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...
Yao's hands are bleeding.
They are cracked, and he stares at them, enchanted—he does not lift his eyes, as the shouting begins and the halberd is pointed; more shouting, and he finally gazes upward to see the tyrant run through; his eyes watch as Dong Zhuo thumps down, squirting blood, squeezing through robes and fat.
The cheer goes up—the tyrant, who has pillaged villages and defiled women, ceaselessly, ceaselessly, is gone and done for.
Yao takes action then, as Dong Zhuo's foster son and murderer Lu Bu raises his head—Yao moves, unsheathing his jian and twirling it to feel it, storming after the others as the tyrant's home is cracked open to the air, as the tyrant's venerable mother cries that she knew this would be so—
There is a child. Yao cuts it down before turning back to the dowager. This is not the first time he has done this, and so he is used to this. He grits his teeth, still.
Despite his numbness towards this scene, the child's screams pierce his heart, and it would almost be surprising if Yao would pay any attention to his armored chest; it is just a child.
There is slashing, more slashing, and there is blood, such as before, and she is dying because she bore the tyrant, and nothing but her womb is to blame. Yao sucks in a breath of metal blood through his teeth. It gushes in, then goes out, and he feels a little more pure.
Yao does not recall his own mother, and yet he is so very filial. That dashes through his head, at the speed of an arrow aimed at the ground; it makes him want to recall a time of more war, but he has already had much of that.
He hears nothing, because the screams are deafening; the venerable dowager cries out before his eyes, and he sees himself burning in the pools of her eyes—her life has been long! He ignores her as she screams for mercy, her wrinkled hands, and sightless eyes gazing upward at his steel. She is so pitiful now.
"I beg for amnesty!" she cries, voice croaking, and Yao simply replies, unrelenting, "So did the men and women your son killed.
"Is your name on the shrine secure?"
More screaming, and the old woman shivers, collapsing.
The jian flails through the air; the job is done.
This family is no more.
...
PT: Way, way, way back in the day, whole families in China would be killed, be it revenge for one person's death, or so no one would be there to seek revenge when one killed an enemy. Dong Zhuo is in one of these such cases—he was a tyrant who had the emperor killed and replaced with the latter's younger brother to be used as a puppet. He was corrupted and lecherous, and many suffered under this reign of his. According to San Guo Yan Yi, which is a ninety-percent fictional historical story of the Three Kingdoms period, he rejoiced to his mother before he was to take the throne—correct me if I'm wrong—and she replied that she had a bad feeling about it. After Dong Zhuo was killed by his foster son, his whole family was killed, including his mother, who was ninety years old—quite a lot for the time. Originally, I wanted this to be about Cao Cao's massacre when he stormed the palace, though—he willingly stabbed a pregnant woman through the womb. But I thought, since Chinese people are insane over filial piety...