Bullets From the Heart – Part 4

I didn’t want to write this morning.  I didn’t want to get up and go through the motions of putting words down onto paper.

I feel like such a fraud, working my butt off and getting terrible sleep in exchange.  I feel like nothing I ever write, or do, will ever accomplish anything.  It feels like I’m wading through thigh high mud without wading boots so that one day in the far distant future I don’t have to be so miserable.

I hate that here soon I have to collect my tiny human and spend the day working at a job where I am forbidden from doing literally anything to relieve the tedium.  I will quite literally have to throw myself into advancement just so that I can avoid being fired for trying to keep myself entertained between calls.

I hate that I constantly lie to myself and to all those around me by not doing or writing the things I say I will do or write.  It’s not even that I’m deliberately trying to misled them or myself.  Things just continue happening that I have no control over, and I have to deal with those things first.  Yet no one, not one person (including me) wants to hear any of that. 

It’s maddening.  And I don’t want anything further to do with it.  No excuses, no exceptions, no more apologies.

I’m awake, and I’ll damn well make the time for this.

Bullets From the Heart – Part 4

My world was nightmare and pain.  I saw through two sets of eyes, those of the sliver of my soul trapped within my korin, and with the half-lidded pain-riddled madness that were my physical pair.  I stared down at the gun in my hands, at mybeautiful, horrible korin.  It glowed softly, runes etched along it’s surface pulsing gently with the power of my own essence.  I wanted to vomit every meal I’d ever eaten.

I sat, pale skin covered in mud, heaving as silently as possible, and waited.  From where I was, I had a line of sight to my left and right, with the building between myself and my attacker.  They would have to come from either side to approach me, as I had enough building above me to keep that from being a solid approach angle. 

My hand shook, but still I waited.  Whomever was firing on me would have to advance eventually.  Korins were nightmarish weapons, but they didn’t function very well as siege devices.  The building was a significant barrier, and one that would need to be circumvented.  So I waited.

My eyes were scanning the approaches, which is why I was able to spot the grenade as it splorched into the mud to my right.  My eyes, lidded in pain and struggling with the dual vision of my gambit, widened in horrified shock.  That nasty bastard.  Plain old grenades would work marvelously, despite the cover I had gained.  I threw my korin aside, and made a mad dash for the grenade.  It hadn’t sunk in deeply, and I managed to get enough desperate energy behind my shaking hand to lob the thing a few dozen yards away. 

It exploded with a resounding boom, mud splaying forth like foam off the muzzle of a rabid dog.  My opponent happened to have been nearby, and they too had been forced to make a haphazard dodge away from the explosive.  I spied their location, and beat a hasty retreat for my slightly mud-coated weapon.  Touching the thing was new forms of torture, but I gripped it in slowly steadying hands.

I’d dealt with torture over my six hundred years.  I could deal with more.  I slipped and slid my way out the opposite side of my small nook, and raised the korin as it glowed ever brighter.  My attacker was still trying to rise.  The blast from the grenade must’ve dazed him or her.  I didn’t really care either way though.  All I cared about was not being the one to die this day. 

I fired.  The shard of my soul I’d placed into the sabotaged power core of the weapon simply exploded.  The korin went with it, erupting into a violent shower of purple and pink comets and shrapnel as it refused to handle the strain of a live soul, no matter how thinly sliced. 

The necromancer opposite me was hit by the blast, and where their left shoulder, chest, and the left side of their face had simply become a void of flesh, marked by a cylinder of impossible heat which had burned a clean disk out of their body.  They fell without making any further noise, their korin falling from limp fingers as the azure and teal of their weapons markings spewed incandescent colors into the night.  The souls trapped by the dead necromancers magic and will were making a bid for freedom.

I left them to it, as I was too busy losing consciousness to care about them overmuch.

To be continued…

Korinfully,
Justin