I had always been in favor of the Male Act.
Yet I knew why I had to remove it.
This task was not merely a command.
It was a test—of who I had become, of how I would navigate a world built to use me.
There was another reason.
The only reason that had nothing to do with law or strategy: my mother.
The government promised that once I completed the mission, I would finally see her. Not for a fleeting moment, but for months—long enough to feel her presence and remind myself why I had survived all these years.
She had been taken from me as a child. Every memory of her—her glory, her warmth, her pain—had been fuel for the fire that shaped me.
This promise weighed heavily.
It was a motivation that made the impossible task almost bearable.
I could remove the Male Act, even knowing it had kept me alive, because it offered a chance to reclaim something I had lost: a fragment of my past, a connection to my mother.
The Male Act protected males from unjust death. Anyone who killed a male without proper cause—unless the male was a mass killer or criminal—risked destroying their entire family. They would become nothing more than beggars, never to rise again.
Those who aided in the crime would share the same fate. Innocent children, however, would be spared, demoted only to ordinary citizens. They would receive five years of free housing, enough to adjust to a new life.
That was the world I had grown up in, and the one I had to navigate now.
And that was why I would do what I must, no matter how conflicted my heart felt.