>>5946844“Perhaps not. It wasn’t an ideal scenario, but I do believe it was the best of a bad situation. I suspected as soon as I heard that the two mystery ninja were after your mother that they might have an interest in killing you as well. That being the case, our options were to wait for them to strike while holding every advantage, or to use trickery to gain some advantages ourselves to put us in the best situation possible to weather the peril when it came. Your life was in peril regardless, but I thought forcing that peril out into the open under our own terms carried a comparatively lesser amount of risk. I would have told you if I wasn’t sure we were being listened to. Also, I haven’t been able to take stock of your acting abilities. That uncertainty meant it was riskier to tell you than the alternative.”
“The issue is that I didn’t get a choice. In tricking them, you tricked me as well. What you’re describing sounds like a shogi match… I haven’t played a lot of shogi, but I do know that the person who moves a piece first and sets the pace is going to have the advantage over the person who goes second and simply reacts. But in this scenario, I wasn’t a player of the game, I was a pawn of the game. I can’t feel safe or respected if my only input is to be manipulated by the hand of a player, regardless of how good their intentions for me are.”
Hotaru has nothing to say to that for a long while. Hours even. You eventually get over your discomfort being carried and meditate on what you’ve learned.
Life. Death. The inexorable whim of fate. Invisible forces far outside of your knowledge and control. The diktats of logic and reason. The diktats of loyalty and ideology. A great confluence of invisible will, writhing, seething, flowing through human instruments, all parts of a selfsame whole that nevertheless gnawed on itself with the ravenous hunger of a starving dog.
The will of the heavens, the spirits, the will of governments, and the will of men. It washes over you like an impenetrable miasma.
There’s no conclusions to be drawn, there may not be a perfect answer to how you should ride the flow of these forces, or resist them. Under what circumstances is riding the great invisible flow of fate and will to be accepted as virtuous? Under what circumstances is it to be rejected? And even if you came to set down some axioms to live by, accepted some enduring principles on the matter, to what degree could you even have faith in your own perspective, the limited human that you are? Perhaps every man considered that they stood alone as a beacon of truth in a corrupt world, and it was those very beacons that, in their totality, formed the blazing inferno of endless bloodshed and hatred that covered the world like a blanket?
