Book 9: Chapter Forty-Four – Infiltration (4)
Sen had to ruthlessly suppress his panicked, guilt-ridden instinct to literally bury the evidence. It would take nothing to sink their corpses down into the earth far enough that no one would find them. He knew that it was childish. Making their bodies disappear wouldn’t make them any less dead. He wouldn’t be any less responsible. Besides, doing that would create all kinds of suspicions. Those two had no doubt been seen by others the previous day. The guards would probably swear up and down that they hadn’t left the sect. People coming and going from the academy had to state their business, so he had to assume that similar measures were in place at the much older and better-established Twisted Blade Sect. No, if these two just disappeared it would create more problems than it solved. He needed to think, not react.
He’d known that something like that was a possibility. He paused. I didn’t expect to find people having sex, he thought. He considered that maybe that was part of why he was so panicky. Death had been a grim but distinct possibility. He’d been prepared for that. Killing people in the midst of that kind of intimacy had felt different. Wrong. Unacceptable. Then, he’d done it anyway because there was no alternative. Once that woman had seen him, there had only ever been one possible outcome. He’d debated it because he’d been shocked and that shock had unsettled him. Ultimately, though, it had been a hollow distraction for himself. He’d wanted to think there was a choice. He’d pretended there was a choice. There had never been a real choice.
Everyone in this sect was his enemy. Fantasizing that they weren’t was only going to get him killed. He’d been getting caught up on the issue of innocence or guilt, but that had never been a real issue. It was about sides. This sect was planning on wiping him and his sect out. That was the beginning and end of it. That put anyone and everyone in this compound on their side. He could never let himself forget that. He was determined to stop them before they could start. That was his side. And there was nothing in the middle. If he got caught, these people would kill him or try their very best to kill him. They wouldn’t ask questions about guilt or innocence. If their elders told them to, they would march north to wage a war. There could be no compromise when faced with annihilation.
Sen didn’t want to think in those terms. He didn’t want to condemn everyone in a sect simply because they were in that sect, but the alternatives were absurd fantasies born out of a desire to avoid blood on his hands. If he kept indulging in those fantasies, he was going to hesitate at a moment when he couldn’t afford it. He had to stop thinking of these Twisted Blade disciples as people first and enemies second. They might be people, but that didn’t matter. It stopped mattering the second their sect decided to go to war. They were enemies. Until the fight was over, that’s all they were. It’s all they could be. When faced with enemies who threatened everything you cared about, there could only be one response.
I can be merciful when it’s done, thought Sen. When they aren’t enemies anymore, when they’re just survivors, I can be merciful then. He knew that for the half-truth that it was. He could maybe be merciful with the outer disciples. That didn’t hold for anyone in even a nominal leadership position. When it came to them, the result had to be absolute. Every single inner sect disciple, core member, and elder had to die. If he could find a way to do it, the patriarch had to die. Of course, that assumed that the patriarch was even in the sect. He’d been told that patriarchs and matriarchs routinely left their sects to enter closed-door cultivation in places that closely aligned with their cultivation. Those places were often deep in the wilds. It was surprisingly common for those peak leaders to vanish for centuries at a time. Later, they would reappear and be forced to cull an overambitious elder who had assumed the mantle under the false belief the patriarch or matriarch was dead.
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