Maniac Dawn -- The Samurai

[Translated from the Japanese.]

I am disgraced, seppuku my lone bastion of honor. What have I if not that? I know what I must do, what I am supposed to do...but still.

I have heard voices. A single voice, rather. It's always of a different timbre, but it speaks the same demon language, one that promises forgiveness. One that promises another realm of existence where man-made concepts of right, wrong, justice, sin, virtue, damnation, ethics, and life itself are alien and as trivial as sand blown between leaves of grass on an abandoned shore. Where chaos reigns, and chaos is holy.

I have seen a face, too. In sleep. This, a bovine skull the likes of which my eyes have never laid upon nor wish to while awake, bleached white and sat crookedly within the hood of a brown, dusty robe; the robe threadbare yet belying no man or beast underneath. A further illusion of my madness.

Madness or enlightenment? I am soothed in my conundrum, for cowardice and bravado are one and the same, my apparition assures. And what else do I have? What else?

All he asks for is a sacrifice. The decapitated head of my general.

I am told I can keep my swords in this otherworld. My attire, too.

Tomorrow I will cut off my master's head.