“If you’re a former criminal, or still one at large even, being a mercenary would probably be one of your best bets if you wished to make an honest living instead. Unlike most, mercenaries rarely cared that much about what you did in the past (unless it was too horrible even for them, that is. You won’t see any baby-eaters getting employment in any decent company) and mostly care about whether you can prove yourself to be useful and reliable or not.
As a result, you’d see quite a few notable mercenaries in history who had turned a life of crime into a more proper living, some even rising to greatness with their names noted down in the history books. Did you know that Oliver Grimjaw was a wanted murderer in Posuin before he became a succesful mercenary? Bellona Carlisle was another. She used to pick pockets in the Caliphate and only barely escaped having her hands chopped off, but nowadays people mostly remember her as the nastiest archer around.
Heck, I myself used to run a small bandit group. We’d hit tax collectors and the likes and share part of our loot with the locals. Easy way to win hearts, that. Once the heat got too much, we skipped over to the Empire and made a living as mercs from then on. We never returned to our old homeland though. Pretty sure they still had bounties for our heads even now.” - Farrel “Mugger” Holmes, Captain of the Merry Men mercenary company, operating out of the Clangeddin Empire, circa 438 VA.
“So, what do you want to do first? The fun or the business?”
“Business first, I think. Fun can always wait a bit anyway.”
The voices roused Katja from her slumber. Years of practice and training had made her a very light sleeper anyway, so even the slightest noise would have woken her up. The woman was tied to the central post of a tent with her hands behind her back, with the tent itself being small and pretty much empty other than herself. From the talks she had heard the past few days, she knew that Edwin was similarly cooped up in another tent, while the rest had been turned in to the local authorities.
She knew all too well that the fate that awaited her would not be much different. That the children her group had aimed for were actually skilled enough to beat them down was completely out of their expectations, and later she learned that there had been several of the adults on watch to begin with, so their little heist was always doomed to failure from the start.
Katja couldn’t help but to squint with her one good eye when the tent flap was opened, which let some of the sunlight in, right against her face. Then the light was promptly turned to shadow as a large figure who had to duck to even enter the tent walked in, followed by a more normal sized woman behind him - or maybe her? Katja could never really tell with Therians - who then stood side to side as they looked down on her from their full heights.
The Therian one looked odd, not the kind that they usually saw in the region, with feline features, and white spotted fur, but most notably of all, that large, thick, very soft-looking tail that swished to and fro behind their back. Only a moment passed before Katja recalled where she had seen the same features, on the little girl they had targeted and had nearly brained Edwin instead. The Captain of the mercenaries himself, then.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
As for the woman who stepped up next to his side, Katja instantly recognized the feeling she gave out. A fellow killer, one who had taken many lives for whatever reasons. The way the woman’s greyish eyes had not even looked at her was at the same time, condescending yet unnerving, but something told her that the woman had probably not even intended that.
“So, we were told that you not only confessed to everything, but had been very helpful compared to the rest,” said the big therian - the human woman next to him barely reached his shoulder - with his gruff voice as he looked at Katja. “They also told me that you neither fought nor resisted unlike the rest, despite being the only one armed to kill people. That brought up many questions, so I’ll start with the simplest one: Why?”
“I just couldn’t…” replied Katja quietly.
“Couldn’t what?” asked the mercenary woman sharply.
“I couldn’t bear to raise my blades upon children… not anymore…” she said. Then Katja told everything she had cooped up for a long time, things that not even her compatriots amongst the kidnappers had known, to the two mercenaries, who to her surprise, had the decency to simply listen to her tale. The two of them even brought out chairs and sat while they listened.
Katja - that name was not even a name in truth, but merely the local dialect for the number thirteen, which was the number she was assigned when she was young - was an orphan who tried to survive in the streets of her birthplace, which she was no longer certain of, when she was young. She was soon taken away by a cult of assassins, who then raised her into one of their agents over a decade.
While she had not thought much about her new life at first, things changed when she grew older, and some of the older assassins placed her in charge of a cadre of young children who were being raised into new members of the cult. That was when she began to truly question what they were doing, and failed to keep her suppressed conscience in check.
The training that the cult put the children through was grueling and cruel. Even during Katja’s own days, out of a batch of twenty children, only four of them survived to the end, and out of those, only two became assassins for the cult, for they were pitted against each other at the final trial, with only the survivors deemed worthwhile. Back then Katja was too busy simply trying to survive to think about it, but when she was made to do the same to a group of children, she soon found that she couldn’t stomach it.
She had actually escaped the cult - along with her batch of children - while she leaked their presence to the local authorities at the time, the battle between the cult and the troops a diversion for her escape. The children she had then left in orphanages, while she herself tried to lay low and live quietly. It was during those times that she met with Edwin Reasley and was hired by him when she was looking for work.
Despite their work as kidnappers, the Reasleys were relatively decent ones, as they generally tried to avoid killing unless it was guards who got in their way, or victims that their families refused to ransom out. The few times they kidnapped children, Katja was the one who took care of the kids, and fortunately, they were always ransomed out, so she faced no true dilemma with them.
After her experiences, Katja simply couldn’t bring herself to harm children, so when the mercenary children had fought back against them, she had been paralyzed by indecision. Which was why when everyone else was taken down, she had simply given up and had not resisted in the least. She knew that chances were that she’d be punished severely - there was a dead or alive warrant for Edwin and Nebula, and bounties for the rest of them - but perhaps she was just tired of a life on the run.