The Moth That Leapt Into the Fire
Self-assurance is necessary for salvation. Fail to prove your worth and you’ll be cast aside—dead. I had lived my entire life beneath that crushing tension, and it was the only lesson I had ever absorbed. My childhood was a battlefield. The first half of adulthood was a battlefield. There was no other reason for my existence. Everything I knew. My entire life. Fighting was my daily reality. Flames were more familiar than peace. Though my body kept marching toward the future, my mind—my soul—remained trapped on the battlefield. I was still wandering through the routines of the past, the daily life of war. In the end, the need to prove my value had twisted into an obsessive compulsion. Even after leaving the corporation, when it was no longer required, I still had to do it. Somehow.
The idea might have been reckless, but my preparations were meticulous. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe I could tear through an entire organization with nothing but a few guns and a single bundle of grenades. Before the raid, I needed exhaustive research and a plan that would guarantee success. That preparation alone took another full month.
Anyone who saw me like this would have called me a moth hurling itself into the fire without a thought for its own life. Honestly, whatever they felt when they looked at me, I had no defense. I thought the same thing about myself. I was an idiot marching toward confirmed destruction. Not someone who stops at the cliff’s edge, but a fool who keeps walking forward. A moth that continues to fly straight into the obvious inferno.
But. But I… I just had to do it. Yes. Like a person with no tomorrow. I was a moth leaping into the flames simply because I had nowhere else to go. This was where I belonged. As I thought that, the smile on my face trembled with unease.
Before long the room was so packed with weapons there was nowhere left to step. The air reeked of gunpowder and steel. The cold smell of electricity threaded through it all. Did I truly want this? It no longer mattered. Even though I knew exactly what waited at the end, did I still have to do it? To be honest, it really didn’t matter anymore.
Whatever happened tomorrow, whatever the future held—it was of no concern to me. To someone uninterested in the present, what did the future matter? To a worthless “me who could not fight,” what meaning could the present possibly have? For me, “now” was a page filled with meaningless words. That was why it accelerated and slipped past. I didn’t truly read a single word; they simply flowed over my head. It wasn’t even speed-reading. I was only repeating the empty motion of turning pages.
Therefore, someone’s death, someone’s ruin, someone’s birth—they were all just part of that meaningless text. None of it moved me. I had spent endless time in self-denial, soothing myself with drugs, but now I understood. I wasn’t living in the present. I was still trapped in the past. I was nothing more than a fool who could only confirm my own value through combat. I was a paper doll clumsily glued onto a page that had nothing to do with me. In the end, a paper doll that could not melt into the present, could not blend into reality, and could not escape the swamp of the past.
But whatever. It didn’t matter anymore. I just wanted to slump down a little more comfortably. To let go of thought and follow the trauma carved into my body. To return to the place I originally belonged. To what I had to do. I walked forward toward a future that had already been decided.
Flames and blood and shredded flesh, then another explosion. A roar loud enough to rip eardrums, and fresh blood spraying up from below my sightline. Anxious shouts, smiles, and familiar noise. The metallic taste of blood, black smoke. And gunfire. A festival danced on a tightrope. To me, already distant from the present moment, pain meant nothing. It was simply one more element dragging me back into the abyss of the past without end.
The place I was heading was not the future but the past. It felt like I was throwing a festival of madness. In contrast to that insanity, every movement my body made was precise and mechanical. I simply repeated the cycle: pull the trigger, throw, kill, get hit. The noise never stopped. It could not be allowed to stop. My smile trembled uneasily. My heart beat with anxious force. My body was so precarious the tightrope felt ready to snap at any second.
Men in tasteless suits exploded in every direction, painting the scene with their deaths. Thoughtlessly. Again. Repetition. Replay. Rewinding the tape.
“You crazy bastard!”
Having completely lost my mind and killed without restraint, someone kicked the door open and charged into the hallway. A figure who looked like an executive, both arms and torso wrapped in heavy metal plating. Yet even he, shouting as he rushed in, lasted less than five seconds before being torn apart from the legs upward. A grenade went off with a heavy whump, shattering lights and walls and spewing red flames. It looked like a firework. A rather violent but vividly alive firework. Bright blood splattered in every direction.
If this scene had been from a movie, the soundtrack would have been rock built on a grinding electric guitar base. Not frenzied metal, but a melodic band track. The kind of music you might hear at a summer festival in the middle of a crowded city.
My body glistened with blood. There were more than one or two holes in me. Here. There. Over there again. The festival. The war. The struggle. The fight.
“Ahaha!!”
My eyes burned. At the same time an inexplicable chill washed over me. Everything grew hot, then cold, as if I were running a fever. Like growing bones itching against the joints, I wanted to stretch my whole body as far as it would go. It was sad, yet joyful. Angry, and even more joyful than that. I was supremely happy. It was a clearly broken happiness, but it was happiness all the same.
…….
I… What the hell am I doing right now? Just. Falling into the past again. Falling into the past… and letting go of the present once more. Giving up on the future. For me. For me there is only… the past.
“You crazy… bitch……”
Bang.
Before I knew it, the world had gone quiet. One act of the summer festival had ended. Blood flowed like a river. The hotel, scene of the uproar, was blasted and torn in every direction, far from normal. It was covered in scars. A mountain of corpses decorated that insane landscape.
…….
I wanted to let everything go. I didn’t know what “everything” was, but I wanted to release all the strength in my body and relax completely.
What the hell have I done?
Just as I wanted. I fought. I killed. I was wounded. I laughed. I danced. I lived. I lived. I lived. I was alive.
“……Wow.”
Once the ringing in my ears finally faded, the echoing gunshots from every direction died away. In the now-silent hotel, only the sound of blood dripping remained. Drip.
I collapsed in the middle of that madness-drenched scene. Dragging a body that had been turned into a rag, I had somehow survived again. Survived once more. Even after becoming a moth that leapt into the inferno, I had survived in the end.
It grew cold. For a while I had laughed with genuine joy, but my strength gave out and the laughter stopped.
“……What am I doing…… me…….”
If living holds no meaning, then why am I still living? What possible meaning could there be in a life that does not move toward the future? What meaning could there be in a life that refuses to look at the present? What on earth am I doing here? Why have I survived until now? What did I survive that long war for, endure all that pain for, and fall back into the past for? In order to achieve what? In order to live what kind of life?
There’s no way something like a restart is possible.
Life is not a save file in a game. I sat in the hotel lobby in a daze, unaware of time’s passage. I couldn’t tell whether time was moving or not. I simply sat there, mind blank, sprawled in the middle of a lake of blood. Not white—blank. Nothingness cannot be expressed. Only blank space. How long had that blankness lasted?
When I came back to myself, someone’s feet stood before me. Come to think of it, I thought I had heard a splashing sound earlier. The sound of stepping through blood.
“This one turned out to be a much crazier bitch than I expected.”
The voice sounded muffled, as if filtered through something. I lifted my gaze. A doll was looking down at me. The hotel chandelier behind her was so dazzling I couldn’t make out her features clearly.
“Too big to be called a fire moth. Maybe I should call you an asura instead.”
No—looking at the shadow, I thought I recognized her. That sharply protruding silhouette. A bird’s beak. She was wearing a gas mask shaped like a bird’s head, staring down at me.
“A human living without a future. A young creature who doesn’t even know why she exists.”
I listened to her words in a daze. There was nothing incorrect in them. A fire moth that does not look at the present and therefore does not even care for the body living in that present. A person with no tomorrow, for whom even death holds no meaning. How was that any different from a corpse?
“Still, your ability is exceptional. It would be a waste to throw you away.”
She thought for a moment, then hoisted my body over her shoulder.
“Then we’ll take you in. I’ll give you meaning.”
I simply stared blankly ahead.