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elementof_riskHe begged.
It seemed a particularly ignominious thing for Quan Li to do, in my opinion. He was the leader of FTL, a major terrorist organization responsible for raining down death on thousands around the world. Admittedly my unit had just annihilated his entire security detail and he was completely defenseless, but there he was, on his knees, begging, as if that would in some way lead to my sparing his life.
I was forced to wonder how many people had begged him for their lives. How many had fallen to their knees before him and his men, and how many times it had stopped him from pulling the trigger. Given his record, I am forced to conclude, not many. Not that it mattered, but I did wonder what he hoped to achieve. He thought me young, perhaps he thought me weak, thought I could be persuaded, moved to pity.
But even then, pity was never a motivating factor in my decision making.
I had a job I had been sent to do. To not do it, to allow him to live would be to go back to Irina having failed, and that was simply unacceptable. So he knelt on the ground, and he begged me for his life, and he asked me to show him mercy, and I shot him twice.
Then I retrieved the artifact Irina had sent me to get, and I went home. Mission completed. Reputation begun.
It seemed a particularly ignominious thing for Quan Li to do, in my opinion. He was the leader of FTL, a major terrorist organization responsible for raining down death on thousands around the world. Admittedly my unit had just annihilated his entire security detail and he was completely defenseless, but there he was, on his knees, begging, as if that would in some way lead to my sparing his life.
I was forced to wonder how many people had begged him for their lives. How many had fallen to their knees before him and his men, and how many times it had stopped him from pulling the trigger. Given his record, I am forced to conclude, not many. Not that it mattered, but I did wonder what he hoped to achieve. He thought me young, perhaps he thought me weak, thought I could be persuaded, moved to pity.
But even then, pity was never a motivating factor in my decision making.
I had a job I had been sent to do. To not do it, to allow him to live would be to go back to Irina having failed, and that was simply unacceptable. So he knelt on the ground, and he begged me for his life, and he asked me to show him mercy, and I shot him twice.
Then I retrieved the artifact Irina had sent me to get, and I went home. Mission completed. Reputation begun.
