[CITY 2 - STRUGGLE]

Rushing through the dark hall towards the lit-up conference room, he freezes at the sight of a standoff.

It’s Valerie, eyes wide with hate as she aims down her sights at someone across the collapsed room divider.

Masaru stops short of the door and curls around to see who she’s aiming at.

“You know, if you could had just gotten over yourself you would have been on that cover instead,” a person that looks almost exactly like Valerie says with a scant, viper-like smile. “You didn’t have to run like that. Now who’s going to care about yo-”

“Shut up!” Valerie shouts.

The other Valerie, with clearer skin, a nicer face, better clothes, and a more striking figure on top of the already beautiful lady’s appearance, jostles her own hunting rifle in her hands. “Shut up… to reason, darling? To sensibility?”

“I said shut up! Shut up, damn you!” Valerie cries as her high-readied aim trembles from fatigue. “I couldn’t do that! I’m not going to let anyone do that to me again!”

The other, “better” Valerie gives a cute, pitying smile as she leans in with an unthreatened gaze. “Then I suppose you just don’t have what it takes!”

Valerie screams as she fires at her copy, who doesn’t even flinch as the round whizzes by her ear, nearly clipping one of her resplendent bangs of hair.

“Childish, even as an adult. Daddy deserved better.”

Sobbing, Valerie falls to her knees as she struggles to cycle the bolt of her rifle. “Daddy… wouldn’t have wanted me to do that!” she snaps through her growing tears.

The other Valerie, pressing her considerable backside against the rim of the conference table, gives the true Valerie the kind of look a mother might give a child who slipped and ruined their good clothes in the mud: compassion, yet frustration at their incompetence. She pulls up her rifle to line up a perfect, pin-point shot.

“It’s okay, dear. You don’t have to embarrass him any mor-”

It barely dodges the tossed office chair, and turns to face its source.

“Well,” it starts with a raised brow, its body fluctuating like disturbed water the moment it looks at Masaru. It cuts its gaze back to Valerie before taking an abrupt shot.

Even when shooting from the hip, and even after abruptly repositioning to dodge a thrown chair, its aim is lock-tight.

The round whizzes past Masaru as he twists around to see Valerie holding a new wound in her chest, fresh blood spilling out onto the thin carpet.

He flinches, towards her, roars, and ultimately turns back to the copy. “Why?!”

The other Valerie, its eyes still on the dying form of its inspiration, shrug. “Removing useless and ugly things should be the role of the strong and the beautiful.” Its pitying smile gains a twinge of pleasure as it watches her grovel on the floor. “Don’t you agree?”

“No!” Masaru shouts, pointing to Valerie. “Do you think that just because you’re ‘prettier’ that you’re better?!”

It grins as it slowly pulls its gaze over to him. “Well, obviously. But on top of that, she’s unworthy because she refuses to take care of her family. She’s given up on herself, and I’m just helping her see the way to the doo-”

“Shut up,” Masaru says.

The dying Valerie, a fall of blood from her mouth glazing the side of her face, looks up to him as her movements begin to slow.

“SH- excuse you, boy! Nothing good happens to fellow with attitudes like tha-”

“Did you hear me?! I said shut up!” Masaru shouts over the copy once again. “Valerie is a wonderful person!”

The copy, its body once again fluctuating like flowing water, loses definition as it scoffs at his words.

“Wonderful? What’s wonderful about abandoning your friends, your family?”

He steps forward, ready to lean into a sprint to tackle it. “She’s wonderful, calm under pressure, and more compassionate than you could ever hope to be!”

The copy laughs as its body fully dissolves into a liquid mass, a blank slate of a person that could have any traits, any face, any shape. “You didn’t answer my ques—”

“I’m sure that whatever it is she did, she had a good reason for it. You can expect people to just be robots and live by your shitty social expectations all the time. No one can be that perfect, not if they’re real, and that’s the one thing that makes her undoubtedly better than you,” he explains, causing the near-death Valerie to slowly turn her head as if to hear him better. Even though her eyes have lost their focus, their vitality, a thin shift in her irises suggest she’s heard him. “Now are you going to show yourself, or am I going to have to make you?” Masaru asks, rearing up to throw a punch.

He hears a hiss come from the amalgam, and that’s answer enough for him.

Masaru strikes into the fluctuating form of water, but meets the heart-pulsing sensation of someone grabbing him back.

The water subsides, and the better Masaru reveals himself in the place of the better Valerie. “Missed me?” it asks with a twisting brow and a lady-killing smirk.

It’s holding Masaru’s right arm in place with one hand, and from the dropping briefcase at its side, its free hand pulls out to reveal a brass knuckle.

Masaru doesn’t have time to react before the doppelganger inserts his fist into his jaw with a blink-fast punch.

He had no idea simply getting punched in the face could hurt so bad.

Masaru jolts and attempts to recover, but his copy already has the momentum.

“You talk a big game to her when she’s clearly a better person than the other one. Don’t tell me you’re jealous?” the better Masaru laughs out as he slams his braced fist back into the spot where it had first hit. Once again its aim is impeccable, and Masaru’s jaw which had barely held up from the first strike shatters into an agonizing kaleidoscope of bone fragments.

He flails against the fake but its ineffective against the direct, focused punch of the top executive as it sends another debilitating striking into the exact point once again. Masaru’s head feels like a volcano erupted and spilled directly into his skull. It’s a profound pain as he collapses onto the ground as begins convulsing.

The better Masaru pins him with his knee onto his neck as he lines up another hit.

“The truth is, Mister Abe,” the better Masaru continues as it continues punching down into his face, this time into the nose, “You’re protecting her as a defense mechanism for yourself. You’re garbage like she is, and garbage like you deserves to be dumped in the street,” it says before slamming in a final time, collapsing Masaru’s skull and sending him back to the drowning feeling.

He cannot speak through his crushed face, but even if he did, he wouldn’t have anything to say.

“I’m defending garbage? Is that all we are?” he asks as the pain fades away with his consciousness.