A Step written in honor of Metal Gear Solid.
They called him many things.
They called him a renegade.
A ghost.
But he was free.
No leash could bind him; no order could drown out the voice of his own reason.
And yet — somehow — he carried something humane within him.
A spark.
A light.
The kind of brilliance you might catch once in a blue moon, in a place that had learned to sing its tragedies like lullabies.
Solid Snake believed there was more to life than the passing of blood.
That a man could leave behind what he truly felt — stitched into stories, songs, and memories.
That these echoes might outlive him.
Might outlast even war.
Might become the truest legacy of a heart that refused to die.
Solid Snake chose to fight Liquid Ocelot,
regardless of his wear and tear.
It was not for glory, or vengeance.
It was about memory.
About choosing who you are.
And Snake chose to remember.
They gave him codes.
They gave him collars.
They tried to slice through him with a blade sharp as a Bowie knife.
But they could never claim him.
This is the oddity that resonates with true freedom — a freedom that stays connected, by choice, not by chains.
He was free — utterly free — because he chose to stay.
His freedom was an act of defiance:
To choose.
To bleed on the battlefield without letting the poison of hate rot him from the inside.
To stand between history and its endless thirst.
A hero in quiet rebellion.
A man who refused to be chained.
His anthem rose not from orders or medals,
but from the raw, unstoppable heartbeat of his own soul.
He was a Phantom.
A vision from the mind of Kojima himself.
But he became something more.
A Diamond among Dogs, unbreakable even when betrayed, because he remembered.
Even when the world gave him every reason to walk away.
No chains.
No conscience corrupted.
Only freedom — and the passion he carried with him always.
A Creed Carved In Granite.