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“What are you?”
“I don’t quite understand what you’re asking. Could you be a bit clearer? Do you want to know my name? Or are you asking what kind of person I am?”
Ethan, left all alone in Belphirn.
And the strange woman who found him.
“Humans really aren’t that smart these days, are they?”
“Hah, what would a mercenary like me know about being smart… Wait—did you just say ‘humans these days’? What’s that supposed to mean? Are you saying you’re not human? Or are you some different kind of human?”
“If I had to explain it, I guess you could call me an ancient human. After all… civilization has already collapsed once.”
Clouds drifted by even though there wasn’t a breath of wind. A blue sky that didn’t match the freezing air.
Ethan looked up at the sky where the clouds floated aimlessly and muttered.
“The sky… it’s fake.”
“It’s a 3D screen.”
It would have been better to just die and move on to the afterlife.
If he stayed here any longer, he was sure he’d lose his mind.
***
“Isn’t being alive reason enough to keep going? Do you really need more than that?”
His life was a desperate struggle, hers a life of surrender.
A life with no future, no past – just the present.
Living in the present, having given up everything, like a doll who knows nothing of the world.
And yet, a man like him — worthless, crawling through dirt and darkness — had the audacity to pity a woman the whole world admired.
As if he didn’t even know his place.
