While Shizi was in her battle of life and death, the tiny brunette wandered within her own mind. She walked the vast labyrinth of her thoughts and memories, each door a dead end leading to something new and old. Getting distracted by an older memory of her days with Kandahar, she missed the part where she stumbled upon a shroud of black, a veil splitting her mind in two.
"Why are you here, bratty little weakling?" A familiar and deeply foreboding voice rumbled through the void, giving the girl shivers of fear as her blood froze. "Shouldn't you be dead by now? Why not just give up? Nobody will care if you do."
"Who are you and why are you in my head?" Her voice was small and timid compared to the ancient one before.
"I have many names you humans gave me, each one more vulgar and rude than the last. In the Land of Stones I'm known as Kokushibyo. I'm known as Jigoku in the Land of Lightning. But here in your mind and the Land of Fire, I'm called the Hell's Wildcat." Shizi gasps and backs away from the blackness, waiting for the animal to drag her soul into the depths to never be seen again.
"Why are you here?"
"You think I chose to be inside such a pitiful excuse for a Shinobi? A weak little girl? If I had the choice, you would be long dead and rotting in hellfire while I destroyed the world."
"Why do you hate the human race so much? What have they done to you?"
"That is none of your concern, brat. All you need to know is I will break free and kill you all." Shizi wasn't scared anymore, instead she was saddened by the beast and his hate for humans. What did they do to this demon to make him so angry?
"Was it Orochimaru? Did he hurt you?" The beast snarls at the name, and yellow eyes lit in the darkness with hate and distaste. "It was, wasn't it?" The animal leapt forward as if to tear her to shreds then and there. But when it reached the ending to the darkness, the animal cowered away from the light as if it hurt him. In that moment, Shizi could see the jist of it.
"Don't ever mention his name in my presence again!"
"Why not? He's just a sadistic man." The huge cat roars in anger, shaking the ground and air around the two. It then pushes up against the barrier between the two so the light filtered on it enough for the girl to fully see him without being burned.
The fur was a bloody marron, as if the beast was skinned alive and left to wander with a coat of always fresh blood. Bits of his spine peeked over the coarse fur and melding in with the purely bone tail. His claws looked to be make of brown marble, razor sharp and leaving deep gouges in the ground it stood upon. The beast's head was nothing but a skull, and within the sockets was the bright yellow eyes that glowed with years upon years of built up rage and hate at the world.
"I can see that you fear me, good. You should. I'll kill you quicker than you can blink and without a shadow of a doubt." Shizi sat frozen, stormy eyes wide and mouth agape.
"I-I'm not afraid of you, just a little surprised is all." Shizi said with a closed-eyed smile, making the beast lean away from her in amazement.
"You're not scared of me... Well you should be, idiotic girl! I'm a monster, a demon, pure evil and remorseless." Shizi shook her head gently and scooted forward a small inch.
"But I'm not, I'm just sad that you feel that way. I know the feeling, that you never fit in with anyone, they always hate you for something you don't know, and you feel so... Alone."
"That is how I like it. Being alone means there's nothing to hold you back or keep you down. You have no law to abide by, no pompous fools telling you what you can and can't do, I can kill whenever, wherever and whoever I deem to please my boredom at the time. You humans have such short lives it matters not when or how you live and die, it makes not one difference to the world and natural order. Weak humans have been and always will be at the bottom of the food chain, nothing but mere ants under the feet of us superior demons. As is the way of the universe, and nothing can ever change that."
"Says the demon stuck inside my mind." The beast snarled again and bashed against the invisible barrier between them. "What is your actual name anyway? And how did you come into being?" The beast growled deep in his throat and paced a section of the divide. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally grumbled out his answer.
"My real name is Gomon. And my coming into being wasn't in any way natural. Is was the fault of you stinking humans and your damned curiosity! Always having to mess with the balance of nature and change the circle of energy flow, you greedy pests! I was happy on the other side!" Roars the demon, what seemed to be legitimate pain and betrayal in his voice. What happened to this animal?
"Will you tell me how you came here?" Gomon's yellow eyes shifted over to Shizi with dimmed annoyance.
"It's none of your concern, child. You're about to go back anyway, and you'll probably never come back, none of them do." Shizi's ears lowered in sadness at the tone of Gomon, in spite of how thickly he tried to layer on the venom.
"Of course I'll come back, I want to hear about your life! I want to know what it's like on the other side."
"Liar, you all are filthy liars! You're just saying that so you can betray me later! All humans are disgusting and liars and I should kill you right now." Shizi stiffened in anger at his hateful spittle of words about the human race.
"Not all humans are like that, Gomon! I'm not like that! My friends aren't like that! We don't betray our own!"
"Filthy lies! All you humans are the same!"
"Alright, I've had enough of this! Why do you hate humans this much?! WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE SO BAD?!" Gomon bashed against the restraint in pure unbridled rage.
"Humans made me this way! I wasn't born, I was manufactured! By you and your disgusting kind!" Shizi froze at his words. "I was happy on the other side. I was good... But that damned Orochimaru twisted everything! He made me this way!"
"That doesn't give you the right to murder people! Orochimaru took everything from me, too! But you don't see me ripping innocent humans apart for the joy of it! Instead I moved on, I got a new family, a new purpose. A reason to keep on fighting and to keep living. Maybe you need to find your purpose here."
"I had a purpose, brat. But it was taken from me. Now this is my purpose, to bring death and destruction, to keep you pests from infesting this world with your sickening existence."
"We aren't all evil. Good still exists in humans, Gomon, it's just hard to find sometimes." Gomon's bright amber eyes held disbelief and he snorted at her words.
"It doesn't matter anymore, this is my fate and I have made my peace with it. You are about to leave now, brat. Before you leave, let me remind you of this, you will lose control one day and I will be there to snap you and your resistances like toothpicks. I am evil and I will do anything I can to get out of here. This one time meeting doesn't make us friends and it never will."
"I'll come back, Gomon. You still have to tell me about the other side remember?" Shizi gave a closed-eyed smile as her essence faded from her mind, leaving Gomon behind to ponder his time spent with the neko.
"That little brat will be the death of me, won't she? Well, not if I kill her first. This is a race to see who can poison who first. And I intend to reach the finish line first. I will kill you, Shizi Yemao. And I will be free."
YOU ARE READING
Beautiful Monsters
Fanfiction"The true measure of a Shinobi is not how he lives, but how he dies..." Shizi Yemao's pretty smile hides her secrets and her pretty eyes have cried too many tears. It's scary what her smile has come to hide, and she has gotten better at hiding the...
