The four men soon had blindfolds and seemed to be ushered into different stagecoaches. Or at least that was what Anson could piece together. It felt like an hour passed as the stagecoach first slowly made its way through the crowds of mercenaries before reaching outer roads full of celebrating Kadon Knees Fans. It seemed like an hour had passed; all the while Anson contemplated his fate.
No man ever wants to die, and it felt as every time Anson neared death or capture, he would become more desperate for life, but either because of the shock or sheer exhaustion, Anson didn’t feel the will to live. If he lived, he figured, it would probably lead to only more death.
After a while, a voice emerged. He didn’t notice all this time, but Osman had been riding along with him the entire time. Speaking in Kadon, he said: “That fire you made was a pain to put out. Firefighters sure took their sweet time getting there. Though, I suppose it was worth it. Everyone seemed to believe the lie you conjured up.”
Anson ignored the quick story that Osman told. Responding in Kadon, Anson asked: “When did you stab me in the back?”
“Stabbing you in the back implies that I intended on helping you at some point. You should have listened when I laughed in your face in that alley with Zeki.” There was another pause with Anson able to hear Osman smirk to himself. “However, I am impressed you made it this far.”
“So, what was the deal?” asked Anson. “You, Eros, and the Chairman split the Sovan shares three ways?”
“I wish,” Osman responded, “But the Chairman isn’t that generous. He forced us to only take a ten percent cut and for Eros to murder the Sovan Triad high command. By the way, what Eros said on stage was a lie.”
“I know,” snapped Anson. “He didn’t approach the Chairman. That was just for the morale of the troops.”
“No, not that,” Osman replied. “What Eros said what the Bandit said was apparently the original plan. Eros was on a boat kilometer from the city until a pigeon from the Chairman told him to come back. We would have arrived at the stock market as soon as you did, but you know, delays.”
Shaking his head. Anson couldn’t believe it. This entire time he went from being a sacrificial goat, to a rebellious leader, to a pawn in the Chairman’s game. He wondered what Ahmed’s reaction to all of this would be. “Hey, Osman,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Can you at least, with your triad, make this shithole a little better? After this is over, I don’t want the stench following me into the afterlife.”
Laughing, Osman responded that he would try his best.
#
The carriage came to a stop. “We’re here,” Osman said.
Dragged out of the stagecoach, Anson was forced to walk up a seemingly never-ending set of stairs. Somehow, the stairs seemed familiar, and though he was blindfolded, Anson had the confidence that, if given enough time, that he would figure out where he was simply by touch.
There seemed to be people all over the place as the sound of shoes going up and down stairs was the only thing Anson could hear for about a minute before they reached the inside of a building. He was then brought a seemingly even further distance to what was the second floor and down a long hallway. By the time they reached the end, Anson knew where he was, but didn’t want to believe it out of pride.
Some grandiose doors opened, and Anson was brought through a couple of meters before being turned to be perpendicular to the door and forced to his knees. More men walked into the room and Anson could hear another person’s forced to their knees. Presumably Cyril or Deo. After a couple of moments of men changing Anson’s restraints to what seemed to be a chain attached to a post in the ground, a harrowing thought came to Ansons’s mind. Was he not to even receive a public execution? Only to be executed in a private room with a blindfold on?
But before Anson could further contemplate the idea, everyone in the room disappeared, closing the door behind them, leaving the room to only Anson and the mystery person across from him. “Cyril? Deo?” Anson asked.
“It’s Deo.”
Anson sighed before asking another question. “Are you also on your—”
“What the fuck was wrong with you!” Deo interrupted. His voice was full tilt and Anson could hear his chains clanging as he tried to escape. “We could have gotten out! We could have left! But no! We had to keep going! He had shares! You even had me convinced that we might make it! We could have left and sold them down the road! Fuck you—”
“Deo!” Anson shot back. “Keep yourself together, we just need to figure out—”
“Oh, we aren’t figuring out shit,” Deo responded. “We’re dead. We’re going to die in this room and that will be the end of it.”
Both men fell silent as Anson tried to grasp his impending doom. What a cowardly death. At Least Ahmed died fighting for his country. Even if that country wasn’t worthy of him in the slightest. Now, here I am, dying because I got too greedy.
Anson’s guard lowered as he tried to remember the few good times in his life before he died. If he were to die, at least he wouldn’t be distraught in his final moments. But he couldn’t think of anything. The only thing that he could conjure up were the times he and Ahmed were sleeping on cold streets and makeshift beds made of wood. If it wasn’t that, it was a memory made today. Being stomped to death by thousands of underside people. A mob.
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With that failing, Anson just tried to be in the moment, try to feel the chains on his hands, his shoes on his feet, or the feeling of what seemed to be a cloth under his knees. He hadn’t noticed it before, but Anson could have sworn he was on the hardwood floor when he entered that building. That wasn’t important, though, as Anson diverted his mind to something else. I wonder what that girl who sold us food or whose dad gave us that sword would react to my situation? It would be quite a site for her to see me now. Anson almost laughed at the thought, but stopped himself, not wanting to distract Deo from his final moment.
After this, Anson heard a set of footsteps emerge from the hallway. Anson tensed his body up once again as the door opened and closed. He knew who one of them was. He heard Osman seemingly trip over himself and apologize to someone. Then, he could hear Osman close the doors, Anson felt an old hand grab his blindfold and lift it.
Anson opened his eyes and saw Chairman Hektor Daniels looking down at him, looking as if he was disappointed in Anson. Osman, on his part, walked over to Deo and lifted his blindfold. Deo quickly realized who it was, and the two men stood in silence, staring at the Chairman as Hektor looked back and forth between the two men without saying a word. Then walking away, Anson watched Hektor walk over to his desk in the back of the room and gently place the blindfolds upon it.
The room looked eerily similar to the main office at the Kadon Headquarters, with the only difference being that there wasn’t a table one the side, rather a world, country, and city map with various statues of various sizes.
Turning his attention to the Chairman, Hektor walked back up to the where the Anson and Deo were knelt. Looking down to the cloth they were kneeling on, he shook his head. “Osman,” he finally spoke. The man’s voice was exactly how he remembered it. As if a brute as pretending to be a man. “Where is Mercenary Commander Eros?”
“He should be here any minute,” responded Osman.
“When did you last see him?” asked Hektor.
“We left with different stagecoaches. He left with Cyril and Vasos.”
Hektor didn’t say anything, simply turning to where the maps were and picking up a light crossbow, presumably freshly imported from Teoland, just like Anson’s, and walking next to Osman, standing side by side with him. He then loaded it and pointed it at Anson first then Deo. “If he didn’t come by now, then it means he has foresight.” Hektor then faced Osman lowering the crossbow. “Which you do not.” Hektor swiftly took a knife from his pocket and slit the front of Osman’s neck, pushing him forward onto the cloth at the same time. Anson and Deo watched in silence and immense tenseness as Osman collapsed onto the cloth with his neck bleeding on the cloth. The Chairman then promptly opened the door and talked to the two men guards outside. “Get more cloth right now, and when you come back get enough men to extract a body without making a mess.” The men immediately followed the order, running down the hall, calling for assistance as the Chairman closed the door and refocused his attention on the now dead Osman.
About a minute passed before the guards came back with more men. The blood spread onto the hardwood by now and Hektor stood right by the blood, seemingly measuring how far it spread. As the guards were cleaning up the body, the Chairman said: “If whoever places down the cloth next time fails to make it wide enough, they’ll be fired, understand?”
“Yes!” All the guards responded with a quiver in their voices. After about two minutes of cleaning and placing the body into a bag, the guards were gone and the Chairman went over to his desk, grabbing one of the chairs meant for visitors and placing in between Deo and Anson, but far enough where it didn’t touch the cloth. He then took a seat in it, placing the crossbow in his lap. “One of you will live and one of you will survive. However, inside the confines of a prison, staring out into the sea until they grow old and rot away.” Looking at both men, seemingly trying to predict who whose will survive was strongest, Hektor took a breath before gently tossing the crossbow in the middle of the cloth.
Anson watched as the crossbow landed and Deo launched forward in an attempt to grab it, though, he was nowhere close as the chains forced him back. He didn’t try again as Deo and Hektor looked at the immobile Anson. He simply looked up to Hektor and said: “I don’t want your crossbow.”
Nodding his head, Hektor picked the crossbow back up and walked over to Deo, standing behind the man. Placing the crossbow in front of the man, Hektor pulled a loop of keys from his pocket and unlocked the chains. Deo didn’t move for a moment as he stared at the crossbow. But right before he was about to grab it, Hektor pushed his knife up against the back of Deo’s neck. “If you point the crossbow at me, you die.”
Deo gave a soft nod as he picked up the loaded crossbow and pointed it at Anson. On his part, Anson stared back into Deo’s eyes. I wonder how long ago he made up his mind? Now that he kept thinking about it, the amazement kept on growing about how he was never killed, up until this moment.. As Deo’s finger neared the trigger, however, Hektor interrupted. “Usually, it is customary to say a couple of words before you murder a man in cold blood.”
Deo was silent for a moment before speaking. His face dropped and his eyes seemed to tremble as he looked at Anson. “We could have left,” said Deo. “But we kept going. All the while you tried to handicap the end result. It’s almost as if you wanted us to fail.”
“Like you are any better,” Anson said back.
“Silence.” Hektor interrupted. “Let Deo say his piece.”
“Baldwyn had a kid,” Deo continued, “But you refused to let them go, but instead letting a child get in harm’s way and slow us down. If we just killed a couple of more people along the way to speed us up, we would have made it. It was for the greater good. I could have wiped out dozens of men in that stock market when Eros came in, but even I have my limits. Even then I continued to listen to your ignorance of the true situation. If we didn’t tie our hands behind or back for most of the operation thanks to your ‘rules’ we could have actually done it. Hell, we almost did it even with such limitations.”
Anson shook his head as he looked down. Sure, he was fine with rest of his life being today and in failure, or at least that is what he tried convincing himself into believing, but hearing this man yap about Anson’s attempts at morality was exhausting. It was as if an animal was attempting to lecture a human how to cook a meal. Why would a man take orders from a thing who had no concept of what they were trying to do? He thought to himself.
“You didn’t even try and save your life,” Deo responded. “A chance at continuing to live and you didn’t even move a muscle.” His voice was spiteful and searing with annoyance. “Guess what, Anson. You don’t get what you want, you won’t die today.”
Anson looked back up and stared at Deo as his eyes were beginning to water. The man’s body was shaking, and his finger was now fully resting on the trigger. After a moment of silence, Deo looked at his crossbow before going back at Anson. “Killing seems to solve everything.”
Anson realized what was about to happen and tried to call out for him to stop, but it was too late. Deo turned the crossbow around and fired the bolt up into his mouth and through his skull. Both he and the crossbow fell onto the floor immediately as blood, pieces of skull, and brains fragments shot backward onto Hektor, who stepped backward in disgust and immediately called for guards to clean the mess up.
Anson, kneeled in his spot, staring at the bolt lodged in the man’s skull. Anson figured out what Deo seemed to figure out moments before. Anson was ready to die and was at peace with it, but so was Deo. What a punishment. To live.