Become God

Her gaze was lifeless when she saw him. She could feel the numbing apathy seep into her skin faster than the blood that leaked out of the boy’s body when Guisei drove his blade into him.

The air was dull like a blurred camera lens.

Erena couldn’t help but think back to her memories of Limbo and that she had none. She heard every story about how this place would make her something more than what she once was, but even though she acted as if those things were fake, a piece of her held onto that even while she followed Guisei through the harsh wilderness of Limbo.

The two of them were quieter than before, and the hole in Erena’s heart returned. No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t forget the powerlessness she felt at the sight of that boy; the way blood dripped past his eyes and how he gripped so deeply to the stone under him that his fingertips burned on contact.

In a situation where she wanted to do anything, she could only watch. Erena wasn’t sure which hurt more, the fact that she couldn’t act or that when she trusted Guisei to do something to help all he did was nothing in her eyes.

She finally recognized the cold look within their golden exterior, the lack of hunger she saw was closer to a void meant to swallow everything in sight, and his desire was…lost; misplaced like a forgotten dream in the morning.

It was so familiar, but she didn’t want to ask even though every muscle in her body screamed to say something. Guisei walked ahead without saying a word. He kept his arms in front of him and his face away from Erena. The black tattoo Mammon had given him slithered across his arm and face like it was alive.

Every time it moved he was reminded of the pain he felt when he received it. Every stab was a tick in the back of his mind, and a voice dared to echo out every second he wasn’t focused.

His gaze diverted when he saw the same scene repeat in his mind. That pitiful boy, and his failed Anima, only for him to end it. A different person each time had done it in his mind, so this was no different.

The only difference was the lack of someone’s footsteps behind him.

Erena had stopped.

“Guisei, why didn’t you save him?”

Erena’s voice quivered as she asked, but Guisei kept moving without even responding. Every step he took carried shadows like bloody footprints. Erena sped up behind him, and called out again.

“Guisei—!”

“I can’t tell if that question is weird or stupid. You never said anything about protecting anyone else in this hellhole. Even then, his body was too weak to withstand his Anima, he was unstable. If you can’t survive on your own then you die. That’s the world we live in,” he said.

His last words lingered in her mind. She remembered the last time someone told her that and the sight of the flames when he said it to her. Erena kept her hands close to her chest.

“That’s the world we live in,” she repeated “Bullshit.”

The words were bitter in her mouth when she said the phrase. Erena couldn’t escape the feeling it brought her. She looked at Guisei, and his apathetic gaze moved forward again as if nothing had happened ⸺ it was useless.

“Everyone says that, but…we never change anything, Guisei,” Erena said.

It was funny. Something about what she said to Guisei was oddly hilarious, more than anything else he heard when he arrived at Curse Academy. Mammon’s face flickered through his mind. He could only remember the look of pity before he lost his arm to that man’s power.

“To change this world…it means that you yourself become a god ⸺ You are no god,” he spat.

“That ⸺ all that sounds like is the same trash that the Deadly Sins tell people to make us content with being powerless,” she muttered. “You don’t have to be a god to do ⸺— something…anything.”

Guisei heard the words, but unlike anything else she said. That was one of the few things that stopped him in his tracks. His hair covered his eyes, and his voice leaked out of him. For only a moment, he was distracted from the pain in his arm.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but… I’m here and I’m alive so that means I can do something,” she said.

Despite everything she said, Guisei stayed quiet. The burning curse of a contract awoke him to his senses. He remembered everything he saw. Not only from the cave but — everything. He saw all of this. So many people had told them this. They saw everything the world had to offer and in the end, Guisei knew one truth and one alone.

It didn’t matter. None of it did, the voices told him that much.

Guisei idly chuckled at her words before breaking into full on laughter. Something was funny about the idea of changing a world of killers, of liars, of thieves into something else. It reminded him of that same man whose reiju leaked out of his body like his flimsy philosophy and ideals.In the moments of death, he became just like the same people he spoke out against, clinging to status and materials like that would be the thing to save him in the end.

His eyes widened.

“Is THAT why you wanted me to protect you? To make some kind of statement? Somehow the longer I stay around you, the more pitiful you become. You almost had me there with that speech,” he said.

Erena stayed quiet as Guisei mocked the only thing that seemed to keep her going through the icy cold that surrounded her life. A sigh left her lips like a barrier against the heat that enveloped them.

“Do you have a dream…Guisei?” she asked.

Guisei grinned.

“Not at all. I thought you said you were the same, or are you just like the people here, hiding your pain with your idiotic goals and ideals while lying to yourselves about what you want?”

“There’s nothing to hide,” Erena replied.

“Then why do you CARE?”

Erena grinned at his words…her heart was broken, but for once her spirit had been revived. She could feel reiju flow into her with every breath she took. The burning flame in her heart reflected in her eyes as they shimmered with life.

“I’d rather be a Black Sheep of a noble who can care for those under me than a weak Deadly Sin who does nothing while calling themselves gods.”

Unlike every other moment they talked after Guisei killed that boy, he turned to face her. The tattoo on his body slithered along his skin, daring to engulf him with its darkness. Guisei looked at Erena, and his eyes were dull despite the agony his body was in.

“You hate them?” he asked with a smirk.

Erena recognized the marking, but she couldn’t react. She had read so many times about the power of contracts to awaken her Anima, but she never had seen one that was pitch black. Especially one that seemed so alive to her.

She was speechless.

“If you hate them so much, if you want to change the world that much, then prove it.” Guisei said, his gaze sharpened at Erena the longer he spoke. “I am the next Sin of Greed, prove you can do something in the face of a God… and kill me.”

Erena looked at him, finally noticing the actual distance between the them. Her reiju still flowed through the air and her eyes still shined with life. She fought to force the words out of her throat.

“You’re lying…you have to be..” she said.

“What use is there lying to a Black Sheep like you who’d die if I even consider leaving you behind.”

Erena’s arm burst into flames before sharpening like a blade. She moved fast and the distance between her and Guisei was nothing. This was the reality she believed in; a realm where humans and gods had no distinction and this was all she needed to prove it.

Her flames met his skin and Guisei’s blood was added to the stains within Limbo. His mind buzzed with the same psychedelic sensation he felt when he first received Mammon’s power. He looked up at Erena standing atop him with a blurred gaze.

“Why don’t you just die then?!” she shouted.

His face stung with the pain of a burning blade slicing across his face, yet he seemed to not even react, or even say a word.

“You’re no different from the nobles that treat the lives of those beneath you like cattle to trade away at convenience. Emotionless gods who trick people into thinking they’re any different from us!”

Erena looked down at Guisei. His gaze that once had the arrogance and pride of a noble suddenly looked different, not dead, but instead tired of something beyond her, yet emotions clouded her mind.

Her hands shook as more and more reiju flooded into her body. The flames around her arm grew more violent with her own desire to stab deeper into him…...yet. Guisei’s voice stopped her.

It was a voice unlike his, one that quelled Erena’s reiju and shattered her spirit.

“Are you done yet, Black Sheep?”

An unearthly blend of Guisei’s voice and another came from within him. Something slowly corrupted the whites of his eyes with dark ink as his golden eyes burned brighter than before. The cold that surrounded him earlier grew like an all-encompassing aura around them.

Reiju burst from his body, launching Erena across the wasteland of Limbo. Burning stone seared her skin when she met the ground. Guisei sighed at the sight with inhumane apathy, before touching his face.

He sneered at the idea a human would wound him in such a way before looking at the body he inhabited as if analyzing himself like a weapon to be used.

“Look at this, he got soft and let his face get cut like that…what a shame.”

The blood on Guisei’s face evaporated, leaving behind a scar for him to memorize like the rest his body bore. Whatever Erena had awoken, in no way in this world where people could say they were like gods…

There was no way the thing that Guisei had become was human.

“There was no use — acting like there’s a difference between us and people like you. It’d be better to accept it, girl,” the being said. “But tell me, child of the Xestis Family. Were you ever taught what it meant to form a true contract…? Every action has a price that has to be paid.”

A vortex formed in the earth below, the ground at the being’s feet spun into sand. Crimson grains swirled around his hands before he snatched it out of the air. Reiju dripped off the steel firearm he created.

“You harmed my body, so I wonder what would be equivalent for you?”

Erena couldn’t do anything. Just like so many times, she could do nothing in the face of something like this. In the face of a god…a true God, all she could do is look. The same feeling in her heart arose to the surface.

That same overwhelming sense of regret.

“Before you atone for your sin, I’ll leave you with a bit of advice, since you want to do the work of gods so badly.”

Erena’s eyes widened at the sound of a harsh click. She stared down the barrel of a gun while the being she challenged stared into her eyes with an apathetic glare. None of this was meant to happen.

She never should have trusted someone like him…he was just like the rest, worse than the rest. Though, maybe she might have just been foolish to believe that someone was similar to her. Despite not even knowing what the being who had replaced Guisei was going to say next, she accepted his words like it was nothing.

It was useless after all.

“Give up on your childish dreams and die.”