They Who Slaughtered Hope 🌈| Slow Updates/Editing

Chapter 17

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𝚁𝚎𝚗

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𝘚𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 29𝘵𝘩, 𝘚𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘈𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘰𝘰𝘯

The final week of September had made its appearance at last, and instead of attending a non-existent church service, Ren headed towards his base of operations—an abandoned rest stop—to decompress before he met with Mitsan. It had been little more than two weeks with the Kendrick-Carson family, but the sniper felt as if it had been ages.

Lennox was finally starting to warm up to him, and he had recently cooled Emily's suspicions. Wade got his kick out of the interrogation-like discussion and afterwards left Ren to his own devices. Although the father's sentiment didn't improve Ren's opinion of him. Because that aside, the florist should have been dead already. Ren griped that if that was the case, he wouldn't be in the mess he was in now.  The sniper already knew Mitsan wouldn't be content with his results thus far.

With his suit vest donned, Ren embarked on his motorcycle, riding up to the heavily guarded Thames River. Where there used to be an open, bustling bridge now stood a block of red- and blue-clothed soldiers. The deafening cacophony of heavy artillery accompanied them. In truth, the Thames Gate housed the core of the terrestrial front—one of the two main fronts of the war. It was where most of the fighting occurred, with the factions battling day and night to gain ground. It was never more than a few inches, though.

The sniper thought of the bridge battles as a black hole to the Syndicate's resources. But he also knew that without it, the Veritas would be swarming the Syndicate side of the overpass, instead of merely leaking through. There would be no safe place to call home; it would be a bloodbath on both sides if the Tower Bridge was lost to either faction. Still, he had his own ways of crossing the river unnoticed. He had done it dozens of times before.

Ren slipped through rank upon rank of soldiers, skirting around the bridge's suspensions and allowing the shadows to conceal him as though they were opaque curtains. Currently, there was a calm period: a lapse between the piercing cries and rotting corpses; a pause before the raging typhoon. And that made it all the more difficult for Ren to avoid the lazy, spacey regard of the squaddies who patrolled the viaduct.

He scampered to the other side of the bridge, so used to riding across it that each crossing left breathless and almost always late. But today was different. He couldn't afford to give Mitsan any more reason to doubt him. Ren wanted to earn his trust and respect back. He wanted Mitsan to be able to depend on him again. And for that to happen, the mission had to go off without a hitch.

Ren approached Little Komainu right as Trixcia was leaving the hollow, her triumphant expression blotting out any hope of her being in the same boat as him. She curled her lip upon seeing him but said nothing.

Her silence disconcerted him, yet he stole up to the door anyway and knocked.

"The door's open, Ren." Mitsan's silvery voice blindsided the sniper.

Usually, the assassination missions were only a one-day affair, so missing someone other than his sister was unknown to him. He was never away long enough for homesickness or nostalgia or whatever that feeling was when he longed to return to someone cherished, like what he was experiencing now.

It was irrelevant to him, even more so that he had accepted that Sarlyn was long gone. To feel that now, for someone alive, it was almost like it was uncalled for. Wrong, even. Nonetheless, he had to go through with this meeting, no matter how he felt. "Sorry, Sir. I didn't want to interrupt."