The Deadman

His name is Rubio Ferric. He has been recently the enemy of all the Magi Families and those who protect the law. They say that Rubio Ferric was a monster, a man whose soul has become so corrupted that he doesn’t mind selling people for profit.

There is truth to that.

Rubio has never objected to these accusations nor has he thought of himself as something else. But he had never told anyone other than the Priest who listened to him when he was lost. He did not think of himself as anything other than a businessman who was managing the affairs of the organization that his Mentor started.

Did he think of them as cattle?

No, Rubio could not.

They were simply humans who had fallen to his hands.

But he was simply the manager. The one that gathers their deeds and allows them to profit. One would think that Rubio’s heart was made of ice and stone.

And yet when he sees a child gutted his heart churns and he feels like the meal he had was like vomit. He was not immune. No one is immune to the cruelty of his operations.

It is a soulless cooperation with his only reason for not breaking was that he was not the one who does the deed. He simply sells the product and delivers the product to the respective buyer.

A transaction that needed to be done.

And in a way, he had another reason.

These people will die without him.

Even if he doesn’t do anything.

Someone or something will get them.

Truthfully, he wasn’t the one doing the capturing. If anything he was the one buying and selling them for a higher price. The people that were sold to him were either dying or ready to be collared like a slave.

They will die without a doubt. The method they were transported. The way they were treated meant that they were not going to last long. He had seen what these people did to the people they caught.

Inhumane. Treated like cattle for sale. They are cattle. But even cattle should be fed well and treated well. How can you sell inferior products if you don’t treat these products right?

Hypocrisy was one of the sins he had.

A hypocrite who felt sorry for the product and at the same time felt that he was better. He needed healthy organs and to do that he needed them well. You cannot harvest them without a checkup. Selling inferior products was not the thing his organization did.

There was a lacking supply of healthy organs.

And people paid handsomely for organs and blood.

The younger and healthier they were.

The better the product.

Not to mention that these people who get their organs harvested could also be used to smuggle drugs to another country. He was working with the Golden Triangle and had been supplying opium in some parts of Asia and around Europe. Business was good. And yet lately there have been changes in how his people were being caught and killed.

His recent dealings with the Sin-Eaters had been catching attention. They were his biggest customers. They were cannibals who butchered people for their own rituals. Rubio didn’t have the stomach to participate in these awful affairs, but nonetheless, the profit he gained from them was much more than the profit he gets from the rest. They paid well and supplied him with a potion that had been keeping his health in top shape.

The benefit from selling them to cults and monsters like the Sin-Eaters outweighs all the other things. He was made to do business. He was created to be the heir of this business that his Mentor did his best to keep alive and prosper.

It was nothing more than business. There was no greater reason. No goal that he was trying to approach other than fill his pockets with earnings. One could say that what he had earned would allow him to retire. Considering how things are he thought to himself that this was the best time to retire with all of the attention he was getting within the international community.

Rubio recalls the first time he had seen the existence of the arcane arts. The professional mask he kept crumbled at the sight of magic. There were many thoughts about magic. Every young man had always once dreamt of having the ability to use spells.

He had that thought. He wanted to learn and he did. He had learned the basics through the use of the cult he had been in contact with. With the use of this potion of enlightenment, he learned the basics. But it also cut off his future. Not that it had any future because of this phenomenon they call the millennium bug that will effectively wipe out the magic when a new century begins.

It was awful.

He hated that he cried for days. Rubio sincerely thought that he would have something other than selling a product, but it was taken from him by the world again.

Although the ability to use a spectral hand to get something from a distance made things easier for him. There were times that someone or something was aiming for his life, but through the charms and trinkets he had purchased, he had avoided them.

He was careful.

He had always been careful.

Being secretive and careful was a trade he had mastered. It was through this that he had been able to avoid the mistakes of his mentor. He had lasted this long because he had been taught well.

Those who glow in the dark are bound to get caught.

But even with the utmost secrecy, he has been conducting his business. The moths still found the lamp. It was going to happen one day. And although many had already tried. He still thinks that this one was the biggest problem that he had encountered ever since he started ruling his Empire.

He had heard the news that his trusted lieutenant had been caught. His line of business was broken and all the hard work that they did had been destroyed.

Rubio visited a small chapel. He entered the confessional booth and started his confession.

“Good morning, Father.”

“Good morning, as well son.”

“Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been weeks since my last confession. These are my sins.”

There was a long silence as if the priest was hesitating.

Rubio confessed his crimes.

All of his crimes to the priest.

From the syndicate, he was running into human trafficking.

He held nothing in front of the priest who was listening.

“I'm an irredeemable sinner, father.”

“That you are, son.”

“I will continue this. My greed for profit will never cease. I will go to hell for this, father.”

“Yes, you will go to hell, son.”

It can’t be forgiven.

It can't be justified no matter what.

“But instead I will pray that those who have been misguided by me shall still be forgiven. The men that I lead. The people that I follow are nothing more than hungry sheep. Hungry men wish good for their families and lovers.

“My friend, Guzman, was a loyal man. He had grown in harsh times. Had witnessed cruelties that one cannot fathom. He hated this. But he knew that this was something he was good at.

“He was a loyal man. A loyal man that would rather die than let his secrets out. He was not evil. He was always a man who believed that those who are close to him are his priority. He was just a man who held a great family.

“But we are an organization that feeds people to monsters. We are a group that also saves through the highly-priced organs that we use well. Tell me, father, do you think that those who have been abducted will have a good chance in life? The moment they were abducted and taken away from their homes. They had no chance to live. Some might be able to escape. Some might be able to return home but in those troubled countries.

“They have nothing to the point that they would sell their own people for money. They sell them knowing that we can use them. From Africa to Asia, many of them come and we check if they are healthy. See if their bodies are healthy. Those who have potential are trained to become like us. The rest are shipped, taken to our hospital, stripped of their organs, and drained of their blood for the sake of a few people desperate enough to buy from us.”

By taking their organs they save people.

By taking what they will waste they help people.

It was a poorly made reasoning that was twisted up to make it feel like they were doing something good despite their activities.

But it was the honest truth.

They didn’t have to lie.

It was something that his people had been used to doing. If anything Rubio had heard that his methods were much cleaner and more humane than his competitors.

But that didn’t change anything.

It meant nothing to the moral belief.

He wasn’t going to justify himself.

He knew what he was doing.

How it will damn him to hell.

There was no sufficient excuse, no matter how righteous it is to make stealing organs and blood without consent acceptable.

Rubio doesn’t think of himself as some psychopath. He wasn’t the one doing the surgery nor he was the one ordering it. To him, it was nothing more than a business transaction to people who are after rare products that can be sold as rare commodities.

If anything he was surprised by the demand for these organs. How many people in this world needed transplants and transfusions? Most of their customers were billionaires and certain charity groups were buying these organs in bulk.

There was a good reason why he wasn’t caught yet. Even if they caught him he had many allies who were willing to protect him to continue the organ trade.

It was an important trade that even governments all over the world would contact him. As long as there is demand for it, someone will always try to profit from it.

And he’d prefer to be that someone.

The one that gets rich while profiting from the suffering of his fellow human.

It was a disgusting thing.

No confessions will save his soul.

Not a single damn thing will.

“You cannot be forgiven, Rubio.”

“I know, father.”

There was no preaching about how he can be saved if changed his ways. Father Gomez understood it well.

Among the many who support him the most.

It was the father who had beliefs about the cruel ways of the old testament. A man who had been twisted by his own dilemma about how a man shall do good without any power.

He condemns all of Rubio’s ways but accepts the donations that feed hundreds, if not thousands of rural communities that cannot feed themselves.

It was simple.

The father chose to save those who knew and did not care about the suffering of people he didn’t know.

He was a twisted man who believed in this belief.

A belief that even Noah was only allowed to bring his family and those animals were chosen by God. He cannot save everyone and let them enter his Ark. Let the rest of the people die and save only those he knew.

And yet here he was lending his ear to one of the biggest sinners there is. Both of them knew that they were damned to hell. 

Nonetheless, they were lending ears, pretending there was still something decent about them left.

They were good at what they did.

And in the eyes of those who knew them.

In his parish town, he was nothing more than a devoted man who goes to the chapel every day to listen to the Priest. 

In this small town, he was a man who had dedicated his wealth to the health and livelihood of his community.

But to others, he was the leader of an international ring that smuggled humans with a price on his head.