Boy didn't remember much before the initiation.
He was number 37 - age 5 with no living family. That was all he needed to know.
He would be given a name if he survived.
It was simple, those were the rules and he had never really known any different - had never needed to know any different.
His handler wore a mask and a cloak, they had no need for identity, so immersed in the deceit as they were.
To begin with, in between his education and the conditioning, 37 liked to imagine what his trainer looked like beneath the layers of cumbersome clothing.
He soon learned that such a fancy was redundant.
It was not an enjoyable lesson.
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At age 8 he was given his first assignment.
The target was a religious man, the brother of a vicar, and deeply enamoured with the idealism of God and Heaven.
The client had requested that the man die in the place he loved the most: the church itself.
The building itself was quaint.
Old stone and gothic splendor alongside towering arched windows of stained glass. It towered above him, proudly declaring humanities' blind faith to the world around it. Young children ran amongst their gossiping parents at the front of the structure and passersbys spared a moment to glance in reverence at the mighty walls of the building, each further indoctrinated in the grandeur of the false illusion than the previous.
Stood in the shadows of a nearby alcove 37 felt the stirring of an intense emotion that he had, previously, only experienced within his first lessons - before he had learned what was better for him.
Disgust.
It churned and raged, a maelstrom of uncontrollable malevolence focused in all of its entirety on the brittle concept that was God. It carried no forewarning and no reasoning even as it settled, a growling weight at the pit of his stomach.
And 37 was filled with an unavoidable need to kill.
It should have scared him. Filled him with dread. Traumatised the small glimmer of humanity that still remained buried within him.
Instead, Boy number 37 smiled.
The mission was fulfilled but two men died that night. The bother of a vicar and the vicar himself.
37 was punished for the extra casualty.
37 couldn't quite find it in himself to care.
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They gave him a name.
He liked the name Cain.
