AuE:「y'Z The ErRor's Imbragea」

Aru lit a cigarette he didn't remember pulling out, taking a drag like it was the last breath of peace he'd get before the world caved in again.

The trash heap of society around him reeked—not of rotting food or rusting metal, but of people. People with their sanctimonious bullshit, their sugar-coated concern that choked tighter than any noose.

"I'm just worried about you."

Those words? They weren't sympathy. They were a death sentence without a killer. Concern disguised as care, but what they really meant was, "I want you gone in a way that won't make me look bad."

Aru had seen it before. The way they smiled, all sympathy and soft edges, but beneath it? An unspoken wish for him to fail, to disappear, to break just enough that they could shake their heads and say, 'We tried.'

They didn't want to help. They wanted to own the story of his downfall. They wanted to be the ones who warned him, the ones who tried to "save him," so they could step away clean while the wreckage settled.

"Your life is a mess, you need guidance."

No. I need you to shut the hell up and stop acting like you're a goddamn savior.

They crawled over each other like maggots in a corpse, writhing, mating, festering in their self-righteous decay. Their words dripped like venom, their manufactured kindness nothing more than a chemical weapon, released in small doses to corrode, weaken, subdue.

They don't build. They infest.

They call it peace, but it's just another battlefield. Another war, fought with poison-tipped smiles and indoctrination dressed up as righteousness. They riot in the streets, not for truth, not for justice, but for control. Their chants are a plague, their unity a hive of brain-dead insects marching in unison, never thinking, never questioning, just obeying.

They don't want peace.

They want submission.

This world is a rotting carcass of something that should have never existed. And they—the maggots—breed in its decay, feasting on the putrid flesh of broken ideologies, birthing more of their own kind, mindless and ravenous.

Their so-called kindness is the bile of the Hollowborn, their unity a collective death march. Their "truth" is a parasite, hollowing out the minds of the weak, turning them into walking husks, incapable of anything but chanting the same scripted words, over and over, until even their own voices fade into static.

The peace they demand is war under another name.

And Aru? Aru had no interest in playing corpse for their rituals.

He exhaled smoke into the void, watching it curl into nothingness. The digital skyline of the city flickered, like the world itself was unstable, glitched. Maybe it was. Maybe the simulation had finally started fraying at the edges. Or maybe people had always been this garbage, and he was just now seeing the seams.

At the end of the day, it didn't matter.

He had no interest in dealing with their sanitized, backhanded kindness, their concern that felt like a pre-written obituary. He wasn't playing their game, wasn't giving them the satisfaction of letting their words sink in. They could keep their pity.

He had already stepped outside their version of reality.

He flicked the cigarette away, watching as it disappeared before it even hit the ground.

Reload.