- 'The colour in our blood is nothing mystical; just iron, just chemistry. Yet people cling to it as if it were sacred.'
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The student pressed his palms together until faint lines of red welled in the creases, as though the veins threatenes to spew miniature, crimson curtains. It would be a red which wished to descend and blind him. He blinked hard, tearing himself away from the thought. Above him, the lecture hall yawned like an overgrown classroom, swollen and empty of meaning. The lecturer's words droned on—material he had mastered months ago. Pointless. A suffocation of seconds, each heartbeat stolen by his own thoughts.
He glanced across the rows of faces. Vermin. Parasites. Things that breathed but did not live. They scrawled at their notebooks with the frantic scratching of beetles in walls, their pens hissing, their bodies hunched and stale. Rotting husks in borrowed seats.
Humans? No. Humanity demanded thought, demanded the courage to wield reason like a blade. These things merely consumed. Blind, complacent, shambling forward in the delusion that obedience was success.
His lip curled.
Why do these pests deserve life, when they spend it chasing shadows of worth? Why should they fill their lungs when all they exhale is waste?
He knew he could not act—not yet. But the thought burned in him like a hidden ember: one day, he would. One day, justice would arrive in the form of annihilation. When the moment came, he would be the hand to deliver it.
Surely, that time would come.