Entombed. (Semi-conscious stream of thought/Labyrinth of memory-woven illusions)

[Gildarts]

You would think, that when you're hit with a bullet you feel the hot, molten lead immediately invading your flesh. But no. You're dosed with adrenaline, testosterone, and endorphins released into your blood helping you to survive through the fight, fear, and yes, through the pain. Shock cascades and your mind remembers the reverberating memory of a gunshot's echo. But surely, the bullet didn't hit you. It couldn't have. It never hits you wrong. Battles are a game of inches. Such is war. Such is chess. Such is trust. All are battles.

Inches. That's the difference between life and death on the battlefield. The millimeters between your finger and the trigger propelling the lead that will deliver death. The centimeters between the debris shattering mid-air and spearing your eyes. Blinding you in battle and inevitably leading you to your helpless demise. To be sightless and with a gun is not the end, but against an army, you're a liability to your own platoon. They'd sooner shoot you for slowing them down, for being a torture session away from delivering the enemy key information to overthrow the entire operation. Our goal, always to win the battle. Some men, I have had to put out of their misery. Not for the operation, but for their honor. That they could live their last moments in peace knowing my bullet was an act of wordless compassion they didn't have to ask for. A warriors death. Inches and it wouldn't have had to be that way.

They died for the cause, willingly sacrificing their lives, souls, and ideal. On the battlefield, the game of chance and inches. The freewill you acted on was usually impulse, muscle reaction. Dive to the right into the dirt to dodge the explosion of a grenade and you fall into a stream of bullets, a trail of automatic gunfire.

Somehow you avoid it, crawl for your life behind a rock that's just a little too short to cover you, and bullets slash through your flank and any appendage sticking out in the enemy's line of sight.

Inches, like I said that's the difference... Of man, ethics, and justice. The difference that separates the sides, opinions of mankind and it's cultures. The difference that makes us fight to the death rather than unite. The gray that makes our choices wayward wanderers who have no idea who they are in the scale of things. They can't just see they as individuals are soldiers and pawns, because they see life first person. It is their senses that immerse them into their lives that will be slain by the end of battle.

So you see, it's the inches in life that make us who we are. The small circumstances, the small life experiences that change us, that define us. It all comes back to inches. And it all comes back to my finger on that trigger.

Listen to me! I sound like a damn philosopher! Really, I am nothing but a unjust murderer constantly on the edge of my next kill. It's like I hunt for my own need for blood. To think thinking about all the times I've been shot could've jogged that thought. How entertaining in my time of desperate isolation. How has pain become my entertainment throughout my life? Suffering, learning, surviving. A constant survival. I was desperate enough to become the fittest, even at the cost of my soul. How can I evolve beyond that cycle, so that the chains no longer bind me?

First part, pain. I have pretty much got that one down. Next I have to learn. I knew enough to allow me to live. But that was all. That was my definition of living. What a sad thing indeed. I had only ever survived. What a waste of years. A vague sensation sparked on my lips, like a forceful tickle. There was no face, but I'm sure I was remembering –no, feeling– a kiss. Even in my agony, my heart was... The survivalist in me told me that this pleasure was weakness, distraction.

It seemed the survivalist's cycle was a die hard habit, one that wouldn't be broken so easily as a bone. It was rooted within me just as deep, an unavoidable skeleton.

I was submerged back into the memory. Mud spattered over our stained uniforms on the battlefield. And I saw his face. It was not the first man I had killed, nor would it be the last.

He was praying, "Please lord, take me into heaven." The medic had shaken her head gravely, saying it would be slow, painful, and inevitable. She could do nothing but sit by his side and watch him die.

I walked over. I told him, "Let this bullet be your ascension." Delivery to heaven. May as well have been adorned with lead wings.

There was no hesitation. I didn't even flinch when the gun kicked. Didn't blink. I was a monster back then. Still am. I am capable of mercilessly killing my enemies and mercy killing my allies. When you hesitated in no-man's-land you didn't return, and you were no man either.

I felt it again. That sensation. The want. The affection. The kiss, so familiar. Lips that had spoken to me before, but the voice was null and gone. Evaporated from my memory just as the sight of their face. I wasn't even sure if it was a male or female's. I could take my guess, though. Whatever the memory was, it had held on strong, even as a fragment. There would be no glass slipper to this ending though, I'm a beast in a fairytale, painted a stone angel by a villainous fiend. Stories, choices, and lives intermingled together with death. Yet all too often terrible and purposelessly, rather than as old friends.

My name is Christa Adams, I have been a deliverer of death, life, and freedom. And my inches of this rope compared to the size of the cliff I helplessly dangle, are officially running out.

I sigh and wonder how that sliver of amazing emotion has been wiped nearly perfectly from my mind. It was likely that the owner or those lips was likely dead. Perhaps Klaud wasn't coming after all. Perhaps I had been sentenced to an eternity of Hell, all because of a few inches.

But I won't let my fate be defeated by a few inches where I lost my fight. No. I'm so much more, than a few inches of good luck, skill, and chance.