Chương 237: Act 3, Chapter 86: Meditation on the weapon’s nature

Day in the story:??? Too late for wondering, it was time for action Gertrude Monkey I am a weapon. I meditated while sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lobby. People moved around me in a constant stream: solitary wanderers, families with children, happy couples. I am a gun's bitch... They flowed around me, weaving past on their little pretend vacation adventures. They lived their lives oblivious to the horror of their existence. Whether they were their own souls or borrowed ones hardly mattered.

They were all complicit in the atrocities committed within this hotel simply by being here, by obeying the compulsion to move and forget. I decided to be different.

"Look at that..." A man sitting on a nearby bench tried to say, but a gulp interrupted him. He took a swig from the bottle in his hand and poured a heavy amount of alcohol down his throat. Then he wiped his face with the sleeve of his dirty jacket.

"... woman," he finished. It was the same man we had met on the first night here, and later again in the hotel bar.

"Silence, old man," Thomas shouted back at him. I know why I am here, and I know who I truly am. There was no denying that I was a tool. An extension of Alexandra's ability to exist. And I carried the will and strength necessary to be blunt in how I approached opposition. To pulverize and erase whatever stood in my way. I am a weapon. I repeated it in my mind like a mantra, yet within that repetition I found myself wondering whether that was all I truly was.

Was there artistry woven into me, or only restrained violence waiting to be unleashed? Every artist needs destruction to create something. I mused on that while remaining as motionless as possible, even as the old man's drunken bickering continued nearby.

"You will die, woman!" he shouted, and Penrose finally snapped. He motioned for Torque to get rid of him. I did not mind the man. My thoughts were becoming clearer even with his heckling reaching my ears.

"This place will eat you, spit your hollow skin back out, and make a puppet out of you. You better..." He hiccupped again as Thomas grabbed him by the collar and threw him over the bench.

"... move," he finished. Artists take what is orderly and introduce controlled chaos into it. Something blank and pristine becomes a painting, a collision of colors, lines, perspectives, directions, dreams, ideas, and Reality-fucking-knows what else. Those who work with chisels do the same to ordinary granite and stone. They chip away at it. Cut into it. Cast fragments aside until the image once trapped inside their mind becomes real enough for others to witness.

So what does an artist whose tools are violence and death chip away at? What does someone like that reveal? Is my canvas the world itself? And by removing its uglier pieces, am I shaping it into an image that already existed in my imagination? Or am I merely acting on instinct? The latter was true, at least in part. Many things are happenstance. One action causes another, which creates more chains that continue onward without the initiator's design or consent. They do not require either to exist.

But that also made them unartistic. Unworthy of being called art. Because the simplest and most fundamental rule of art required intention behind the act. I am a weapon. A gun's bitch. Someone who would point a firearm and pull the trigger because it has to be done. But that intention alone wasn't enough to find art within what I could do. Hell no. A common thug walking into the hood, pulling out a piece, and making somebody bleed with its lead isn't creating anything despite having a clear goal in mind.

They may want to kill, maim, or send a message, but merely doing so—even thoughtfully—does not make the act artistic. There was another essential part to the path of the artist: creation's relationship with its environment. How it captures the essence of what the artist sees within it. How it conveys emotion. How it guides the observer through an entire thought process. There is no art if it fails to reveal some deeper truth about the world. The folded spiders Alexa and Elle made, they are art.

Not only because they are crafted with care, precision, and according to old Japanese traditions. They are art because they portray a deeper truth Alexa—that I—see about the universe. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Spiders are representations of creators—of the other artists beside humans on good old Earth. And because of that, they become extensions of our will.

Even something as simple as a filled black circle can become art when the intention behind it is to portray a goofy hole in space. There is purpose in it. A relationship with the world itself that makes Reality feel just a tiny bit less serious. I am a weapon. And weapons act through motion. They fulfill their purpose only when something happens because of them. Daggers and swords cut. Stilettos and rapiers pierce. Guns and rifles shoot. Bombs explode. Traps spring. Punches are thrown.

People understood this long ago and cultivated approaches to movement around it, creating martial arts. But the way I saw them did not help me much. They already embodied what they represented. There was an identity of calmness in how Aikido redirected attacks and flowed around violence, or fierce agility in how kung fu imitated nature through fluid movement.

No single motion could truly become what it represented because only the complete system of attacks and reactions formed something coherent enough to be called art. But motion does not always have to originate from the weapon itself. A well-placed obstacle could become a weapon of mass destruction once a train slammed into it. The train delivered the motion, while the artistry of the creation, whose sole purpose was destruction, existed in how, when, and where it was placed.

Thus, in how it interacted with the environment. And I could become that. I could become a wall. An immovable object. I could become a breakwater upon which a wave crashes. And through that realization alone, I became a twofold creation—one that carried not only the Authority of my creator, but also my own, further expressed through the way I interacted with the universe and the hotel around me. Whatever it threw in my path, I would become an unyielding obstacle to it.

Whether that resistance was physical or metaphysical—though, in my mind, it was very much the latter—was for the universe itself to decide. The art within it lay in the performance itself. And perform I would—by indomitable inaction.

"Look how shiny she is," the drunk muttered from behind the bench before taking another swallow of the liquid that had long ago turned his brain into pudding. At least, in doing so, he revealed himself for what he truly was: an awakened person. If there could be doubts before, they was no reason for skepticism anymore.

"Shut the fuck up." Thomas exploded at him in fury. He went closer and kicked the man in the belly, resulting in him coughing and spewing whatever his stomach had managed to half-digest right onto Torque's shoes. This, of course, did not sit well with the kicker, as he hated the foul stench like nothing else. He coughed and cupped his own mouth in response.

"I am speaking the truth…" the drunkard wiped his own mouth, supported by his other arm in a crawling position.

"Seems like it doesn't work well for you, sir." He was unusually coherent for someone drinking constantly.

"You might—" he started saying something when Thomas vomited as well. The whole altercation attracted every eye in the room onto those two and the guards who came to resolve the issue. In the meantime, the identity of me being immovable worked its magic on the people, who started making wider and wider circles in their attempts to go the fuck around me. It seemed as if they felt that whatever I and the ground around me were, should not be—or rather could not be—disturbed.

Penrose noticed the incoming guards and moved to intercept them, standing firmly between them and his subordinate, extending his hand with a banknote that he rolled into a point. It extended forward, rising quickly into something resembling a spear that shone with silver light around it.

"I wouldn't dare test the patience of mine, if I were you, good… gentlemen," he said calmly. He was a defiant man, and the approaching ones stopped immediately upon seeing that. There was hesitation in their movements—they swayed back and forth unsure how to proceed and looked at one another, as if the memory of being turned to shreds in their previous incarnations had returned to them.

"We'll settle this issue by our own merits," Penrose added.

"Isn't that right?" he turned and asked Thomas and the drunkard.

"I have no issue with any of you." The man with the bottle replied. He was sitting on his fucking ass already and taking another sip. Thomas just nodded, bent in half, and extended a thumbs-up. It seemed to be enough for the guards, as they retreated without a word. I looked at all of that through the tattooed sp-eye-ders, but my thoughts, however, were elsewhere. I was a weapon. I kept meditating on the nature of my artistry and purpose. Alexandra was explicit in how the universe should see that part of her.

I was her, stripped of artistic inclination toward painting, music, sculpting, or whatever the fuck else she admired about the process of creation. But she was wrong. She did not notice that there was an art in how she approached the heists, misdirection, and killings. There was an intention behind the steals and the kills and all the cheats, and it was the foundation for the performance that happened when they were conducted.

The way she dealt with the reverend, who through his repeated prayers could bring back the dead to fight again—she planted a fire in his own throat. A conflagration on paper, not unlike the ones he'd cast away when he did his magic. And it burned in him like the flame of faith expressed through his voice. The unbending giant in that same fight—the Red—was made to kneel when I shot through his knees. He crawled, trying to pursue me.

Eve should be dead by all means through the work of art as well—killed stripped of all her powers, when her life's goal was to collect them and make herself the most powerful. The terracotta giant was made just a tiny bit more humane, just the way the original creators intended them to be, only to die because of that change. If that is not poetic in nature, then I knew shit about art. And maybe I did.

But I saw how the killings that meant something to me, how those opponents that proved obstacles were dealt with in a manner that required both finesse and creativity, and in that they were the art itself. I am a gun's bitch. I liked to shoot. To pull the trigger and see the effect of the bullet's flight when it collided with the target. The quiet sting of something simple, or the implosion a hit from Equinox could create. It wasn't something Alexandra had ingrained into herself—she was never very fond of firearms.

They were an afterthought to her, an absolute necessity. I was different in that department. In her mind, and because of that for the universe, I embodied someone who could take the teachings of the gray-haired, well-mannered monster in the man's suit and use those shooting weapons like I'd been born just to do that. I'm not a gun's bitch. I am the gun's bitch.