IV.

We stood just outside Ethae's hideout. He was, like Delth, located in a woodsier area off the beaten path, though the trees were much less dense with large patches of sandy plain strewn about. It was, still nearly uninhabited, and in fact without our book's guiding light we might not have found Ethae at all, as his home was hidden underground with only a trapdoor to enter, tucked away beneath grass and dust. I was feeling much more confident this time. Delth had put up a fight, but we'd done it - we'd killed him! - and now we also knew for certain that god was on our side. Maine had volunteered to go down first and point the gun, with Matt, and M-Bot and I acting as backup. F.P. had come with us this time, realizing that it was best for him to stay just ouside so, if needed, he could heal us immediately. In the meantime, he would be reading a book of some of Alzeki's sermons which had been written down over the years by people of the Town. I crouched over the trapdoor and slowly, very slowly, opened it up, revealing a ladder down a dark tunnel. I nodded to Maine, and he climbed down, careful not to make much noise. I followed, and the others after me, all silent.

The ladder was short, bringing us maybe only ten feet underground before letting us out into a short stone path leading to a shabby wooden door. There were no walls, ceiling, or floor - it was a pure carved-out tunnel with the only usable light coming through the trapdoor, a bit also peeking through from the room ahead. Maine crept forward and finally burst through the door, rifle at the ready. Me and the others followed, holding our rifles at our chests. The main house wasn't much better off than the entryway, looking like an even more barren version of Zsuius' cave-home. A rug, a radio, and rations - that was pretty much it. The room was dimly lit by a lamp in its center. Ethae was holed up in a notch carved into the wall with a makeshift bed of blankets, listening to staticky academic music on the radio, and rolled out as we entered. He stood with his hands raised, a resigned look in his eyes.

"Finally come to get me?" He asked.

"We're just here to ask a few questions about your former organization. There'll only be trouble if you make trouble," Maine said.

"Who sent you?"

"The great goddess Almendra," I responded.

"Bad time to find out that god's real," Ethae said. I looked him over. He was a very average-looking man; average height and weight, short hair, a moustache, beard stubble. No real distinctive features. He looked middle-aged like the other hitmen, maybe in his forties if I had to guess. I always thought, when I heard about hitmen, that they might have scars, eyepatches, things like that, but really the damage seemed to be mental. They all had a dead look in their eyes, Ethae in particular. I wondered if he even had a gun here.

"Pretty crummy house," Matt commented. Ethae scoffed.

"Not my fault Delth took the money. I had to hide on short notice; what am I supposed to do? I dig out a hole in the dirt and wait to come out, like an animal."

"And why do you have to hide here, anyways?" I asked.

"Come on. Why do you think?"

"You say Delth took the money? Seems like you two must not like each other very much."

"Delth was a bastard."

"'Was'?" Maine narrowed his eyes slightly.

Ethae gave a forced smile. "Back when we used to work together, you see."

Maine made a motion with his rifle, saying, "You should really be honest with us, you know. It'll be better for you if we don't think you're lying."

"Of course," Ethae said, his eyes closed and his smile widening. "Yes, I'll be honest. We have a system in place that acts as an alert when one of us dies. After all, even if we don't speak, it would be good to know if we were being hunted - say, by a rival hitman, or a vengeful family member. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"

"Nope. Like Sef said before, we're here on th' god's orders," Matt said. Ethae clicked his tongue.

"So you're serious," he said. "Then you won't take a bribe."

"Delth tried it too. Now what's that about the alert system?" Maine asked, deadpan. His voice had been exceptionally flat after being revived, but even as that cleared up, he tended to speak in a low monotone, unemotional and aloof.

"We each have a code we send once a day. If we don't enter the code, we're dead. I hope I can get away with not telling you mine; you are, after all, just here for information. I'm feeling quite cooperative. I assume Delth was not?"

"He tried making a run for it and got what was coming to him," I said, "and if you don't try something like that, then yes, you won't have to worry about the code."

"We didn't get much information from Delth, so we're going to take it from the top with our questions," Maine said. "First off, what was your organization? What did you do there?"

Ethae smiled, a real smile this time. "You really don't know what you're doing here, do you?" Maine sighed. "No, don't worry, I'll say. But really - why are you coming all this way to find me? Isn't my being a hitman enough for you? If you don't already know the details, why would you want to, and why would you even care so much?"

"To tell you the truth, we're mostly here because of your connection to our main target. His name is Cardo, and he used to work with you," Maine explained. "Remember him?"

"Oh, yes, yes, I do. That's quite the valid target, I would think. And you want to know more about him? Understand him before you hit him?" Maine nodded. "Well, good luck with that. He's a black hole. I hardly understood him, either. But regardless; we were a group of professional assassins. We killed for hire. Delth, Cardo, and I were captains in administrative roles - after a time, I hardly ever got my hands dirty. Each of us had a collection of servants who took on jobs at our request, and many of them had servants of their own. Over time, you would rise up through the hierarchy, making bigger decisions, learning more sensitive information. We dabbled in some other crimes, but mostly stuck to killing. It was dangerous, but quite lucrative. Some of our clients - well, you would be surprised to know them. Most of our kills were not requested by individual people for their own petty grievances, as you might think. There were some, to be sure, and they were satisfying to an extent. But most were part of a wider strategy, using us as hired muscle against targeted individuals. They would look like singular killings, but in reality were part of much wider patterns, covert wars and hijackings. That's what made my blood pump - to be part of a much grander puzzle. This is, of course, all sensitive information - I hope you can excuse my secrecy."

"That's fine," Maine said, "We're not interested in those details. For my own curiosity, though - what made things go so wrong between you and the others?"

"The type of person who spends his days killing is not the type of person you want to associate with," he replied. I found that hard to argue with. The image of Zsuius flashed through my mind, though - I wouldn't call him a friend per se, especially after he abandoned me back in Rottindam, but if someone were sent to kill him the way we had been sent to kill Cardo, would we be included as an 'association', I wondered?

"The organization got on good for seventy, eighty years," he continued, "and we were in the third or so generation of captains. Things were in decline at the end. Less people joining in, double agents telling targets about us. Biggest thing, though, was people's psyches just breaking. Only so much of the job you can take, and our missions were getting nastier, the wars were getting nastier. In the end, Cardo had a break that brought the whole thing down."

"Tell us about that," Maine said. He was holding his gun in a more relaxed way, now. Ethae got a distant look, eyes glazed over.

"A lot of men died. I'll tell you that first off. A captain, too. Burnt our base to the ground. I was there, running for my life. The halls were filled with bodies. I barely got out before it collapsed. It was deep in the woods, miles off from here. We all had to run to our little secret bases on short notice, trying to hide from him. Eventually we realized that the game was over, that too much information had gotten out about us, that without our gangs we might start getting chased. It was at that point that the arguments started, when we had to find some holes in the ground to stay for good. Or at least, I did; when the slaughter began, Delth was running around our rooms, taking as much of our cash as he could hold and running off with it all. Not a very popular man after that, but he knew we wouldn't try and get it back. Too dangerous to peek our heads out, try and find him."

"Even if y'did, he might've killed ya," Matt said. "Had a bunch of traps in his house, a turret behind'a wall panel. Almost killed us with that." Ethae chuckled.

"So what about Cardo's strengths, weaknesses?" I asked. "Anything we can use?"

"Strengths... He can't die, and he can manipulate the world to his liking. He can make lightning strike, flames burst out of air, open up the ground. He's charismatic. Cult leader now, is what I've heard through the grapevine, with a small but very devoted following. Has his own little apocalypse theology. I never bothered to learn the details. Weaknesses? He doesn't have any. You're dead already, and you don't even know it. Makes me sad. He's going to get his way eventually, and if he wants the world to end, then I suppose the world will end. It's not such a big deal, anyways. World's going to hell and wouldn't have been worth living in much longer. Really, it's a bit of a favor."

My face fell. "Really? There's nothing?"

He shook his head saying, "No. You're on your own. I'm sorry. Delth wanted to hunt him down for a time, but it was a suicide mission. In fact, I have a request to make myself, if you'll allow it."

"What?" Maine asked.

Ethae kneeled down, putting his forehead to the barrel of Maine's rifle. "I'd like to die too, now, if it's no problem."

"But- what? And what about the code?" I sputtered.

"They already know they're targeted."

"They don't think Delth could've slipped and cracked his head open?" M-Bot asked.

"No. You see, the time for me to enter my code was five minutes ago."

"Fuck!" I shouted, punching the air. "Why the hell didn't you tell us!?" He just smiled.

"Well, now you've got good reason to pull the trigger, don't you?" Ethae reasoned, voice calm. "I'm ready to die. All the killing wears on you, after a while - and where did it get me? Just a hole in the ground. It was all for nothing. And besides, it'll all be over soon one way or the other."

"But why not just, ah, do it yourself?" Matt asked.

"Well, it's a sin, after all," he responded with a smile. He turned his eyes back up towards Maine. "Go on, cat. Do it."

Maine shot and Ethae died instantly, his brains splattering on the wall and his body falling to the ground, bent in a strange position. The corpse was grotesque to look at, and the noise made me flinch. In just a moment, I thought, everything Ethae had been, all his thoughts and memories and personality, were gone. I quickly turned to leave, feeling sick, and the others followed without saying anything. When we got back to the surface, F.P. was waiting at standby. It occurred to me at that moment that we had left the body there instead of burying it, but I then realized we wouldn't be able to get it back out up the ladder. He had dug his own grave, it seemed.

"I heard a gunshot. Is everybody alright?" F.P. asked.

"Just the target. He was suicidal." M-Bot replied. Maine was silent. Matt and I recounted the information he'd given us as we walked back to our bus.

I thought about a quote I had once read, though I forget the source: 'The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name.' I was thinking about how Ethae had spent what must have been a decade in that hole in the ground and wondered how he hadn't just gone insane. He was an empty man, a doomed man, I thought.

We were becoming doomed men, too. There was a strange feeling growing inside of me, a hollow pit in my stomach. Another quote from that source described the revolutionary as a 'dedicated man' - Ethae failed because he was not dedicated, giving in to his doomed fate, but we were dedicated. We would keep fighting, clawing at everything we could get. We would visit each of the surviving captains, get as much information as we could from them, and kill them as soon as it was necessary. Then we would visit Cardo, kill his cult, kill him, and save the world. The longer it stretched on, the more it felt like this was the only thing for us to do, the only important thing in our lives. And wasn't it? It had been months since we had seen any of our other friends from the town. It was just us five, an amateur death squad coming to deal with the rotten fruit of this secret organization, to turn over the fate the world had been given. Cardo was a false prophet, and would be burnt in our fire. But Al, I thought, imagine if my friends could see me now! What would they think of me, turning away from his corpse without even burying it, just leaving it to rot? Jozep, Alexicut, Yon, what would they all say? And Vanis, so old now in her eighties, she would faint just hearing about it! They were lucky not to be doomed like we were, doomed to die throwing ourselves against the flames for the greater good, so that they could keep living, so their worlds could keep turning.

I hated the sight of blood. I felt dizzy and nauseous, the sight of Ethae's blown-open head flashing through my mind's eye, and when I tried to ignore it other awful sights flashed through - Maine getting shot through the head, Delth choking on his blood, the burnt-off nub where my arm should have been. All the people dead in the streets, the whole town of Rottindam reduced to nothing but ash. I imagined the Town of the Dead Sea Bridge destroyed like that, the Town of the Church of Holy Light destroyed like that, and vomited in the bushes. I couldn't stand to think of my home like that, the place I had spent my whole life, the people I had grown up knowing. It was all too much. Maine put a hand on my back and helped me walk the rest of the way. Al, Maine - he had gone through so much, too, and you never saw him complaining about it! So stupid for me to act this way, to have these thoughts. I needed to become stronger, harder, to detach from the world the way Maine was able to, like the ideal revolutionary in those writings. I blinked a few times, and the gory images disappeared from my mind. It was a sunny day, and I was stepping through tall grass, giant and beautiful trees surrounding us, as we approached our bus. Our heads turned as a flock of birds, giant and loud, tore through the sky. We all climbed back into the bus and drove, right back to the road, onwards and upwards towards the moment we would prove ourselves, prove our God's strength and righteousness, that final confrontation with the demonic false prophet Cardo.

A few hours after sundown, we finally stopped to camp for the night. Maine wanted to discuss strategy and information, but we were too worn out to talk for long, and so after just a few minutes set up our tents and sleeping bags. Bloody flashbacks rushed through my mind as I tossed and turned before finally falling into a deep sleep.