The Saviour!

'The afternoon, in every way, testified the onset of September. A feeling of febrile lethargy prevailed even when one performed the most excruciating physical task. The cattle, hunger sated, ruminated on the cud listlessly, by the riverside. The river flowed on, throughout the year, occasionally vitrifying in the winters. Before it could revert to its amorphous state within weeks, urchins, half-naked, would emulate Tony Hawk on a rotten log. The trees painted invisible, low-period sinusoidal waves on the sky. A dried leaf, whilst on its way to the crust of The Hades, valiantly attempted to trace a sinusoidal curve, too.'Thus concluded the dairy-entry of Dr.Sam Bayard, a professor of Mathematics, MIT, and the winner of Maths Olympiad. Placing his pen in the cleavage of his book, he leaned back with his arms behind his head and mused on his latest research paper- 'The unintended Golden ratio between the hands of a watch and its history'. In that he had described how the efficiency of a watch would be incredibly high when the ratio between its two hands is 1.618, and how it would fall down by 2% for every 0.3 units either way.Dr.Kliment Kostadin, a pioneer in every department of Mathematics, professor at the Bulgaraian university of Mathematics, and the runner-up of the Maths Olympiad, sat in an unventilated corner. He had never lost a battle before and this feeling is strange. He could relate the feeling to letting his wife be fucked by his brother. Dr.Bayard and he were good friends and prominent members of 'The Fellowship of Mathematicians'. But losing the biggest battle of his life to him didn't go down too well, not even with seven swigs of whiskey. How could the bastard have won, he thought. His was a topic that had no practical application, no theoretical beauty. It was arcane, clever, but that was all it was. With another long gulp, he attempted to wash the discomfiture down.

Fumbling for grip, he rose unsteadily, awkwardly. He looked into the mirror and a bald, pot-bellied, sweaty, farcical reflection of his youth looked back at him dimly. In a fit of rage produced by all the preceding events, he hurled the whiskey bottle at it. It missed its target and crashed into his study-lamp, setting his papers afire. As reflexively as a drunken lout can manage, he tried to douse the flames engulfing years of his effort in vain. A sinuous smoke rose, dancing alongside the flames to his wails. He hugged the remainder of his work to his chest, kissed it a couple of times and wailed again. He wiped the tears that flowed profusely with the back of his palm and dumped the papers he held into the trash and walked out. Knocking on the door and finding no response, Dr. Kostadin opened the door of Dr.Bayard and walked in. Seating himself on his absent host's chair, he flicked through the pages of the diary. Every word he read reminded him of his vainly efforts. 'I grieve the loss of my love and this bastard has the time to write about nature,' he thought. He dropped the book down and went out and knocked again until Dr.Bayard came out."Hello, Dr.Kostadin, how are you?""I am gereat""Are you drunk, Mr.Kostadin?""You shourd noth haf won""Excuse me!""You shourd noth haf won, you basshtard," Kostadin decided and pulled out his revolver.Before Dr.Bayard could raise his hands and protest, the shot rang off. The bullet surged out, leaving a skirt of smoke behind and was heading for Bayard's chest at 900m/s. Bayard, provided the time, would have calculated the force of the impact and its exit velocity through the back of his shoulder-blade. He looked at the falling leaves, floating slowly, taunting the laws of gravity. The swivelling, seraphic grace of the leaves was upset by a sudden whoosh and a streak of blue before the bullet hit something akin to steel and dropped lifelessly, without ricocheting.Mouth agape, Kostadin, looking into a pair of blue eyes, muttered, "Wh..who are you?

"Wh..who are you?" an appalled Kostadim manages to utter, after being knocked into his senses by the turn of the events."Justice!," a gruffy voice answers and levitates Kostadim off the ground."Wha..what on earth is happening?," a clearly confused and consternated Kostadim succeeds in saying before he is banged back onto the earth with a massive thud. He lays still, not moving a muscle, not breathing. Out of concern for his old friend, ignoring the assault he made on his life seconds before, Dr.Bayard reaches on to check if the limp, unmoving figure on the ground was breathing. On feeling no breath against his fingers, he turns to his saviour- the merciless castigator, the inexorable adjudicator, the pitiless punisher - and excalims accusingly,"How can saving one life entitle you to take another?," and breaks down, sobbing on his friend's body- grieving for his friend and regretting winning the Olympiad, but for which his friend would have been alive at this moment, as the initially concieved image of a noble superhero normally associated with blue eyes coalesces into an ominous bird of prey that feeds on the misdeeds of others and inundates itself in specious notions of justice takes off with a sibilant fizz.

After his friend's passing away, Bayard is a lonely man. Kostadim was not just a friend to him, but more than a brother. His death was like the amputation of a vital limb. This crucial period of coping with the death of a dear one has been wrongly interpreted by the same person who rattled off complex Fourier transforms at the snap of a finger. He has now become a frequenter of the local bar, attempting to flush his sorrow by drinking himself to unconsciousness often. His colleagues at MIT are wary of his recently-acquired foul-mouth and are now trying to avoid being seen with him. On one desolate night, after imbibing in excess of what even a highly intoxicated average heavy drinker would raise his eyebrows at, Bayard threw up his guts and lay, face-down in it. When finally his crapulence waned enough to permit some coherent thinking, he slipped back into old times, occasionally rising from his delirious nostalgia into the present and realizing with stinging clarity his degeneration into this wreck.This thought kept coming back to him like a sore reminder of the uprising epiphany of that day. Seven days later, he had reached the climax of a gruelling internal debate that had at times shot up to the levels of an unbearable quandary:'I had always loved doing what I had wanted. I had never in my life done anything that I should be shameful of as I retrospect when I grow old and weak to solve any more mathematical problems, except for the days I had spent drinking like an unstable playboy. I had never let anything affect my decision prior to that, nor have I let anything induce in me something that I hadn't liked. I will make up for what I had lost; I will undo for what I had so callously accepted at a point when I was supposed to be rigidly reasonable. I will never quit mathematics. I will avenge my friend'