When I watched war movies, I always wondered how it truly felt to be on the ground when the planes flew overhead. I could see a mix of terror and frustration and helplessness on the faces of the actors. They sprinted and dove and huddled for cover as a whistling sound descended upon them from overhead; the tune of the reaper.

  Your limbs get torn off by forces built beyond the comprehension of nature. Your viscera spreads to the four corners of the world as people helplessly watch. They cannot put you back together. You are ground meat, the same that you find in the supermarket.

  In that case, what did it feel like to be the bomb? The ordinance dropped from the sky to rain down indiscriminate death.

  You hear about even today, the unintended people that are caught up in a blast meant for specific individuals. Communities where children flinch in fear at the sound of a drone engine. How did it feel to be the cause of that fear? To feel yourself weightless in the sky, falling without a care in the world until your reach your destination at the bottom. Your body cracks on the first surface it breaks into, blasting your ordinance indiscriminately.

  I was the missile. I sprang high into the air and rained death upon anything that tried to live below me. Their corpses splattered and melted away into black pools, never to be seen again.

  Power flowed throughout my body, each kill taking me exponentially further ahead. Levels piled up just to allow for more room to place my new stats into. My extradimensional stomach kept grinding and killing everything that woke up inside it, squeezing out every single stat point that it possibly could.

  I had blitzed through the tens of thousands of stats to reach the hundreds of thousands of stats. Soon, I’d be in the millions. My strength was incomparable to it was when I first arrived. I would have turned the me of yesterday into paste.

  A flood of death coated the battlefield in its inky ichor and with it, came stillness. A war, crushed within the hour by someone who wasn’t even involved.

  Now, I just needed to find the main event.

  I lifted a rock and it turned to powder in my hand. My eyes widened. I was growing too strong for this realm already.

  My tongue snaked out of my mouth. My eyes drifted upwards to see the false Olympus floating just above the summit. I was starving for what lied beyond. It was growing to be time to throw my own hat in the ring.

  I lifted a different rock more gently this time. I aimed it towards the nearest fortress and threw it with all my might. It struck the structure instantly, ripping through the black metal and tumbling deep into the distance.

  “Two more,” I said to myself, picking up two more rocks.

  Two additional loud bangs tore through the silence. I tapped my foot impatiently while I waited for a response. It wouldn’t be interesting to take them out one by one. I wanted to take them all on at once.

  “What are you all doing? How did you allow the command post to be attacked?” An eagle in a suit demanded as they stormed out of a fortress.

  “Tsk. I must find the commander and fix their poor performance,” a dog-headed dressed in an officer’s uniform remarked as they walked out of a different fortress.

  “I don’t like how quiet it is,” a man made of bark murmured to himself.

  They eventually all wandered to my location. Each step they took, I could see unease building. An entire battlefield, gone. There wasn’t a single soul but me.

  “Who are you?” They asked in near unison.

  “Just someone passing through,” I answered with a shrug. “I saw some fighting that looked fun so I decided to join in. I didn’t realize that it would end so quickly.”

  “How dare you interfere with our fight, interloper?” The dog barked at me.

  “Where are our troops?” The eagle asked.

  I made a show of looking around. I squinted my eyes, looking deeply for the demons that we no longer there. I threw my arms up and sighed.

  “Seems like they defected,” I answered. “I guess they got tired of following you.”

  “Impossible,” the tree man denied. “They are loyal followers of our cause, our utopia. They would not abandon their posts and give up on their dreams.”

  “Where have they gone?” The eagle asked again.

  “It doesn’t matter where they’ve gone,” I said with a smile. “All that matters is that they are not coming back. Now, I’d like to ask a question of my own; one that I’ve been dying to know since I got here. Which one of you is the real one?”

  “Me,” they all answered.

  “Wrong,” I replied with a wag of my finger. “There’s nobody who can overhear you, there will be no defections for finding out you’re a liar. So, speak truthfully, which one of you is the real one?”

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  They all looked at each other with suspicious eyes. They were trying to communicate without me. I was hurt that they would continue this poor attempt at duplicity. But, I’d be unsatisfied if I didn’t get an answer, so I allowed them to try to fool me.

  “Me,” they all answered.

  “Wrong again,” I sighed. “Try giving a speech.”

  “What?” The oak asked.

  “Give a speech. I know how you talk. I’ve seen it before on video. The real one has charisma, a voice that could coax its entire population to be complicit in the atrocities committed behind their backs. So show me. The one that makes the biggest impression will be the real one. I’ll even show you where your troops are.”

  “We have no reason to obey you,” the dog said indignantly. “What does it matter whether or not you believe? You’re just some lizard.”

  I felt their hostility rising. They were choosing the moment to strike together. Not that divided anymore, were they?

  At the very least, it gave me a confirmation of something.

  “You know what I think?” I said, bringing some slight confusion to their faces. “I don’t think any of you are the real one. So, that begs the question. What happened to the real leader?”

  “There is a saying that I heard when I was in Paris,” the eagle responded. “We had taken the city and draped our flags over every monument. We made a temporary officer’s club in a café not too far away from the headquarters. There were girls there, brought in from the street by some of the boys. We were drinking, playing cards, or slipping away into the backrooms to relax a little. You know how much pent up resentment needed to be relieved? Their fathers blamed everything on us, brought us into poverty. It was only right that we get ours back.”

  “The point,” I requested impatiently. My eyes darted around me, taking note of the fact that the other two were in motion while the eagle told his long winded story.

  “Sure,” the eagle answered as the dog and tree loosened their posture slightly. “Hanging on the wall, there was a photo of a handsome man with his eyes crossed out with red lipstick. There was some epitaph written in thick black ink underneath. I was curious, so I asked a girl what the photo said. She answered that it was from a poem.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “Don’t touch your idols, gold always rubs off on your hands.”

  “The more you know about someone you idolized, the more their mystique goes away,” the oak continued. “Each new thing that gets revealed moves them away from being a figure that is above man and closer to seeing the flawed individual that resides beneath.”

  “And, when you are physically out on the battlefield. When your hands freeze and your stomach growls and your body shakes from the ceaseless bombs and gunfire, you realize that you possessed the ideals of the Party to a far greater degree than the Party itself,” the dog added.

  “We met many who claimed to be former leaders that were only interested insofar as to create the same power dynamic that existed before our deaths,” the eagle said. “They just wanted to rebuild the system where they got to give all the orders and we got to bleed and die over and over and over again. And why should we do that? I did not live long enough to see the end, but I knew that our loss was inevitable, that our dream was dead. So, we each individually had a thought. Why give control back over to those who lost the war? We will just lose again.”

  “There were many war dead that all trickled down into the depths at once,” the oak explained. “Every black-hearted soldier from across all the theatres found themselves at odds with each other again. Tensions were high. Hatred was high. It was a bloodbath.”

  “In all of that, you couldn’t find your leader?” I asked.

  “No,” the eagle answered. “Maybe, he got unlucky and found himself outnumbered and turned to paste. Maybe, he’s completely thrown us away to pursue a different calling. Maybe, we actually did find him and refused to believe it because he failed to live up to expectations. Regardless, it became clear, after meeting other supposed officials, that I don’t think I ever actually wanted to find him. That it would be better to claim to be him than be disappointed. I couldn’t handle it.”

  “It sounds like all three of you had the same idea independently.”

  “Indeed. Our forces were inevitably going to intersect. So, we decided to end it like gentleman,” the tree man confirmed. “Whoever won would be the leader and would sit on the throne at the summit.”

  “And you came along and ruined it,” the dog spat.

  “The pigs overthrow the humans and then become the same as them,” I commented.

  “What?”

  “You cursed and overthrew your old leaders for sending you off to die and suffer without sacrificing anything themselves. Now, you are leaders and you hide in your fortresses and allow your loyal followers to suffer in your stead. Do you not see that you have transformed into the soft-handed bureaucrats that you once despised?”

  “We couldn’t afford to be out there,” the oak reasoned. “If we fell, then we’d lose.”

  “Then you were more important?” I asked, scratching my chin. “Sounds familiar.”

  The three leaders swallowed their words. Surprise, rage, resignation; each of the three sported their own unique reaction to my words.

  “Where are our men?” The eagle asked again.

  “Fight me. Either way, you will see them soon.”

  An empty battlefield. When the soldier die, the leaders stand no chance. I wondered if these three had ever realized that their skill was eroding. What they showed me was nothing, just a ton of power without any way to control it. It ended so quickly, like a child trying to fight a speeding car.

  The dog chose not to believe it. He lunged at me, expecting the other two to fly in with him. His eyes faded before he knew that neither of them moved. They used him to gauge my strength and found that there was nothing that they could do.

  “What are your goals?” The eagle asked as I chopped down the tree man with my hand. “What are you doing this for?”

  “What else is there to do in a world like this?” I answered. “A world that never ends. Did any of you actually enjoy the process to get here?”

  “No. It was awful. I never wanted to live it again.”

  “Then this place wasn’t made for you," I shrugged. "You were never going to conquer the top anyways.”

  "Is it a sin to try?"

  "No, it is as natural as what comes next."

  With that, it was over. Normally, I would have felt disappointed. But, for some reason, it was fine. I gained something from the experience.

  Knowledge that there were more free meals waiting so nearby. Another endless war resided just over the horizon.

  As I readied myself to speed over there, a red box filled my eyes. It was a quest; bewilderingly simple. But, I was so excited to see it.

  Quest

  Untrodden Footsteps III

  It's time to show me what you've learned.

  “Master?”

  No response. Just a pin on the map, high up the side of the mountain. A simple challenge that caused my entire body to come alive.

  “Now I really need to kill these guys quickly.”