The Eternal Struggle

Everything... Everything feels like a joke... I hold the arm she nearly tore off... It will heal, as will the bruises and cuts. The pain reminds me that this is no dream. It mocks me, saying that I needed to fight so hard against this girl. It laughs at my exhaustion with doing battle with this cretin. She sits on her ass playing videogames... She eats half her weight in junk food every day... She has no formal training as a warrior... And yet, she can push me, a woman who has struggled all her life to obtain perfection as a warrior, to summon the greatest of efforts to beat her... She is not normal, and more so, she is gifted in ways I can never understand. "She's better than you," my throbbing head says to me. "One day, she will best you. Her true potential will be revealed and you will see the difference in your abilities..." Those thoughts, this understanding, it hurts more than the most painful death imaginable. Every fiber in my battered body screams to me to end this now. While I am still the superior... While she lies at my feet, her idiot friend screaming her name at the top of her lungs, beaten and bound. Helpless...

I ignore it all... I already know what I will do. I'll leave them with the shadow of death lingering over them, with but the faintest glimmer of hope for survival, as I always do. A bomb with just enough time for them to wiggle free and escape before they are blown to Hell? A room slowly filling with water to drown the life out of them should they not manage to undo the ropes I tied with just enough chance for them to undo the knots? It's all so irrelevant... I know they'll make it out just in time, they always do. Such is the point of this eternal struggle. I want to see the limits of what she can do. I want to push her to the edge and force her to fight back with everything she is to survive. If I am truly inferior, then may death wash away my shame, but the greatest shame is to never know. To never test my limits. To show fear is a shame that not even death can defeat...

It's just a game to me, and maybe even to them... So let's play at least this one more time. One day we will see who the best is. Then, we will defy the heavens themselves, and bring an end to eternity...