Walking elegy (tensura/marvel self insert): Chapter 5: Stillness and collateral

Humanity is a beautiful, rotting fruit. Its skin gleams with the promise of sweetness, but bite deep, and you will find only the squirming truth within.

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The regret-inhibitor was a cool, blue stone against my palm, a river-smoothed pebble of my own creation. I called it Stillness.

It was not a drug, not really. It was a concept given physical form, a tiny thing that whispered a single, soothing lie to my soul: Nothing you do matters.

It was something created based on the concept I represented. True dragons—through what I remembered from reading the novels in my first life and from what Veldora had informed us about—with a stronger and older one being among the greatest threats against us, against the continuous existence of Tempest, were pillars of reality.

Literal aspects of the world, it would not be wrong to say.

This is why some of the titles given to true dragons as a whole were ones like the World's Root or Origin Dragons and the like.

It wouldn't be wrong to say that true dragons were more akin to primordials from Greek mythology than anything else, with each one of them representing something different.

It didn't mean that we were limited by those concepts, just that we gravitated toward them due to embodying them, and that they came very easily to us compared to everything else.

Velgrynd is the embodiment of the concept of acceleration and possesses control over fire. Veldora was born as the incarnation of chaos, having control of wind, fire, and space.

We discovered with the help of Veldora that I was ironically born embodying the concept of nothing, with control over death, destruction, and curses.

It was such a bad joke. Make me the person who killed themselves the embodiment of nothingness.

All of that to say that Stillness was made from the concept I embodied—the literal concept of nothing.

I pressed it to the base of my skull, felt the enchantment seep through scales and bone, a frost blooming in the neural pathways where guilt and memory festered.

The world didn't change, but my relationship to it did.

The sharp edges softened. The screaming colors of carnage muted to a tolerable gray. It was a spiritual anesthetic, and I was its most grateful addict.

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My command tent was a pocket of ordered silence amidst the brutish chaos of the warfront.

Maps glowed on tables of solidified shadow, showing the bleeding ulcer that was the Dwargon-Grasswalker border. We'd lost the Grasswalker plains three weeks ago. The Dwargon fortresses of the Abyss Range were now the front line, and the stone was weeping blood.

Shale, my Ogre war-chief, entered without ceremony. He was a mountain given bipedal form, his grey hide scarred from a hundred battles that would have vaporized a lesser being.

In his hands, he carried a small, broken thing. It was a goblin child's doll, crudely carved from Abyss-wood, one of its button eyes missing.

It was the one belonging to Klik's daughter.

To be honest, I hated looking at it. There were many times I had to force myself not to destroy it so that I would not think about its circumstances, about what it represented.

I wanted to do so, but a little girl and a wife had lost their father and husband.

It didn't feel right to make them lose the last thing he left behind.

"Tell me more about what happened," I ordered.

"They overran Forward Observation Post Gamma," he rumbled, his voice like continents grinding together. He placed the doll on my map, right over the valley where Gamma had been. "The Seventh Goblin Cohort was there. They held the line for six hours against the Imperial Vanguard. Bought us time to reinforce the Serrated Pass."

"Casualties?"

My voice was flat, the Stillness doing its work. I felt the question was necessary, a data point to be logged, not a tragedy to be mourned.

Maybe if I were lucky, even if it wasn't Klik, maybe one of his subordinates had survived.

"The Seventh is gone," Shale said, his massive shoulders slumping a fraction. "To the last. They detonated their core-mana reserves when surrounded. Took five Imperial Champions with them."

Five Champions.

Each one a being who could, on a bad day, shatter a mountain range with a focused ki shout. A fair trade, for a single cohort of goblins?

The logistics of the war demanded I say yes. The part of me that was still, faintly, a person, screamed that it was monstrous arithmetic.

This was the heart of our damnation.

Rimuru, Veldora, Milim, myself—we were forces of nature.

I could probably scour a continent with a thought, leaving only glass and echoing silence.

But we were not fighting a continent.

We were fighting something worse.

We were fighting something greater.

We were fighting an idea.

An idea with half a billion swords, and the chilling willingness to use every last one.

The Eastern Empire was a machine two thousand years in the making. Its soldiers were not just warriors; they were a self-replicating, adaptive system.

For every Champion we obliterated, two more seemed to take their place, their power cultivated in brutal, soul-forging academies we never knew existed.

We had the quality. They had the catastrophic, drowning quantity.

And they had Velgrynd.

The Scorch Dragon.

I had faced her twice. The first time, she had broken seven of my ribs, shattered my left horn, and left a wound even healed that still felt as if weepiny phantom fire. The second time, I had managed to rip one of her wings while she ripped my two wings and three of my limbs before Veldora's timely, boisterous intervention forced a stalemate.

She was older, more disciplined, a master of the sacred and profane arts of war in a way I, a newborn dragon stumbling through my own power, could never be.

And her partner, the Emperor Rudra, was a ghost in the machine. We had never seen him. We only felt his will through the stratagems and the cruelty of the empire. He was the strategist; Velgrynd was the executioner.

We were the nails they were patiently, methodically hammering down.

That's how it felt at least.

"The Serrated Pass cannot hold," I stated, pushing the doll aside.

The Stillness ensured it was a tactical assessment, not a eulogy. "Their artillery is too concentrated. We need to cede the pass."

Shale's jaw tightened. "Ceding the pass gives them a straight shot to the Sky-Spire Nexus. If they take that, they can project power over half of Dwargon."

"I am aware."

I traced a line on the map with a single, taloned finger. A spark of blue energy followed its path, etching a new defensive line into the stone table. "We collapse the pass as we retreat. I will handle the… collateral."

Collateral was the word I used for the three Imperial legions, nearly 300,000 souls currently fortifying the pass.

I would not fight them. I would simply unmake the geography they stood on. Something like a continental plate shift, localized and precise. It would be like erasing a troublesome sketch from a drawing.

Clean. Efficient.

The Stillness hummed its approval.

"Understood, Viceroy," Shale said, his voice heavy with an emotion the Stillness allowed me to observe but not feel. He picked up the goblin doll, holding it with surprising tenderness. "I will… see that this is returned to its family after the end of all of this… if any are left."

He left me then, the mountain-man carrying a tiny, broken heart.

I turned from the map, from the doll, and looked at my own reflection in the polished surface of my armored vambrace. A blue-scaled monster in human shape with eyes of molten gold stared back.

The first time I had used my power on such a scale, I had vomited for an hour afterward.

Now, with the Stillness nestled against my spine, I felt only a distant, clinical interest. Would a localized gravitic inversion be more efficient than a matter-disintegration wave?

The ideas spun in my mind, beautiful and cold.

It made all of this feel horrifying, and this was with the Stillness.

I would have never thought I would find the real horror in my strength wasn't that I could kill millions, but that I had learned to do the act, the math without flinching but here I was.

I guess war truly made us all monsters.

scene

Humanity is a contradiction carved in flesh—the only animal that can imagine God, and the only god that can envy the animals.

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The problem with power, I had learned, is not that it corrupts.

That is a simple moral platitude for people who have never held anything heavier than their own self-righteousness.

No, the problem with power is that it lies. It whispers that scale is a substitute for meaning, that the sheer magnitude of an act can be sanctified , or at least have the actor of it be absolved if the reason of the atrocity held sufficient weight, if the atrocity no matter how despicable it was had been done in the name of a greater good.

At the beginning of this war—this more than pointless war—I might have believed that. War was always pointless, a frantic scrabbling in the dirt that only proved we were all just animals with better tools.

But now?

Now I knew a more exquisite truth. Power was not a sword; it was a broom. A bigger broom for a bigger mess, and because I had it, it had made me the head janitor of a continental slaughterhouse.

And I felt nothing about it. Absolutely nothing.

That was the gift and the curse of the Stillness. It was not an emotion, not a state of mind, but a fundamental re-ordering of reality around me.

It was like being submerged in the deepest, most lightless trench of an ocean, where the pressure was so immense it became a new form of support, and the screams of the world were just faint, irrelevant vibrations against a hull of infinite thickness.

I was calm.

I was pure.

I was utterly, terribly still.

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I think it was a Tuesday.

The days had begun to blur into a smear of logistical reports and casualty figures, a calendar written in blood and ink. The specific date was a meaningless squiggle on parchment, but the problem was not.

The problem was three Imperial legions, a seething clot of human ambition and hatred, fortifying the Serrated Pass. On my enchanted topographical table, they were a cluster of glowing red pins, an infection I was about to cauterize.

Shale, my Ogre war-chief, stood across from me.

I could smell the acrid tang of his anxiety, a scent like ozone before a storm.

It was a human like scent ironically.

I did not hold it against him. To do so would be like blaming a dog for panting.

"The Serrated Pass cannot hold," I stated.

My voice did not echo; it was a flat, smooth stone dropped into the Stillness, creating no ripples. "Their artillery density is unsustainable. We cede the pass."

His jaw, a formidable construct of granite and stubbornness, worked side to side. I could hear the faint grind of his teeth. "Ceding the pass gives them a straight shot to the Sky-Spire Nexus. If they take that—"

‘We are functionally fucked,’ I finished the thought in the silence of my own mind.

It was a simple, logical conclusion. A leads to B leads to C, and C was the end of everything I was supposed to protect here, through a combination of whim and weary obligation, that I had built.

"I am aware of the tactical implications," I cut him off.

The words were clean, surgical, severing his emotional objection from the pure geometry of the problem.

I traced a line on the map with a single, azure-painted nail. A thread of blue energy, cold and precise, followed the path, etching a new, desperate defensive line into the stone.

"We collapse the pass as we retreat. I will handle the… collateral."

Collateral.

What a wonderfully sterile word. A term from accounting, from logistics. It was the word I used for the 297,843 individual universes currently housed in the valley below.

Each one a soul—a man dreaming of his lover's touch, a woman polishing a sword and thinking of her child's laugh.

I had done the math. The equation was brutally simple: 297,843 lives versus the several million under my protection, plus the strategic integrity of the entire Western Front.

The math was not kind, but it was unequivocal. It was efficient.

They wanted to kill us, of course. To them, we were Others. Abominations. Monsters.

They marched under banners of purity and light, their hearts swollen with a righteous fury that was, in its own way, terribly beautiful in its simplicity. They didn't see themselves as butchers arranging a slaughterhouse; they saw themselves as heroes cleansing a festering wound from the world.

And that was the most hilarious, the most tragic part of it all.

The hero is merely the villain of the other side, and love for one's own tribe is just hate for the other, wearing a prettier mask.

They screamed their love for humanity, and the echo that returned was a death sentence for anything that fell outside its narrow, jealous definition.

I didn't hate them. I didn't hate anything anymore. That was the entire point of the Stillness.

Hate was a color—a violent, passionate red. It was a temperature—a boiling, messy heat. It was a flavor that lingered on the tongue.

The Stillness washed everything in a monochrome of pure, sterilized logic. The pass was a problem. They were the manifestation of that problem. I was the solution.

It was as simple, and as awful, as that.

I closed my eyes. An unnecessary but familiar and thus welcome gesture.

The act was one of focus, a deliberate closing of shutters against the distracting, grainy film of external reality. In the private, perfect darkness behind my eyelids, I began the true work.

This was not about brute force. Any thug with a big enough hammer or a sufficiently destructive spell could pulverize a mountain. That was vulgar. Messy.

This was about persuasion.

It was in a way an act of intimate, terrible diplomacy.

I reached out with my will, not to push, but to listen. I found the patient, ancient conversation between the continental plates, the slow, grinding argument of tectonics that had built these peaks over millennia.

Had I have been not a true dragon, it would not have worked but I was and true dragons were but the world living through itself.

I found the fault line—a deep, tired scar in the earth's crust, a forgotten wound humming with stored grief.

I didn't command it. I didn't force it. I simply… agreed with it.

I lent my boundless will to its own latent, geological desire to shift, to settle, to finally be done with the immense, billion-year pressure. I showed it a new geometry, a more stable, more peaceful arrangement.

A canyon. A void. A silence.

The first thing to change was the sound.

Or rather, the introduction of a new foundational note to the symphony of the world.

It was not a roar.

It was a groan, a bass note so profound it was felt rather than heard, a vibration that originated in the planet's very heart.

It started in the bones, a resonant frequency that traveled up from the soles of my feet, a hum that made my teeth ache and the metal filigree on my robes vibrate.

In the command tent, I felt the ironwood table shuddered, I heard the glowing red pins rattling like the final, desperate chattering of teeth in a skull.

I felt Shale brace himself, his great, slab-like hands pressing flat against the map's surface as if he could hold the world together through sheer physical defiance.

Then, the world outside began to move.

It was not a violent, shattering motion. It was stately. Inevitable. It was the movement of a conclusion, not of conflict.

The far wall of the valley, a sheer cliff of grey granite that had stood for epochs, simply began to slide.

It didn't fall in a chaotic avalanche; it descended.

I guess that it would look like watching a curtain of stone being drawn slowly, deliberately, across a stage.

The air began to fill with a fine, grey mist.

It was not dust, not yet.

It was the rock itself, pulverized into its constituent atoms by the unimaginable pressures, being squeezed out from between the grinding continents like paste from a tube.

It rose in a silent, expanding cloud, a shroud of pure matter, blotting out the sun, turning the bright midday into a premature, gritty twilight.

The light that filtered through the tent flap was the color of forgotten things, of ashes and old bones.

The ground beneath our own feet, miles from the epicenter, gave a long, rolling shudder. It was the earth settling into its new shape like a vast sigh of relief.

Through the opening of the tent, I watched with draconic senses other than sigh the cloud rise. It climbed for miles, a dirty, brown-grey pillar supporting a ceiling of its own making, a new and terrible firmament.

At its base, where the Serrated Pass had been, there was now… nothing.

Not rubble. Not ruin. A void.

A smooth, sheer-walled canyon three miles deep, its bottom already beginning to glow with a sullen, infernal orange as the mantle's blood wept up to fill the fresh, gaping wound. The walls were smoother than any glass, polished to a mirror finish by the friction of a continent moving against itself in a single, conclusive argument.

I had not heard a single scream. I had not seen a single death.

There had been no fireballs, no blasts of defiant magic, no heroic last stands. There was only a before and an after. A place that was, and then, a place that was not.

I had not committed massacre; I had done something that was probably worse than one.

And it shouldn't have worked.

In those legions, among those hundreds of thousands, there must have been thousands, mages, holy knights, heroes with the individual power to shatter mountains, to disintegrate stone, to defy the very earth with their will.

They should have survived.

They should have erupted from the collapsing rock like avenging angels, their spells alight, their blades drawn, war cries on their tongues, fervour in their eyes.

They would have, I was sure, had I not been what I am.

A True Dragon.

Not just a creature of power, but the embodiment of a concept.

My will was not an opposing force to be met and countered; it was the revocation of the premise upon which their power stood.

I simply hadn’t wanted them to be able to use their powers and thus, those powers, abilities that could have saved them were negated.

Against my negation, their strength was not merely overcome; it was rendered irrelevant like a shout into a perfect vacuum that carries no sound.

They were not defeated; they were unmade.

People.

A word so small for something so vast yet so little.

People with dreams that smelled like spring rain, with hopes as fragile as spun sugar, with hatreds that warmed them on cold nights, with families and wants and a lifetime of accumulated, precious, mundane moments.

All of them, gone.

And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could have done to change this result.

I opened my eyes.

The world felt as if it had not changed, as if nothing had happened.

The command tent was the same. The maps were the same.

Shale was the same, though his face was now a petrified mask of stunned, horrified awe.

The only difference was on the map. The cluster of red pins was gone. Vanished. In its place, my cool, blue line glowed, a stark, newly-drawn border between what was and what I had decided would be.

"The… collateral…" Shale whispered.

The word felt like a blasphemy here, a tiny, pathetic attempt to label the unlabelable. It was like calling the ocean 'damp'.

"Is handled," I finished for him, my voice still that same flat, frozen stone.

I reached out and picked up a casualty report from a minor skirmish on the southern flank, my movements precise, economical, devoid of any tremor.

I felt nothing. No triumphant thrill. No sinking remorse. There was only a slight, metaphysical fatigue, the kind one feels after completing a complex and tedious piece of accounting.

The ledgers were balanced. The assets and liabilities had been reconciled. The problem was solved.

I had just killed three hundred thousand people. I had erased them from the book of life as one might wipe a smudge from a lens.

And all I had to show for it was the quiet, sterile satisfaction of a task checked off a list.

This was the true tragedy I think, the one that even the Stillness could not completely silence.

Not the act itself, the universe is indifferent to acts, no matter their scale but the silence that followed it within me.

Something like a ghost of my former self, the echo of the softer, smaller thing I used to be, stood in a soundproofed room at the very back of my consciousness and screamed.

It was a raw, endless scream of horror, a perfect understanding of the weight I had just lifted and thrown into the abyss.

It knew that each of those red pins had been a person.

It knew this was wrong in a way that transcended tactics and logistics.

But the scream was muffled, filtered through layers of perfect, impregnable Stillness until it was just a faint, theoretical hum, like the memory of a sound from a childhood I could barely recall.

I knew I should care. I knew I should be on my knees, my body wracked with sobs, vomiting up the sheer, undiluted horror of it.

But the Stillness held me upright, a beautiful, elegant golem of duty and power, its only animation the faint flicker of will required to initial the next requisition form for grain and arrowheads.

More than that, what was 300,000 more when I had already killed millions? It was just more blood on my hands that had stopped being pristine since what felt like an eternity.

I looked at Shale, at the undisguised shock and dawning grief on his face, and I felt a faint, distant pity—for him.

To care about the death of those who wished to kill everyone you knew, not for any action, but for the simple crime of being… it was such a luxurious, such a human or in that case more appropriately, monstrous indulgence.

In a better, kinder, softer world, he would be a farmer, or a storyteller, his strength used for building and nurturing. But this was not that world. This was not the dream it was supposed to be but the nightmare it had become.

"The supply lines to the western front will need re-routing," I said, my finger tapping the smooth, unbroken expanse on the map that now represented the new canyon.

The gesture was instructional, a teacher pointing to a lesson on a blackboard. "See to it, Shale. The Seventh's sacrifice bought us time. Let's not waste it."

I used the word "sacrifice." It felt like a lie, but a more palatable one. I think it felt more palatable because it implied choice, nobility, a purpose willingly embraced.

It was so much easier than the truth: that they had been unmade, processed, and logged as a necessary expenditure, their deaths as meaningful and personal as the erosion of a grain of sand on a vast, infinite beach.

He left, his steps heavy with a weight, a meaning I could observe but didn't feel.

I was alone again.

Alone with the ringing silence, the ghost of a planetary groan still hanging in the air, and the cool, perfect blue stone against my neck that whispered its eternal, comforting promise: that nothing I did would ever, ever truly matter.