Where are all the commenters? Write some comments please. Give
Give me some power stones there you go~đ
*****
He hadn't been born a hero or a villain. He grew up in the suburbs, a product of a peaceful age where the biggest worry was passing algebra. He was a carefree youth, drifting through high school with average grades and an above-average indifference to the future.
By the time he graduated, he was fed up.
Books were boring. The idea of collegeâfour more years of sitting in a classroom, accumulating debt to get a job he hatedâfelt like a prison sentence.
He was stuck. Aimless. A ship without a rudder..
It was his grandmother who steered him. She was a tough old bird, a former Military Nurse who had seen the worst of Vietnam and came back made of iron.
"The world doesn't need another accountant, boy," she had told him, smoke curling from her cigarette. "The world powers are always hungry. They are always looking for young, strong, stupid men to feed the machine. Go. Let them break you down and build you back up."
So, at the age of eighteen, Atlas signed the papers.
He traded his freedom for a uniform. He traded his boredom for a rifle.
Three years later, he was deployed to Afghanistan.
The "Sandbox."
Coming from the Land of Freedom to the wild world of beasts was a shock to the system that no amount of training could prepare him for.
He remembered the smell first. It wasn't the smell of spices or exotic lands. It was the smell of burning plastic, open sewage, and ancient dust. It was a bleak, dead, chaotic place where life was cheap and death was sudden.
It took him weeks to get used to it. To get used to the povertyâchildren playing in rubble with no shoes, staring at his convoy with eyes that were too old for their faces. To get used to the fearâthe constant, grinding anxiety that every pile of trash on the side of the road was an IED waiting to turn his Humvee into a coffin.
He learned many life lessons in the desert.
He learned that "collateral damage" was a polite term for a nightmare.
He remembered his first kill. It wasn't glorious. It was an airstrike caller. They leveled a compound. When they cleared the rubble, they found the target. They also found his family.
He remembered standing there, dust coating his goggles, looking at the broken body of a child who had just been in the wrong house at the wrong time. He didn't feel like a hero. He felt like a mechanic of death.
But the desert wasn't all darkness. It had moments of blinding color, too.
Her name was Salma.
She wasn't a soldier. She was a local, a translator they worked with in a village near Kandahar. She had dark eyes that held a sadness he wanted to fix, and a laugh that sounded like water in a desert.
Atlas, young and stupid and desperate for connection, fell for her. He fell hard. For a few weeks, amidst the patrols and the firefights, she was his anchor. He lost his virginity to her in a cramped safehouse, fumbling and passionate, believing that love could exist in hell.
He was a fool.
Two weeks later, a young religious nut jobâno older than fifteenâwalked into the marketplace where she was buying bread. He screamed a prayer to Allah and detonated a vest strapped to his chest.
He wanted to blow up the Americans. He missed.
He killed a third of the market instead and Salma with it.
Atlas remembered finding her. Or what was left of her.
That was the day the boy died, and the man was born.
He realized then that purity was a liability. Ideals got you killed.
After that, Atlas stopped looking for love. He started looking for distractions and orders. It turned out, in that hellhole of a place, a US dollar was a magic wand. With a hundred-dollar bill, you could buy silence. You could buy liquor. You could buy comfort.
He indulged. He visited the "off-limits" places in the city during leave. He found girls of all ages, desperate for money, willing to do anything for a taste of the wealth he carried in his pocket. It was a dark, cesspool of a world, and he swam in it. He learned that everyone had a price. He learned that pleasure was a drug, and he was happy to overdose if it meant forgetting the image of Salma in the marketplace.
But even that didn't last long as he got used to it.
Sentimentality is the first casualty of deployment. The memory of herâthat brief, fragile connectionâdidn't stand a chance against the grinding reality of the service. New orders came down like a gavel: immediate relocation. He packed his kit, boarded the transport, and left her behind. By the time the dust of the new city settled on his boots, her face was already fading, replaced by target profiles and mission specs.
âAnd the final nail in the coffin? A classified intelligence report that crossed his desk months later. It turned out she wasn't the angel he had constructed in his mind. She was compromised, taintedâjust another lie in a world built on them.
âFor the next two years, he stopped being a man and became an instrument. He pointed his rifle where the finger of command pointed. He detonated charges on structures he was told were 'strategic assets.' 'Top Secret' became a euphemism for 'Illegal.'
âBut the silence of his obedience was slowly being drowned out by the screams of the aftermath. The resentment for the brassâthe faceless men in air-conditioned officesâbegan to fester like gangrene.
The raids were the worst. Kick down a door at 0300 hours, night-vision turning the world green and black. Chaos. Screaming. The terrifying confusion of a firefight in a living room. Bullets don't discriminate, and neither did the shrapnel.
They called it 'asymmetric warfare,' but he knew the truth. When you raid a terrorist cell embedded in a village, you don't just kill the cancer; you kill the host.
âHe saw the bodies pile up. Not just the radicalized combatants, but the collateral. The grandmothers caught in the crossfire. The children are sleeping in the wrong room at the wrong time. His hands were stained with a mix of guilty and innocent blood, a cocktail that no amount of scrubbing could remove. He realized with a hollow horror that to his superiors, the piles of dead civilians were just a line item in a budgetâthe acceptable cost of doing business.
He hated the higher-ups, but he also understood the terrifying chain of command. They were merely executing the will of the architects above them, who were in turn protecting their own interestsâtheir capital, their influence, and the illusion of invincibility. After all, a graveyard of soldiers is bad for the image of a superpower.
They were merely cogs in a vast, grinding machine, beholden to shadows cast from even greater heights. Not all were monsters; many were simply pragmatists, trading blood for stability.
âHe accepted the grim reality: even if he sat in the highest office, he could not save everyone. Governance is a game of attrition. The needs of the many will always take precedence over the needs of the few.
Perhaps only Omnipotence could spare every soul, but therein lay the paradox: to save man from every danger is to enslave him. Is not the freedom to choose also the freedom to err? Silent killers like tobacco harvest more souls than any terrorist, yet we accept them as the cost of liberty. So if the goal is truly to "save lives," he would have to become a dictator of virtue. To save everyone is to govern a prison of safety.
âAnd if he focused only on the extremists? Where does the purge end? To kill the fanatic is useless if you do not kill the ideology. Do you slaughter their families to stop the infection? Do you ban the books that, when twisted, turn men into monsters? These men believe they are fighting for freedom just as surely as he is. It is an endless cycle of Ouroboros eating its own tail.
âIt was a paradox without a solution.
After weeks of ruminating on this Gordian knot, he realized the solution lay beyond the event horizon of his mortal comprehension. And so, with a heavy sigh, he surrendered to the current, allowing the machine to pull him along.
At the ripe old age of twenty-four, his war ended.
It wasn't a parade. It was a mistake.
A hostage situation. A raid on a suspected insurgent cell. Atlas kicked down the door. He saw a young boy in the corner, holding a rusty AK-47. The boy was shaking, terrified.
Atlas hesitated. He saw the fear in the kid's eyes. He saw a victim.
"Drop it!" Atlas had yelled, lowering his aim slightly. "Don't do it, kid!"
The kid panicked. He pulled the trigger.
The bullet tore through Atlas's hand, shattering the bones, and another slammed into his stomach plate, cracking through everything and puncturing the arteries.
Atlas went down.
As he lay there, gasping for air, choking on blood, he watched his squad leader enter the room. The sergeant didn't hesitate. Bang. The kid dropped.
Atlas was medically retired. He got a Purple Heart for his trouble. He got a disability check that barely covered life. And he got a lifetime of compensation for a dominant hand that would be slower than the other hand.
He was thankful to that kid, in a way.
Because of that bullet, he got to leave the Sandbox. He got to go home.
But when he returned to the States, he realized the war hadn't changed him; it had just opened his eyes.
He looked at the high-rise buildings of Las Vegas, the suits on Wall Street, the politicians on TV. He realized they were the same beasts he saw in Afghanistan. They just wore fancier suits. They just used pens instead of bombs.
They looked down on everyone else, consuming the weak to feed their own power.
"Older men declare war," Atlas thought, the memory bitter on his tongue. "But it is the youth that must fight and die."
But he was also very grateful to them at least because he had his freedom and it wasn't a cesspool as openly as it is in Afghanistan.
He settled into a routine. He rested for months, letting his body heal, though his mind remained scarred. He wanted to find a mundane job in the city, working hard just to pay off an expensive mortgage on a house that felt too big for one person.
Moving forward he wanted life to become ordinary. Wonderfully, boringly ordinary.
His hobbies became his escape. He played video games, read novels, and watched anime.
These were the only things that gave flavor to his new more relaxed existence.
He would occasionally barbecue with his few remaining friends, drinking beer and venting about looking for work, laughing at the absurdity of it all. He got good at finding joy in adversity.
Compared to the IEDs and the smell of burning flesh, it was a joke.
His goal became simple: pay off the mortgage, find a beautiful woman who didn't know about the desert, and settle down.
If you looked at it that way, Atlas was painfully ordinary. Just another vet trying to reintegrate.