​Chapter 35. Just Be

The silence after the battle was alive and tangible, like breath. It soaked into the howl of the icy wind, the scrape of cooling metal, and the crackle of dying electronics. Mark stood with his back pressed against the frozen wall of the high-rise, feeling the crumbling concrete biting through his soaked jacket. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind a void in which his own thoughts hummed. He tried to remember the fight. The rage came back to him—molten, like liquid metal in his veins. The world slowing down, stretching—reality suspended in dark amber, with himself at its center.

And then—a fall. Blackness filled with roaring, flashes of light, and the sense that he was no longer a man but something else—something that broke the very foundations of the world.

In the distance, among the snow-covered ruins, Legion fighters moved like soundless shadows. Barely visible in the veil of the blizzard, they methodically collected trophies from corpses: batteries, armor plates, rifles still warm from firing. From time to time someone threw Mark a quick, sidelong glance—not hostile, but filled with superstitious awe. They no longer saw a man, but a wild beast who by some twist of fate fought on their side. Or perhaps not a beast at all, but a god—cruel, unfathomable, born of blood and darkness.

From around the corner, leaning on Rusty and another fighter, Derek appeared. His face had taken on a gray, lifeless shade, and his left arm ended in a torn stump wrapped in a filthy, blood-soaked rag. Blood dripped down his pant leg, leaving dark stains on the snow. He stopped. In his eyes, despite the pain, flickered a shadow of his old mockery.

“Not bad for a former cop,” Derek said, exhaling. His voice trembled, but still held that predatory calm that had made him the leader of the Legion.

Rusty led Derek further, toward the improvised med station in the next building. The Legion was gathering everyone who survived, even the heavily wounded. Mark watched them go, feeling the cold of the Ring sinking deeper—not into his body, but into his very core. He wasn’t the cop who used to log corpses and hate the City. He had changed, and that terrified him as much as it thrilled him.

Bran and Nora approached without a sound, their shadows gliding across the snow like reflections in dark water. Their faces remained impassive, but their posture carried the coiled readiness of predators waiting for a command.

“We need to move,” Bran muttered. “Drones are already inbound. The City won’t forgive this.”

Mark nodded, and the Legion began to withdraw as well: people carrying the wounded, dissolving into the shadows of the buildings. They knew the City would retaliate. And the Agency was no longer hunting a rogue cop — it was hunting the monster who had ripped their strike group apart single-handedly. The Ring stood frozen in a tense, breathless pause.

On the battlefield, not only borgs lay scattered. Among the bodies were people: augs, assault troops—just like he once was, like Diana. They had memories, habits, families, even if sewn together with code. What was it they said in Mari’s books, zos and kia? Even if only a fraction of one percent of a human being remained, it was still a person. And he had killed them.

Their blood still steamed in the snow, and the thought kept circling back to him. The City—and any average person—would call him evil. But the City calls evil any will except its own. So what is evil, really? What is evil at all? War is always born from each side believing it is right. Sides and justifications change, but the essence stays the same: everyone calls the other a monster. And by that logic, he was neither worse nor better than anyone else.

The City could not be good—he had understood that long ago. But why then was the City evil? Not because it controlled or maintained order, but because it stripped people of choice. It took the soul and reforged it into a synthetic shell. It broke will and called it happiness. That’s why he went against BioTech—they wanted to break him the way they broke the Ring and replace his will with an algorithm.

So goodness wasn’t in the law or in majority consensus, not in a Committee protocol or in commandments. Goodness was when your will remained yours. When you could say “no” even when the world expected “yes.” When you refused to bend to a dogma, refused to dissolve into a convenient lie.

True evil is the destruction of will. Everything else is just a way to preserve that will.

When he returned to the little bookshop, the pre-dawn gloom had already given way to falling snow. The smells wrapped around him like a memory of another life. A pocket universe in the chaos of the Ring: shelves overloaded with books, the soft glow of a lamp, the worn-out couch he had sat on so many times. Mari stood behind the counter, her fragile figure seeming like part of this place, as though she were cut from the same paper as the dusty pages. Without asking a thing, she set a cup of tea in front of him, her movements smooth, almost ritualistic. Steam rose, dissolving in the half-light, and Mark felt the tension of the battle finally release its grip.

He sank into the couch, looking out the window, where snowflakes swirled in the dim light. Today’s victory wasn’t the end. It was only the opening note of his personal overture to the real war.

He looked at Mari. Her calm, her quiet certainty hid answers to every question he was afraid to ask. But he couldn’t stay silent anymore. He had to understand.

“Who are they?” he asked, surprised by how strange and hollow his own voice sounded. “The ‘Children of Chaos,’ Eliza... demons? What the hell are they?”

Her visor held a tiny ghost of his reflection. She watched him, and her words held no pity, no mockery—only cold, inhuman clarity.

“Remember what I told you about the shared dream?” she began. “The one that binds all of us. One man, a long time ago, in the New York subway, called it the Pact. I liked the name. Demons are the ones who wake up inside that dream. They refused its rules, its lies and morality. But they still have an anchor in the Pact—their body.”

She paused. Mark felt her voice seep into him like the cold of the Ring.

“Archdemons like Lilith are stronger than the others,” Mari continued. “They find the ‘awakened’ and destroy their body, cutting it off from the Pact. Then they give a new anchor—in Limbo, in their own reality: through rituals, sigils, the eating of flesh. Demons can return to the Pact, but they need a vessel, a body. They used people for that — the weak in spirit, the mentally ill. They called it possession: someone else stepping into a human. Now a bioprinted body is enough. But archdemons are stronger—their anchor isn’t in Limbo, but in Hell itself, and Hell holds on through Satan.”

Mari shattered his understanding of reality, yet instead of fear, Mark felt only calm, almost joyful clarity. In that strange stillness he found only one question.

“So Eliza really was killing people?”

“She took their souls into Limbo so she could return them to the Pact later. Eliza is a Reaper. She’s building an army. The demons you saw today—they’re her children.”

“And me?” he asked, and his voice trembled. “What about me?”

Mari’s visor remained unreadable.

“You’re not a demon, Mark,” she said. “I killed you.”

He felt no pain, no despair. The fact slid neatly into the cold structure of his new world. He nodded, accepting her words.

“I killed you in that burning car,” she went on, and there was... pity in her voice? “If I hadn’t, you would’ve died for real. Your soul, your ‘self’—call it what you want—would have dissolved in the rupture. No one knows what’s beyond the Pact or Hell. I didn’t let you disappear.”

His human side should have screamed, clinging to the Pact and its illusions. But he stayed silent. Inside, only clarity remained—he accepted himself, Eliza, and what Mari had revealed.

“Then who are you?” he asked, more quietly than he’d intended. “If you’re not with Lily, not a demon... then what?”

Mari smiled. Not warmly and not sadly—she smiled the way people do when they’ve been waiting for a question and have always known it would come.

“I am your point of balance, Mark,” she said. “Your anchor in this world. Without me, you would’ve dissolved into the void like millions of others.”

There was a confession in her words—and it came closer to love than anything he had ever seen in the Pact: its songs, its films, its sterilized promises of happiness. He had no name for it.

“You... are Death?” he asked, surprised at how calm those words sounded.

Mari laughed, and in that laughter was an inhuman lightness—as if she had heard this question a thousand times.

“People like to cover the complicated with simple names,” she said. “No, Mark. I’m not an ending. I’m a transition. In old texts—ones my clients adore—they call me Mara. But that name is too... demonic. I prefer Mari.”

She fell silent. Her calm was a mirror reflecting his own new, monstrous face—the face of a Destroyer carved from fire and blood. Mark searched her for lies or madness, but all he saw was the truth—merciless as the stars reflected in her visor.

“Demons don’t like you,” he said, recalling Amy’s words at the bar. Not a question, but a conclusion assembled from fragments of stories and memories.

“Correct.” Her smile widened. “No one likes me, Mark. They fear me. Those who cling to the Pact, and those who dream of breaking it. To the Pact, I’m a glitch, a crack in their system. To demons, I’m a reminder that their Hell isn’t the only reality.”

He watched her, trying to understand whether her words held more bitterness or challenge.

“Then why are you with me?” he asked. The one question that burned like a shard of molten metal inside his mind.

Mari turned away, staring at the falling snow outside the window. Her silhouette in the dark glass looked fragile, almost ghostlike, but inside it, an unbreakable force glowed.

“I’m not helping you, Mark,” she said, her voice quiet, yet it slipped under the skin like a needle. “I exist through you. The angels’ victory, their order, would mean the end. No doors, no passages. An eternal crystal dome where nothing ever changes. There’s no place for me in such a world.”

She lifted her eyes, and the reflection of light slashed across his face like a blade.

“That’s why Chaos is closer to me now. Not because I want its triumph. Chaos breaks walls—therefore, it opens thresholds. I’m not with Lilith and not with the Agency. I stand for the transition itself. For the cycle not to turn to stone. So there will always be a door — from one world to another.”

Not an ally, but the law of movement itself, the crack in the monolith of existence. Mark rose from the couch and stepped closer. In the window’s reflection, both of them appeared: her thin, fragile figure and his warped shape; the horns on his head looked like a crown of obsidian.

He stopped behind her.

“Or because I don’t fear you?” he whispered.

He reached toward her face, toward the visor she never removed. His fingers—black, clawed—trembled not from fear, but from the anticipation of something inevitable and final.

“You shouldn’t see me,” Mari whispered, not turning. For the first time, there was fear in her voice — not loud, but ancient, like the emptiness between worlds.

But Mark didn’t stop. His fingers touched the visor, the cold of the metal pulsing through his skin. He paused for a moment, testing—would she allow it? Somewhere in the room, an old clock ticked.

He felt the tension building, the world holding its breath around this single point. Carefully, as if afraid to break a fragile balance, he removed the visor.

Mari turned her head, and her face opened to him.

The skin around her eye sockets was gray, corpse-like, revealing what shouldn’t exist beneath. In the voids where her eyes had once been, a mass of pale, writhing maggots churned. They intertwined, moved, breathed like a single organism—and looked at him, not with eyes, but with the blind, chaotic life of their own being. Death birthing life and devouring itself.

Mark didn’t recoil. He saw not decay, but truth—bare, stripped of the Pact’s illusions. An essence that hid behind no facade of symmetry or bright light. A reflection of his own nature, born of fire and blood, of chaos and destruction.

He leaned in and kissed her. His lips touched her cold skin, her rotting tongue, and he felt movement — as if the flesh itself were breathing beneath his lips.

It wasn’t love in the sense the Pact romanticized it — nothing like the kind that only promised reproduction. It was recognition, the resonance of two fractures in the fabric of the dream, two beings who happened to stand on the same side of the mirror. He, the Destroyer, saw in her not deformity but truth. She, looking at him—a monster—saw not a mistake, but purpose.

Their kiss held no passion, only rhythm—a shared cadence where two nightmares intertwined into one. Not merging, but a convergence of realities, a moment in which two truths recognized each other.

He didn’t draw back. The kiss sank deeper, the flesh beneath his lips crumbling like wet soil, the maggots shifting and intertwining as if breathing back at him. He felt her cold, collapsing body—and didn’t pull away. He stepped into the rift she opened, and she received him with no warmth, no desire, only a clarity more terrifying than love.

The cold of her flesh wrapped around him like wet, icy clay. Her skin tore beneath his fingers, gray scraps sliding away to reveal the whitish tissue below, alive and dead at once. Maggots fell onto his hands and moved through his hair — it was her breath, her presence.

The moment was a rhythm — two fractures in the fabric of the dream beating in unison. Every pulse of that rhythm was answered with a crunch, a rustle, the breathing of decay. He smelled the rot, heard the maggots shift beneath her skin, and all of it was more honest than any touch the Pact had ever promised.

Beauty wasn’t in the lines of her body. Beauty lived in decay, in what did not pretend to be alive. In the cold of gray skin, in the empty sockets crawling with sightless beings.

Outside, snow fell and then hung, frozen in midair, and in that stillness Mark no longer feared the Pact or the City. Now he knew: his point of balance would not vanish. She was eternal.

And in that knowledge lay freedom. Not the kind the Pact promised—a sterile paradise without fractures. Not the kind demons offered—a chaotic hell devouring itself. This was freedom to be himself. The freedom of the Destroyer, born of fire and bound to the Transition that stands at every threshold.

He looked into her empty sockets, where the pale mass writhed, and smiled into the face of his own death. Not a human smile—a beast’s grin, finding its essence.

“What now?” he asked.

Mari answered with a smile, and for the first time, there was a spark in it—something almost like warmth.

“Now, Mark,” she said. “You will destroy everything. Or create something new. That depends only on you.”

Beauty has always been a lie. The Pact showed towers bathed in even light—the façade of a sterile paradise. Symmetry, order, harmony—a decoration meant to suggest meaning. A mask hiding the emptiness of the collective dream.

But true beauty was not born in lines and proportions, not in the golden ratio or the symmetry of storefronts. It lived where truth was exposed and falsehood vanished. In the smell of blood on snow—sharp as a slap to the face. In the twisted grin where teeth were the memory of pain. In the maggots shifting in empty sockets, because death doesn’t pretend it isn’t there. In the dirt under fingernails, the scars on the face, the pus that does not feel shame for its nature. In what does not hide and does not ask for approval.

True beauty is what is not afraid to be itself. What stands naked before the world—without filters or corrections, without algorithms shaping it to standards. It whispers: “I exist, and that is enough.” It remains truth, even when others call it ugliness. When the crowd turns away, that truth does not bend—it cuts, like a shard of glass in the palm. It is the thing that cracks reality and forces you to look. In that fracture where the Pact breaks and Chaos pushes through—in that gap between worlds, another kind of vision is born. It grips you like a magnet, making you stare into the abyss, because in it lies the reflection of your own essence, neither prettified nor broken.

There is freedom in this: not obeying someone else’s instructions, not bowing to imposed ideals. Not following protocols where beauty is measured in numbers, where a scar is erased by laser, and asymmetry is a crime against harmony. Freedom is in rejecting that lie, in the right to smash the display window and see the emptiness behind it. In the right to call a monster beautiful, and an idol—an empty shell: a demon with horns—the pinnacle of evolution; a borg with a perfect smile — just a puppet without a soul. In the right to choose your own truth, even if that truth is larvae in eye sockets and blood on snow.

In a world where the City had built its towers out of lies, true beauty was an act of rebellion: it tore down walls, exposing the nerves of reality, making you feel the pulse beneath the skin—uneven, painful, but alive. And in that pulse, in that stripped-down truth, the fracture became a doorway into his new “self.”