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“I Hear…  Your heart…” My voice shatters the silence like a rolling head startles a large crowd. My voice echoes for what seems like eternity before the silence strikes me down. I feel tingling in my arms, this tingling slowly directs itself towards pain… I hear screams of many banging on the walls  “release me” “HElP!!!” They yell for me but I cannot do anything to help them. “A good day this was, no?” My commander said to me. “What did you make me do!” I grab my commander by the throat and shove my knife into his gut and repeatedly stab again and again until his life slowly drains from his piercing blue eyes “you're a monster”  I say to him as he draws his final breath. “Go to hell” he muttered before I heard the click of A firing pin striking the striker of a bullet. “Guess you’re out of luck.” I snatched the gun from him, A Burned titanium .357 magnum, unmarked. “Nice engraving”, It was a stylized engraving of the grim reaper piercing through the heart of the Penitent thief, Saint Dismas, I said to him  as he coughed up blood and said ”Damn… you”,he looked at me one last time. I throw him on the ground with pity as he attempts to scurry away slowly dragging himself to the camp. I noticed one last round of Ammunition in the cylinder. I take The revolver of “Death's dealer” and roll the cylinder down my arm, spinning the cylinder as it goes further down the length of my arm. Time itself seems to freeze as I line up the revolver with his skull. “Look at me” I said to him. He refused. “LOOK AT ME!” I scream at him, He looks up at me as I look down upon him “Pitiful” I said to him. I squeeze the trigger and I hear the BOOM of the .357 Magnum. “Do you hear that?” I asked myself, I did hear it, it sounded of A crunch with an irritable sound of mushiness… his skull… The crunch of his skull cracking caused something in me to do an act of violence so vile none knew what was to come. 

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I awake from my eternal slumber with rage as the only thing I can see. “YOU!” The men who had taken me stared at me in horror as I arose from the dead with a bullet hole through my face gushing blood. They raised their guns but they knew not what to do knowing I awoke from a bullet to the head “How the hell?!” they yell, deeply in concern. I break through the locking mechanism as though it was made of lead breaking in mere seconds as I lunge towards them ready to kill them. The first opposition I face is the easiest i’ve felt killing a man, without a second or third thought I broke his arm and as He screamed and wailed in pain I took hold of his arm and continued to bend it until his bone ripped through  his skin slowly and with one slick and clean movement I stabbed him in his throat with his own exposed bone. The other soldiers that were present seemingly disappeared from sight and I took the opportunity of silence to apologize to the man I had just… killed, thinking it would free me of sin. It never will, not for what I've done. I rip some cloth off the man I killed and patch up my head. The bullet did not pass through the skull, “clearly” I thought to myself.

I hear the rhythm of soldiers marching to meet my position to, what I assume… kill me. The marching stops and I hear the screeching of tank treads scraping across the concrete floor outside slowly. It cracks the concrete with each slight movement like glass being struck with an iron hammer. I can hear a faint chant as their ever approaching army makes the noise replicating the humming of starlings fluttering through the skies. A loudspeaker turns on and begins speaking in a demanding tone seemingly in Cyrillic. “Ты осмелился войти в нашу любимую страну и не сделал того, что тебе сказали... жалко!” He yells through the microphone. I yell at the speaker in distress “Release me!” He says two words in response “казните... его!” I can take into general assumption as to what he said. I scramble to find the balance in my feet, I could not as rapidly as I had originally wished. I run and run not thinking of what I am to do after I make it away from the forward marching elite soldiers slowly… stepping… closer. The ticking of the watch in my pocket grew slower by the Tick. Tick. tick.. Tick… tick…. Tick….. I looked around in panic looking for an escape, there was naught but one. “No no no yo-you cant do that… it's an impossible task” I thought to myself “F*ck it” I turned the corner slowly creeping towards the marching, I saw nothing, there was no sign of there ever being an army near me… it was silent… nothing was there.

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War… One small, Insignificant, meaningless spark is all it takes…

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I release the tension in my eyelids allowing my eyes to rest, only for a moment… I awake to a crumbling building, the stone walls seemingly have organisms growing within the open spaces. The warm air hits my face, reminding me of a time many winters ago. I stand up from the cracked and warped floor. I notice craters in the wall resembling very much like bullet holes. I looked to see where the warm air was coming from and noticed a hole three times the size of my body, near the top of the wall, the I-beam rafters hung on by only a cable barely grasping onto the ceiling. I get my wits about me and walk forward down the corridor. I walk around this place only noticing the lack of people and large scale destruction. I hear what sounds like a can getting kicked followed by three repeating gunshots. I see birds out the window fly away and a body drop at the end of the corridor. I take cover behind a few bags of cow manure in the hallway and listen to whoever killed that poor devil. I hear two people, seemingly soldiers talking and laughing in a heavy belgian accent. They walk up to the corpse and kick it while laughing. “F*cker didn’t know what was going on, Haha, well your dead now sh*t stain!” the soldier cackles and walks off, the second soldier crouches down, looks at the dead man's face. The soldier opens the dead man's mouth and yells to the other “HA I got one!” the other soldier runs up to him and takes a kneel. They grab a rusted pair of pliers that look like they haven’t seen cleanliness for years. They then reach into the man's mouth with the pliers and start pulling on something somewhat shiny and coarse. A Gold crown of a tooth, after pulling on it for 3 minutes they finally yank it out and the man they were pulling it from let out his final scream of agony as the soldiers put the tooth in a satchel bag full with, I can only assume, other teeth from other… “donors”. The soldiers reach for a knife and put the blade up to the man's throat, but they don’t finish the job. The soldier holding the blade then stands up and puts the knife away. “I don’t feel like cleaning my knife… so if you can just sit here for a moment.” the soldier pipes up, he walks towards his rifle and picks it up. It looks vaguely like a Slavic made rifle, he racks back the bolt and it extracts a spent casing, he catches it mid air. He grabs an oil can and dumps it on the man. “P-Please! N-n-not like this!” the soldier stands there dumping it on him… Unphased. The soldier backs away and raises his rifle towards the man covered in the tar like oil, he looks down the radium iron sights… click, the rifle didn’t shoot. The soldier pulls out a match and ignites it. He throws it on the man and the oil explodes into  a raging fire burning the man alive… slowly. I try to ignore his wailing but it soon has me by a chokehold as my throat feels like sandpaper. I struggle to fight the urge to leave and forget it. I fight through it and go after the soldiers. 

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I tracked the soldiers to their encampment and waited… darkness was quick to fall over us all like a blanket snuffing out the flame. The only thing that was still illuminated was a burn pit making the faces of the ghoul like soldiers glow like disembodied faces. I was now a child of the darkness, a stalker of the damned. I listened to the soldiers speaking in a very heavy russian accent, “Ha! As if we could hold our own against them, The Monolith would shred us like we were a thin piece of paper!” 

“Yeah man, the Monolith has too much power. It would be nice to knock 'em down a notch but to think we could do anything against them is insane!”

I moved behind a tent and listened for noise inside, I heard a faint snoring. I moved inside the tent and saw two men… Sleeping. I looked about for a weapon and noticed a large knife on a military crate and thought it to be… effective. I grabbed the knife and walked slowly to the first soldier. I grasped his mouth and plunged the blade deep into his chest ripping through any blood vessel or organ in the way. The edge of the blade was curled and chipped, tearing the skin rather than slicing through it. When I stabbed into his flesh it felt… right. He quickly woke up and kicked around for a few moments before finally accepting his fate, I looked him in the eyes as his soul diminished. The other soldier must have heard the commotion and sat up, I turned to face him and ready my blade holding it up at jaw-level he threw a punch and missed, I followed up by slashing his gut open and sealing his mouth shut with my hand, I quickly got behind him and repeatedly stabbed him between his neck and shoulders until he slowly went limp. His blood was all over my arm at that point, there was no hiding it. I heard a deep, raspy voice come over my head like an old comms station in a building. “Wear it, His Face, TAKE HIS FACE!” I listened to them… I cut and sawed through his flesh and eventually it peeled off of his skull, his face was none but mine now. I wore his face… 

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I left the tent holding the knife… and wearing his face. I crept up behind the men sitting at the fire. There were two of them, they burned the man alive. I pushed the first man into the burning flame, his screams were… good to hear. The second man begged for mercy as I walked towards him “P-Please N-No I have a family and kids back home!”, he soon saw his friend's face over my own and realized mercy was not of the matter. “You sick f*ck!” He gets up and charges at me, I threw the blade at his leg and he fell to the ground as the handle of the blade protruded from his leg. He screamed in pain as he fell and impacted the ground. He looks up at me and I look down at him. I walked beside his head and I raised my leg up. With the anger built up I released all of it by crushing his entire skull with my boot. His blood soaks into the leather and I feel the warmth against the skin of my foot. BOOM. I have a sharp pain in my left shoulder, I look down at the pain and realize it's a gunshot wound. Turn to look at the shooter, It was the man that I pushed into the open flame. I run at him, he fires again and again, to no avail. The rounds did not hurt, they felt like getting poked with a freshly used but very dull pencil. With one hand I grab him by the throat and swoop him up above my head and slam him down onto the log he was sitting on prior, breaking his spine almost immediately. He did not scream… he did not wail… he only teared up… He couldn’t move.

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“There is no sweeter destiny than to lose everything” -Georgy Adamovich

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I awake from my slumber in the cold, silent yet strong wind. I search for warmer clothing and find a surplus of random militant clothing. I look around for a jacket of sorts, I only find an old soviet trench coat and boots. Sigh “I guess it’ll do for now.” I put on the trench coat, it fits nicely, the boots do not fit nearly as perfectly, they are covered in mud and in an unrepairable state. I found a map in the trench coat’s pocket, the map had a circle written on it with “Monolith Headquarters” written next to the far from perfect circle. I search around some more and find an old Mosin Nagant rifle with a scope crudely mounted on the barrel over top of the bolt. I walk up to the soldiers and search their corpses and find a few rounds of 7.62x51 mm ammunition for the rifle, “great.” I say as I walk out of the camp.