Mercenary Kobold — Part III: The First Choice
link here: https://ych.commishes.com/auction/show/5R3HA/kobold-mercenary/
The square should have been a simple job.
Enter. Find the target. Eliminate. Exit.
Nothing more.
She had learned to reduce things to that. One target, one route, one exit. It didn’t matter who was around. It didn’t matter how many people got caught in between. Contracts didn’t speak of people. They spoke of results.
But that night everything went wrong.
The first shot shattered the air and, within seconds, the square turned into chaos—screams, smoke, hurried footsteps. The target’s men appeared from different points, firing without much concern for who might be in their way.
She reacted as she had been trained.
She moved.
An enemy fell behind her. Another tried to surprise her from the side and ended up against one of the square’s benches. She kept advancing, dodging bullets with almost automatic precision, until she reached the man she had come for.
The fight ended a few seconds later.
The target fell to the ground, wounded and disarmed.
She breathed once.
Then she heard the crying.
She turned her head.
On the other side of the square was a child.
Human.
No more than seven or eight years old.
He had been trapped in the middle of the clash. Frozen beside a staircase, too scared to run, while one of the target’s men raised a shotgun toward him.
She stood still.
For a fraction of a second, her mind did what it had always done.
Calculated the distance.
The trajectory.
The time.
The chance of success.
And then something happened that wasn’t in any training.
She didn’t want him to die.
She didn’t think about the contract.
She didn’t think about her own safety.
She simply ran.
She leapt over a bench, pressed a hand against the backrest, and used the momentum to change direction. A shot passed behind her. She flew down the stairs almost without touching them, dodged another enemy, and slid across the ground as a kick missed her face by inches.
The man with the shotgun saw her coming.
He turned the weapon toward her.
Too late.
She slid on her knees, almost with her back against the ground, and drew the sword from her waist in the same motion.
The blade swept beneath the man’s legs.
The shotgun fell from his hands.
She caught it before it hit the ground.
One shot.
Silence.
For a few seconds, she could only hear her own breathing.
It was different.
Faster.
Heavier.
For the first time in many years, she was shaken.
Not because she had almost died.
Because she had almost been too late.
She looked at the child.
He was still there.
Trembling.
She dropped the weapon and approached slowly.
The boy stepped back at first, but she knelt before him.
—Are you alright?
The child didn’t answer.
His eyes were full of tears.
She raised a hand, uncertain. Those hands had been used for too many things. She had learned to hold weapons with them. To strike. To kill.
She had never learned what to do with a frightened child.
Still, she embraced him.
The boy clung to her and began to cry.
She remained motionless for a few seconds, as if that contact were something completely unknown.
Then, slowly, she stroked his head.
The child looked up.
—Who are you?
She opened her mouth.
All her life she had had names.
Aliases.
Identities.
Contracts.
People who told her who she had to be.
But she had never had an answer to that question.
She looked at the boy.
And, for the first time, she didn’t feel ashamed of not knowing.
—I don’t know who I am.
She paused briefly.
—But soon I will find out.
The boy kept looking at her, still with tears in his eyes.
She reached into one of her pockets and found something she had picked up days earlier without knowing why.
A small four-leaf clover.
She placed it in the boy’s hand.
—For you.
The child stared at it.
—What does it mean?
She shook her head softly.
—I don’t know.
And for some reason, that answer seemed enough.
She stood up.
Took one last look at the ruined square.
Then looked at her hands again.
They were the same hands.
But something had changed.
She hadn’t received an order.
She hadn’t followed a contract.
She hadn’t gained anything.
She had chosen.
And as she walked away from the square, an idea began to take shape within her.
Perhaps discovering who she was didn’t mean remembering who she had been.
Perhaps it meant discovering what she could choose to be from now on.
That night she had saved a life.
But, without realizing it, she had also found a small piece of her own.
