use the trees for protection.

This went on for far too long, well into the night and into the sunrise. My bones were beyond beaten, and his were too, I couldn't even feel or hear myself breathe, and we had gotten so slow that any thief could come by and kill us both.

One mistake was all it took, one miss, one inability to control my blade, and he had knocked it out of my hands. I had fallen back onto the ground and he had positioned his blade on my neck.

He struggled through breathing harder than he probably had ever before to celebrate his victory.

"Are you done now? Can we go home?"

I didn't care anymore. If he won't let me leave, then I'll simply not stay. I was struggling to breathe the same way he was.

"Just kill me."

"What?"

"Slice my damn head off and get it over with. I'd rather die than spend another minute in that house with you."

"What are you even saying?" He could barely finish his sentences.

"Just do it. Kill me."

"Are you serious? You'd rather die here than live another day? Living at the house is that horrible?"

"Koyo, slice my head off."

"Erik you're being an idiot. Just accept your loss and come back to the damn house, I'm not going to murder someone just because they find me annoying."

"Koyo-"

"No! I'm not going to do it! This is ridiculous! Any other solution, even if we exchanged only one word about why you're upset would be far better than this. I'll lose on purpose, I'll avoid eye contact when I walk by you, I'll spend my days hunting for food so you don't have to see me when you're training. Anything else, I'll do it, please, Erik, don't be like this. Don't do this to me."

"Koyo-"

"I'M NOT GOING TO DO IT!"

I leaped up from my spot and hit him as hard as I could in the stomach. He spit out blood, some of which landed on me, and fell onto the ground, his hands clutching his stomach and his blade beside him.

I got my bag of food and my blade from where it had been thrown away to, and before I walked away leaving him on the ground I had to say one last thing.

"You don't regret a single thing you've done. You're just pretending you do because you're upset you aren't getting away with it."

I walked into the forest and finally had found the freedom that had been taken away from me for the past two years. The choice to go wherever I wanted, to do whatever I wanted. Ground beneath my feet that wasn't those damn wooden floorboards or the field where he'd lie to me about having no powers and make fun of me for losing.

For the first time, I felt a control that had been absent my entire life. I spoke to myself instinctually, as if he was still there, as if he could still hear me.

"You're a parasite, Koyo. And the worst part is, you know that you're a parasite."

I walked into the forest and became nothing but a man, alone in the world.