Note: I do not own Trigun. I'm not making money off this. Don't prosecute me please.
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Legato was now a tall and handsome man of twenty-one. His blue hair had grown down to cover his eyes as he never had any care to cut it, and his lanky frame had filled out with a bit of muscle as he grew and worked through the years. He had acquired a white canvas coat that he wore most everywhere, which would come to define him when stories were told of him after his passing. He rarely left the compound of the Gung-Ho Guns and their leader, and so had become a man of fair complexion and few words.
The psychic powers of the blue-haired man had quickly revealed themselves after that day when he had held the life of his teacher in his hands. He continued to work under the eye of Nikita, but now he sometimes was invited to the dark and dome-shaped chambers where his Master met with those who served below him. More often than not, he was summoned there when one of the Gung-Ho Guns would fail in their missions and return, begging for the mercy of the angel on hand and knee. Legato's telltale presence in the chambers always meant doom for whatever flunky happened to show up, bruised and beaten from their endeavors against Vash the Stampede. However, Legato had never been allowed to kill one of these failed men yet. He was only allowed so far as to torture them until they were left as a torn and broken pulp of flesh, and when it was time, his Master would do the final deed to all those who had failed him. It always left Legato wanting and longing for more.
Millions Knives, the angel, the Master, was a sight to be cherished these days. The man in the white coat saw him rarely, only inside of those dark chambers where he did the angel's bidding against his disappointing followers. It was a saddening reality for Legato to find that he was no longer the fortunate son, the favorite sheep under the shepherd's wing. He lived to serve the Master, he had told him so. He had been pure in body and mind, and had never deviated from the Master's orders. His life was devoted to that one purpose, to please and serve this angel of the Lord.
So what had he done wrong?
His frustration was only magnified by the fact that, although he thought that he was improving, he was continually forced to work under that stone-eyed woman. To show his resentment and aggravation would have been to show his weakness, and that was not a thing to do when you lived among the quickest and most ruthless guns on the planet. Emotions were but a trivial nuisance anyway, a thing unnecessary in any kind of useful endeavor that he would ever undertake. And so, in his waking hours, his mind was a blank wall to anyone who might try to peer inside, his face a blank mask of apathy to the outside world, his voice a dull monotone that expertly veiled his emotions.
Fortunately, this month had been a better time for him. Nikita, the Eye, had been sent on her own quest to bring back Vash the Stampede. This month was a hiatus from training for him, but it was in no way a hiatus from the use of his mind to bring harm to others. He continued to torture those who failed Knives, and had taken a newfound liking to playing mind games with the newest Gung-Ho Guns to be enlisted. These included a jazz player short of money called Midvalley the Hornfreak and a masked mute who went as Caine the Long-shot.
Legato sat in his room as he contemplated over these matters, eating a sugar-laden meal as he often did when he thought of the Master. He watched out into the barren desert through the one window of the room, the setting sun turning the sky a burgundy red hue. If only it could have been simply he and the Master on this planet. And, of course, Vash the Stampede. Even the blue-haired minion knew that the absence of the Humanoid Typhoon was what plagued the Master the most.
Legato.
Golden eyes twitched upwards, and the fork stopped halfway to his mouth. It was the Master.
It is time.
It was indeed.
He set down his fork and dashed to his feet, coat on and halfway out the door before he stopped himself. Giddy excitement at seeing the Master? Of course he felt it, but to show that would be to lose what respect he had earned for himself. And so he slowed himself, and walked at as quick a pace as possible to that dome-shaped chamber of the man who would be God to him. He passed by the room of Midvalley, though he could only tell by the noise of the saxophone playing inside. Monev the Gale and Leonof the Puppeteer went by him, but he ignored them all in his controlled gait. It took but a few minutes, though in his mind it took an eternity.
Three months since he had last seen the angel. It had been much too long.
Legato passed through the door and knelt down immediately, lowering his head down and speaking in a forcibly controlled voice as he did so. "You called, Master?"
No reply met his ears. He stayed in his position for a moment longer, and then raised his head to look before him. "Master?"
The Master was indeed there, and with a guest this time as well. None other than Nikita, the Eye, knelt on the floor, her back to Legato and her face towards Knives. Her head was lowered, and Legato could see the minute tremors of her body as she tried to stay still. Her coat was torn and bloody, as was the Eye herself. Her student could smell the sharp scent of her blood in the air; it was almost cloying to even be in the room with her. It was on intuition that Legato assumed that she had been beaten by Vash the Stampede.
It is time.
That voice rang in Legato's head again, and he peered up to the face of the Master. It was those three words that he had been waiting for so long to hear. So long ago was that day when the Master had told him that the time would come. Now the time had arrived, and he could not have been more ready.
Those reins of control that this woman had helped to find were used against her as her body was contorted into a shape more reminiscent of a knot than of a human body. She cried out in pain, her eyes forced to look at her former student as he bent her head back between her shoulder blades and her feet up against the base of her spine. Those dull gray eyes were alive with the rush of doom, and even as Legato could still not look directly into her eyes, he could still see the silent pleas for mercy from her. She continued to squeal like a stuck pig, and as her body folded tighter and tighter against itself, Legato paused, and looked to the Master. It was his turn now.
"You've failed me, Nikita, the Eye," said Knives, not moving from his place as a spectator to this whole event. "One of my most valuable followers, and you could not bring to me a man of little more than flesh and metal. But what more could I expect from a mere spider as yourself. Spiders cannot wish to manipulate the butterfly."
She is a human, worth nothing.
The gray eyes squeezed shut as blood dripped from the cuts and wounds to the floor. Her mouth moved, and she whined, "Please, have mercy on me."
Let this first kill bring you to me.
The eyes opened again, and pleaded silently with the student for a release from this agony. "I can explain, I can…"
Let this first kill bring you to your rightful place beneath your Master and above all others.
The blood began to pool beneath the writhing body, half-suspended not of its own accord. The pain-wracked voice of Nikita shrieked out. "God, mercy, please! I beg of you!"
Let this first kill be your most glorious.
Legato looked into the gray eyes of Nikita, the Eye, and smiled. He felt the pain and the rush of memories, and swatted both away as nothing more than annoying flies with his own mental capacity. As the shock dawned over and the gray eyes widened, Legato murmured pleasantly, "Good-bye, Nikita."
Her head twisted to the side sharply, and the body fell to the floor without protest. The eyes were as deadened glass marbles in the sockets, and the hands lay splayed like dead spiders on the floor. A mostly bloodless death, the passing caused no drowning pool of sticky human life to ruin the picturesque quality of the moment. The body did not rise again.
Legato was howling his triumph inside of himself, screaming down the corpse and ripping it inside out, but the only show on the outside was that smirk of assured competence. He had won. He had gotten rid of the spider that had threatened his Master with her incompetence. He had destroyed the source of his torment.
It was a week later when he was called back to the Master's chambers and given the stripped and bleached skull of Nikita, the Eye, as a trophy of his first kill. He treated it as the prize that it was, and displayed it on the left shoulder of his coat as if to proudly show that he had mastered his demon, and would do the same to any others what he had done to her.
Following this point, Legato became the greatest of the minions of Millions Knives, ascending to become the right-hand man of his master. He ruled over the Gung-Ho Guns as their leader, and took commands only from the Master himself. He went out from the compound often now, to carry out the orders of havoc that he was sent to fulfill, and never failed in his efforts for years to come. The skull upon his left sleeve remained the first of many murder trophies that he would accumulate throughout his lifetime.