Sing we for love and idleness

Naught else is worth the having.

Though I have been in many a land,

There is naught else in living.

-Ezra Pound, An Immorality

The Valentine Chronicles

Episode 4: One's Own, Part II (Vincent's War)

Following orders is always the easy way out. Sometimes it's the only way out.

I was back in Callahan's tent. I typed up a signed-and-sealed Order of the Day for distribution among the 3rd Recon Battalion. The orders contained the bad news that SOLDIER 1st Class Callahan would not be leading this particular excursion due to a run of bad health, but that he sends his best wishes. The troops were ordered to march west, just south of the western branch of the Nibel mountain ridge that separated Nibelheim and Rocket Town. Upon arriving at the western coast, they were to set up camp and prepare an embarkation point for the eventual invasion of Wutai.

The orders did not mention anything about the fact that this was a suicide march. That probably would've had a negative effect on morale.

It all went as smoothly as could be. The company commanders arrived at the tent, were told that Callahan was suffering from illness but had their orders for them, and went to carry those orders out. By noon, the entire battalion had packed camp and was on the move, winding its way down the mountain path that switchbacked back and forth across the ridge. They were proud, confident, and completely unaware.

I trailed them from the ridge top, picking my way across knolls and outcroppings. If I looked to my north and squinted, I could see the shimmering spire of Shinra Rocket No. 26, purportedly bound for outer space sometime in the next thousand years. As the day wore on, the red glare of the sun stood in mute testament to the blood that would be shed tonight. There would be a lot of blood, all innocent, and all on my hands. Pretty standard job description for a Turk.

Why'd I join them, to begin with? It's a question I go back and forth on. Helluva good looking suit, to begin with. Great salary, good perks, great way to pick up women, yadda yadda yadda. There's something more to it, though, something I always shied away from admitting, even to myself. Sure, I had joined the Turks to do some good in the world, admittedly from the shadows. But that sense of moral obligation was confusingly juxtaposed with a much baser instinct – an instinct I've spent a long time denying myself.

I love combat. I love killing.

I love the adrenaline rush, the smell of cordite, the interminable nature of mortal aggression. I love the recoil of a pistol, the sound a grenade pin makes as it tinkles to the floor, the look in a man's eyes when he realizes you're the faster draw. There is a darkness inside my heart, and it constantly beseeches me to be let out, to be let loose, to be unleashed upon the world. You can't be a Turk without it, really. Not a good one.

The sun was setting as the 3rd Recon moved into the foothills of the Nibel Mountains, preparing to set up camp. I watched from the ridge top as they bustled about, starting fires, setting up tents, fully going about things as if they expected to be alive the next day. I lit a lonely campfire of my own and gnawed on some three-day old rabbit meat. I wasn't sure if the Wutai ambush would be sprung tonight or tomorrow, when the troops reached the coast, but my hunch was tonight. The cover of darkness was ideal, as was the position of the battalion – nestled in the foothills, they were easy prey for an assault from above.

I went to sleep. I realize this might confuse some of you. But Vincent, aren't you on a mission! you'll demand. All I can say is, if your body isn't wired to wake itself up when things start happening around you, you shouldn't be in the intelligence/covert ops/killing people business. You learn to catch your sleep when you can, and your body learns when to wake itself up.

My eyes opened. There was death in the air.

My sense of time told me it was roughly two fifteen in the morning, give or take a few minutes. A few fires were still smoldering in the campsite, but mostly they were out, the soldiers sleeping soundly. Far too few guards patrolled the outskirts of the camp, not looking too alert. The place was ripe for an ambush, and one was coming.

They were good, but not good enough to hide themselves from me. I saw them, split roughly into two groups, creeping down the ridge towards the camp: Wutai assassins. There looked to be roughly eighty of them in total, each approaching from a different end of the campsite. While they'd be outnumbered roughly ten to one (the average Shinra battalion consisted of about 1,200 men, but the recon battalions had less), that only mattered in a pitched battle. This wasn't a pitched battle, it was an ambush – and once the assassins took out the guards, it would become a massacre. All my doing. I felt momentarily sick to my stomach.

The image of Callahan, seated in his chair, staring me down snuck unbidden into my head. I'd given that man my word, and here I was, masterfully orchestrating the slaughter of every last one of his men. Shit, I didn't like that one goddamn bit. I've done a lot of shitty things in my life, but I've always tried to cling to my honor as one of the last vestiges of my own personal morality. Yet here I was, shooting it to hell, all for the job.

Ah, well, it's not like I'm not already going to hell anyway. Just means a few more million years in the eternal pits of hellfire, or whatever else the devil's got cooked up for me. I'm sure by now he's pretty excited about getting me down there.

The guards went down, one after another, victims to a blade to the throat. The assassins were in the camp.

Flame. The stench of burning flesh, the horrific screams of the engulfed. The frantic, mindless stampeding of a doomed collective, with no destination but annihilation. And finally, the relative quiet…when everyone is dead or near-dead. I smoked a cigarette.

It's a promise, then?

…Yeah. It's a promise.

I decided I had some work to do. It wouldn't salvage my honor, but at least it would right the scales. And besides, I really just needed to kill, and kill a lot. Sorrow and regret had given way to cool, crystallized rage.

I made my way down the ridge, eventually following the exact path the ambushers had followed. The Wutai assassins were still prowling the flaming campsite, searching for survivors and dispatching them. As I crouched down, right by the eastern edge of the camp, I could see two of them almost right in front of me, finishing off a blue-armored soldier with both legs missing. I slipped the silencer on each pistol and splattered their heads from forty paces, the musical click of the gunshots almost completely silenced by the still-crackling fires. A third assassin nearby had time to look up in alarm before I punched a bullet through his neck. Nobody else had noticed. I moved into the camp.

From then on it was my game, all the way. I kept to the perimeter at first, taking my time, dropping guards in ones and twos. No grenades, no loud noises, just the cover of darkness and precision marksmanship. When I had completed the circle and returned roughly to where I started, I moved in a bit. Now that my killing zones were surrounded by fires on all sides, subtlety became less of an option. I ripped the pins off three grenades and hurled them into the rough center of the camp, ducking behind a smoldering tent as I did. The resulting explosions produced some extremely satisfying screams, and even better, the sound of running footsteps, headed my way. I tossed aside the two .38s and drew two .45s instead – the time for pure killing power had come.

I could tell that they were getting close by their footsteps. As the first one came into view I whipped out a forearm and caught the spot just below his chin beautifully – his head flew backwards as his neck audibly snapped. Almost immediately I had my arm around his shoulders as I maneuvered his body in front of mine. Shots rang out from somewhere in front of me, thudding into my human shield's chest and abdomen, and I was able to mentally map their locations from the gunshots. I tossed the body forward and rolled to the right, squeezing off three shots from each gun as I moved. Six shots, six shooters, six corpses. I moved towards center camp.

I got a lucky break. The Wutai assassins had apparently spared the tent with the battalion's ration of alcohol in it, and a fair amount of them had decided to celebrate their recent massacre by getting shitfaced together. I was able to wipe them all out with a single well-thrown grenade, which was a real time-saver. One of them managed to claw his way outside the tent, and I had just finished him off when a thin trail of pain seared its way down my left cheek.

"Most impressive," came a too-calm voice. "Nearly my entire squad. My, my, my."

I wheeled around. Dark-haired man, about my height, dressed all in black. He held a throwing dagger in his left hand, and his empty right hand probably accounted for the blood dripping down my cheek. He was flanked on either side by two masked Wutai assassins, dressed much as he was.

"And you are?"

"Rittake Fui," was the reply. "Commander of the Snow Leopard Squad…well, former squad, I should say. You seem to have…thinned our numbers a bit."

I shrugged. "Sorry about that."

He shook his head. "It's the syndicate way. Those who deserve to live…do. Those who die have merely paid for their own inadequacy."

"Right," I spit out. "Just like you're about to pay for yours, you callous bastard."

"I doubt it." He raised his hand slightly. I gripped my guns.

He was fast...almost too fast. His left hand blurred and I barely had time to sidestep as the knife whipped past my chest. He let fly with two more almost immediately, but by now the instinct had taken hold and I shot each one out of the air. One of the other two assassins was charging me with a long dagger aimed squarely at my sternum – I flung myself backwards to avoid the first thrust and ducked to avoid the second. As the blade whistled over my head I broke his kneecap with a snap left foot and shot him twice in the gut as he was going down. Two to go. The other lackey tried to go for a gun, I put two bullets in his brain before his hand ever touched his weapon. One left…but where was he!

I sensed Fui behind me and whipped around, consequently saving my life. The knife which would've cut my spinal chord from behind hit my shoulder instead, wrenching the pistol from my hand and sending shockwaves of pain radiating through my body. Unfortunately for Fui, I was still upright, and I still had one gun left. He tried again, another knife spinning towards me, but I shot it out of the air with one bullet and dropped him with the second. Right between his goddamned eyes, the son of a bitch.

I wrenched the knife out and went looking for more people to kill. There weren't many left, at that point. The ones I found, I killed, and killed good.

And in the end, it was the mirror image of so many tableaus before. All the scales had been balanced, all debts paid for in blood. Everyone was dead but me. A fitting end to Vincent's war. My war.

I wrapped my shoulder, packed my stuff, and headed east. Back to Midgar. Back to Shinra. Back to my job. After all, I'm a Turk, and killing is my business. Don't you ever forget it.

Author's note: More coming. Eventually. Read and review, or you'll be stricken by a plague of locusts. You hear me! LOCUSTS!