Elias Marrow was happy. Genuinely, unabashedly happy. It felt like his birthday—no, better. It felt like every birthday he never had rolled into one sublime, explosive moment of destructive glee. He stood alone amidst a field of devastation, surrounded by the twisted bones of buildings and streets torn asunder. The roads, once paved and purposeful, were now jagged ruins. Debris lay in great choking piles, smoking faintly as if the village still coughed out its dying breath.
The scent of burning flesh lingered thick in the air, mingled with ozone and scorched wood, a heady perfume of aftermath. Elias tilted his fox-shaped head upward and inhaled deeply. The grin that stretched across his vulpine muzzle was nothing short of euphoric.
Everything was ruined. But the symphony... he shivered as if he could feel the sound waves again, hear their dissonance nestle gently around him and rock the world into oblivion and beyond! How delightful!
He had played his part masterfully. The erratic charges, the sudden stops, the aimless loops around the outer walls of the village—all calculated madness. He'd feigned confusion, faked feral instinct. The shinobi had been perplexed, chasing him like rats scrambling after a wily god. He had scattered them, pulled them away from their precious centers of power.
But he hadn't forgotten what he'd seen.
The little men, the warriors in masks and armor, were unlike anything he'd known in his former life. They moved like ghosts and struck like thunder. They didn't have guns, which disappointed him slightly—no good ol' American lead to dodge. But they had something else, something ancient. They were wizards with blades, conjurers of flame and wind and earth and they were G.I JOE size!
This wasn't 'Merica. This wasn't a land of fast food and cheap beer, of Cocacola and liberty. There were no overfunded border walls built by underpaid foreign contractors. There were no suburban sprawl nightmares or Alabamamen. And even more sadly, the big building with the japanese writings wasn't a sushi restaurant.
No. This was something else.
Elias didn't know exactly where he was, but he knew it was far from home—and yet something about it felt deeply, violently familiar. Like the dream of a war he'd fought in another life.
His Japanese was rusty. He hadn't spoken it since Ryoka, the cellmate across the hall, had gone to take a shower and never come back. Ryoka had been a tenor. When he dropped the soap his voice could cut through concrete when he sang his newly discovered sensations, shamelessly. A dropped bar of soap in a lethal company, what a departure.
Elias blinked. A slow, satisfied blink. He was letting his thoughts drift too far back but it wasn't time yet to remember Big Guguo joining his belowed Ryoka trough the gates of a shredder... not yet at least.
These ninja were dangerous. Deadly. But so was he—or rather, so was the body he now inhabited. The beast whose skin he wore. The demon fox he became or maybe always was?
Somewhere in the marrow of this monstrous form, he felt it—the fading echo of the soul that had once lived here. It had been full of rage, of hate, of sorrow. Elias understood that kind of pain. He embraced it. But then, he looked sideways frowning as if hit by an unpleasant realisation. It seemed more like it gave back to Caesar what belonged to Caesar from the start, offering the throne to it's rightful owner! But it was not the right time to think about it yet.
The memories that remained, faded and jagged as broken glass, told stories. Stories of chains, of darkness, of a woman with red hair and tears in her eyes. Of being used. Contained. Feared. And that red moon, that disgusting inky eye-shaped moon...
He didn't pity the beast. He didn't welcome it either. He was much more than a stupid animal in a cage.
With a vulpine chuckle, Elias whispered through his deadly fangs:
"Ma che bello."
The decision came to him as if the skies opened wide and angels descended to offer him the perfect script for the perfect little cute fox he was. It was a revelation!
He would stay hidden.
He would become part of this world. He would learn about it. Understand it's truth. Gnaw on it untill it bleeds dead!
Somewhere out there, in this strange place, there had to be an Emperor of Mankind. A central figure. A god-king. He would find them. Or become them.
But first, patience.
He would lie dormant, like a disease waiting for a weakened host. He would listen to their fears, he would memorize their smiles, their rituals, their hypocrisies. He would carve paths beneath their streets and poison their waters while remaining hidden under their noses.
He would watch them rebuild.
And when the time came, he would return. With new art. With new style. He'll even feed them some memberberries for the sake of old times!.
He would become a whisper in the walls. A smiling infection. A secret boogeyman beneath their beds.
He will become… the Senate!
He will have the POWER!
No one can stop him!
And so, with all the drama of a dying deity, Elias collapsed. He lowered his great fox body to the cracked earth and curled his tails inward. He let his tongue loll from his mouth like a flag of surrender.
He went still.
To any onlooker, he was unconscious. Spent. Defeated by his own glorious madness.
But inside?
Inside, he was laughing.