tw; graphic imagery/gore, death



My Father was a hopeful fan of this old poem. As a soldier deployed in the midst of the rise of meta-powers, or quirks, you could imagine fighting in a war was tantamount to fighting the evil that used those powers. Some people have fragile mindsets, and it doesn't take much for a simple superpower to make them think they're a divine being sent by God to revolutionise Japan by slaughtering dozens. He grew fed up with it, so after it was done he estranged his army, and came to his and my birthplace, Hokkaido, to raise me.

He was an Ainu. An Ainu diluted by Japanese blood over the years, sure, but still an Ainu to his core, a man incredibly in touch with his culture. I grew up in a town with likeminded people who held value for the practice of history, so I learned herbalism, survivalism, tracking, hunting— practically anything required of a huntsman from ancient times. But more importantly; my culture. Culture today is a thing that is valued in terms of tourism, and socialism. I never viewed it as such. Nobody likes being viewed as a living novelty item.

Hokkaido is a land of an endless winter, but it is home to incredible warmth. I grew to love cooking. The grandmothers loved the help in the kitchens. I hunted when permitted, and grew saddened when I'd crossed everything off my list. Maybe when I earned enough money, I could go to Russia or China, and hunt there too. But a week after my seventeenth birthday, my father gave me his hunting knife and a photo of my mother, and left the town to fight another battle he was enlisted in. I didn't see him again. He said mother abandoned us at birth. Perhaps she wanted to be spared the grief of his inevitable death.

As a youth with no income and status, and apparent with idiocy, I ignored my father's warnings and enlisted, having nowhere else to turn to. Who knew? Maybe I'd meet him again on the battlefield— in death, that was.

I trained for a couple years. I received my first and only warning for shattering a superior officer's jaw when he tried to take my matanpushi off. I learnt Russian. I received a reputation based on my impulsiveness for roughhousing with the other soldiers— whether good intentioned or not is up to interpretation. Tensions grew on China's border with Russia. The other soldiers learned to stop screwing with me. I finished my training. Chinese guerillas started a war with Russia. I was deployed.

I was selected to be a translator for Russian and Japanese soldiers. From what we, the division deployed to help its Russian allies, understood, guerillas from China insisted on sparking its age-old war with Russia once more, and stealing some of their territory. Being guerillas, they were illegal, and therefore used quirks in illegal warfare. Shit I didn't bother to understand. What did it matter when you were burdened with the knowledge that you had to kill people just the same as you? I only got to hunt one bear before I was on the front lines. At least my comrades thought it tasted good.

Squash the revolution. Try not to die, even if your enemy was using a quirk. I had killed animals before. What about humans was so different? Their screams. One, two, three, four. I stab one man through the heart with my father's hunting knife. I gouge another's eyes out. I shoot one man, and the bullet hits another behind him. Five, six, seven, eight. A single grenade makes bloody carnage and meat from a group of soldiers. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. It feels like a dream. Eventually, I stop counting, genuinely wondering if I had already died and was enduring an endless nightmare as due by my sins.

I am due to storm a construction alongside my comrades. Orders; leave the wounded, but kill any armed persons. I am already stained in blood, and their screams accentuate the art painted on my body. I have already died, and question what drives my undead body. Or perhaps, there was no drive to protect, but a drive to kill, born from a hunter's instinct?

The last body falls to the floor, my knife in their sternum, and I am no longer human. A single child watches me heave for oxygen, and the colour of her hair reflects the colour I am painted in. But there is no colour in her gaze as I kneel before her, asking her if she can stand. I ask her name, and she does not respond. She is conscious, but she does not see. I pick her up.

"What do you plan on doing with her?" A soldier asks as we leave.

"China won't want her." I reply. "I'm taking her back."

"Surely that's illegal?"

"It doesn't matter. She deserves a home." I look back at the red-painted walls of the building. "Hers isn't here."

---

When I return home with the child in tow, I am so inhuman that I have come full circle. My mania born from sin alludes me into who I was before the war, and whatever inhumane personality inside me is locked away when I see the child. She has seen humanity, a monster at its worse, but I realise that she cannot see that— when I arrive in my town and see the village elders and the running children, it’s like whatever was hollow inside her has had new life breathed into it. Perhaps, purely out of the safety of her sanity, she has chosen to forget me slaying her own parents.

It is likely for the best.

China had a strict policy with children. Those in poverty, even more strict. Those born from wartime, even more so. With the grandmothers needing a new child to fuss over and children to play with, Chiharu would fit in more than she ever would back in her home country. Whilst I am sure she was happy in the village, she shone ever more brightly so when I taught her the ways of the Ainu, and when we hunted in the snow stricken mountains, disappearing for weeks on end.

Chiharu has breathed life into her life, and so has she to mine. Whatever wenkamuy inside me that still stalks the battlefield searching for its next victim stays there whilst she is with me. Though I know, eventually she will believe me not to be her father, and the purity of her life will be lost when she looks into her roots. When that does happen, I hope she will understand that there is nothing more in the world that I love more than my little bear.