Numbers make men statistics; at the end, a thousand dead are better than a million - no matter the fact that they were alive. Lives are traded for more lives; in the scenario of the greater outcome, the sacrifices may be right - but they will never be moral.
It is not in the sense that it was wrong; it will never be as simple as being right or wrong. The world is a thousand different shades of gray; No one is to blame, for simply wishing to live. Neither the ones that had to kill, neither the ones that were killed nor the ones that survived from the death of others. Cruelty was never born from birth, it was created out of fear and misery.
There is a sense of sympathy for the villain - an unspoken one. We are not afraid of them simply because we are reminded of our mortality, but of our morality. Just how many more days, until the scales tip us off - and we become them?
This is not to say that villains are good people - mistakes still need to be owned up to. No matter the circumstances leading to it, in this cold world - even if you are not for fault, you are still responsible.
Perhaps, this is why heroes have larger backs. They carry the guilt of a thousand corpses, and the hope of a million others. No matter the evil they have killed, in the end they have still killed. Killed men, killed people with hope - there's never a completely dark soul. Heavens, if that were the thing - the world would have been such an easier place. Heroes are bound to murder people that simply never had the peace they deserved.
Scums do exist, and perhaps it's the few morally dark existence that leads to the destruction of empathy.
We are bound to catch a fever from a cold world.
And that in itself is scary - if the act of slaying man becomes staple, if justice becomes victory - just how long until we lose the significance of what it means to be human? But oh, who am I kidding. What sort of pride is there in even being human. We are all simply in a world where hunger has become omnipotent. Where ultimately, empathy has been treated as a flaw.
Here, where even god himself seems to weep - where divinity itself has lost its glow. Man climbs upwards on a tower made of terracore corpses - he reaches for the clouds, he reaches out for sky-
And he finds it is empty.