Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 19 - Chapter 4

0108A660. The Last One

Jin Mogis’s life wasn’t just covered in shit, it was shit itself.

The House of Mogis had always been shit. Enad George, who had founded the shitty Kingdom of Arabakia, was the king of shit, and Ishidua Zaemoon, the close associate of his who had plotted his assassination, was shit too. The stupid girl he’d raised to prominence, Friau, was also shit, which meant everyone in the House of the Founder who was descended from her all had shit in their blood. It was said that Steech, the leader of the House of the North, who had feuded with them, was more or less shit too, and the idiot daughter of the House of Mogis, who had fallen in love with a prodigal son of the influential House of Ishidua, must have been the shittiest shit. Thanks to her, the House of Mogis got covered in shit and fell into circumstances that were shittier than a manure pile. We’re talking some concentrated shit here.

Jin Mogis grew up hearing shitty stories about all this shit.

“We of the House of Mogis are special.”

Those were the fetid words that so often leaked from his father, William Mogis’s, shit-eating mouth.

The shitty son hated his shitty father’s greasy red hair, clumped together with grime and dust, more than he hated shit. He’d wanted to pound sharp nails through the jaundiced whites of the old man’s fiery, rust-colored eyes. Wished over and over that he’d get the chance.

“We of the House of Mogis aren’t like the rest of these shits, Jin. Don’t you ever forget that.”

His shitty father went around bowing his head to all sorts of people, and somehow managed to make his only son a soldier in the Royal Army. Not that his son had ever asked. That shit was an unwelcome nuisance.

“Jin, you have a gift. I can tell these things. A gift for murder. I know, Jin. Were you eight years old when you caught and killed that dog from the farm next to ours? You’d never been out hunting for rabbits or rats, but you could kill a dog. Did you know that’s a serious crime? Dogs are property, after all. But I understand. You knew perfectly well that no one would ever think an eight-year-old brat could have been the culprit. Why’d you kill that dog? I have an idea about that, just a personal theory. The dog was always barking. It was too noisy for its own good. That’s why you killed it. Am I right?”

It had been a spotted dog with bloodshot eyes. And it had bitten him once. That was when he’d sworn it would die by his hand. How had he done it? He’d planned carefully, then acted. At age eight. Yes. He had only been eight at the time.

“I know you raped that girl from the next village too. You were eleven. You threatened her, saying you’d kill her if she told a soul, right? You really pulled it off. How many more have you raped since? You’ve certainly developed a taste for it. I can understand. It’s a good time.”

His shitty old man spoke of it with a lasciviousness that suggested the bastard had watched it happening personally. Had Jin Mogis been seen? He couldn’t imagine he had. But while he didn’t know for sure, his father’s account of events was too accurate to have been a wild guess.

“I know there was one girl who wouldn’t listen to your threats, so you killed and buried her. Was it just the one? No, of course it wasn’t. I’m sure you’ve killed several. I can tell, Jin. I know these things. Why, you ask?”

Because you’re shit.

Because we’re the same kind of shit.

William Mogis had beaten his own wife—Jin’s mother—to death and buried her. Jin knew that before he’d finished the job, his father had decided it would be a shame not to screw her one last time, so he’d raped the corpse.

I saw it with my own young eyes.

Jin Mogis hadn’t watched it openly, of course. He had been hiding as he did.

“Where’s mom?” he’d asked the next day, playing ignorant.

William had plastered a thin, fake smile on his face and said, “The bitch ran out on us. Well, it’s no great loss. She was a dullard who never shut up. I’m glad to be rid of her. You agree, don’t you, Jin?”

You piece of shit. What an absolute bastard.

The young Jin Mogis loathed William Mogis from the bottom of his heart. But on the other hand, that day, or more accurately the night before, when he had realized his mother was gone, it hadn’t felt so bad.

Jin Mogis’s mother had been exactly the kind of bitch William Mogis deserved. Being the kind of woman who’d willingly married into the shit-encrusted House of Mogis, there was no way she could have been decent. About all Jin Mogis remembered of her was that her breath stank so bad it made him nauseous, that she was missing three of her front teeth, that the remaining ones were black, that she had hairy armpits and a hairy back, and that she would start screeching violently whenever she didn’t like something, then get physical.

He was the baby that piece of shit woman had shat out after copulating with his piece of shit father.

He was excrement born and bred. Truly shit.

That was who Jin Mogis was.

“You’re going to be a soldier, Jin.”

Every word that the piece of shit known as William Mogis vomited into his son’s ears was like a curse.

“Jin, even if you’ll never be a good soldier, you can kill lots of people on the battlefield. I’m sure you’ll be fine no matter how many of your allies die, and the more enemies you kill, the more you’ll be rewarded. Good grief. I should’ve become a military man myself. Might have made something of myself by now if I had. Still, to tell you the truth, the House of Mogis is hated. Originally, our family was feared. Our great ancestor, Zaburo Mogis, was Enad George’s pet assassin—a skilled murderer. He’d disappear anyone who got on Enad’s bad side. He didn’t even have to be ordered to kill a guy; Zaburo just knew when someone needed to die. He was the kind of man who’d commit a murder before breakfast, another after lunch, a third before dinner, and then close out the day with one last murder before going to bed. Do you get it, Jin? You do, don’t you? Well, that’s what our ancestor did, working for Enad. He killed people like crazy. Jin, I’m going to tell you something. ‘Zaburo Mogis’ was a name that Enad gave him. His real name, it was ‘Mogi Zaburow.’ Mogi Zaburow was a special sort of assassin. Enad was able to climb his way up to being king because Mogi Zaburow repeatedly murdered anyone who got in his way. That’s the relationship our ancestor had with Enad. And that’s why once Enad got taken down by Ishidua Zaemoon, the House of Mogis’s fate was sealed. But the higher-ups are still leery of people from our house. They never know what we’re gonna do. Because we of the House of Mogis, we’re special...”

“Bring me a horse!” Jin Mogis shouted with foggy breath as he left through the main gate of Tenboro Tower. The sky was brightening with the impending dawn.

“Sire, here!” One of his black-cloaked personal attendants led a horse with vibrantly gray hair over to Mogis by its reins. Mogis waved his hand as if swatting away a fly.

“That one’s no good! Bring another!”

There were a number of horses from the mainland saddled up and waiting near the main entrance. One of them was a small dark bay horse.

“That one will do,” Mogis declared, pointing at the dark bay horse. The black cloak hurriedly brought it to him. Mogis straddled the horse. He’d never ridden on this one before. It was a bit small for him, but solidly built. Why had he chosen this horse? Mogis never thought about it. It was the right decision. He was confident of that.

“I’m taking command of the defense of Alterna! Anyone who can ride a horse, mount up and come with me! The rest of you, follow on foot!”

The black cloaks and other soldiers answered him, their shouts rising almost to a roar.

Mogis drove his horse forward. The chaos was worst near the south gate, but Mogis directed his horse toward the north gate. He never turned to look behind him. The dark bay horse had good legs despite its short stature and responded well to his control of the reins. And unlike the gray, it wouldn’t stand out.

The north gate up ahead of them was shut. Soldiers were massed around it and up into the watchtowers.

“Commander Mogis!”

“Commander!”

“He’s here! Commander Mogis is here!”

They started making a big fuss. Mogis slowed his horse a little and ordered the gates open.

“O-Open the gates...?”

He watched confusion spread through the crowd of soldiers.

Mogis had been up on top of the walls to check the situation for himself. Something bizarre was going on out there. It had almost looked like a river had overflowed its banks in heavy rain, triggering a flood. But there was no rain, and no river near Alterna that could cause such a flood. It wasn’t water out there. It was dark and possibly liquid, though he wasn’t sure of that, but it definitely had no fixed shape. Countless unidentified black entities were squirming about, surging over the landscape. Some of them struck the walls of Alterna, but they hadn’t come over the ramparts. Alterna hadn’t been breached. The walls were defending the Frontier Army from the black entities.

“Enough talk! Open them at once!” Mogis yelled, and the soldier moved to follow his orders immediately.

The unidentified black entities hadn’t gotten inside Alterna yet. From what Mogis could tell, the entities were more focused around the hill to the southeast. Were the black streams flowing in that direction? The Forbidden Tower, which stood atop the hill, had completely changed. It had grown to several times its former size, covered in black objects.

Whatever these black things were, the Frontier Army would probably be safe so long as they stayed shut up inside the walls of Alterna. Every storm, no matter how large, would pass eventually. They only needed to wait for that to happen.

“Hurry!”

The soldiers rushed to open the gate as Mogis shouted at them. It was already open wide enough for a person to pass through, or maybe two at a time.

“If you want to survive, do as I say! Let’s go!”

Mogis suddenly spurred his horse onward.

The dark bay reared back in surprise, its front hooves in the air.

“Hi-yah!” Mogis delivered a quick slap to the horse’s backside. It took off running, with both man and horse going through the gate in an instant.

There was no guarantee they’d be safe inside the walls—none at all. That was what Mogis’s intuition told him.

It was rare for him to think things through logically like, Should I kill this guy? Or not? That was too slow. He’d act too late. He needed to kill as soon as he thought, All right, I’m gonna kill him. Ideally, he’d kill them before he thought to. That was the easiest time to do it.

But Mogis truly did feel hesitant. Should he kill the prey before him? If that were the only question, it would have been easy. But reality tended to be more complicated than that. Even Jin Mogis hesitated sometimes. Worried about what to do, even.

Honestly, up until the point Mogis had left Tenboro Tower, the commander hadn’t been set on this course of action. Shinohara, who’d left through the south gate, hadn’t returned. He was probably not in a good situation. That man was quite skilled and knew the frontier better than Mogis did. Yet he hadn’t come back.

That meant it was pretty dangerous outside. Wouldn’t it have been wiser to stay put here? If Mogis was going to make a move, he could have waited until he was forced to.

But he was frightened. Even Jin Mogis, born into the infamous House of Mogis, felt fear sometimes. He had no idea what it was that had inspired this fear in him, and he feared what he did not know.

Mogis had never died before. That was why he feared death. Despite all the people he’d killed, all those he’d seen die, he had no idea what they experienced as they passed from this life. Was death nothingness? Or did the dead experience a different kind of perception from the living? Was it possible they went to a world of the dead?

The first time Mogis had returned home on leave from the army, he’d killed his father. It had been a mercy killing, as far as he was concerned. His father had been sick. Some kind of organ failure. He’d wasted away, his ashen face not so different from that of a corpse. Unable to rise from the rotting bed he lay on, he had struggled even to cough.

“How about I put you out of your misery, old man?”

When his son made the offer, William Mogis had considered it long and hard, then answered, “Yeah, sure,” his voice like the wind across a desolate plain. “Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad.”

“I have a favor to ask.”

“What? Ask away, Jin.”

“I know I said I’d put you out of your misery, but I want to do it little by little. There’s something I need to know.”

“What’s that?”

“How do people die? What do they see? What do they hear? What do they think?”

“I’m interested in that too. When most people die, it’s like, ‘What, that’s it?’”

“I had a feeling this day would come, old man.”

“What a coincidence. So did I, Jin.”

He had been as careful as he could be, but William Mogis had still died in a manner that would make you say, “What, that’s it?” Unfortunately, he had been too far gone by that point to die slowly. The invalid whose life could have run out at any time quickly found himself unable to breathe, and then his heart stopped. Jin Mogis had thought he might be able to restart the heart by cutting his father’s chest open and giving it a massage, but the effort had been wasted.

In every way, in every facet of his life, William Mogis had been no more than a useless piece of shit. And leaving behind the blood of the House of Mogis, that vile shit juice, was the most harmful shit he had ever done.

Not long after the army had exited the north gate, their path was obstructed by a black river. Jin Mogis had his horse continue to the northwest. Then, pulling on the reins, he turned it further west. A stream of black things lay ahead of them there too.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to Mogis: Do I have any children?

As his father had pointed out, Jin Mogis had been raping women from a young age. How many had he violated? He couldn’t be bothered to keep count. When the urge took him, there was no reason to hold back.

I want a child of my own.

I want to leave the Mogis blood behind.

He’d never had such an urge before.

Women were simply an outlet for Mogis’s lust. They might have been even less than that at times, but they were most definitely never more. Some women obeyed him readily, while others resisted. He’d screwed the same woman repeatedly before too. But Mogis had never loved anyone, woman or otherwise.

Had he ever heard rumors of one of the women he’d screwed getting pregnant afterward? Obviously, when he violated a woman he just happened across, he never saw her again. He couldn’t be sure none of them had borne a child with the blood of the House of Mogis.

During a battle with the southern barbarians, Mogis had taken a wound that had caused him to lose his testicles. In the jungles of the south, there was one despicable tribe of savages that would hide in the bushes, persistently targeting their enemies’ gonads. The soldiers called them ankle-cutters and ball-hunters. He’d never live down the humiliation of knowing what had been done to him by those savages. It was his greatest pain, his deepest shame. He’d kept the loss of his testicles a secret, even killing several people just to shut them up.

He hadn’t raped a woman since.

There’d been no need.

He couldn’t do it anymore.

“Not yet,” Mogis said, looking down at his left hand, holding the reins. He wore a big ring on his left index finger—gold with a blue stone. The patterns floating on its surface weren’t scratches or stains.

They looked like flower petals.

Two petals shone and shimmered inside the blue stone.

This was no mere ring. It was a gift, given to him by the master of the Forbidden Tower, Sir Unchain, to cement their alliance. Mogis had already tested its effects for himself.

Mogis felt the urge to turn around on the back of his horse. The foot soldiers had never stood a chance, but perhaps a number of the riders had kept up with him? Or had things gotten so bad that he, the Commander of the Frontier Army, was reduced to riding around on his own?

He’d abandoned his men to save his own skin. Even if someone were to call him out for his cowardice, it wouldn’t have bothered him in the slightest. Because Jin Mogis was a piece of shit born from a piece of shit. He might say he wasn’t just shit; he was a special kind of shit. But when all was said and done, shit was shit. He’d never had a shred of conscience. And being shit, he wasn’t burdened with the sense of pride humans had. He’d do all sorts of shitty things, swimming through an ocean of shit, eating shit if he had to, in order to survive.

He wasn’t like his father—not like William Mogis.

William Mogis had been weakened after suffering from illness for so long. He’d wanted to be put to rest. But he couldn’t have ended his life on his own. As his appetite had dwindled, and he’d even lost the ability to drink water, all he had been able to do was wait for his last breath to come.

Please, kill me, he’d pleaded with his son with glazed eyes. The man hadn’t been human; he’d been a piece of shit among pieces of shit, but he had still loved his son in his own way. You might even say he had fawned over Jin. The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. They were birds of a feather. Shit birds. Jin Mogis could read his father’s feelings as if they were his own.

It’s fine.

Hey, Jin.

Even if I die, you’re still here.

The rest is up to you.

Live on. Survive. Kill. Kill a whole lot. Get out there and rape women.

Leave behind children.

Preserve our blood.

The special blood of the House of Mogis.

If his father had held on a little longer and not died so easily, Jin Mogis might have whispered these words to him as his son:

I know, old man.

You can move on in peace.

The Mogis bloodline is still here.

But the only Mogis left now was the heaping pile of shit, Jin Mogis, and he’d lost his gonads.

“It’s not my time yet!” Jin Mogis declared, furiously digging his heels into his horse’s sides, urging the beast onward. The ground wasn’t a black lake. There were black streams running this way and that across it, but they didn’t cover it entirely. Mogis raced his horse across the gaps between them.

Where was he running to? He’d changed direction so many times, he might have been going back the way he’d come.

No, I’m fleeing. I’m going to get away from here.

He’d nearly died in the south too. The scion of the House of Mogis had been mercilessly sent off to the front lines even as a fresh recruit. The front line squads had hardly any priests of Lumiaris. Soldiers had just been forced to treat one another if they got wounded. Anyone who came down with a fever would be abandoned to rest in the shade somewhere. It had been too muggy to wear armor either. They’d roamed the jungle almost naked, had killed any barbarians that attacked them, and had stolen food and water from their assailants. It wasn’t just the barbarians, though. Sometimes they fought with their own allies for supplies. He’d nearly been killed by his fellow soldiers on multiple occasions. He’d fought back and gotten them instead, of course.

His horse was exhausted and sweating profusely.

Jin Mogis finally turned to look back. There was just one black cloak still desperately following Mogis on horseback. That said, the man was twenty, no, thirty meters behind him.

“Commander!” the black cloak cried, his voice shrill. His horse’s legs suddenly gave out, and it pitched forward. The black cloak was thrown from his saddle and sailed through the air. In no time at all, a black stream rushed over his horse, swallowing it up.

“What is that?”

Mogis stared, eyes wide. There was something riding the black stream that swallowed the black cloak’s horse. It, too, was black. Something so dark it seemed to be wrapped in the night itself was standing atop the black stream.

It looks almost...human, Mogis thought as he noticed it was carrying a short sword in its right hand and a shield with a dull silver luster in its left.

The night-clad one swung its sword. It danced through the air, easily slicing up the last black cloak. Then it came for Mogis, still riding the black stream.

Mogis turned to face it, laughing despite himself. He laughed and laughed and laughed. The House of Mogis was probably cursed. This world was trying to purge itself of their blood. In all likelihood, destruction was the fate that awaited him.

But what of it?

If you can kill me, then kill me. My blood is special. I won’t die just yet. I’m going to keep on living. I’ll show you I can survive.