Sado began to explain himself as his eyes, fell into a long period of downtrodden tone.
The only reason Tsumigakure exists is for people like you, I made it as a home for people like us. What I wanted, was simple. I wanted a home. I wanted land to call ours. We have that now. We have the foundation, what we work on now is the framework. You're the framework, of what Tsumigakure could and will be.
Before this it had been years since I'd put down roots and decided to live in a society. When you make a mistake out there, in the world, as a mercenary you can drop everything and start fresh. It is irritating, and it costs in time and blood and sweat, but it can be done. There is a comfort in chaos, in knowing that a fresh start is always possible if you grow tired, or bored, you can just start anew. But a village, society is not like that. It requires stability. It is not always a chaotic thing but at times it can be. It is a living thing, and living things defy simple fixing. Roots cannot be forgotten, or easily mended. They scar, and broken branches must be cut and sealed. And this makes me angry, as it always has, and my anger has no place to go. It was much easier when I was mercenary. I could use my anger like a hammer against the world. I was so sure of myself, and my objectives, and my rightness. I would hammer at the world and breaking felt like making to me, and I was good at it. And while I was not wrong, neither was I entirely right. Nothing is simple.
I wasn't always a part of this world. Well, I mean I've always been in the world as a person, but I was never a part of the shinobi world, so I can understand you Chise. This is a confusing, twisting mass of diplomacy, civility, negotiation, and apathy. This world that will toss you aside as soon as you no longer remain useful, Tsumigakure won't do that. We take the forsaken and the sinful and we keep them and build them up. Though my world was like that, it tossed me aside the first time I made a mistake I became complacent something I was told to never do. I'm getting ahead of myself. My story starts much further back than that. To a time before all of this, before the failure of the Freehold and the flourishing of Tsumigakure. It started nearly twenty-five years ago. You see, my father. Well from what I know of him, he was a beast of rage and alcoholism. He pillaged the civilized world, stealing away riches, objects and-...
Women. That's still hard to say, but it's the truth. I'm the bastard spawn of a beast, and his human pet. You see I come from a tribe of Goliath. We're not like you, we're not human. We don't have the ability to control our instincts. We lose ourselves easily in this world, to the energy in it. It makes us unstable, I believe it makes us less than human, but my tribe. They believed it made us more, oh so much more. Anyway, my father, he was insatiable, he would go on devastating rampages through civilized society killing many, destroying everything in his way and stealing away people. Keep in mind this was before my time it's only the stories I was told. My mother, she was one of those women that he stole away. A human. Through some form of Stockholm syndrome or maybe it was genuine love I was conceived. To celebrate my father went ape-shit, attacking a settlement, he was felled by a civilized society.
Pushing past that my mother died in childbirth, her body was that of a human, she couldn't bear my form, my unstable, mangled, shape. She died, bringing me into this world. Sometimes I wish she had taken me with her. At least that way I wouldn't need to-... t-.. So I was raised by the tribe. Not as a child, but as a warrior. They made me fight, they made me kill, they made me learn what it was like to take the pain, and force that pain out upon others. It took a broken child and shattered him into pieces. However, I grew and I accepted my role in the tribe as just a half-blooded bastard, scum that's only job was to protect what he could. Just when I was being accepted for something more than what I am around the age of fifteen, that's the day it was all wrested from me torn from my hands.
I can remember it clearly. I have seen shinobi eat others. The Claymore, they're just as broken, just as twisted and mangled as I am. They attacked one day while I was on watch. Apparently, they were hired by the same origination that had done away with my father. One thousand Ryo for each ear of a Goliath, but they wanted more. They literally ate my people Chise. Like veal, they tore children from their mothers and picked them apart. What was left were numerous fallen corpses. Obviously, I was blamed, my chieftain decided that my inaction was the cause of everything. He crafted my punishment, a near-death beating then exile. I could never return to the world I knew. The world that had raised me, the only world that accepted me even just partially. From there I've been doing this every day.
With a bit of clarity, I can finally see my life as a series of compounding, poor choices. Nothing but a string of death and rebirth. I'm always dying. Like everyone else, I want to learn the way to win, but I still can't accept the way to lose, to accept defeat, to learn to die. I want to be liberated from it all. So that when tomorrow finally comes, I can free my ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying, the art of surviving, the art of moving on.
I know now there was nothing I could've done to save my tribe, yet I still sold my soul to your kind in search of power and vengeance. After that event, I traded my own safety for the belief that I could murder my way to peace, I fought as a mercenary. I killed, I drank, I fucked away my problems, then I did it all again the next day. I believed that if I could be a greater horror, than what I saw that day it would bring my tribe back. Once this lie was shattered by years of idleness and inability I scrambled to find a solution, to make a deal, to undo my mistakes and balance the scales. I now understand that there are no scales, and there is no redemption for a terrible monster like me.
No ledger that judges me good or evil, that tracks my deeds and tells the world of who I am and what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. But I still want to do my part, I want to do what I can, in search of acceptance. With this in mind, I want to be free to simply be myself and live with the terrible mistakes I've made but they're always there. Always telling me how I'm going to fail next time. How tomorrow everyone around me will die, bleeding and screaming and how every building will burn to ash, and when I finally stop to tally my accomplishments and my rage, anger, and determination subsides and my vision returns from that blurred state of aggression. I'll be standing in an endless pool of blood as far as the eye can see, a pile of bodies reaching the skies. A pool of my own making soiled head to toe in the red sticky ichor of the ones I fought so hard to protect.
So Chise, you have a lot to do, a lot to build and you have to find yourself, but to find yourself you have to first know yourself well enough to tell others. I appreciate your time and effort and your ear, but now you know your Tsumikage and you can begin the process of knowing yourself. We won't abandon you, you deserve to be here, and not only that as long as you continue to grow and learn, and fight, and work, you can become an integral part of what we're building.
It was more than plain to see that Sado was thoroughly distracted.