The word came apart in his throat and came out wrong.
"UNREASONABLE—"
He screamed it again, like it was something stuck in him that wouldn't come loose.
"UNREASONABLE!?"
His knees hit the stone.
"Am I?" His forehead followed his knees down, cracking against the cobblestone. "AM I?!"
He pushed himself back up only far enough to do it again.
"Tell me!" Another crack of skull on stone. "TELL ME! SAY IT!"
"UNREASONABLE!!"
"How am I unreasonable?" This time it came out almost quiet, almost a real question, aimed at no one — the boy, the dead vice leader, the sky. Then it broke again.
"AM I?! ANSWER ME!" Kneeling, he looked up at the sky.
His nails found his own cheek and dragged down, deep enough to open it.
"AGAAAH!" Another furrow, lower, into his jaw. "SAY IT! — TELL ME—"
No one answered him. No one could have.
He was no longer reasonable.
Answers or questions had no true meaning when all reason is lost.
Whatever knelt in that square, bleeding from its own hands, screaming a single word at the world, had no claim to the name Reason anymore.
UnReason.
His head fell again.
His howls sounded again, like a storm's wind, reaching the sky and deep into the earth.
Then, mid-motion, forehead an inch from the stone again — he stopped.
His whole body went still, held there, suspended.
His eyes had found the point, the blade at his stomach.
A silence stretched out, long enough that the boy scrambled backward against the wall, almost believing it was over.
Then UnReason started laughing, low at first, and it climbed.
"I"
"WE"
"CAN NOT"
"DIE"
"AM I NOT UNREASONABLE!!?"
Ash…
Snow…
The winds rose and roared.
"I've done this before." He said it almost gently, standing up, wiping blood from one torn cheek with the back of his hand, smearing it worse.
"You know that? I've done this so many times."
He held up fingers, like a lost child counting… he lost count… laughed again...
"The cliff." One word at a time, like each one costs something.
"Didn't work. The fire — that just hurt. Poison, that only made Persona angry. The river." A breath.
"Twice. Didn't even slow us down."
"DO YOU KNOW THE FEELING!?"
"As your lungs fill..."
"AS EVERYTHING BLURS!!"
"As your body still gasps..."
"DO YOU KNOW IT!?"
'Stop' — a voice from somewhere further back, small, cracking through for half a second.
Gone before it could finish.
UnReason's smile didn't move.
He found the blade jutting out below his ribs and closed his hand around the bare edge.
With one hand, he gripped the blade impaling him.
Instead of pushing it out, the way it had gone in...
He pulled forward.
The blade tore deeper, a rib giving way with a wet crack, the entry wound at his lower back splitting wide as he forced the crossguard through it, laughing the whole time.
Finally, at the exit wound, what came loose along the steel and crossguard should never have come out of anything still upright and talking.
He didn't stop until the hilt came free.
Blood and insides sheeted down both legs.
He held the dripping sword up to his face,
He shouted at it like it owed him an answer.
"WE DON'T DIE!" Louder than anything before it.
"We CAN'T! Do you understand?!"
"I tried... I tried so many things so many times!!" He reminisced for a moment longer, yet he almost seemed happy thinking back.
"That day, that beautiful day, the bright moon."
"The closest we ever felt to death, as those bullets tore through us,"
"It took some time for Monster to finish, but in the end, our body fell into the oceans of blood left behind, and death was finally there to take us." He sounded satisfied.
Looking up, the morning light lit his face.
He was staring straight into the sun.
But... just as calm he sounded and seemed for a moment, "YET WE ARE HERE!"
A howl, the winds and fires flared again.
Ash, no longer ash, scattered even more, drawing a thin icy layer over the world.
A tired sigh. A disappointed sigh.
"Again I tried today too — Tiana, I tried to — thought maybe if just ONE of us actually stopped, just one, just for once, then maybe—"
A laugh cracked into something closer to a sob and back again.
"Maybe SOMETHING in this body could finally, FINALLY—"
He didn't finish it.
Only a few bandits remained now.
Some whose willpower overcame their fear ran away after the vice leader's death, though most who were still alive stood frozen in fear.
Now, two of them broke again and tried to run during the preaching.
They achieved one thing: falling.
Their legs, and everyone's, had long since been locked in a layer of frost.
No one who heard him speak was allowed to leave.
No one.
As the sense of being trapped emerged, they began to scream and flail, just away, anywhere away.
They had to run away.
UnReason paused. "Through Monster, I realised one thing..."
"If we came so close to death through so many dying." He brought the sword to his face again, examining the reflection in the stained steel.
"Then what if..."
The wind, already rising, tore loose entirely.
"Everyone dies?"
Ash turned to snow, turned to a storm of white, howling sideways across the square, dragging at his hair, at his ruined, healing face.
His spilled insides moved, almost as if being dragged back inside him, but halfway through the healing, it stopped.
He looked up into the rising sun again, sword still dripping in his hand, and his voice came out flat and certain, cutting clean through the storm.
"I'm going to kill all of you."
"I'm going to kill everything."
"I am going to kill this world."
Frost climbed from his hand up the blade as he said it.
By the time the sentence finished, the steel wasn't steel anymore.
He held the blade the wrong way round, but the ice soon covered it.
Where his fist closed around the naked edge, the ice built outward past his hand until it became a new hilt.
The true hilt vanished under ice that swallowed the crossguard whole and kept growing past it.
An ice greatsword, pale blue, humming with cold that fogged the air around it.
He looked toward what was left of the bandits.
"NO!" They screamed, expecting a strike that never came.
Instead...
He swung it once, wide, unhurried, twirling the sword.
The tip shallowly pierced into the road below.
[NO!] In the next moment, perplexed, the bandits looked around.
A scream, a sound just like theirs before, but this one came not from any of them, not even from the monster in front.
A rather young voice.
[STOP!]
Screaming desperately.
[COLD!]
The ground, the sky, the trees and grass, the houses, and the fire burning them — the sound came from all of them, it came from everywhere.
[HURTS!]
The ground shook as pain filled the words.
"Ah... ahah." The bandits' desperate cries broke into something like laughter.
Horror alone was pulling that sound out of them, nothing else.
All the fires still burning gathered together. A huge ball of fire.
[STOP IT!]
Tongues of flame launched at the monster standing motionless in the square.
But...
They didn't reach him.
They never could.
Frozen, scattered, like ash... snow.
In a single moment, everything was extinguished.
Disappeared like the fire never even existed.
"This world-" UnReason's arms tensed a little, about to push the blade deeper.
'No!' Suddenly, his other arm grasped it, opposing the push.
"LET GO!" UnReason's face twisted.
"No!" Silver light.
One golden, one silver eye.
"I can not do this!"
"LET GO!" Two sides opposed each other.
"I won't allow it! If the world dies, everyone dies!"
"THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE!"
"My words... my promise... I have already failed one, I can not..."
"UGAH!" The pressures pressed together for a moment.
Then...
*Flung*
The ice sword flew out of the ground, his hand still holding the hilt, as the gold began to wane.
"NO!" UnReason's hand turned, the blade twisted.
"Uh!?"
"TODAY, I'LL KILL US!"
Though the words were different, the slash was aimed not at himself but at the bandits in front.
"IN ITS PATH, ALL DIES!" The cut didn't look fast. It didn't need to be.
No matter who or how they struggled, every man in the path went down together, before any of them understood they had already been opened.
But...
No blood or even bodies hit the earth — the cold from each wound spread in an instant.
Just like the fire that once existed there...
Frozen, scattered, snow.
What hit the earth was just a light blanket, melting into an embrace.
The square went quiet.
The monster looked up.
Snow kept falling, settling into the half-healed wounds on his face, melting pink where it touched.
Reason stood among the quickly melting ice and snow, the ice sword dripping, melting, then slipping from his hand, breathing hard, and said nothing at all.
"Agh..." A sound, Reason's head turned. The young bandit at his side... gasping for air, he was choking on his own breath.
"Scram..."
It didn't need to be said a second time.
The boy ran even before getting up. Even after getting up and running and tumbling, he was sure not to look back.
For a moment longer, Reason looked at the fleeing boy.
"Un..." His words didn't finish, his body uncontrollably hunched forward as dark blood came up.
His exhausted body couldn't hold the position even for a moment and fell face-first into the road.
Reason choked on the blood for half a second before his trembling hands could push his body up.
'He stopped the healing halfway...' Though the body was a complete mess, Reason's mind was still the same.
'Used up all our power...' Analyzing everything.
'...even what Monster left behind...'
'The body is dying...'
'I will lose consciousness in a minute...'
'What do I do?' But rather than an answer, he only arrived at a question.
He crawled into an alley, trying to hide from whatever threat he couldn't account for.
'This body still has power but...' Almost like an answer, the veins on his arms burst, blood spraying all over the alley.
'I can't control it...' He sat up, back to the wall, looking at both his arms as they healed in an instant, almost mocking him.
Pain filled his body as his blood surged the wrong way, warring with itself inside him.
'This body keeps fighting itself...'
He coughed, dark blood spilling down his front, curling and pooling before it settled.
He pressed his hand into his stomach, trying to hold what remained of his torn insides together, keeping the blood loss to a minimum.
'So many kinds of blood and flesh, forced into one shape...' None of them wanted to sit still together.
"Heal... me..." Reason whispered.
His body jerked, pain lancing through him.
It would not listen.
'Without my power...' He was one of the best at controlling this body, and even that was only thanks to the power itself.
Countless wills, countless bloodlines, crammed into a single frame.
Though this body was now a true reflection of their mind and soul, that same truth seemed ready to kill them for it.
"Heal me..." he asked again, but the flesh only strained harder against itself, fighting worse than before.
'I can't control it...'
The world began to blur.
'I am losing consciousness...'
'Father...'
'In the end... in the end...'
'So... this is it?'
It might have happened thanks to Echo using his power inside... or maybe Reason's mind was playing with him.
'This is what your word, your promise amounts to?'
A memory surfaced... more than a simple memory. A man none of them could or will ever forget.
Reason looked up, though everything was blurry, he didn't need to ask who this figure was.
A rather short stature, yet just as muscular. A big beard and those eyes, those green eyes looking over him.
Eyes filled with such disappointment and disgust...
"Ugh..." Reason's stomach twisted. Maybe it was the pain, or the body, or the emotions that flared up in him from that gaze.
'This is what your... Reasons amount to?'
Reason's teeth clamped together as the man turned and walked out of the alley.
'In the end, are you just an unreasonable monster?'
The man disappeared like a mirage, the mirage he was.
Reason's face turned...
Even with so many wounds, his face almost seemed unbothered, yet now... anger, rage.
"Heal me!" He ordered.
The body moved, "Heal me!" yet Reason gave it no chance to oppose him anymore.
The warring blood and muscle went still, almost startled.
"Do you not see my spilled blood, my torn flesh?"
"It's dead... If the body dies, no matter what flesh or blood it is... it will die!"
"Choose! Heal me, or die!"
In an instant, the response came.
The wounds all over his face, his insides, the entry and exit wounds, everything fused and healed up in a blink.
"Ugh!" Such a speed that Reason couldn't even remove his hand from his abdomen, holding his innards.
But the 'regeneration' didn't stop there.
The healed wounds on his face grew, flesh and blood warping out in deformed, unnatural ways.
"Stop-" Reason tore the hand out, his abdomen open once again, reaching up to the overgrown flesh.
"IT!" With a single motion, he tore it off.
*Agh... agh* Reason's breath turned ragged.
As the regeneration calmed, he put a hand over the new hole in his abdomen.
The dispersing emotions invited back all the exhaustion even more strongly.
His eyes closed involuntarily.
'No, the blood loss... It's too much, I will still die... I need to.'
A warm feeling emerged in his chest.
But then...
A sound reached him.
'No!' He had already lost all feeling in the body, he couldn't even open his eyes anymore, and yet, with will alone, he raised his hands over his head.
It was not of the will to fight but...
'I have to protect us!' A will closer to a memory.
'Damned old man! Just leave us alone! Don't hit us anymore!' Though the memory was of a time long passed.
Before he could even move a thought more, Reason fell back deep down.