Freshly spilled blood ran along the broken blade of my dagger, and there wasn’t a shake or tremble in my hands. The blood flowing from the man’s new smile slowed to a trickle, yet my heartbeat remained stable. Looking into focusless eyes didn’t spark a reaction in me.

I didn’t regret killing the man. In fact, he deserved a lot worse than what he got. If I had to means and time, he would have endured all the pain and suffering he and his men had infected on Geisai and more. With everything said and done I felt nothing in the end.

But something in the back of my mind bugged me.

“I thought we weren’t gonna kill him?” Geisai’s question drew me out of my head.

He descended from his hiding spot, going from a free fall to a rolling landing with one flaunt motion. His earlier anxiousness almost entirely gone from his face as he walked past the corpse without a second glance. It was wasn’t that long ago that he was chomping at the bit to kill the man, but now that he was dead the man could’ve been a rock for all Geisai seemed to care.

Another ping hit me, this one causing a slight pain in my chest.

His emotions shouldn’t change so quickly, should they? Something about it seemed off.

“No, I said that we needed him for information. I never said we needed him alive after we got what we needed.” Doing my best to push my nagging feeling aside, I wiped the blood off my dagger and sheathed it.

After a quick look above, I breathed a sigh and started pulling my throwing knives out of the man’s body. Depending on how long it took to clean up their camp, we could make it back to our cave before midday tomorrow.

The last knife remained lodged in the man’s left shoulder when I tried to pull it out. I tried to yank it out with a bit more force but…

“Augh.”

I received a shot of pain through my hand for my trouble. Next time I repeatedly punched someone in the face, I needed to wear some hand protection.

As I rubbed my swollen knuckles, Geisai reached over and pulled the knife free with ease.

“This is what you get for losing your head.” The self-satisfied smirk on his face almost made it seem like everything was normal.

Normal…? Was this our version of ordinary?

Ooh, so that’s it.

“Geisai…”

“Hmm…?”

“What we- what I did just now, was something that needed to be done.”

“The bashing his face in or using him as a target board?” It felt as if a stone landed in the pit of my stomach when he said that. His eyes had a bright crimson gleam to them as he gave me a full grin.

But, that was to be expected given that he’d performed the act while he wasn’t in his right mind.

“Geisai, listen this is important.” I took a deep breath and tried to find the right words.

“No matter how much I wish things were different, we’ve killed people, not animals or monsters, but actual people. They had names, families, and their own goals. But, we killed them nevertheless.”

“They deserved it! They tortured me and would’ve done the same to you if given a chance!” The fire had returned in Geisai eyes, but what I had to say need to be told here and now.

“I know that. I’m not saying that they hadn’t earned their deaths, but we can’t let our anger, no matter how justified, blind us to the fact that they’d been people. I wish things were different, but we may find ourselves in a position where we have to kill again. If or when that situation comes up, we can’t allow ourselves to forget that some of those we kill well be people.”

“Why? We don’t owe them anything. Why should we give those that try to hurt us that much?” His joyful tone had vanished. There only something cold behind his words. For the first ever Geisai eyes had turned the shade of old blood. There was no anger, just contempt.

And he had every right to feel that way, but it still didn’t sit well with me.

Seven years ago, everything I knew was turned on my head when the basic of my being was yanked away by an uncaring world. But the experience didn’t kill me, instead of dying in the wreckage of the past I was forced to live beyond that tragedy. I should’ve died, I probably would’ve on my on, but I had someone with me, someone that gave me a purpose.

However that part of me was still missing and it there’d been no way to restore had been lost, it could only be replaced. Had the proceeding event been less jarring, I probably would have noticed the gradual changes before now. What had once been incomprehensible became a regular part of my daily routine.

Killing wild animals for food or because they got too close to our dwelling, leading goblins into collapsing tunnel traps, or dropping Inpulsa Vespa nest on the occasional troll or giant bear. I initially had misgivings about performing those actions, but now, those things were nothing more than occasional tasks.

I just killed a man.

After inflected a fraction of the pain and suffering he deserved, I killed him with a simple stroke across his throat. I killed him, and if you took away the anger behind the act, it was no different from killing a goblin.

It wouldn’t take much for killing people to become just another annoyance, just another occasional task.

And that scared me, or rather, what that would mean frightened me. Buried deep within me, the last remnants of the girl I could’ve been was on the verge of fading away, and I wasn’t ready for it to disappear.

“Geisai, our hands are already stained with blood. If we don’t acknowledge them as people, if we start killing indiscriminately than we’d be no different from the monsters you’re painting them to be.”

Our haven was on the verge of collapsing, and I doubted we would survive without spilling more blood. It was impossible to stop the flood, but we still had the power to give direction to its flow. It was a thin line to navigate, but traversing it was the only way to hold on to myself. No matter how cruel we had to be to survive, I didn’t want to become complete monsters.

“I don’t care what I become in anyone else’s eyes… But, if you say that’s the right thing to do, then I’ll do it. No matter how many we kill, no matter how low my opinion of them are, I won’t belittle who they were in life. Okay?” His expression softened a bit before he cast a glance toward the body. The bitterness was still there, but he was doing his best for my sake.

I reached over and hugged him. “I love you.” It was a symbol statement, but Geisai’s body went stiff.

“Athm, I take it we won’t be leaving him here.” He pulled away from me and turned his attention to the body. Right, we still had a lot of things to take care of. Besides, staying here was probably uncomfortable for him.

“We can’t afford to have his shambling corpse wandering around the forest in a couple of days. Take him back to his camp and start gathering the rest of the bodies around the firepit. I’ll join you in a little bit.

Geisai gave me a hard stare.

“Relax, I’m just gonna gather the kindling. Once I get back, we can start sorting through their things.”

“We’re still gonna take their stuff? What happened to respecting them as people?”

“We’re taking the time to dispose of their bodies properly, and we’ve already acknowledged them as people. What are the dead gonna do with material things?”

“Oh, for a moment there, I thought we were gonna burn them with their things.”

“There’s a difference between acknowledgment and irrational behavior. Come on, let’s get to work.”