— Later that evening, the fate of one Theater member’s participation in the attack hung in the balance.
The Order’s priestess had already left some time ago. Amani almost slammed the door to her room. She may have felt disrespected, but she didn’t want to disrespect the man, despite what he’d told her.
“Don’t go.”
Which was to say, “Don’t participate in the mission.”
She thought she’d already proven to him that she wasn’t a vulnerable young girl. He even seemed like he was beginning to accept it, but, as it turned out, it wouldn’t be as simple as that.
What she didn’t know was that Jon felt actual, physical pain — some kind of constricting feeling he could only compare to the time when his wife had died — in simply knowing that Amani urgently wanted to participate in the Theater’s operations. He didn’t understand what drove her to want to prove herself, but now, he also didn’t understand why he felt the things he felt.
He was still downstairs, mulling over Amani’s obviously distraught reaction over what he’d said, but also his own reaction to her walking out on him: some kind of sinking feeling, a different kind of unfortunate hurt than anything he’d experienced. He’d long known that he didn’t understand many things about her. Now, he had to struggle with knowing himself, as well. Why did he care about this wayward child all of a sudden? She reminded him of no one. She had done nothing for him.
Wait, wasn’t it because he felt a mote of kinship with her? They had both lost everything early in their lives. Jon had been taken in by some kind strangers, and so had been Amani. As did the Intercontinental have a noble mission, so did the Theater: the protection of balance and order.
Amani was all too eager to assist … and so was he, back when he was still a young agent. Whenever he thought back to that time, the urge to slap his younger self in the jaw, knock him out cold, and drag him into the closest social services center possessed him with conviction.
His eagerness in serving the Intercontinental had been a profound mistake. Perhaps, he just didn’t want Amani to make the same.
Alyssa and Damian saw the perplexed face he was making, themselves perplexed that he was able to make such a face at all. It was like angry contemplation as he stared at the floor, cupping his hand around his mouth.
For a little moment, Alyssa and Damian looked to each other. Damian looked away first, and he stood up — a way of telling her, “You handle this.” Not like she’d trust him with this kind of affair, anyway.
As soon as Damian left, Alyssa spoke. “That’s quite a problem you have on your mind there, Jon.”
He looked up at her, then back down, saying nothing. She frowned slightly, but she continued. “Isn’t it obvious what you should do?”
Jon looked up at her. “Obvious?” he parroted. Nothing about this was ‘obvious’ at all.
“The only reason you’re making that kind of face” — this wasn’t the first time she’d seen that face, after all — “is because you know what’s wrong, but the solution won’t bring you what you want.”
That was right. He needed to apologize, but he didn’t want Amani to take it as a go-ahead for her to join the mission.
To be frank, what could she do, anyway? He’d heard that she’d helped Alyssa attack the encampment on the wharf, but all she’d done was reload Alyssa’s guns for her … even if the fact that she’d kept up with Alyssa’s ammunition expenditure was a feat in itself.
Alright, granted, she had some fight in her — that much he’d gleamed during that time he saved her from accidentally walking into a death trap under the Theater, and she’d mistakenly attacked him at that time — but that level of skill wasn’t enough at all.
She’d just get killed. She’d just waste her life.
“There you go again.” Alyssa sighed. “You want to change someone’s mind, but you don’t think about giving them a reason to change their mind about you.”
“What are you trying to say?” Alyssa’s words perplexed him in a way that, previously, only one person had ever done.
“Tell her what’s at stake for you,” she continued. “You already know she feels indebted to you, don’t you? But she doesn’t know what’s in it for you. Isn’t that much clear? You’ve never told her anything about you.” She leaned in closer. “If she truly feels indebted to you, she must take your interests to heart. She’ll have to listen to you. Do you understand?”
Never before had Jon felt like he was the most unintelligent man who walked the earth.
He didn’t spend time ruminating on his next actions. He stood up, excusing himself from the table and gunning for the stairs.
Make no mistake, Alyssa wasn’t a guru in human relationships. She’d just returned some words said to her by a certain charmingly cold man from a previous life. It seemed that the man himself never remembered his own words, though — no surprise there.
He forgot about most things he didn’t deem potentially useful, and half-heartedly delivered cool words like that were just something he logically determined on the spot. Attacking a problem from a different angle, after all, was the thing to do when initial approaches didn’t work the first two times — never wait for the third.
That his own words came back to help him was almost like divine fate.
… Alyssa silently thanked Ravena for helping her recall Jon’s exact wording back then.
Jon arrived in front of Amani’s door. Jiraya was there, blocking it, and eyeing Jon with some wariness.
Jon slowed his step until he stopped in front of Jiraya, coming face to face with the man. There wasn’t any sound for a moment. “Just going to apologize,” Jon said.
This shocked Jiraya more than seeing Jon take out dozens of men per second. Such violent men weren’t typically capable of any kind of verbal admission, preferring to let silence and pained expressions carry their message for them. If they were going to say anything, it would be with their last breaths.
Yes, he’d seen this happen all too often, and right in front of him, too. Why couldn’t the bastards just — talk, damn it!
That’s why, he had newfound respect for the man in front him, not just because of his qualities as an unstoppable killing machine, but also as a man who simply charged forward at the problems he was presented with. Somehow, this man had managed to extend his bravery in the face of enemy fire, to the battlefield of human relationships.
That’s why … he stepped aside and opened the door for him.
Of course, in Jon’s mind, it wasn’t anything so philosophical. Once he found an actionable solution, he simply stopped having extraneous thoughts. ‘Will it work?’ No. Make it work. He disallowed his mind from interfering with the inertia of his body and spirit. That was all.
When the door opened, he saw Amani’s surprised face as she sulked against the wall in the corner of her bed. “Why are you?…” she muttered, her words trailing off. She glared at Jiraya, whom she’d expressly asked to turn away anyone and tell them she wasn’t feeling well. The look he gave her, however, was one of relaxed confidence.
That was strange. When she looked back to Jon, however, she could tell why. “Please come in,” she said. Jon stepped inside without a further word, pulling up a chair beside Amani.
Jon’s mindset going into this wasn’t to “win.” As a lifelong assassin, he had plenty of experience working alongside a great many people of diverse skill sets, and one of those people was something of an acquaintance: a civilian contractor who went by ‘Jerry,’ or something close to that, he couldn’t really remember.
However, he did remember that Jerry was a negotiator, and a very good one at that. If there was one thing about negotiations that Jerry beat into Jon, negotiations weren’t about winning.
Everyone carried their cards close to their chest, but it was also those cards which carried the key to a successful negotiation. More often than not, two parties’ immediate interests never cleanly aligned. In such a case, it was the goal of negotiation to uncover what those other interests might be — to make both parties reveal their cards so that they could talk in the context of all of them.
Even if they couldn’t walk out of the meeting with the things they originally wanted, they could at least walk out of there with something else they needed.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Alyssa’s words had joggled these things from his memory, and he was grateful for it.
It was obvious that he didn’t understand Amani, but he’d never considered that Amani didn’t understand him. In such a case, it was as clear as day that the reason why they were having such a perplexing kind of conflict was that they never understood each other.
These were all why he was sitting in front of Amani right now, willing to … ‘negotiate,’ in a way of putting it.
However, there was one critical problem at this moment.
He lacked good conversational skills.
He and Amani sat in silence for an uncomfortably extended moment. Jiraya’s earlier valuation of Jon nosedived.
New world, old habits. Jon fell right back to his routine back when he was part of the training team after he retired as a frontline agent. There were lots of new faces every few months, and he was at that job for a good few years, so of course he’d developed a routine whenever he came face to face with recruits he’d never met before.
At this point, Amani was leaning on the far wall, so Jon was able to scoot over with his chair. Both Amani and Jiraya were surprised that he whipped out a pistol, and for a moment, Jiraya was nervous that he’d start shooting up the place.
He was already getting ready to resign himself to death … when Jon started disassembling the pistol.
These things were much more complex than he’d originally given them credit for. Even if, by principle, they were just tubes with mana-conducting wire leading from the grip to the combustion chamber, additional engineering went into making the gun maintainable. The mana wires would dissolve over time, so those had to be replaced, while the barrel needed frequent cleaning — no surprise, there.
After five seconds, there were pistol guts neatly arranged in a grid in front of Amani. She was rather confused by the whole thing. On the other hand, Jon was just patiently waiting in front of her, so what gives?
— Was this … a test?
Seeing that nothing was going to happen, she started picking through the various parts: a barrel, the wooden “receiver,” the breech block, a wire spool with frayed wire, and all the various fasteners that held them together.
Truth be told, she’d never seen this specific guncraft before, but she still knew by principle where things were supposed to go.
Jon watched her play puzzle pieces with the parts with some interest. It was obvious to his experienced eyes that she had a solid grasp of the functions of each part and fastener, but that she’d just never seen these ones before.
She finished putting everything back together just shy of forty seconds.
“Where’d you learn?” Jon asked.
Amani was a little taken aback. Those were his first words, of all the possible words to say. “The Aranai taught me,” she replied. War, no matter how brief, was a situation of necessity.
“Who, exactly?” Jon asked.
Amani couldn’t tell what he was going for here. “An old man.”
“Old man?” Jon parroted — no, mirrored. This, too, was Jeff’s legacy: a technique to squeeze out as much information out of someone as possible. Ah, only in a negotiation scenario, of course.
“No one you’d find important,” Amani replied. Jon saw her forlorn face.
“He’s important to you,” he said.
“He was.”
“Is.”
Amani smiled. “Is.” Perhaps she’d misjudged Jon. Perhaps … she could let her curiosity kill her for a moment. “How are you so deadly, Mr. Fuze?”
He sighed deeply — a sigh that she didn’t expect to carry so much weight from the chest that breathed it. “Someone taught me.”
Perhaps his story was like mine? “Someone important?”
Wilson Scott. “Important enough for me to kill.”
This didn’t go anything like she imagined. “ ‘Kill’ — why?”
“He takes kids like you,” he said, his tone staying so eerily steady compared to the words he was saying, “and turns them into machines.”
Putting two and two together, Amani realized what Jon was: a rebel. He’d realized something wrong in his world, and he’d tried to change it, turning all the power it gave him against it.
She was nothing like him. She didn’t wield the kind of power he did. All she could do — all she’d ever really done — was to show a morsel of defiance … only to take a beating because of it.
“Did you kill him?” she asked.
“No.” His answer was swift enough to surprise her.
“He’s still out there?” One day, the Theater might have to confront such a person. If she could gather more information —
“He killed me first,” Jon said — making her realize something far more significant.
She was raised to be a death priestess of Ravena, and in the course of her training, she had been taught about the existence of rare individuals brought back to life by Ravena from a place called the Archive of the Broken World.
Sometimes those people were ordinary; sometimes, they were exceptional. Whatever their origin, Ravena would bring them here for her own purposes. Sometimes they died leaving behind ordinary legacies — sometimes, they’d shake the world.
Amani had her own thoughts on the matter. Ravena was variously known as the Goddess of Death, the Sister in Black, or Lumina’s Foil. However, Amani’s people had always known her as the Keeper: a divine wind who used whispers to keep the world spinning as it always had. Just because an otherworlder lived and died as an ordinary person having contributed nothing of note, it didn’t mean that they weren’t an important piece in Ravena’s plans.
A slightly talented courier here, a friendly pastry chef there — they were all valid agents who would support Ravena’s agenda in keeping the world running at a sustainable pace.
The man in front of Amani, however, was obviously one of the more exceptional ones. He was no hero; he was an assassin. With his level of skill, that only meant that Ravena needed quite a number of specific people dead, all in the name of preserving the world’s order.
More importantly, she thought, Jon didn’t have a place to go back to anymore. Ravena and the Theater were his home now.
— Was that why he’s so adamant in keeping me from participating? He meant to protect me … to keep himself from losing too much all at once?
He was a much more fragile man that he let on.
For the record, her conclusions were both correct and incorrect. Jon was a single-minded man: he simply didn’t want Amani to go through what he’d gone through, and it was just the best option he could think of to keep her from getting too used to killing just as he had. On the other hand, she was becoming truly aware of some things about him that even he, himself, didn’t know.
She reconsidered her stance on this matter. Thinking through it logically, she didn’t have very much to contribute in the way of fighting power. She still yearned for the strength to fight on her terms, to fight for the things she believed in, but attaining that strength was impossible to achieve in 24 hours.
Little did she know, but a long time had passed since she’d gotten immersed in her thoughts. Even so, Jon was still there, patiently waiting for her to fill the silence.
“Alright,” she said. “I won’t participate tomorrow.”
Jon looked up at her, masking his surprise. He didn’t feel ‘glad’ or ‘happy’ to hear such a thing from her, but ‘relief’ — now that was an emotion he understood.
“However,” Amani continued, “I cannot continue to be so weak. You already know what’s at stake for me in the Aranai, and one day, I will return to that desert once and for all. I request your expertise to help me train myself in the near future.” She paused. “Please.”
... Truthfully, he couldn’t actually understand what she was in a hurry for, but he didn’t want to ruin this thin bridge of mutual understanding they’d established. The pain in her plea, as well, had touched him as something very unlike himself. It was a uniquely … ‘human’ pain that he didn’t know how to interpret, and he was very well aware of this missing part of him that didn’t know how to experience the kind of anguish that she did. Perhaps one day, he’d truly understand her hurry, and if all it took was patience to get to that understanding, then he’d be patient. For now...
“Alright,” he said. They’d have to speak about it again in the future, but it was obvious even now that if anyone was going to train her, it should be him. He didn’t trust anyone else to do it, and if he didn’t, then the girl would end up seeking out anyone at all who would be willing to train her. Such people couldn’t possibly impart in her the proper sense of danger and appreciation for life and death — all for the sake of sharpening her senses and turning herself into a bullet focused only on her own goals, and nothing else.
She beheld her goals close to her heart — that much he understood, now that he had a clearer mind. Having one’s own will was something he didn’t want to infringe upon, and was, upon further reflection, something he should actually be cultivating in her.
What better way to make sure someone didn’t turn into a killing machine, than by making them feel they had a human will?
Alright, he thought to himself. He didn’t need to construct a philosophy more complex than this to move forward. He’ll give Amani the power to make her will her own, and if she starts becoming something too sad for him to watch, he’ll just counteract the trend himself.
He stood up, making his way to the door, where an astonished Jiraya was holding it open for him.
“Mr. Fuze,” Amani called out, and he turned around. “Please come by here again tomorrow morning, before you leave. If I cannot be present with you tomorrow, I will bestow something upon you to represent me.”
Jon nodded, finally leaving the room.
Amani pondered over the designs she could use —
“Priestess,” Jiraya said, interrupting her thoughts, “I apologize if this is rude, but is it possibly that you two were speaking through Telepathy?”
“What?” Amani tilted her head.
“Well — the words the two of you uttered shouldn’t have led up to that kind of conclusion. It was the assemblage of a gun in one moment, then something about who taught you, then … How did he get you to agree? I’m astonished.” He cleared his throat and stood straighter, realizing that his gestures had become loose and informal. “Priestess.”
This, too, was one of Jeff’s most important teachings: silence is power, and simply allowing the person on the other side of the table uninterrupted time to think could make all the difference. Had Jon interrupted Amani’s thoughts at any point, she wouldn’t have been able to come to a deep understanding of him as she had.
She later spent the rest of the night inking the patterns of a special kind of death card — but nothing like the abominable ones that had enslaved the souls of those poor Kittari mercenaries.
With this, even if Jon were killed, as long as the body remained mostly intact, he could be reliably revived. It would greatly trouble her, after all, to lose a man who had made an important promise to her.