" YUANFEN " genji shimada.

i | the vixen

yuanfen.
act two, chapter one.
"the vixen"

—

EIGHT YEARS LATER...

THE NOTEBOOK BENEATH HER bed which she used to keep track of every single day that she was among their ranks told her that it had been eight years to the day since she had joined them. Eight years since her old life ended and her new one began. Truthfully, however, she had no recollection of her life before Talon. She knew she had one; she wasn't an omnic, she didn't simply spawn in the midst of Talon on their command. She knew that she must have been born, she must have had a life for over twenty years before she became one of them.

Shaking the thoughts from her head, she frowned. She knew better than to reminisce on a past that she couldn't even remember. She had to focus on the mission, execute the job cleanly and quickly, and return to him before the sun rose.

Her figure lurked in the shadows, cast into darkness as the moon slipped behind a cloud. She peered through a window, watching as a man took a seat at a desk placed in the middle of the large office. The room seemed almost too large, for the only furniture inside was an old wooden desk and a few dark bookshelves that lined the wall. A single lamp placed on the desk was the only lighting in the entire room, illuminating only a few feet around it.

She was standing outside of an omnic civil rights headquarters, and the man inside was a former Overwatch agent. Since the disbandment of the international task force, its members were scattered across the globe, each fighting in their own way to keep peace in the world. She scoffed at the thought, recalling the numerous Null Sector attacks that had left thousands of people dead on the streets of their own hometowns.

There was no hope in restoring peace to the world, and she thought that anyone who believed otherwise was stupidly naive.

The man's back was to her as he sat at his desk, and she took this as her chance to strike. She slipped soundlessly through the window and landed on the wooden floor behind him. She pulled a pistol out of its holster on her belt, cocking the weapon and pressing it against the back of the unsuspecting man's skull. His body grew tense, but oddly enough he didn't seem surprised.

"I figured you would be coming after me soon," he said bitterly. His voice wasn't shaky, he showed no sign of fear, and this frustrated her. They always showed fear. No matter how brave, how noble, these agents seemed to the public eye, they all shared the same fear: death. They were all cowards. The former agents, men and women who were once praised for their bravery, always begged for their life when it was in her hands.

"All must die." The words slipped through her lips in a sinister manner. She grinned, satisfied upon hearing the nervous intake of breath from her victim, then pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed through the nearly empty room, ringing almost painfully in her ears. The man fell to the desk, dead, with a hole in the back of his skull. Scarlet blood leaked from the wound, collecting on the wooden surface and dripping onto the floor below. Satisfied, she shoved her gun back into the holster.

With the target dead, most Assassins would already be out the window and on their way back to the base, but not her. She had her own mission, one that required her to stay a bit longer than what was necessary. She knelt down beside the desk, doing her best to ignore the coppery tang of the blood come from the puddle on the floor beside her. The smell always got to her, often making her sick to her stomach whenever she returned from missions. She pulled open several drawers in the desk, searching for a particular object that she found to be a common possession of the targets. The former Overwatch agents turned out to be quite nostalgic, many of them keeping with them the last thing they had of Overwatch.