Pain Case

Part VI

The night caresses

the moon rises to meet me

one purpose alone

I hear the wind rustle through the trees and my country's call come at last.  I have killed 245 people world wide since my induction into this sacred order.  It's been 45 years that I have faithfully served my country and my empire with this device and it has been upgraded and enhanced over the years as well as granted me an eternal youth.  I have been most honored by my divine leaders.

They've informed me, however that tonight ends my necessity and with this, the end of my assignment and usefulness.  My last target is my maker who is now 83 years old and has also lived a wonderful life due to his involvement in this program.  It is said that he has been ordered to keep his honor by burying this program with his body, however, he is a coward and refuses to die with dignity.

"不名誉な," I mutter aloud.

In any case, I will give him the honorable death whether he wants it or not.  I think this as I watch him from the branch of his maple outside of his window.  He sleeps soundly with the lights on and using my enhancements, I can even hear him snoring.

I enter his room through the window and make no sound.  I raise my sword to end his life...

ためらい

What holds me back from my duty and honor?  What is this feeling in my soul?  A mix of programming perhaps?  A subroutine written in by him?

"お父さんを目覚めさせる!" I say with impatience.

He wakes up slowly and barely coherent.  I tell him that I want to give him the opportunity to accept a noble death.

"死は恥ずべきである,"  He said to me.

The anger and shame towards him built with in me.  My rage began to burn my soul and my clearheaded became clouded.  With one swift cut, I sliced through his neck.  The cut was so clean he managed to say one last thing before he died.

He said, "私は私の息子、あなたを愛しています。"

My heart might have sank but I was committed to what I did next.  I plunged my 脇差 into my chest.  Without the assistance of a second, I would have to wait to die.  I felt the blood leave me and imagined my marks.  As the light slowly left, I felt at peace in the darkness.

絶望

I awoke to feel what was not living and was not death.  The machines within me had brought me back to life but I no longer felt the pumping of blood.  I no longer felt my heart.  I no longer thought of memories besides the ones I'd had tonight.  I can not remember my mother's face and barely remember what mother or father means.

They took my life.  There is no honor anymore.  I have been programmed to kill and torture.  I did this for my country but I feel no sympathies anymore.  I feel the need to burn down the world.  Damn them for this emptyness.  Damn them for my lost soul.  Damn them to the hell I will send them to when I have made a plan.

I leave for New York City tonight.  It's time to make a plan to destroy their power and hurt them completely. 

In death my soul left

my nightmare awakened me

complete destruction.

Pain Case

Part V

I've been following the news for weeks and hardly slept a full night. Jesus Christ, have I really lost it.

Anything that could explain this odd conversion of mine.  The military discharged me after the mid 70's when they saw that I wasn't aging.  Something about, "We've played god and now it's up to you to right our wrong."  They still won't tell me what that wrong is but I'm going to find the mother fuckers that did this to me and make sure they get theirs.

The mid 80's were a hoot and gave me some time to cool off.  Designer drugs were kind to me as the cocaine era of the 70's only agitated my condition.  Often times I'd find after a coke binge that I had become covered in someone else's blood while the bodies would just vanish.  My wife left me during this era.  She said I wasn't the man she'd fallen in love with any more.  She said I was almost machine like and had some how drastically changed since that fateful blackout in 1965.

Luck was on the horizon though through a man named Shultz.  Shultz was a military shrink and had been with me since '68.  Sometimes I thought he might have been the reason I was covered in blood but he seemed to know how to... well... program me; if that makes any sense.  The horrible things I must have done in that man's name and couldn't remember a damn thing had me up late reading news articles from thousands of sources, some, simultaneously in my head.  I knew I would find something; some one; maybe even another with this bionic eye type device who was having similar reactions to me.  It was the mid 90's before I finally got a hit.

I remember I was scanning photos and then there it was.  In the background of a local jewelry shop opening, there was a man whose left eye seemed to glow a little that was too preternatural to be a glare.  On what little I had, I shredded my military issue debit card and bought a one way to New York City.  I left a note on  old Shultzee's desk telling him that I thought I might have found purpose.

I didn't know it then but he had apparently phoned HQ that night and told them I flew the coop.  I was doomed before I started but not if I could get to them first.  The assault would be much grander with two of us with this purpose.  I was ready to fight.

Pain Case

Part IV:

I imagine that if there are any others in my position, they very likely ask themselves what a new found sadist does with himself after vengeance?  Well, I'll tell you what he does, exactly what his фигня country tells him to do until his фигня country decides to retire him and he becomes a ghost.

I imagine many ex KGB feel the way I felt when they told me my job was over and that I was scheduled for execution due to the danger factor of keeping me alive.

"мудак!" I shouted over and over again to no avail from my cell.

For years, I had done things like calculate the depth of an incision to slowly remove skin from a persons body, in varying sections; I had calculated the exact position of nerve endings so as to cut every one so quickly that a person would experience indescribable pain before telling me and my government everything they needed to know before I disposed of him anyway.  Not many people know what it is to cut out a voice box with frightening speed and accuracy while denying the person the quick, "bleed to death" courtesy.  Better still, not many people know what it's like to have electrical impulses screwing with your moral compass to the point you enjoy said activities.

It was a Wednesday when they came for me.  Hump day.  Oh did I have fun with that one.

The guard was a педик.  I could tell from his intonation and the way he carried himself.  He didn't know that I knew and he made himself that much more macho in order that he might disguise his perversion as he dealt with me and my rather handsome form each day.

"Эй педик! Приходите дать мне минет!" I taunted from my cell.

He now knew that I knew and I counted on that.  In his fit of rage, he came to beat me and called for back up to hold me down.

"Собираетесь ли вы попробовать и ебать меня, педик?" I said.  I taunted more because the more pressure he applied to me, the more pressure I had to break the cuffs I had on and flick the metal at the light in the enclosed cell to do my work.

As the light smashed and went out, I grabbed his night stick and impaled the other guard from the bottom of his chin and out the top of his head.  I made sure I hit as many nerve endings as I could and also to miss the major arteries and veins so he might have knowledge of my act and even a little pain in the few seconds he had as he gargled his last breath.

In that same instant I had rapped Маленькая фея on the head so he had now passed out.

As I watched them both with night vision, the silence and darkness gave me an idea.  I tilted the impaled guard's head back and drove the stake into the wall. With his cuffs, I cuffed the other guard behind his back and pulled down his pants.  With his utility knife I cut off the impaled guard's phallus and ran it through with a pointed, whittled down night stick I grabbed from his utility belt.  I then rammed that into the анус of the passed out guard.

With their blood, I wrote on the walls, "For god and country.  I am your best.  Now I am free, Мать Россия ..."

That night, I would travel to America and let them know of what had been done to me and perhaps gain use and freedom through the defection.

I was wrong. America is no freer to the weaponized killer and ex compatriot that the Russians want for war crimes.  I was like the toy in the common phrase, "Мальчики и их игрушки ..."  

Fuck it.  It wasn't like this old Ruskie didn't know how to hide...

A Devil's Raid

At the top of a hill, we descended from land toward the small bay of the city built into the steppes.  While our warships waited in the harbor for a quick getaway; as catapulted heated rocks with flaming pitch at the poorly built defenses.  There was no military importance to this town.  The whores were none existent but the aristocratic women were more exquisite than any whore and were far more pleasurable as well.  There's no corrupting a whore but an eloquent girl of 15 from a finely adorned enemy's nobility?  Well, there's no joy greater than his pain.

I remember the whites and blues of those walls.  The steps toward the ocean were made of marble and my sword cracked open so many skulls, leaving fragments of bone and blood on the walls.  My men were the immoral lecturers but I on the other hand took greater pleasure, sexual and other wise, from turning a man, woman or whoever happened to cross my path, into a corpse.  War is hell, or so they say, but I could not help but enjoy the empowerment of causing death.  From this raid, we would get much gold and food and in the process, we would kill pagans who had no right to his good graces in the first place.

It sickened me how the blue banners flew from their window sills and how opulent this trade city had become from the ignorance to death and pain.  I remember slitting the throat of a boy no older than twelve to stain a banner adorned with a pagan god for the simple sake of turning it red with blood.  As the angel of death did with the first born of Egypt, so too did I do to these people that day.  Their door frames were painted red with their own blood as lambs to the slaughter.

The thick black fog swirled around in the half circle shape of the town that led to the bay.  It stunk of hell but cleansed like heaven.  God's judgement on these people was swift and absolute and we had no problem with their slaughter.  "Pirates," they called us; "Barbars!" They said.  And each one who uttered such blasphemy was put to the sword one by one and God saved no one.

I felt the heat as we neared the ships and smelled the stink of the pitch burning live bodies who struggled to get it off them.  It is pathetic to see a grown man screaming to have his skin scraped off rather than burned off as it were.  In my mercy, I slaughtered many who the fire licked with arrows and simple cuts from my sword.

The walls were blue and white, now they were red; The town was alive up and down the houses built into a hill that from far off, more than likely represented the stadium seating of a Greek theater. Now it was dead.  With confidence and the wretched love of the slaughter, I breathed in the smell of death and lived a little before the hunger began to lap at me like a ragged mange.

I ran back up into the hill and found survivors until behind a corner, I felt a knife drive deep into my chest.  I turned around and laughed.  I began to laugh heartily at the boy of seventeen who now backed into a corner in sheer terror until he began to grab for his knife as if to stab me again.

"What's your name, boy?" I bellowed.
"iben tal-bniedem," He said.
"Today, you've met the devil and I've brought hell with me."

I removed the knife from my chest and licked the sweet blood.  My head began to shift into that of a dog resembling a doberman.  I ate the boy and chewed on his flesh in that tiny little room, on the island nation.  I used his collar bone to pick my teeth as I descended the steppes and climbed aboard the boat.  I noticed a few new troops aboard my boat and I noticed that many of the men we looking a bit lifeless.

"Captain!" I said, summoning my head of the guard, "Throw some of our oldest soldiers to the waters when we get far enough out.  Only enough to cover the replacements to our horde.

The Death of the lucky rich

At the end of the rainbow, there's a place where the Leprechauns meet to discuss the future of wealth and luck. We've all heard of the pot o' gold and the luck of the Irish but those are both metaphors for the wealth that this council of little green men control. It's from this table at the end of the rainbow that they decide who gets the wealth and the luck and who does not. Recently, I feel that the council has lost sight of the good they used to do. Something had to change.

Leprechaun’s are fae (fairies) and fae are gods: creatures in charge of something just as Hestia was in charge of the hearth and Thor was in charge of thunder. They guide such things and control them through means beyond that which any human can understand. God? One thing that created the universe? It's mythology for the gullible. What people don't understand is that many things made the universe and many things control it. It's not as simple as an umbrella figure but fuck's sake if it were only that easy.

Most of us know about the others or are at least aware that something else could exist, but we differ in our responsibilities and reasons. Some might view me as a god of dogs because I am immortal and all dogs directly descend from the canis lupus or the wolf, but I am not as lucky as all that. God or no God, I have never been as lucky as the movies portray my kind.

The vampires, descended from aristocracy and humpers of their own family, were cursed by the gods for their wretched concentration of power and wealth (not to mention greed beyond comprehension to the point that their blood thinned and it was a fitting and almost biological punishment that they should have to drink to keep their blood strong. However, do to the royal money and greed, they do not suffer the common man's eyes over the centuries like I do. A Were in a movie seems to never worry about money. Somehow they all have it and they're all educated and the immortals have amassed enough wealth that they never speak of working at a corner store for minimum wage. HA! It's right where the Leprechaun’s would want me. It’s bad enough that they can barely control the vampires over the centuries by toppling the monarchical system.

I drone on about my pathetic little world, so I suppose I'll get to the night it happened. The gatherings are always after a full hearted rain when the air is crisp with moisture and a cool breeze blows to clear the clouds. At the end of the broken sunlight trail, in a clearing in the same place as always, there's the rainbow's end and a pot of gold that never runs dry. Within this pot is all the wealth in the world that ever was or ever will be. Each coin represents pieces of a fortune monetary or otherwise that the council will bestow on certain people. They are outside of time and space and therefore they could review everyone in the world at the same time and nobody would be able to tell that meetings take place at lengths of days or weeks or sometimes years. Wolves can't enter their realm unless one of them has been caught and we have the key.

One of them was caught alright; one of them was torn to pieces as I had intended to do with the rest. Mankind had become so formulaic that bestowing wealth was far too easy and the council had to be stopped. I remember running in wolf form, with the key draped from my jaw, towards the edge of a cliff at the edge of the world in the grassy plains of Ireland. The conditions were perfect and the rainbow ran right off the edge. As the dew and mist stung my face like thousands of tiny pine needles, I ran with the speed of the Windigo and leapt from the cliff towards the rocks below.

The next I noticed, I was in the forest next to the pot of gold and I was naked and back to human form. Ahead of me were shrubs that grew as tall as redwoods and made two almost covered paths to the table of gifts. The meeting had already begun and they had gathered the water vapors to the center of the table to peer in on the world of the humans. The Leprechaun’s liked to pretend like life was "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" and thus they designed this dungeon of real power to resemble the idea that what they did was only following the natural course of human free will. The wrong path would take you in circles, while the right one took you to the table of gifts. Ironic that the right path turned out to be literally the right path. It was designed that way to show you that there is definitely a wrong path; self-righteous, arrogant, pricks.

I walked into the meeting with stealth so that I made no sound and announced absolutely no presence but they knew I was there and what I was the moment I entered. This was their realm and they showed no fear. Why would they fear? They weren't warriors; their weapon was fortune. Lucky me that fortune favors the bold. As if to prove my wretched boldness, I moved with speed the human eye could not perceive but with speed that they could almost match. Almost but not quite. As I said, they're business men, not war lords and wolves are hunters, not business savvy purveyors of wealth. The advantage to assassination was on my side.

As I finish wounding them to incapacitate movement, I began my address.

"Thousands of years I've watched you shape the fortune of this world into its oblivion. I have never had your luck on my side and never cared to as I carry my own like all preternatural creatures. However, I have seen the greed of the wealthy grow, in some cases, beyond even your control and as you are no longer needed and your 'balance' is proven to be broken, it has come time that you all be retired."

"Ya dannae what ya do, boy," said a Leprechaun. "We be the last line of defense against the most corrupt of your world."

"I know that's what you say and we both know immortality. Beyond that, I'd say the playground has us both as children grasping at straws. There was a point that they were not but mortals who depended on us but you lost control as did many of the higher realms."

"There's a way for everything to..."

Their cries barely echoed for an instant and in that moment, incapacitated and unable to use the powers they had, even the basic ones like accelerated movement, I feel like they knew what it meant to be powerless to your fate, just as I had seen in the humans of the day. Those who they had doomed because they had given gifts to a CEO who had the course of his life mapped out till he took control from them and began wrecking all those in his way. I had watched it and now they could feel it: helpless and now headless.

There is only one way to kill an immortal. That way is to decapitate him. Anything less is only going to make him mad. There are some out there that even decapitation doesn't work on but everything is cleansed with fire at the end. It's difficult to set a fire with dew all around you but I came prepared and along with burning their table, I burned all of them in the center of it.

It's a beautiful thing, Justice. That's what happened that day and it felt wonderful. It felt vindicating: holding the leprechaun heart in my hands. The bloody limp organ like a diminished ego dripping with gold flakes. Ha! How pathetic and cliché that in our world, a stupid saying like "Riches are in our blood" would be literal. The last sigh of a dying creature comes so much quicker when its gargling its own blood. I'd so hoped it would be more dramatic: this death scene but it was quick and brutal and over in the blink of an eye.

It was fitting. The end of money married to luck was over in an instant but outside, the walls began to fall. countries fought wars and within the states, anarchy ran rampant. The wealth staggered and everyone became nervous. That nervousness lead to civil war and the war led to the end of capitalism as we know it but that's a story for another day.

The three little (Mobster) Pigs

It’s a rough world for an animal, especially when there’s so much competition.  You got Tommy the rat, Snoop the dog, Charley the squirrel, Don the stool pigeon, and about a hundred other wise guys gunning for one thing, their own damn hides.  The unspoken rule though, is nobody talks to the cops.  Those wolves would rather eat you than give you your due process.  I can’t blame ‘em on account of our revolving door prison system but hey! That’s just LA.

To begin my “tale of woe,” I’ll just tell you right off the bat I’m telling it posthumously.  In other words, I’m dead kids; nails in the coffin, six feet under dead.  I hate it when wise guys tell a story where they make you guess whether they got knocked off and you know the truth of the matter; they did.  You found the fucking bloody manuscript at their desk, you know they’re dead but they add this unnecessary drama to make their story more exciting and leave it on their desk when you come to shoot them between the fucking eyeballs.  Meh, what do I know about writing, I’m a fucking pig.

Freddy the Pig.  I run a butcher shop and a couple other businesses around town with my two brothers, Eddy and Teddy.  I know what you’re thinking about the rhyming names and this being a story book tale but forget it.  Fredrick, Edward and Theodore were our god given names and the rest is for street credit and appearance of a united front.  Our last names?  Prosciutto.  Together they call us the three little pigs because of account we make our money in pounds of flesh.

I remember the night I died clear as crystal.  Eddy was working down town at the butcher’s shop; Teddy was around the corner at the packaging plant and me?  Well I was across town at the slaughterhouse.  The wolves had our scent and they were out for blood on account of Teddy being a dumb mother fucker and killing a cop.  I had the body at the plant and along with some pig and cow intestines was ready to turn it into beef bologna.

Inspector Mike Wolfe was on duty that night and he had rounded up a posy of LA’s finest to take all of us three in for racketeering, armed robbery, various organized crimes and multiple accounts of murder.  Wolfe was the kind of guy who mirrored guys like Wyatt Earp and Rooster Cogburn.  You either gave up or got shot up and Eddy knew it when he heard the knock.

They hit Eddy first.  Pure little Eddy was no problem at all.  He didn’t even have a leg to stand on, on account of the doors at 1^st and Main being made of glass.  It was 11 o’ clock; closing time and Eddy had just locked up. He was cleaning behind the door when he heard the knock.

“Eddy the pig!”

No response from Eddy as he cowered behind the meat case in fear.

“EDDY THE PIG!” said Officer Wolfe louder this time and with agitation in his voice and his finger on his trigger.

“Look, Eddy, we can do this the easy way.  You open the door and I arrest you or we can do it the hard way where I have to blow the door down.”

Still no response from Eddy.

Wolfe stood back from the door and fired two shots into it, shattering the glass and giving him about three steps between him and the meat case.  Eddy got off a round directly into Wolfe’s vest but it was too late because Wolfe always shot for the head.  After the shots had been fired by those two men and Eddy was on the floor, all hell broke loose. Those cops ate him up as they sprayed the meat case till there was probably nothing left of Eddy when they heard Wolfe’s yelling, “Hold your fire, ya mooks!”

They took a lot into evidence and then a small contingent of them moved on down the road to Teddy.

They came up to the establishment with sirens blazing and lights on.  They wanted Teddy to know they had come for him.  This was not meant to be a blood bath but it had to be.  Teddy wasn’t one of us three little pigs to just lie down and take it.  That’s why I had the dead body of a cop ready to be turned into lunch meat.

Knocking on the wooden door to the processing plant, Teddy was sure he was safe.  Wood is stronger than glass and he had about 6 pad locks on it between him and that Wolfe.

“Teddy the pig!”

“Suck my big, fat dick you scuzzle butt, hairy faced whore, Wolfe!”

“Teddy, that hurts my feelings but you will open the door… even if I have to blow this place up!” said Wolfe.

Readying a Browning M2 that he mounted on the railing, Teddy was ready to obliterate anything that came through that door.

“Teddy, I know the kind of toys you like to play with and this place you’re holed up in is made of sticks compared to what I got for it,” said Wolfe

Teddy drew back on the lock to load the machine gun and said, “You hear that?  That’s a fucking browning M2, Wolfe.  You come near the inside of this place and I’m going to roll you like barrel full of nothing!”

“Teddy, I think we got you out gunned out here.  I got some heavy duty stuff.  You sure you want to do this dance again?”

Teddy knew Wolfe on a personal account of five years prior when Wolfe had gotten shot in the leg and Teddy still had a bullet lodged in his shoulder somewhere near the tendon.  In this moment, Teddy thought about that night and made the conscious decision to shoot first.  It was glorious!  If it had been a movie, you would have heard, “Ode to Joy” while chunks of brick and mortar spat out at the wall of police officers like hundreds of arrows flying over the battlefield of some ancient china man’s war. 

You could see that even though the smoke grenades went into the building and the grenade grenades blew away the cat walk that vicious Teddy the pig stood on, he kept shooting all the way to the ground. The cops bodies were riddled with bullets and pieces of them littered the meat packing plant’s floor till the animal parts and these wolves parts were indistinguishable.

The alpha Wolfe, however was unscathed.  He had let his men go in and gotten not a scratch on him.  As he looked about at the men lying on the floor in pieces, he came over to Teddy’s body, which at this point was laughing and choking on the blood that gurgled out of his shot up body.  The Wolfe in his rage, drew his knife from his utility belt, cut the broken bullet proof vest from Teddy’s front and stuck the knife into Teddy’s gut like a stuck pig.  Teddy, all that time, continued to laugh in Mike’s face and spit his blood all over Mike Wolfe’s snout until Mike twisted the knife and Teddy the pig was no more.

It was my turn at last.  The last little pig and the boss little pig.  I was the smart one; the most animal of them all because I could maximize my death toll without the destruction.  My door was made from solid steel on account of this being a slaughterhouse and the meat needed to be immediately chilled.

Wolfe wouldn’t knock on this door.  Even if he did, he knew I wouldn’t hear the response and his words wouldn’t get through the raw metal.  So he called the plant’s phone, hoping he could reason with me and avoid as many casualties as Teddy cost him.

“Hello?” I said

“Freddy, it’s Mike Wolfe.  Your brothers are dead and we have your place surrounded.  Your brother cost me a lot of men and as you’re the boss, I’m sure you can cost me just as much.  So let’s both be smart, I know you didn’t kill that cop and the one who did is already dead.  You can beat the charges so why don’t we just talk after you let me in.”

I heard his words and part of me was scared but the dominant part wanted revenge for my flesh and blood that the Wolfe and his Wolves had killed.  It was that part that uttered in rage, “not by the hairs on my mother fucking chin, you dick!”

From the other end of the line, I heard, “Ok, take it out, before the door blew open with the force of C4.  Cops in riot gear came flooding in as I hid in an office on the first floor.

Mike Wolfe, also dressed in armor, yelled out on the factory floor, “little pig, little pig where are you?”

They taunted us, I suppose, on account of all the “good cops” we’d taken from them.  I didn’t give a Tommy the rat’s ass.

“Come and get me you shit cop!”

“Fan out!”

25 cops accompanied Mike Wolfe that night and 10 of them I wounded and 15 of them I killed using Gurkha tactics I’d learned while I was stationed in Burma during the war.  You see, Eddy had no idea what he was doing so he used this little snub nose P.O.S. to protect himself; Teddy knew what he was doing but with Teddy is was always a light show.  The boy liked big toys because he thought he was invincible.  Me?  Well I knew the trick to mass slaughter was deception, sneaking and a knife with a sharp edge.  It was ironic that my life should be ended by another knife just like Teddy’s was.

                When the backup arrived, Mike Wolfe was cleaning off his blade and intensely staring at my Kukri. Officer Roger Cub from the 5^th precinct stood with him and, disgusted caught a glimpse of my blade.

“I’ve never seen such an un-American piece of garbage as this knife, have you?” said officer Cub

“Got the job done,” said Wolfe tossing it at my corpse.

“What are you going to tell the papers about how you lost 22 cops tonight?” said officer Cub.

“The story of the Prosciutto brothers… The story of the three little pigs,” said Officer Wolfe.

Pain Case

                                             Part III:


My soul is quiet
my body retaliates
yet, I feel nothing.

In my training, I have acquired certain skills that make me trained to kill with precision and indecision for the betterment of the empire of the sun.  I will deny my existence to those who catch me and would rather die with honor than sell out my country.  Therefore, in the eyes of the world, I work alone and with only myself to blame for the destruction I cause.

To kill someone in a tortuous way, one simply needs to cut the cerebellum from the nervous system at the bottom of the skull in the back.  This can be accomplished with a swiss army knife but I would hardly debase my skills by using something so primitive.  This is why my government has honored me with a physical upgrade, they call an ocular implant.  All of a sudden I was able to move quicker and know the heartbeat of time and space myself...

In one beat of my own heart, my movements could match and overcome that of an inferior foe and everyone became inferior.

To initialize my story, I will tell you of my very first mission.  As I said before, a small knife, inserted at the bottom of the neck and twisted will sever all nerves and cause instant paralysis as one begins to watch as their lungs and heart stop working.  Depending on the point of insertion...  But death is not the best choice for getting information.  To do that, you want a similar instrument but less of an instrument of laceration and more for puncture.  You want a nerve toxin.

The night was quiet as I remember and the sweet stink of cherry blossoms filled the air in Shinjuku park. He sat on the bench waiting nervously for a friend that he would never meet with.  I waited in the shadow of a Himalayan Cedar for the best cover I could muster.  As time ploded on like a Brahmin walking on coals, I realized the target would never show and with my enhancement, I calculated a trajectory that put my needle into his spine in a shorter time than it would have taken him to stand up.

As I dropped the plunger he did not have the time or sufficient power to scream before I pulled him back into the tree leaving an undisturbed vignette. The nerve toxin incapacitated him in a fraction of a second as it coursed directly into the CNS and PNS control center.  He was not only paralysed but, as I had injected it close to the man's reticular formation, I imagine he instantly fell asleep.

We meander the quiet corridors of the blackened abyss and come to a light in the base of a dismal abode.  I strap him to a chair and calculate pressure and amounts of pain a body can endure, determined in synaptic impulses, before he dies or loses consciousness.  The equations are complex but I have been given the brain of a computer to complete the necessary details.  It's so easy as I throw him in a rusted out shell and fill it with salt water.

"Eventually, you will die here Mr. Hisagi, but first you will tell me a few things.  First, Why you wish to alert the Americans of our remilitarization? And second, why you are such a dishonored scum to betray your own people?"

"PLEASE! I..."

"黙れ 豚！."

He remains quiet as the ballet begins.  In my mind, I hear the beauty of war; the sound of cannons, both musical and explosive, and the screams of people shouting "no," as my ancestors have bayonets rammed into their guts by white men who know nothing of honor.

"檜佐木さん," I continue, "You do not deserve the luxury of a true Japanese name, therefore, I will call you Mr. Smith."

He begins weeping like a little girl as I cut the first shallow slice into his skin with speed so swift and shadows so dark, it seems no more than a blur from the darkness to him.  I see the room as clearly as day with my upgrade and ask him with condescension, "Mr Smith, who is your contact to the United states?"

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

"We know who you are and we know what you've taken."

"I took nothing! I am only a low level government employee.  I serve papers but I never would observe anything!"

"A small concession.  We're making progress!"

Swiftly I cut two more lacerations in his skin as the salt water begins to seep in and burn him with malevolence.  The upgrade has given me the ability to be so far detached from the moral compass I used to have that I find it splendid for things like a quick torture case.  For a second, my lesser faculties take hold and I ponder what the other superpowers would do with such technology, the Americans?  Their old cold war rival, the Russians?  This is surely the greatest technology to be achieved in an arms war since nuclear weapons were discovered and Japan is the victor, not those two arrogant fatheads.

As I circled him like a cloud circles earth waiting to send forth its lightening retribution.

"名前..."

"ごめんなさい！私は知らない！"

"You will tell me Hisagi san.  You see? I can be kind if you let me.  I give you your name back in exchange for hers."

"How did you know?"

"So it's a she?"

"NO! I misspoke! I know nothing."

Two strikes of lightning and the cloudy salt water in the tub tints red.  I observe his facial fluctuations.  I sense his pulse, I smell his fear and I begin to determine the answers I seek myself.

"So the girl, I assume she's close to you."

His pulse goes up and I hold my hand and dagger as I circle and determine his lies.

"...Very close?"

He gasps in a small, inaudible shock.

So, is she family? A girlfriend? a spouse?

All of a sudden, he goes calm and I can not read him.  I sense that he is beginning to use the pain as a crutch.

[So you are surely Japanese] I think to myself.

I have figured it out, Mr. Hisagi, you are no longer needed.  It is your wife, Mrs. Hisagi.

His pulse lifts and he begins to stir.

"...But how?  How did you know?  What kind of demon are you whose eye glows read and who moved with such speed and agility that even a ninja could only hope to imitate?"

"I knew because you just told me and beyond that?  I knew it was someone close and even with your level of concentration and training, you are not impervious to lie detectors such as me.  I see inside your head through your eyes and her image is imprinted in your brain to make you calm as well as the pain you use to enjoy your misery.  The yin and the yang defense cannot be broken by human beings but I am Japan.  I am her military now but I will give you one last courtesy for being strong as she has taught you to be."

Within an instant, my knife thrusts into his stomach and carves his chest open as my sword removes his head in one simple gesture.  One series of movements that eliminates unnecessary steps to become one movement calculated to precision.

As I leave the dilapidated apartment building, I wipe my instruments clean as a chef cleans his knives of gristle.  He died with honor.  I gave him that.  Now time to end his lineage with his Eve.