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The truth of the matter is, Takasugi is a man who is singularly defined by his rage over the loss of the one thing – maybe even the one person – he ever cared about. Canon indicates that while all of his old comrades entered the war with some sort of cause in mind, Takasugi only decided to fight because it was the life that Shouyo, his mentor and a man he deeply admired, had given him. Shouyo had given him a means to live in the world; as such, Shouyo’s beliefs were Takasugi’s beliefs, and Shouyo’s cause was Takasugi’s cause. Losing him, then, crushed Takasugi completely, leaving him with nothing but hatred for the world that had stolen Shouyo from him. If that wasn’t enough, there were also the horrors of the Amanto war to contend with, and the gradual disappearance of his comrades: these were people Takasugi had grown up with after all and may have come to love as his brothers, and throughout the course of the war, every single one of them ended up either dying, changing beyond recognition or abandoning the cause. Having to contend with the loss of Shouyo and fighting a hopeless battle is what drove Takasugi to cut everything away, sacrificing everything – morals, beliefs, emotion, his very humanity – to better focus on becoming a beast whose sole purpose was to destroy the world that had been so cruel as to steal the only things that had ever made it world living in.