Dungeon Prowler : One Man Army 353 my vengeance and broken compass

"if that was all, if my heart was all she broke, i would not have called it betrayal. She did the only thing our kind forbade since it was born, fratricide, killing one's own pack. The leaders of our faction were rather curious about how to create capable scouts and rangers taking me as the model, i said i could teach for them, but that was not enough, they wanted the secret books". Lucian waved his hand and summoned 4 books, all the books had pictograms on the hard covers, one had a wolf sniffing a trail, one had a wolf surrounded by magic constructs, on had a depiction of a wolf running on a field, the last had a wolf howling to the moon.

Yunan could tell what two of the four meant, and guessed that those were the ones Lucian and his wife learned, the other two were something else. Lucian was kind of disappointed that Yunan did not understand all the pictograms, but only sighed and continued "she sold out our pack for a spot as the concubine of someone, i did not need to dig that far when i found out. I was aware something is wrong when all my requests for a family visit were denied and i could not leave the dungeon to see my family, my wife also started to stay behind as i kept advancing further into the dungeon, which was very unlike her, she was too ambitious to stay behind."

"Then one day i had a very bad feeling and decided to return to the village come hell or high water, so i used my weekend vacation to reach the village, i found only my master, he was nursing wounds that were beyond healing, he survived some torture and death thanks to his constitution, he was discarded because he was thought of as beyond life, he survived somehow for almost 3 months after that, when i found him, he called me traitor, kinslayer and berated me for forgetting his teachings".

"That was when i understood why I could not be allowed to return home, the scent of those that killed my family still clung to the woods and there was no way they would let me anywhere near, there was also the fact that they somehow were able to make my master think i was part of the groupe who hunted him, an imposter would never escape his notice, but there are ways to make him think i was with the enemies, well, smell basically, I managed to convince him by letting him scan my memory and as he breathed his last he made me promise to pass on the legacy and take revenge."

"I would wager you did not take your revenge immediately, i wonder why was that?" Asked Yunan. "i needed to know why" answered Lucian before he continued with his story "the only way something like this happens was if my wife was in terrible danger or she somehow benefited from such a heinous act, both of which were not good enough for me, so i stopped guessing and returned to the faction with some items that i pretended to have taken a moment to gather, immediately upon my return i was asked by my wife if i had any knowledge about these books, i answered that they were with master, the disappointed look in her eyes told me everything i needed to know, but i still played dumb and asked her if she could pull some strings and make so that we can go home, as my wife she had no reason to decline, so she told me one more mission, i had no power to fight a faction head on so i needed to eliminate her, the one who knows me most"

"Let me guess, you were stabbed halfway to death on the next mission and then was left alone to die". " Exactly, but it didn't go that way, for the first time ever, my wife chose to go to the rendezvous point with someone else, I never knew she was able to reach my floor before but i did not think too much about it, i was very useful to the faction so they will not kill me, or so i thought, turns out she was hanging around with the future leader of the faction and they brought me out to their party for killing me, she said once i was surrounded that she can not become a concubine without my death, after all, i knew her too well and might muddy the reputation of the future leader if i talked about how he took away my wife in some drunken stupor, and since i did not know where the wolf legacy was, I had no use anymore".

"Sounds like your ordinary nobel, i assume that you could have killed all of them, went rogue and brought the faction tumbling like a rotten cottage, how did they get you to stand still?"

"She told me how much she hated my touch after she got us both into the faction, she described how she cheated on me with every single person who looked at her funny and how she promised the wolf legacy in order to get us both into the faction and her into the royalty, i didn't even react as she pumped her memory into my head, that and the pleasure she felt when she murdered our entire tribe by her hands before she personally tortured our master, those memories and many more shackled me as i was then stabbed halfway to death, Leader Mary found me and killed two who were about to cut my head off, the rest ran from the aura she gave off but she tracked them all, all but my wife and her new husband, those two i got to kill myself".

"So tell me how vengeful did you get, werebeast are not as sound of mind as they pretend to be, especially someone with a broken heart and soul, you especially must have been very susceptible to rage and the animal inside"

"After I recovered, Leader and i walked through the front door of the faction and killed our way to the elites, since this was still a minor faction, they were not able to keep any adventurers beyond the 80th floors due to the regulations of the guild, these smaller faction are more known as associations, organisation or whatever it is they are called this day and age, and none of them could hold a candle to my Leader, she killed teams and parties like they were made of straw, in the end the faction leader came to negotiate when he understood we wanted to talk to him. He was very keen on us stopping the massacre and readily led us to his own son's house, where he gave us the two we were seeking and even licked our boots to stay alive and keep his elites intact"

"What came next was rather scary, i unleashed all the emotions i had held inside me on them, oh how sweet she sang when my fingernails were skinning her alive, how beautiful was her voice as she begged for my forgiveness when i gouged out her eyeballs and chew on them, the way she moaned as i used her over and over and over, i went full beast on her and it felt so good, never in my life was i as free as i was when taking pleasure in making her scream, i broke her eventually, she stopped crying, she stopped begging and she stopped even resisting, she confessed eventually, she said that she only wanted what she deserved, she was too good for me, too beautiful to delve in the dungeon, too great to be just an adventurer, she wanted the luxury she was born to have, she deserved it, or so she thought, i killed her that day, i had lost all my rage somehow, so i killed her and burned her body to ashes"

Yunan sighed "she seems to have gotten her wish, she did get what she deserved, it was just that she was not expecting it to be something like that". Lucian nodded "the thing that bothers me most is that to this day, i have no regrets, many i met claim that after revenge life turned bleeker and the momentary satisfaction was something that haunted them for years, i still feel the same relief as the moment when I killed her, i still feel the pleasure from causing her pain, what haunts me is that even now i still do not feel shame or regret for doing such an act, no matter how you think about it ,she was the last of my kin, my wife to boot, and i killed her, savagely over such a long time and i enjoyed it then and relish in the memory now"

"Riddle me this" Yunan asked with his mind out of focus "when you killed people before, you never showed regret and remorse or hesitation, yet you feel haunted by the fact that vengeance brought you pleasure? I have played god once or twice deciding who shall live or die based on my own personal beliefs of right and wrong, i tortured people who i knew did not deserve it and those who i thought did, but i never felt doubt because of the same thing that you went through, your belief is what told you to do those things, it was not mindless revenge or blind rage, you didn't attack on the first chance, you waited, your followed your belief, and let me tell you something, if you ever wavered in your own morality, you would have never made it this far".

"You mean that the same beliefs and values i hold as my moral compass are what drove me to do what i did and they are what keeps me from drowning in this guilt of not being guilty?". Yunan vigorously nodded "you see, your guilt is not because you did something, but it's because you felt bad for actually continuing to feel good about something that should be bad. Feelings are a mirror to your mind and you have annihilated a cult and their innocent people and you still sleep soundly, all the things you did do not haunt your dreams, they haunt your waking time, this lack of empathy is mostly related to your code and not your nature, you killed them because there was a chance for them to cause harm, your wife set herself free from your wicked torture by coming clean and confessing, your compass is still working, it is just that you have been influenced by outsiders, you should worry when there is no need for justification the moment you decided to kill"

"An excuse to kill? Please feel free to stop joking any moment now, i have not made excuses for killing people since i was a toddler, all i care about is if there is any reservations i have against their death, if not i will feel free to kill."

"An excuse is just stupid for people like you and me, what i am talking about is something a bit deeper in terms of affecting the decision making process, it is what makes it so you either kill or pass, just like that, having principles and a moral code is basically the minimum requirements for it, as long as your moral compass is working fine you can kill without stop, as of this moment your compass has not stopped working, you are trying to find something wrong with it and going for the fact that it should have reacted to something that was not of interest, you are the problem, if you really feel like you have been wrong just give me those books and go die, since i am your student i will fulfill the wishes of your master, if your compass still does not react when you try to kill yourself, then you know you are doing it right".

After this the two of them stayed silent for hours on end only exchanging the occasional word about this or that.

Chapter end