Tales of the Pearly Kingdom (Pearly Tales Vol. 2)

132. The Avenger's Trauma

Seamus didn't have any idea where these feelings were coming from. Killing had been his job and he was more or less indifferent when it came to taking lives. But if he could just get one hand free, if he could slip one blade into her he would kill her. He may have unwittingly molested Jasmine, that was Cal's fault. But the time he had to understand a woman's body it wasn't done for something as base as sexual perversion. Every single one of their lives were on the line for that infiltration.

The details came flooding back to him. The horrors of finding his comrades beaten, raped, and dying for the sake of a little information came back to him. The elves and their games! Toying with lives. It was the last mission of his last formal boss. Someone who was a traitor against the deists. On the surface they were infiltrating the base of a different possible traitor. A smuggler.

Seamus just followed orders.

He was someone who retrieved information from his comrades and passed it on to the boss and his superiors. Only he had a mismatching set of circumstances for who he was supposed to pass the information to. He should have known there was something strange about destroying evidence he was supposed to be gathering. The smuggler was into many unsavory things. Coded letters were used for passing on that information. But passing them hand to hand wasn't always an option.

The situation was highly exceptional and the scheduled times for passing information was routine. If they didn't show up to give him the information, he had to go look for them and they were always in the same place. He remembered digging through a pile of corpse to find the raped and broken or dying bodies of his comrades. He would either have to fish around their mouth for the special capsule that held the message, or more likely he would have to cut them open and dig around their stomach for it.

He'd then deliver it to the designated people. He always had to look for a second capsule. At the time he thought nothing of it. However halfway through the mission a different team came in and sieged their location. There was an inquisition and his boss was found trying to cover for the person they were after. The entire mission ended up being a culling. Many of his comrades, some of the best under him, claimed the Deists were evil and either spat insults, held their head up high, or begged Seamus to join them. The faithful had died, unwittingly sabotaged by the traitor faction.

The inquisitors gave Seamus a hard time. Timid the unbreakably faithful, had been suspected of helping lead the traitors. He proved his innocence... by killing his comrades on that mission that were suspected of being traitors. He wasn't given any weapons and he wasn't allowed to make it quick. With his hands on their necks Timid killed each one without hesitation. In the end he also killed his boss and the noble in question.

For Timid he just did as he always did. He slept, ate, killed, and returned home. It was just another mission that emptied the room of his comrades even further.

Now... that memory flared in his mind with a vengeance. Sure, he knew the feeling of many different female bodies. He knew how they felt when they were both dead and alive, inside and out... and not necessary in that order.

Many emotions of pain, anger, and regret built inside of him. The concept of friend and comrade crossed, and he imaged digging up Juliette's corpse, Digging through Jasmine's insides and discovering she was both still barely alive and pregnant, he imagined his fingers around Vera and Ophelia's necks as they cried and begged him to spare them. He imagined Greffin giving him all the orders and then killing her when it was discovered she'd betrayed him. The defiant look of someone who was dying for what they believed in and died a proud martyr on her face.