• Mature • Kill The Boy (Graded)

[Kasoria]

15th Trial, Cylus, 706a
South-West outskirts of Middlecleft
16th Bell

Continued from here




The high couldn't last forever. The numbing, narrowing rush of the fight. There was a simplicity there that he craved. A purity of purpose. You, your enemy, and all the multitude of moves and counters you could make. Stretching on across dimensions of contest until there was a Winner, and a Loser. Alive or Dead. Plus or Minus. The world fell away, your past fell away, all concerns and fears and shames and forgotten dreams were just that: forgotten. Until that last blow was dealt and you had the answer to the terrible wager you had both made.

Kasoria hated these moments. The aftermath of all his efforts. Because they allowed him time to think upon what had happened. What the consequences would be. The buzzing, deafening roar of battle ebbed away, like liquor from a glass or storm from the skies. Then there was peace. Time for the mind to focus on what you'd done, and what you would allow.

"Pl... Please..."

Such as the barely living thing in the narrow hallway leading to the backdoor. He could glimpse it, ragged and torn, covered in blood. Weakly twitching on the floorboards. Kasoria walked through the still house, silent save for the pot bubbling over above the fire, and the steadily cursing figure squatting next to it.

"What happened?"

Venger turned with a scowl and lifted up his bloody foot. "Fuck does it look like?!"

There was no reaction from the little man, and finally Venger just rolled his eyes. Fucking Kasoria. Always so inscrutable. He went back to trying to yank he crossbow out with a pair of fireplace tongs, paying the man no more attention. Kasoria returned the favor and kept walking. With every step he saw more of the wreckage left by the duo that were watching the back. Namely, the woman dying in the middle of it. Further down, by the door, was a man made nearly headless by what looked like some crushing blow. Chunks of brain and shards of bone were splattered everywhere. Bloody footprints around, past, over, even on the woman, and as he approached the bedroom-

-a grip so weak a baby could have broken it found the bottom of his breeches. He looked down into the eyes of one that should not still live. Chose your woman well, Miyam, he thought. He knelt down and looked over the woman. There were lumps in her chest and her legs and arms that... were not growths. They were shattered bones. Fragments probably piercing her organs. One that nearly knocked her jaw clean off, and yet...

"... pluh... pluhse..." She gasped without tongue or teeth, beseeching him. "Dun... Dun let... him..."

Him. Kasoria swallowed and forced down the same, indignant, pointless outrage he'd been fighting for trials. Every since he knew who would be in this crew, this death squad, traveling far from the Big Rock to slash and burn the Family Miyam. The fear, the horror, the naked terror a parent felt for a child... Kasoria knew what it looked like, even if he'd never felt it himself. Only one among their number could evoke that in such a personal way.

Demented cunt.

The killer reached out and picked up the simple knife the woman had tried to use. Failed miserably, too, but still the courage of her was impressive. One woman, without skills or training, standing before two callous murderers festooned with weapons and deadly intent. But she'd not ran. Hadn't abandoned her children. Fought to the very end and now, refused to even die and free herself from her pain.

So help her.

The voice was so small, now. It had grown so distant. Kasoria heard it, but it was like trying to grasp wet rock with soaking fingers. It was there, then it was gone. Leaving nothing but the coldness that looked down at her... and thrust the knife into the side of her throat.

Sandra gasped, one last time. Her grip was strong again, for but a moment... and then her hand fell, limp and spent. Her eyes followed suit, and a trill or two later, her whole body just seemed to... deflate. As if her soul was finally free from such agonized bondage, lifting up and fleeing this place of wrath and ruin and horror. Kasoria did not begrudge her that. He knew he should have dragged her outside, too. But would she have even survived that?

Still disobeyed ordered. Mister Handy back there won't be happy.

He touched his dirty fingers to her face, and closed her eyes. He'd deal with that later. For now-

"Awwww, Kasoria," a sickly sweet voice said from the bedroom. "I didn't know you had such tenderness in your heart."

What I would give to be able to end you...

Merry looked pleased with himself. Happy. Refreshed. Relaxed. That in itself was enough to make Kasoria's stomach turn. He knew exactly how Merry got in that state of being. It involved pain the likes of which he'd never known.

He looked around the room and saw dead children. On the floor in front of him. The oldest son, dead trying to hold the door closed, killed in an instant. By the open window, curtains flapping around it like frightened wings, was a younger boy. Barely up to Kasoria's nose. Bleeding out on his back from some wound to his front. But he knew the worst was to come. He ground his teeth. He steeled himself. Then he dragged his gaze to the bed...

"Shhhh," Merry said, pulling his pants back on. "I dare say she quite exhausted me, my friend."

He was on him in an instant. Without wounds from his fight, without exhaustion to impede him. Just a flash of movement as Merry's crow of laughter filled the room, then the chuckling monster was shoved against the wall. Kasoria's gladius was in his hand an instant later, cocked and leveled, and... and...

"Oh, come now, Kasoria." Merry pouted like a schoolboy who'd been caught stealing chocolates. "Must you judge me so harshly? A man is entitled to take some enjoyment from his labor, is he not?" He put up a finger, grinning, excited, heedless to death bare inches from his face. "Or, one better! To have your pleasures be your labors. Must you hate and revile me for that, Kasoria? For simply being a luckier man than you?"

Kasoria was all teeth and flaring nostrils before Merry. Refusing to take his eyes from him, lest they slide back to that naked, bruised mass of flesh laying on the bed. She'd been sleeping in it, not a break ago. A single break. She'd been innocent and dreaming. Not understanding what was to happen to her, or why. Then they'd come, like wraiths from nightmares, and they'd laid waste to everything. Everyone. Every dream they'd had and love they treasured.

Kasoria stood in the wreckage of a life that had been loved, and valued. He stood there, because he'd helped destroy it. And Merry knew it.

"Get out of here," was all he managed to say, gripping the man around the throat a touch tighter to stall his response. "Before I decide I don't care what Carrow says about ending you right fucking here."

"As you command, good sir," Merry said, buckling his breeches in the tight space between them. Still smiling. Still joking. Still carrying daemons in his eyes. "If you'd please...?"

Kasoria stood aside, helpless and useless. No. Neither one of those. He had Miyam's blood smeared on his hands and Larks' on his shoes. He didn't even pause to remember Jonas. He doubted anyone else would, either. But he looked around as Merry traipsed away, swinging his mace like a conductor would a baton, singing some happy tune as he went. He looked and saw dead children.

You helped let this happen. That's like doing it.

Because you didn't just stand aside. You stood in the darkness.

"Shut up."

"Fuck wuzzat?"

Kasoria saw Venger swaying in the doorway, a bunch of towels wrapped around his foot. It looked like he'd stuck it in a colorless melon and couldn't get it out. He didn't respond. Couldn't find any words that wouldn't have started a fresh brawl. Instead he looked down at the dead woman in the hall, and since he already had his gladius...

[Kasoria]

He'd tried so hard to live, and now he could not die. He'd fought through pain that he'd never experienced before, all the more brutal that it came at him older, with grey in his beard and tiredness in his limbs. Still, he had endured. With a knife in his belly he had struck off a man's hand, and fought another younger and faster. Disemboweled and wounded again, on his knees, he had tried to rise until beaten down. And then, even on his back, he'd tried to roll, to crawl, to live.

Until his fading eyes saw Kasoria emerge from inside the house. Holding something that swayed as he walked. Miyam knew what it was before it hovered into his true sight, but he still hoped. Hoped and prayed without words or even a mouth that would still obey him, for gods and salvation he had never believed in. But hope was alien to that place, that night. There was no-one to help them. No savior or redemption to be found.

Just Miyam, dying and helpless, looking at his wife's head, hanging by the hair from the hand of a murderer.

"N... No..."

"The fuck is that?!"

"His wife's-"

"I know what it fucking is, smartarse!" Carrow's mood had not improved. Unsurprising, considering he'd stuck his new stump into the brazier to seal the wound and stop himself from bleeding to death. Kasoria wouldn't be happy, either. "Why the fuck didn't you bring the others out?!"

There was movement behind him and Kasoria jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Because those two killed everyone else before I got there. Two boys. The wife. The one with the 'stache. All dead by the time I got there."

"Ah-ah-ah!" Merry said as he waltzed over, wagging a chiding finger. "All of them, Kasoria?"

Carrow swung his glare back to Kasoria, who sighed and made a thorough, detailed, and extensive mental note to flay Merry alive as soon as was convenient. "Fuck does he mean by that?"

"He means, the woman was breathing. I cut her throat." He plowed on before Carrow got a chance to lose his mind completely and do something stupid. He liked his odds, defending himself to Vorund after cutting this arsehole's head off, but he'd rather avoid the possibility altogether. "She wouldn't have lasted me draggin' her out here, anyway. Woulda' been dead by the time we got her next to him. Besides..."

He dropped the head next to Miyam, and the battered, severed boulder half-rolled against the man's head. Immediately he started to twitch and writhe, trying to get away from it.

"... sends the same message, dunt it?"

"It wasn't what we were told to-"

Okay, fuck this.

"Then you should a' left those two cunts-" again he gestured to Merry, squatting on Larks' ample belly like a grisly stool, legs crossed, observing all with blatant amusement, and Venger, still at the front door. "-with crossbows an' kept them the fuck away from the house! But no. You wanted them watching the back, and what happened? Exactly what the fuck always happens!"

Even Carrow was silenced by that. The explosion of noise, packed with all the disgust and hate that Kasoria had been unable to vent, came out in one massive, sonic boom of a sound. Sleeping things in the darkness were shocked into movement, scurrying and fluttering away from the rage Kasoria screamed into the other man's face. And he wasn't done yet.

"Venger lost his fuckin' temper an' probably killed everyone in his way, an' Merry fucked that girl bloody an' cut her throat! The fuck did you think would happen?"

"Oh, aye, smart fuckin' man."

"Eat shit, Venger," Kasoria spat after the hobbling man, as he turned back around and went into the farmhouse. Probably to root around for food or booze or just take trophies, as was often his want. Ears and noses, Kasoria had heard. "An' fuck this evil sack of grinning shit, too. The job got done, that's what matters."

Carrow wanted to rage back at him. He wanted to scream and mock and strip layers off Kasoria's flesh with a rusty razor. He wanted to have something to hurl back at the man, but there was no ammunition to be found. The little cunt was right, damn him. He'd fucked up, putting those two lunatics in the back. Now the job hadn't gone as ordered.

But it had gone, Carrow reminded himself, mind finally cooling down after getting over losing his hand. This cunt suffers, his family all dies, the cunts helping him die, word'll get back eventually over why... exactly like Vorund wanted.

"We're fuckin' gone," he said eventually, not taking his eyes off Kasoria. "An' next time I give youse an order, youse-"

"One a' the fuckin' boys'zz gone!"

Officer Miyam heard the words, and they brought him back from the brink. Every scrap of his soul had been defiled, cleaved or severed or sullied by those animals. Then he heard those words, just as he finally let go... and he managed a bloody-toothed smile as the two men arguing above him exploded into vulgarity. They forgot him entirely, running off, stampeding back into the house, almost knocking over the limping man who'd called out to them.

Miyam opened his eyes... and beheld the stars above. Where his wife and children waited for him. Those he'd lost, and the one alive... the one smart and strong and fast enough to escape... he would live. He would flee into the dark and the countryside, hide himself, grow to be a man and he would be beyond their wrath. He would avenge himself against the men who wished his death, by the simple trick of not dying.

"Muh... son..."

Then the stars were blinked out and died above him. Something huge and shadowed replaced them. Black and formless, save for a cheery smile set into a head that was one with the night. Miyam tried to call out, but there was a boot on his throat, slowing pushing down.

"Shhhh, now," Merry said, stroking the front of his breeches as he watched those precious last few drops dribble out of Miyam's decimated mortal form. "Almost over, old boy..."

[Kasoria]

He didn't want to die. It wasn't courage that dragged him up from the floor. Wasn't heroic willpower that pulled him up out the window. It wasn't love that saw him take step after painful step across the cold earth, bones jangling and blood oozing from the hole in his chest. It wasn't a fearlessness born of destiny that made him plunge headlong into the darkness beyond the nimbus of torchlight that set the farm apart from the smothering night surrounding it, leagues from another homestead, let along the town of Middlecleft.

Aurus did not want to die, and if he had to endure all of that to survive, then so be it.

Then he heard voice. Raised and shouting, accusing and cursing, turning on each other like starving dog. He turned as he stumbled, looking back at the house. He could see figures rushing about inside, a couple spilling back out with torches and peering into the darkness. He knew he was safe where he was, a hundred or so feet into the pitch, invisible to those lights. Then he heard a voice from inside that awful room-

"Got blood on the window!" It was the man with long hair. He lifted himself up and out the window, staring down where Aurus had landed. "S'on the dirt outside, too! This is where he came out!"

"Fuckin' find him, you bastards!"

Aurus didn't need any more encouragement. He heaved himself back up, body wracked and soul shattered, but buried, immutable laws of his species could not be denied by mere pain. Run. Survive. That was all that mattered. He'd awoken to find his mother headless. His brother dead. His sister the same, and violated in a way that would never, ever leave him. He stood amidst all that, a ghost risen from the corpses, and was sure he was dead. But then the pain struck him, and he knew the dead were beyond such concerns.

He was alive. His family would want him to stay that way.

He kept moving, as the blind killers plunged into the vast fields cloaked in an even greater blackness. They hunted and shouted and swung swords in futility. Aurus dared to look back and saw a shaggy-haired little monster rushing around under his torch, but in the wrong direction. They couldn't know where he was going, which was simply... away. A straight line, and with a head start. He would move and keep moving, until his wounds claimed him or some miracle saved him. Aurus knew only this: every moment he lived, was a victory.

Then he heard it. Rising like a wind from across the ocean. Carried over the air and stopping him where he stood. Set him to trembling all over again as he heard the words.

"As I went down to the river to pray... studyin' about them good ol' ways... an' who shall wear, a gory crown... good lords, show me the way!"

Laughter followed it. Laughter that scorned the curses of the singers' fellows, Aurus' misery, the atrocity they had been architect and willing participant of. Laughter that shuddered up and down the boy's spine until he shook it off and kept walking, kept moving, kept living. He made a vow in the darkness, not knowing if he'd see another break, his wounds such as they were.

The Law would be honored. His father's great faith would not be forgotten. His mother's sacrifice. His brother's bravery. His sister's... his sister...

Aurus ground his teeth and let history weep him headlong towards his destiny. Leaving the clutch of killers to scramble in the darkness, never to find him. Until Kasoria and Carrow and Merry and Venger, all of them converged back onto the farmhouse and convinced themselves the boy would be dead by morning. Venger explained the wound he'd given the boy. How deep, how wide... and that was enough for them.

Kasoria cast his eye into the faceless horizon, devoid of light and life. He kept his thoughts to himself. A boy stabbed through the chest, yet strong enough to rise, and climb, and flee? That did not seem the kind of die easily. He kept staring into the night. Sometimes, he fancied he could see things staring back. It wasn't until Carrow shoved his shoulder that he snapped back to the cabal around him.

"Oi?! You hear me?! We tell Vorund he died out there, cuz he probably fucking will!"

"Understood."

"Good! Right, s'get the fuck outta here."

The boy who died, kept walking. The killers who lived, left the mark of their work for the crows and creeping things. Soon there was no sound at all in that place. Nothing but still bodies and drying blood. Nothing but memories and madness, soaked into the wood and the stone. Nothing but another horrible memory that Kasoria did not look back on, as he marched away with the other monsters, into someone else's nightmare.

[Zip]

Kassy

Knowledge.........

Detection: Finding a Blood Trail
Discipline: Holding Back From Killing One Who Truly Deserves it
Medicine: Cauterizing a Wound to Stop Bleeding and Infection
Philosophy: Not Stopping An Evil When You Can, Is The Same As Helping It
Stealth: Fleeing Into Pitch Darkness
Tactics: Position Unstable Assets Far Away From Targets You Need Alive

Non-Skill Knowledge:
NPC Merry: Sick and Evil Even by The Standards of Psychopaths
NPC Merry: Smarter and More Dangerous Than He Looks
NPC Sandra: Brave Woman, Loving Mother, Died For Nothing
NPC "The Boy": Escaped The Massacre

Loot....................

None

Consequence......

Nope

Renown..............

10

Experience...........

10

Well that was definitely... something. I freely admit I went back to check out the other two parts before posting my review.

I wanna first start by saying that the, um, the mutiple POV's from both villians and victims really, really, really made this particular portion of this solo series. From Kasoria's role as the lighter shade of grey in the midst of Verger and the aptly misnamed Merry, from the lows of his adredaline cooldown and his disgust and his rage and his little gesture of black mercy to the last non-sonny member of that sorry family, to his resigned non-decision to let the boy go. From Carrow's 'oh god, oh god, I'm working with two psychos and a guy who to follow a set of suddenly acquired standards that screwed the job just a little sideways'. From Miyam's heartbreaking little insight to into his broken psyche and the last, fierce hope that the tiniest bit of his family had survived, to Auya's, well, physical but definitely not spritual survival.

This was beautiful in so many ways, Mate. As roleplayers, we neglect NPCs a lot. A lot of times we slap a name on, have them serve their purpose, and then we never see them again. But it's different with you. Even Merry, a fairly one dimensional uber-psycho, felt much more real if only because the reactions towards him are real; he elicits disgust, he's distrusted, he's on the verge of being murdered out of sheer revulsion of his violations. I have no doubt he'll meet his comuppance eventually in a future thread.

Well done and enjoy your points.

Please edit your grade request.

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