Ultraman: You Know What? I Like You

The world is like a rusted scale, one side piled high with gold, the other weighed down by splintered bones. We, women, men, children, and the elderly, are all blown off balance by the same wind, our eyes filled with the same confusion and fire.

My name is Mozhu. I’m just one speck among countless ashes, bearing the same bruises and question marks, barely surviving in a world where everything has a price tag.

The gods died long ago, morality is marked down, and we are forced to learn to dull the pain with profanity and pay our bills with silence. We are too insignificant to do anything. All we can do is watch coldly through the news and say, “There’s nothing we can do...”

Until that day, when Tregear said, “Earthling, I’ll give you two choices: keep sitting around and waiting to die, or take the power to tear up the script, destroy everything, and become a new tyrant??”

I couldn’t laugh.

Power was like a searing coin, stamped with “justice” on one side and “destruction” on the other. I was afraid even to choose a side, lest I hurt myself.

But in the end, I still gave in, falling a little further, bit by bit, devouring who I used to be.

Maybe the end will still be defeat, but if even confusion is forbidden, then the world really is a bastard...

“You think you’re ‘ashes’? Mozhu, you’re not even worthy of being scattered by the wind. You’re just a sponge soaking in warm water, absorbing everyone else’s ‘helplessness’ and mistaking it for your own bones.”

“You don’t even have the courage to hold on to anything, so what can you say about ‘choice’? The light is a gilded cage, the darkness a barbed chain, and chaos is what lets you tear apart both cage and chain.”

“You don’t even dare to ‘begin,’ so how can you talk about the end?”

“How pathetic. I’m about to throw up...”