The first time I killed a man, I was standing in the treeline two miles west of the estate, and the man was a Sarahan scout who didn't see me until the compressed-air sphere hit his throat.
He was Level 3. Clad Intermediate. Wearing light armor with the Qadir cavalry insignia on the shoulder sand-colored, functional, designed for speed. He was alone an advance scout, separated from his unit, mapping the approach road for the force behind him. His sword was sheathed. His aura was suppressed to the minimum output of a man trying not to be detected.
I detected him at four hundred meters. The Arbiter flagged his aura signature faint, suppressed, but present the moment he entered my mana perception range. I tracked him for six minutes as he moved through the forest, reading the terrain, making notes on a tablet he carried in his off-hand. Professional. Focused. Doing his job.
I killed him from twenty meters. A single spell air compression, tight, fast, aimed at the throat where the armor didn't cover. The sphere hit, collapsed his windpipe, and he went down without a sound. His body hit the leaf-covered ground and lay still.
I stood in the trees and looked at him and felt nothing.
Not nothing. The absence of the thing I expected to feel. In Lagos, I'd never killed anyone. I'd fought. I'd been cut, beaten, nearly killed myself. But I'd never taken a life. I'd imagined it in the darkest moments, the angriest moments, the moments when the world felt so fundamentally unjust that destruction seemed like the only honest response but I'd never done it.
Now I had. And the sky didn't fall. The earth didn't shake. The universe didn't deliver a moral reckoning. A man was alive, and then he wasn't, and the forest was exactly as quiet afterward as it had been before.
[Target eliminated. No secondary contacts detected within 800 meters. Recommend relocating to the next observation point. Also: you are processing a moral and emotional response to your first kill. This is normal for non-sociopathic humans. I recommend allowing the processing to occur rather than suppressing it, as suppression correlates with degraded combat performance in subsequent engagements. Feel what you need to feel. Then move.]
The Arbiter, dispensing battlefield emotional therapy with the bedside manner of a spreadsheet.
But it was right. I felt what I needed to feel a cold, heavy weight that settled in my chest like a stone and then I moved. Because six more scouts were in the area, and the Sarahan advance force would arrive within forty-eight hours, and the dead man on the ground had been carrying information that would have compromised our defensive positions.
I picked up his tablet. I read his notes. Detailed, precise, written in Sarahan script that I couldn't read but the Arbiter drawing on pattern-matching algorithms built from years of processing linguistic data could partially decode.
Troop strength estimates. Terrain analysis. Approach routes. The scout had been mapping exactly what Osawe had predicted a comprehensive intelligence picture of the Udo defensive position.
I altered three entries before replacing the tablet on the body. Changed approach-route classifications. Adjusted terrain assessments. Small modifications, carefully calibrated to be plausible but wrong the kind of errors that a hurried scout might make in the field, that wouldn't be caught by a commander reading the report at speed.
When the Sarahan force found their scout's body and they would they'd find his intelligence intact. They'd use it. And the intelligence would steer them into the kill zones that Aruan and I had prepared.
A Lagos con. The biggest one I'd ever run. The mark: an army of ten thousand. The take: their lives.
I moved to the next position. I left the stone in my chest where it was. It would be there for a long time.