everyone around him dies

Part 11

Some mistakes you can't undo and you can't make it better.

Some sins that permanently scar whatever remnants of a soul that might exist within a person. Raw and painful mistakes that leave their echoes throughout time and strangle breath away.

However, those sins and mistakes can all be packed away in a box neatly labeled 'fuck that noise' and shoved into the darkest possible corner of the attic because who the hell has time for such extradainary existential dread when there are still questions like how will I manage my next meal and will I live to see tomorrow weighing on the mind?

Cale was quite pleased to shove all of that to the furthest point away from him and his twin, Roksu, was more than happy to help him pack that box.

So, maybe the world was ending and maybe they were the only ones with a solid idea how or why. And perhaps everything they'd ever known had been something of an illusion with the stability of an elephant on a cracker.

They could spend their days in dread and horror or perhaps even cry out warnings of doom onto the deaf ears of the public.

Or they could make the much more sensible decision to dedicate themselves to achieving any future at all. Sure, maybe they'd be able to stop the world from ending if they poured everything they possibly had into the venture. And that maybe was doing a lot of heavy lifting considering all of the odds that were stacked against them. But even if they achieved that maybe and saved all of humanity that wouldn't solve the much more salient question of how do I avoid starving to death? The orphanage would only watch over them for so long and after that, it would be up to them to make a living. They were still fairly cute eleven year olds but the amount of scams they got away with because they were cute and young were going to dwindle into none fairly soon as puberty hit. Soon it wouldn't be what a scamp, alright kid you won fair and square and it would become that rotten teenager scammed me!

That wasn't even mentioning that their meager savings from years of mischief wouldn't do anything to support them once they were faced with bills and rent and taxes and all of the other financial obligations that came with adulthood.

Saving the world wouldn't get them a solid job or a roof over their heads.

And so, Cale and Roksu dedicated their time to making a plausible and achievable plan to obtain financial stability by the time they reached adulthood. There were certainly still dimensional cracks and every so once in a while, a monster slipped through and caused some havoc, but society as a whole appeared to be adjusted quite well to the new normal. It helped that they lived in South Korea where military service was required of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. It meant that a significant amount of the adults in the country had military training.

Goblins weren't pushovers but their skin wasn't actually thick enough to bounce back a barrage of bullets.

Of course, not all the changes were for the best. A more heavily armed police force always introduced its own problems and there would always be those in power who were willing to take advantage of tragedy. Corruption lives on in the hearts of men and more armaments can only lead to more conflicts and so on and so forth.

But for the average person like Cale and Roksu, all this meant was that they could leave this matter to the corrupt government to deal with while they went on with living their lives to the best of their abilities. Why deal with an impossible problem when you could just delegate it to someone else?

Of course this entirely rational reasoning truly begged the question why they would spend their days off volunteering at shelters or in neighborhoods that had taken the brunt of the colliding realities.