I’ve been interrogating this soldier for a while now but it seems as though he doesn’t know anything. I wonder why he didn’t say anything.

“Mmff mmfff…” he says weakly.

“I sealed your ability to speak, you say?” I place his knife down and glared at him.

I see him looking at me with fear in his soulless eyes. He’s desperate and afraid and I know why. I caused him to become that way. I inflicted an ungodly amount of pain upon this person who probably didn’t do anything wrong. In other words, he’s just another solider just doing his job.

I crouched and stared him in his eyes. “Say, do you want to live?”

He nodded as the smell of blood and fear mixed into the air. He’s bleeding heavily.

I smile and let out a soft chuckle. “Okay,” I stand up and reach my hand out towards him. “Let me help you up.”

He looks at me with apprehension in his eyes but in the end, he decided to trust me. Good. He takes my hand and I pull him towards me for a hug.

“Mmf?! Mff?!” He panics but offers little resistance.”

I gaze into his eyes and smile. “Shh. It’s going to be over soon I stabbed him in the stomach with his knife, twisting it while I continued to maintain eye contact. I wanted to at least give him the respect and dignity that he deserves in death. I will not kill him by stabbing him in the back.

That’s cowardly.

“M…mmff…” He struggles, flailing his arms as though he was trying to push me but obviously, he couldn’t pull it off, not with the amount of blood that he’s lost.

“It didn’t have to be this way but this is war.” I tried to convince myself of that fact. I know that there’s something violent inside of me but once I commit unspeakable horrors in the name of vengeance, only then will I truly lose myself.

I know for a fact that this level of violence is common in battlefields around the world but I do not delight in it nor do I take pride in the fact that I tortured this man. I made him lose face and self-respect and the only way I could have ever apologized is by taking on the burden of killing him to his face.

“Men are strange creatures.” I sigh as the man tried to struggle.

Little by little, I notice that the amount of force behind his movement slowly dissipate. For a while, he continued moving but in the end, I decided to finish him. I twisted the knife still in his stomach and proceed to cut him diagonally.

Splok. Shhff, shff.

His innards spill out as his arteries spray out his blood. His body, at this moment, does know that it had just died so it tries to keep things in order by working normally and doing so caused him to die.

I mean, thinking about this seriously, you just can’t stop your body from functioning right? I mean without external help, sure. So either way, working regularly or irregularly, his body would have died by the trauma that I inflicted upon it, loss of blood and of course, losing his innards.

“…t…..thank…..y…you.” He closed his eyes, seemingly satisfied.

“Why do I feel like I’m the one who lost out?” I wipe the knife clean and pick up the knife’s sheath.

As I thought about burying him, a notebook slipped from his person.

I picked it up and started browsing it, stealing a glance here and there whenever something interested me.

Floop.

Something slipped from the pages. I crouched down and picked it up.

“Hm.” It was a picture. I look at it and see the soldier together with a woman roughly the same age as he was. She wasn’t anything special but she wasn’t bad either.

I turned the picture around and read the dedication out loud.

“With love, Candice.” I pocketed the picture. “So that was his girlfriend, huh.”

I felt a bond with my first kill. I feel as though I owe him a debt of a lifetime. I know that it’s weird to think this way.

“Humans are strange creatures.” Wryly, I say to myself.

The man took away the last thing preventing me from becoming a full-fledged solider, the thing that separated me from the rest of the cowards out there.

“Yes, I’ve killed now.” I chuckle to myself. I’m not happy about killing, of course not. I’m happy that I now have a burden to carry, that right now, this Mr. Tonkatsu is not just anyone. He’s killed and he will kill more, even legions upon legions if only to protect his benefactor, the woman who saved his life.

“Rest peacefully.” I offer a silent prayer to the soldier whose life I just ended.

I stand up and start jogging towards the enemy camp. This I know because of the map the soldier had with him.

I climbed the nearest tree and jumped to the next, repeating this process as I gained speed and momentum. I tried to avoid making noise but I’m only human after all. It seems that the power inside of me, or whatever it is can only come out when I’m feeling an extreme emotion such as loss or anger.

I have to keep myself calm. I cannot succumb to that power. I have to grasp whatever humanity I have left, even cling to it if I had to.

Jumping to the next tree, I notice that some of the animals in the forest are avoiding me. It must be the smell of blood surrounding me.

“Huh. Maybe these animals are smart after all.” I jumped to the next tree and grabbed a branch. “So these beasts will give way to bigger beasts.” Law of the jungle and all that.

I soon hear someone barking out orders. It seems I’m close to the base.

I stopped my movement and gathered mana into my right arm. I breathed in and out, releasing the impurities inside of my body as I took in the mana around me.

Crack.

I hear movement a feet away from me.

It seems there’s a soldier patrolling the grounds. Well, I expected resistance so one, two or a hundred of them wouldn’t change anything.

“Yes,” I took out my knife. “I did resolve myself to protect her.

I watched the soldier for an opening. He is looking around, seemingly alert. I have to be cautious for now. I can take my time. I’m the hunter and they are my prey.

(Yawn….)

An opening!

“Activate: Rune.” I feel power surging from my body and for some reason, the words that came out of my mouth seemed natural, as though I’ve been saying those words for years now. “Laser Beam.”

Unexpectedly, energy wrapped my body in a red light and as I thought to take a step, I realize that it took me right in front of the soldier. With no time to react, he futilely tries to avoid me by jumping to the left but I am faster. Much faster.

Holding the knife with two hands, I pass through the soldier like a hot knife cutting through butter and he explodes into a lump of flesh behind me.

“Laser beam…huh?” I cleaned the knife and returned it to its sheath. “That’s a horrible way to die.”

Crack, crumple.

“A...a….arr…arrrgghhhhhh!”

“Shit.” A hoarse scream sounds to a few meters away from me. “I’ve been found.”

I gather mana into my right hand reactivate Laser Beam. “Eh?” It won’t activate!

I dashed towards the enemy soldier as he takes out his sword.

“You fucking monster!” He waves his sword, running towards me. “Die!”

He floppily slashes down his sword. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem as though he’s skilled at this.

“Die,” he strikes from below and delivers a flurry of stabs “Die!”

“Naïve.” I block the flurry by hitting the base of his sword with my knife and directed it upwards.

Due to the momentum of my counterattack, the enemy’s sword scratched his face but that should be the least of his concerns. He is pushed down by my attack and I take the opportunity to straddle him.

“M…Monster…” He cries as he sends spittle to my face. “S..spare me!”

I paid him no heed and I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. I stabbed his jugular and using the serrated edge of the blade, I ripped out his larynx.

“G..guhhhh” he weakly sends punches towards me but of course they don’t do much.

Finally deciding to end his misery, I stab his face and find myself covered in blood and grey matter.

“Disgusting” I wipe myself, trying to clean out the sweat, blood and foreign flesh stuck to my body. “I should try to be cleaner when I kill them.”

With resolve in my eyes, I continue my advance to the enemy stronghold.

“Why didn’t Laser Beam work? Is there a charge time between attacks or something?” I slipped into the shadows and crept towards the next enemy soldier. “I guess I need to study my abilities more.”

I also had to keep ‘that’ in check.

I throw a rock towards the nearest tree.

Tok.

“Huh?” the enemy soldier takes out his sword as he turns around to investigate the source of the sound.

“Was that just an animal or was I imagining-“ the next words, whatever they may be, will forever be unknown.

I pounce at this opening and covered his mouth with my left hand as I repeatedly stabbed his chest.

Crack, gukok.

I hear his ribs and chestplate breaking but I pay it no mind as I gently put him down. Confirming his demise, I move on.

Reaching the enemy tent, I notice that there are no guards around it.

“Now that’s weird.” I take out my knife and cautiously made my way inside.

“No, please, no!”

Crack, guuushhh, splok

I hear someone! I rush inside the tent and I find myself suddenly surrounded by blood, guts and crushed bone fragments.

“What the fuck?” I wipe my face clean and prepared to activate my runes but what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

Standing in from me was a suit of armor that I have never seen before. At least after my amnesia, I suppose.

It’s surrounded by a current of electricity and in its right arm was a sword as large as my body. It’s approximately 173 cm long and 60 cm wide. It’s bigger than a broadsword!

Holding up its left hand, I soon realize that that’s where all of the blood came from. It was dangling the crushed remains of the enemy officer that I saw a few moments ago. It seems as though this suit of armor crushed this base by itself.

“Shit.” I stood ready, preparing for combat. “I won’t die, not from this.”

The suit of armor dropped the enemy and looked at me. From this angle, it seems as though the armor is contemplating on whether or not it should kill me. It releases the electric current from its body and releases steam from its thrusters.

It relaxes its stance but I know better. I keep up my guard and prepare myself for a fight or flight scenario.

The suit of armor sheaths its sword and laughs. Eh? I think I know that voice.

“Been a while, hick.” She says.

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Mr. Tonkatsu's progress so far

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Author's Notes

Strawberry Jam everywhere. (You know, the blood and guts and whatnot)

Hey everyone. Alizoned here. I hope you enjoyed the chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. Oh, that came out wrong. I do not condone violence, okay?