The Fall

At just 25 years old, Kazuo found his ironclad rule crumbling before his wild eyes. From the gilded palace spires he had built atop his criminal empire, Kazuo watched flames of revolt engulfing the city below.

This very capital that once trembled silently before Kazuo's child soldiers now roared with brazen demonstrators waving banners demanding justice for lives shattered by such a young tyrant's capricious cruelty.

"No! I am your god!" screamed Kazuo as ministers a generation his senior filtered out of the panicking royal chambers, abandoning their posts to flee the advance of rebel armies and people's rage against decades of oppression under the vicious prodigy.

In his flame-licked sanctuary, surrounded only by gold-plated automatic rifles and cocaine-dusted mirrors, the last dispatches from Kazuo's vanishing generals told of defections, of panicked retaliations fizzling out before they began. The people's pent-up wrath consuming all institutions and icons of the regime like wildfire.

Kazuo's climb from feral street orphan to world dictator lasted less time than his most respected enemies spent earning a university tenure. In the end, the child abandons the crumbling palace to wander his lost empire alone and crazed with anger and longing for the power, wealth and dominion now disappearing like heat from his trembling, outstretched hands.