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Sora wakes with pain.
She aches in a dozen different places from a dozen different wounds that have since healed over.
Here, on her chest, a stony Choujin shattered each and every rib.
Here, on her thigh, an acid-secreting Choujin corroded her flesh to the bone.
Here, on her neck, a bladed Choujin slit her throat.
(It goes without saying that she killed each and every one of them.)
Sora explores the geography of her flesh. Her Choujin nature ensures that there is no mark anywhere on her body, but the pain lingers like an invisible scar.
She remembers a time when that was not the case, but it is a distant memory, glimpsed through foggy glass.
It was a time before Queem, before her Choujin awakening, before the world became so much bigger and brighter and louder and harder. It was a time when the world was only ever as big as the convent and the garden outside her window. It was a time of innocence.
Beyond the flap of her tent, her commander’s quarters in this military tent city, she hears the shrill sound of an air raid siren.
Another day of killing. Another day of pain.
She prays to God that it will end.
Her jet black harpe carves off the lizard man’s tail. He cries out in pain before the blade finds him again. He gasps, whimpers, but does not cry out. He doe not have the chance. The blade has pierced his chest and stopped his heart before he can belt out a death rattle or a prayer.
She likes to think God will welcome even this lizard man into His kingdom, that he has been lead astray by Queem’s oddly persuasive heresies and all will be forgiven.
Smoke and blood cling to her form and burrow into her nostrils. It smells like finality.
The battle continues to rage around her, but it is largely a formality. She hears Antitise, a savage man of savage pleasures, howling in excitement as he and his braves storm the terrified mortal men in the last machine gun nest on this lonely stretch of road. There is no longer any need for her sickle sword today.
She sinks to her knees in prayer for the dead Choujin. She prays out of compassion for his wasted life and his departed soul. She prays even though she knows on some deeper level that he has already received a kind of blessing.
His pain is at an end.
Kagomura is speaking.
Sora conjures a rose of iron and turns it over in her hand. She concentrates on its shape, its weight. Something to take her mind off of the dull agony, constant and sharp, like a dozen knives being driven into her skin.
Kagomura is speaking again.
She fumbles, cuts her left thumb on the hard edge of the iron rose, and glances down at the fresh red. Pain again. Pain now. Pain forever.
“Lady Sora.”
Oh, right, Kagomura was saying something, wasn’t he?
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was a million miles away. What did you want to talk about?”
“We lost two more of our Choujin soldiers today.”
“I will pray for them.”
Kagomura shifts uncomfortably. So unlike him, who stands ramrod straight and speaks in a clipped, cordial tone at all times. She knits her eyebrows together in such a way that she conveys curiosity without speaking aloud.
“I… I know it is against your faith.”
“To pray for our fallen?” She is more curious and more bewildered than ever. She prays for every soldier, both ally and enemy. What could the swordsman possibly mean?
“To pray for suicides.”
The seconds threaten to tick away into infinity.
Then Kagomura starts speaking again.
“The two that we lost today… they did not die by enemy action. They walked arm-in-arm into a napalm fire.”
“And that was enough to kill them?”
She hopes that her voice does not betray her jealousy.
She kneels before the shattered cross of this devastated church.
How wonderful that He would arrange things just to ensure that she found this place of solace just as her faith began to waiver. Praise Him.
How foolish she was. Of course she suffered, just as the Son suffered. God does not place any obstacle in her path that she cannot overcome. She will overcome this–this pain, this doubt, this war.
She must.
She must.
Must she?
The battle she fights today is not on the battlefield, not after Queem’s latest retreat, but in the medical tent.
She goes to the wounded.
(They are not Choujin, but that goes without saying. Choujin like her and Antitise and Kagomura do not stay wounded for long.)
She prays for them. She aids the nurses in feeding those who cannot feed themselves, dressing their wounds, scrubbing away their burned and tortured flesh. Some of them scream. Some of them weep. A few of them even thank her.
One man, eyeless and faceless, begs her. Not for her blessing or her smile or her kiss, as is common.
He begs her for more morphine.
Anything to take away the pain.
She should tell him to sleep and to pray. She should do a great many things.
Instead, she goes to a doctor in a blood-spattered gown and asks him for morphine for the faceless man.
Her smile is beatific. Her grace is boundless. Her reputation is spotless. Of course the good doctor trusts her.
The morphine for the eyeless man goes into her veins not even an hour later.
In the dead of night, with eyes sharper than even her sickle sword, Sora spies a tank crawling across the river on fleshy legs instead of tank treads.
He thinks to ambush her in the night? How quaint
So the spider-tank is the form he has taken today. Perhaps his stinging defeat in their last battle has humbled him. Perhaps he no longer trusts in the shape of the many-armed bomber that killed a young girl who awoke as the next Choujin X.
She smiles.
She smiles because she knows the end is close at hand.
She has seen it in her dreams at night. Oh, what a wondrous night. A night with visions of victory, a night without pain, a night of medicinal bliss.
Indeed, God has given her all the tools she needs to succeed.A body of immortal vigor, a sword of mortality, and a fistful of ampules waiting for her back in her tent.
Victory today and bliss tonight.
It will not be the final victory, her dream vision whispers, but it will bring her closer than ever before.
Praise Him for giving her all the tools she could ever need to end this terrible man and this horrible pain.
Surely, this is what He intended.
Surely, God would not have allowed the poppy to grow in His garden if He had not intended for His children to drink of its milk.
Praise Him in His infinite wisdom.