42. DAPPER-DAN #3
The moment the sun dips low enough to blur the edges of the day, something in me changes with it—one that feels more natural than anything I perform under fluorescent classroom lights.
The same hands that turn pages and solve equations are the same hands that take back their axe to haunt worthless, pathetic creatures.
Day offers observation.
Night allows application.
I move through both without conflict, maintaining one existence while perfecting another. The separation between them is so clean it almost feels intentional—as if the world itself has divided into two systems, and I’ve simply learned how to operate smoothly within both.
Some struggle. Most don’t.
It was interesting, at first, to see the people shocked to see a twelve-year-old smiling boy approaching them with an axe.
To watch them struggle to stay alive like worms. To observe the instinctive way their bodies resist the inevitable, clinging to a desperate hope of survival that’s already slipping beyond their control.
There’s a pattern to it, a rhythm in the panic, in the way breath turns uneven and movements grow sloppy. Survival itself follows a structure I can study and understand.
It makes me wonder if my mother fought the same way.
If she tried to hold on.
If she struggled to stay alive. For me.
I’d never know the answers.
And still, I look for the reaction, the answers in every hunt, only to come up empty-handed.
It drives me insane, and sometimes I take it out on another hunt—two or three kills a night—until I’m spent.
The euphoria of hunting doesn’t linger much longer to matter. Repetition dulls even the most intricate patterns.
And eventually, the process stops being interesting.
It becomes predictable.
Then tedious.
And just like everything else that no longer serves a purpose, I lose interest.
That’s how I’m caught.
I wasn’t being careless, though—I just stopped caring about being careful. That distinction matters more than ordinary people care to realize.
Triarch Dominion didn’t arrive like authorities. There were no sirens, no raised voices, no moral outrage attempting to assert dominance over the situation.
There’s only observation.
They find me exactly where I stand, hands still stained red, breathing steady, the same smile resting on my lips since it never failed me before.
Fifteen is what they counted.
Only fifteen. It’s offensive.
They missed the ones who disappear without disruption, the ones whose absence blended seamlessly into a world that rarely notices what it creates in the process of losing something.
“Interesting,” one of them says.
He doesn’t sound horrified or impressed. But simply… intrigued. Like I’m a problem worth solving.
I try but can’t see his face in the dark.
He stands against the light in such a way that erases every detail, reducing him to a silhouette that’s more intentional than accidental.
The black-colored mask only adds to it, obscuring whatever expression might be there, turning him into something impersonal, something that observes rather than participates.
It makes him feel less ‘human’ and far more ‘unpredictable’.
“You’ve potential,” he says.
Potential.
Such a human concept, heavy with expectation, filled with worthless hope.
So full of promise.
So empty of meaning.
I remember that word clearly, for hearing it quite a lot of times in classrooms and conversations. My teachers tried to define me in terms that I never found particularly useful. They always say I’ve potential, potential to be better.
Little did they know, I wanted to be worse.
Everyone seems convinced I have it, as if that alone holds value. But potential without application is inert. Just as a stored possibility. Utterly useless.
“Work with us. Let us refine what you are and make you useful. Or…” the sentence trails off unfinished.
They don’t finish the alternative. Yet it lingers in the space between us, heavier than any coercion.
They called it a choice. I call it an opportunity to choose a better hell.
I fully look at them, the three of them, and for the first time—since the kitchen, since the repetitive pattern of the deaths started to bore me—something unfamiliarly interesting stirs beneath the surface.
So I smile widely. Just like my mother taught me. “I’ll work for you.”
“Even if I say we killed your mother?”
I should react.
The chopped-off body I left behind hasn’t cooled completely yet. A few pieces are still twitching.
I should reach for the discarded axe and relive the moment on the silhouettes standing before me.
But I don’t. Mainly because I don’t have a chance against three grown-ups who are already aware of my potential. I don’t want to turn into chopped pieces before playing with their leash.
So I tilt my head slightly instead, my gaze steady.
The absence of light in my blue eyes—the last thing I’ve left of my mother in me—is far more telling than any visible reaction can.
“If you did, then you should know exactly why I belong with you,” that same quiet smile remains fixed in place.
And just like that, the sad little boy with the song in his head stops being something the world can break.
He becomes something that can destroy the world instead.
With my smile I turned the world upside down.