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"It's almost time for the endgame," came the small voice. "Reconstruction of reality. The unsealing of paradise."

"At the cost of everything else," Kenichi muttered sullenly.

Umiko drew herself up. "I don't follow."

"You were once human," Kenichi appealed from his prone position. "You must still have feelings and urges for people. Look what you did to me, and I still have them. Not everything is dark and negative with you people; not everything needs to be fought for and won, not everything needs to be destroyed to replace new things with old."

Umiko looked almost sad. "You understand nothing. You understand not why I do what I do. I love my Master. I love my people. I love -"

"That's not love," Kenichi returned savagely. "That's an abomination. You're talking about murder, genocide, as if the human race was nothing but cockro-" His voice off suddenly as he found himself hauled up into the air, above the bed. Umiko's eyes burned with hatred, controlling the threads of dark matter that ran through his body. His throat was being closed, he realised dimly as he struggled for breath, and somewhere else in his head, he realised that was what he wanted. Release. He didn't want to do what they had planned for him and couldn't end it all himself, so having someone else end it for him, that was his only chance.

A moment before his triumph, he felt the air around him cool, the tendrils within him slack and release, and he dropped onto the bed's surface. Umiko sat beside him, dejected. "You never accepted the gift we gave you."

"It isn't a gift."

"It is if you think about it the right way. Freedom, freedom to do what you want, power, the power to make your life your own..."

"And a lack of morals and honour. Power corrupts all. I've seen it, in my position, before. A lot."

"You never felt for a man with a vision?"

"Once, I did," Kenichi replied. "But his vision was rotten under the surface. Shining towers for Tokyo turned into slimy grasping fingers trying to hold on to power in the city."

Umiko sighed. "That sounds great."

"He was rotten to the core. No personal integrity, but he hid it well. He donated to charities, he spent time with orphans, he did all the right things, and I fell for them. I should have known better."

"Don't you want to get back at people like that? Make them pay for abusing their privledge?"

Kenichi shook his ehad. "No. Not at all. What you don't understand is that you don't win by lowering yourself to their level. You win by forcing them to rise to yours."

"Not everything can be done happily."

"No, no it can't. But neither can peace be won by a gun or a soldier. That breeds resentment."

"How do you explain your job, then?"

"It's something that I'm good at. Giving my life for another. It's not a trick I can do more than once, usually, so my job might make the one I eventually save for real think about their life, think about what they're doing."

"Most people in power never do. They think your life is theirs to use and abuse, to keep them in their ivory tower."

"You're trying to have me think what you're doing is a good idea. That by supporting you, somehow my life will have meaning. That I'll be justified by their extinction. But I'm human, too."

"No, you're not," Umiko interjected with a smile.

"No," Kenichi said, touching a hand to his heart. And then he knew. Knew what the woman with the bell meant. He'd forgotten his heart. He'd once believed in the power of goodness. That was why he was willing to sacrifice himself. Why he was willing to deprive his ex-wife of a good former husband and his children a good father. He had believed that even evil would do the work of good, even if by accident, simply because good was too overpoweringly strong to resist it. Angels were everywhere. And right then, he realised he himself had been one, and he was determined to regain that feeling within himself. "Unlike you, I'll always be human. Because that's what I choose. That's how I choose to live."

Love, Chapter 17