Post by Bianca Sabbato on Oct 28, 2020 22:05:55 GMT -5
I was able to notice the veritable barrage of semblance fire coming our way. Most of it went way over our heads or so far to the sides we basically ran no risk from being affected by it in any meaningful way.
Two attacks, however, managed to find a clean path towards where Argent and I were laying low at the time. Without a second thought, I jumped in between them and Argent. I wasn’t sure if they would have hit him anyway. But I didn’t wanna take the risk. He needed as much time and space as realistically possible to line his shot.
I felt the pain struck my back and shoulder as a blast of frozen lighting hit me just as I was pushing my aura towards impact zones. It hurt like a bitch, and I had to grit my teeth to avoid making a noise that would have given our position away to the enemy.
The pain was temporal. Dying was not. So I sucked it up and soldiered through it. And as for Argent...
The knives sailed through the air, and they found they target true.
A tremendous force applied to them caused the sharpened edges to pierce through the aura-deprived flesh and bone of their objective. Organs were damaged, blood began to spill, and soon enough, bodily functions would cease working, and if there was a thing like a soul inside of it, it would soon leave the body as well.
And that’s pretty much it... Pull this string, and it will make this sound, do this thing, and then that will happen. Cause and effect.
Killing the commander had been nothing different from the steps that preceded it, like climbing up the ship or boarding the train to Kerch. And in a way, all of that had been a preamble, a necessary prerequisite for this.
Let's not fool ourselves. We had begun to kill him as soon as we enlisted for this. Be it by our hand or by others.
It was what the council had ordered, and we had provided the results. I even had the evidence of it right on my scroll. So I expected zero complaints on behalf of us for the end result of the operation.
I mean, if you wanted to find some emotional scapegoat for doing what we did, you could always think that if it wasn’t us, it would simply have been someone else.
Or you could think about all the good things that would come from this. Like, for example, how the commander wouldn’t go out to repeat his actions in some other small, insignificant town without any means to defend itself like Kerch.
But that also would have been a lie.
Would I have killed him even if he was just a small-time criminal that possed no serious threat to my safety? No, I didn’t like to take lives, it wasn’t my idea of a happy or enjoyable time.
Would have I done it if the higher-ups ordered it...? Yes. I would have. Whatever the mission might be, following the most effective steps to completing it should be your top priority.
But even beyond all of that. I think I liked those justifications a great deal... On a broader scale. I think we did something good here, even if we did it for the wrong reasons. I mean... Did it even matter? Did it matter that I felt absolutely nothing after the fact?
To be honest, I feel worse about the fact of how little it affected me than for committing the act itself. I was sure that would be the thing keeping me up at night, not visions of the dead body, nor feelings of dread from my implication on its demise. But guilt, guilt at how little it seemed to matter to me when something as precious as a life extinguished before my eyes... And maybe that was something that I needed to work on... If it even could be worked on.
But now was not the time for that. Now we still had the hardest part of the trip to make. To survive the aftermath.
Reaching the shore was easy, our greatest concern was having to walk around with damp clothes for the rest of the night. It seemed like the enemies weren’t aware of our current position, so we received no welcoming party nor confetti cannons to celebrate our arrival
Nodding wordlessly. I began to move toward the storm drains, or at least where I believed access to them to be from what I knew about the urbanization of the capital. It was time to find Raul and Alice and get the civilians safe. And then, out of this hellhole.
We managed to get by hiding through the shadows. Being patient while we waited for the remaining soldiers to pass us by and only moving with the utmost care and without uttering a single word.
Most of them were scared, frantic at the disappearance of their leader. And the presence of dangerous hostiles that had managed to snuff him out of their grasp (and of this world) in an instant... They probably deserved that. The amount of insecurity and anxiety they experienced was nothing in comparison to what they had inflicted upon the innocent people of Kerch... So fuck them, as far as I was concerned.
I hoped they at least redeemed themselves by fighting against the Grimm while the civilians were safely kept away from all of that, even if they did so only to save their own skins.
After a while of playing this game of cat and mouse, we found a suitable entrance to the drains. Once we figured out no enemy was near, we entered the darkness below. Of course. Us being faunus meant there was precious little this darkness could do to slow us down, something that couldn’t be said about the celestial legion...
I fished out my scroll, it wasn’t broken, so that was a relief. Checking the memory for the last recorded videos, I found the video I was looking for. Right between a recording of myself practicing a particularly difficult tune, and a small video I once I downloaded about the benefits of coconut oil in your hair or some menial shit.
I muted the device and ran the video. Watching the sequence one time after the other, my attention undivided, focused on figuring out if it was a clean takeout or not.
After about the third rewatch, I figured there was no way of surviving that, shrugged off, and began to move just after a stray patrol of soldiers passed by on the surface, completely oblivious to our presence just a couple meters under the ground.
-Welp. Now it’s time to go find the civilians, regroup with Alice and Raul and send a distress signal or whatever it is called so we are rescued once all of the heat has cooled off. With this new info, Argus could probably send their fleet to clean things up and send us back to Haven...-
I commented in a low voice, mostly to make myself sure I wasn’t forgetting something. Argent had been a little quiet, so I wanted to know his input on the whole ordeal.
I avoided doing any stupid remarks like “good shot sir!” or “great work out there!” As those were bootlicking at best. He knew how well we had done. He probably didn’t need me patting him in the back for it... It was another day in the office for us, the people training to be huntsman and huntresses, whatever the reason might be.
The job had been properly done. Now it was time to wrap things up and return home.
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