'God does not exist.'
A belief that gets people killed in certain parts of the world.
I know. I lived it.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Before we get to the dying part, let me tell you a little about myself.
My name is Kael.
I'm thirty-one years old. I'm a mixed martial artist I train six days a week, I eat plain food that tastes like cardboard, I sleep alone in an apartment that has a water stain on the ceiling shaped like nothing in particular, and I have never once in my adult life asked anyone for anything.
You'll understand why later.
Let's talk about effort.
People love to say things like 'hard work pays off' or 'you get what you deserve' or my personal favourite
'the universe rewards those who push themselves.'
Does it?
Does the universe reward effort?
I trained for twenty years Twenty fucking years of broken knuckles and dislocated fingers and a rib that never healed right because I didn't take enough time off and now it just lives inside me like a permanent complaint.
Twenty years of waking up before the sun and eating food I didn't enjoy and going to bed with ice packs strapped to things that had no business being hit as many times as they were hit.
And you know what the universe gave me?
A mid-tier apartment with a water stain on the ceiling.
I'm not bitter about it i want to be clear about that. I made choices and the choices got me here and here is fine.
I'm not standing outside a mansion crying about what I don't have.
I just think the quote is wrong.
Effort doesn't betray you. But effort also doesn't promise you anything. Effort just means you showed up. What happens after you show up is a completely different story, and that story has a lot more characters in it than just you.
Talent, for example.
Luck.
Who your father is.
Whether the right person happened to see you on the right day.
I know guys who trained twice as hard as me and never made it past regional bouts because they had the wrong jaw structure for taking punches.
I know guys who walked in off the street, almost zero training, and had that thing that raw structural thing that you either have or you don't — and within two years they were headlining cards I was fighting on as a warm up act.
Effort got me here.
But let's not pretend effort is the whole story
Right. The book hehhh , i almost forgot
About two months before everything happened, I found a fantasy novel in a bin outside a used bookshop.
Dark cover, gold title.
The kind of thick paperback that airports sell to people who need something to last a long flight.
It was called "The Light of Aldenmere."
I read it because I had nothing better to do that evening, and I finished it in four days, and then I read it again.
Not because it was good.
I mean it was fine.
The protagonist was a guy called Aldric he is an Orphan chosen by a goddess blessed with divine power wins every fight, gets the girl, saves the world.
Very popular and topic book. I understand why People like reading about people who have things given to them and then use those things well.
I'm not one of those people.
But there was a side character A minor noble's son named Adam ( i dont remeber his full name)
He shows up in three chapters. The author uses him as the villain of a small arc as the jealous classmate, the obstacle the hero overcomes You're supposed to dislike him.
Here's the thing.
Adam never did anything wrong.
I mean that literally I went back and checkedevry word in that book
Every accusation against him in the novel is from secondhand sources Every bad thing attributed to him happens off-page
Meanwhile on the page, the actual page, what you see is a guy who helps people who insult him, who loves genuinely and completely, who keeps showing up for a world that keeps taking from him without giving back.
He challenges the hero at the end.
Not out of evilbut Out of desperation.
The one person left in his life had chosen the hero,the bitch that is his childhood friend, and he just snapped.
One moment of not being able to take it anymore.
He loses badly. very badly ( i almost laugh at that moment)
Then he goes back to his room and thinks about everything he did right in his life, every kindness he gave, every person he helped.
And then he kills himself.
Alone.
I read those three chapters six times six times??
I don't know what that says about me.
I just thought someone should have noticed. Someone should have looked at Adam and said wait, hold on, this person is not what the story says he is.
This person is actually honest , and the story is treating that as a character flaw.
But no one did.
He died alone in a room and the novel moved on to the next chapter.
___ ____ ____ _____ _______ ______ _____
I woke up at six like I always did The apartment was cold because I'd left the window open again
I showered with cold water, made coffee from the cheap tin, stood at the window looking at the brick wall six feet away.
A normal morning.
I had a fight that night.
My opponent was a guy named Declan Morrish.
Twenty-eight, striker, good hands, habit of dropping his right heel before his cross. I'd watched his fights on my laptop with the cracked screen. I knew what I needed to know.
On the walk to the gym I passed a couple buying coffee at a cart on the corner. The woman was laughing.
The man had his arm around her like it was the easiest thing in the world.
I looked at them for about two seconds.
Then I walked on.
My coach Reyes was already there.
He wrapped my hands without saying much, which was how Reyes operated most of the time. At one point he looked at me and said
"your doing that thing again?"
" what thing."
He said
"the thing where you go somewhere behind your eyes and I can't reach you."
I told him "Morrish dropped his right heel before the cross."
He looked at me for a second and then nodded and went back to wrapping.
I trained for three hours.
Ate rice and chicken at noon. Read some more of The Light of Aldenmere in the afternoon i was halfway through a reread. Put it in my bag and went to fight.
The fight was in a mid-tier arena. About three thousand people. The kind of venue where the beer is overpriced and the lighting is slightly too bright and everything smells like a large crowd trying to smell like less of a large crowd.
First round: chess.
I let Morrish show me things.
Second round: I started pressing slightly.
Just enough. I watched his feet. The heel dropped three times. Three times I slipped the cross and put something short in return. Nothing big.
Just: I see you.
Third round: He needed to end it.
He knew he was behind. He came forward with the jab-cross, heel dropped, and I stepped outside his line and brought my elbow across the bridge of his nose with everything I had.
He went down.
The referee stopped it.
I stood in the middle of the cage and looked at my hands for a moment. The crowd was loud. I raised one hand. Collected my purse. Shook Reyes's hand. Left.
I didn't shower at the venue. I never did.
I wanted to be back in the ordinary world quickly. The theatre of it wasn't interesting to me.
i just want to go home.
I'd gone three blocks when I noticed the two men behind me.
I notice these things.
I didn't slow down or speed up.
just catalogued.
There was two men, forty feet back, matching my turns.
Then a third in a doorway I passed.
Then two more at the mouth of an alley ahead.
And a sixth stepping out of a shadow by the wall.
Six
six bastardes
I'd been aware of this group the way you're aware of weather forming far away.
They had opinions about atheists.
because i am an atheists, i dont belive in god , i say that many time before fighten in the ring
I set my bag down on the pavement.
"Alright" I said.
"Which of you bastardeswill be the first to go to the hospitale ."
The nearest one had a pipe. a big pipe
He looked confused that I wasn't afraid.
People always look confused by that.
He swung.
What happened next was not a clean technical fight.
It was one man against six in a wet street at night, which means there's no room for patience or chess or any of the things that work in a cage.
i have just to applied damage as fast as possible, in the right order.
I broke the first man's nose before the pipe landed.
Put the second man into a wall. Took three hits from behind that I knew were coming and couldn't fully avoid that's just physics.
Something struck the back of my head and the world went bright for a second.
I went to one knee.
Got back up.
The training always said:
"get back up. You can be horizontal later."
I put the third man down. Put the fourth man down. Got my back to the wall. Two left standing, both hesitating.
One moment — just one — where the balance of the thing felt almost possible.
The sixth man stepped in from my right.
I didn't see the blade until it was already in my side
Left side. Just under the ribs.
That's actually how it feels cold first, which is not what you expect, but that's what it is. Cold and then spreading and then the body starting to understand the situation before the brain has fully caught up.
I hit him twice. He went down.
The last man ran.
I stood there alone in the street with four people on the ground and the city just
continuing. Music from somewhere. A lit window three floors up. Someone laughing in a bar around the corner.
I thought: I should sit before I fall.
So I sat. Put my back against the wall. Legs out in front of me on the wet pavement.
The bag was ten feet away.
The book was in it.
I thought about Adam sitting alone in a room reviewing his life and finding nothing wrong with how he'd lived it and dying anyway.
I thought: we're not the same.
But I couldn't, right then, with the cold spreading through my side and the city not noticing, think of what the actual difference was.
The street lights blurred.
I closed my eyes.
______ _______ _________ _____________
I want to be honest with you.
There was no beautiful last thought.
No moment where everything became clear and the questions I'd never bothered to ask opened themselves up and handed me answers.
I was tired and alone.
I was thirty-one years old, and I had won my fight, and four men were on the ground around me because I am very good at my job, and none of that meant anything in particular.
Like a sentence that stops
_______ ________ _________ ____________
And then I woke up.