Cole wipes the blade of his knife on the grass, taking a long breath, relying on his training to not cut the crying man's tongue out of his mouth. Camping for a few nights in this jungle – with its screeching toucans and moist humidity, combined with the incessant bug bites all along his skin – hasn't done much to better mood, and now he's on a razor's edge as the man pleads for the hundredth time to be let go.
Sagging against the tree, blood runs from the corners of his lips, his gaping teeth the result of Cole shoving his boot in the man's mouth. He told the man to quit begging once, and to use his mouth while he still can. To tell him the direction of the village.
His hands are limp at his side, eight out of ten fingernails gone; scattered amongst the grass, and one still on Cole's blade. He wipes it again.
Blood has streamed down the front of his shirt, the seat of his pants stained and smeared with something other than dirt. The make of that shirt alone told Cole he was close, but he had no means of navigating towards the village, even though he can read the stars as easily as a book.
The man had been so wrought with fear when Cole ambushed him by the river, he'd soiled himself. Cole had snuck up behind him while the man was fishing and first punched the man in the ribs before shoving his head into the water. He waited until the man was on the brink of death before heaving his head out and dragging him to this secluded cave within the mountains.
He's been asking the man about the village for the better part of an hour, according to his watch. He mostly kept whimpering and begging in slurred Spanish, only once having the gall to try and fight Cole to escape.
That awarded him the broken ribs and blackened eye.
"I'll ask you again," Cole says in Spanish, turning towards the man, his face passive and cold, "where is Encanto?"
The village had been hidden for centuries, closed off from the world, but somehow its people had not only survived, but thrived. A freshwater river flowing through its center, crops and fruits harvested along with the fish and sometimes cattle and pigs.
His organization has been searching for the village since it first popped up on one of their radars. An anomaly that made their equipment malfunction in a way that was nothing short of unexplainable. Cole hadn't been there; he'd been across the globe seducing a Korean spy about nuclear warfare when he'd gotten the call to come back home.
He'd left the woman in pieces before leaving. No loose ends, as he'd always been taught. She had been a bust anyway, even if she was a spy, she was a shit one.
"Please señor," the man pleads once more, "let me go. I have a family."
"That doesn't mean shit to me." He gives a grin that has made his enemies shit their pants. "Maybe I'll go after them once I'm done with you."
The man's hazel eyes widen to show whites all around. "N-No! No, please!"
"Then tell me where Encanto is."
The man's lips fold in. "Encanto, is more than just a place." His face becomes abnormally serious. "You know that."
Cole's face reveals nothing.
The word itself in Spanish means charm, and though they've managed to narrow their search down to the mountains of Columbia, it still left a section of jungle to explore.
However, even with their malfunctioning equipment, they've managed to use that to try and pinpoint areas of it would be happening, and created a perimeter around a narrow patch of jungle that even on a library computer reveals nothing.
"There is a village," his father had said, "that holds such mystery. It is only spoken in legends, but legends are lessons twined with truth."
Cole had been told the story a million times by now. He'd constantly heard it while growing up and training with his father.
Despite being the head of a multinational technology company that specializes in consumer electronics, software, and online services, his father was stuck in a fantasy land, talking endlessly about Encanto.
A village with magic. Cole thought it was a crock of shit, and made as much known to his father.
His father retaliated by beating Cole within an inch of his life. Breaking his spine and right hand.
Finding Encanto had become his father's personal pet project. He never stopped raving about the village and their abilities that he couldn't even dream of.
However, they could take it.
But there had been no one in the world who could find it.
Until now.
Which is why Cole is here. Not just at the behest of his father, but for his own quest to find answers.
He can still feel it streaming through his blood, coiling tight around his bones. A writhing darkness that had simmered inside him from the moment he'd turned eight.
An unholy, dark power.
And when his father had found out, he'd sent Cole off into training to hone it.
At first, Cole didn't care. He'd do anything to drown that power. To smother it.
Some days, the sheer dread and panic locked his body up so thoroughly that nothing could get him to breathe. Nothing could stop the awful power from beginning to rise, rise, rise in him. Nothing beyond the sweat and soreness from training, the endless bottles of alcohol, and the sex that made him feel nothing—but offered a moment of release amid the roaring inside him.
It was also the first glimpse Cole had caught of his father's second life – one that dwells within the underbelly of the city. One full of sex and drugs and shady dealings. One that had a solid connection to a 'vocational school,' he'd called it, located in Siberia.
He didn't have much a choice in the matter, as it had been for most of his life. Before, it was dealing with the glittering and ever smiling and scheming heads of other companies, dressed in fine suits and clinking champagne glasses to try and seal some deals.
Now, it was walking around dressed in a black leather battle suit, armed to the teeth like he's going onto a killing field. A man cheated out of his childhood and forced to deal with a life-changing discovery that made him feel so out of place. So alien in the modern, human world.
The spy-mercenary work suited him though. Provided enough distraction and, release, from the power constantly growling and purring in his ear to be let out.
There were some days when he just didn't care. Some days when he truly became the monster and weapon his father and teachers had made him. As they ripped away his humanity, his mortality, and made him into this.
The man's weeping brings Cole back into his body, having gone preternaturally still in thought. No doubt it left the man trembling. It was something that unnerved a lot of people – when Cole went as still as death, a stiffness only accomplished by skilled predators. "Please. Please let me go."
"You know I can't do that." Cole's voice is low and gruff. "Now where is it?"
He man swears at him, the filthiest word he can think of.
Cole chuckles, and faster than a striking asp, he has one of the man's arms against the trunk, the dagger glinting.
The man screams as he finds his arms pinned.
His blood is nearly black in the moonlight. He thrashes, cursing Cole again and again. He would bleed to death unless he pulled his arms from the trunk.
With otherworldly silence, Cole crouches before him and lifts his chin with another knife. The man, balding and sweating bullets, pants as Cole brings his face close.
The man's eyes widen as Cole loosens his power ever so slightly. Enough to reveal what prowls beneath his skin. Enough so that his turquoise eyes shift into something ancient and unforgiving. Nothing of this world.
Even in the silvery moonlight, Cole can see the man's sun-tanned skin pale.
"Where is the village?" he asks, his voice like gravel.
The man weakly shakes his head. "P-Please, I cannot tell you."
And then, without even an intake of breath, Cole buries another dagger so deep into the man's thigh, Cole can feel the reverberation as it pierces the dirt beneath.
The man's scream shatters out of him, his feet kicking and tearing more flesh.
"Where is it?" Cole asks again.
"Money," the man moans. "I have money."
Cole draws yet another dagger and shoves it into the man's other thigh, piercing again to the dirt. The man shrieks—shrieks to gods who will not save him. "Where is Encanto?"
The man only shakes his head.
After a heartbeat, Cole withdraws the daggers from the man's thighs. He almost soils himself at the pain, at the relief.
He weeps. Cole sits back on his heels and stares at him.
Slowly, Cole rises to a stand.
"There's a reason why we hide from monsters like you." The man weeps.
In one smooth motion, Cole draws the pistol strapped at his thigh and pulls the trigger.
The crack of the gun rings in his ears, the flash illuminating the man for the slightest of seconds.
The man's head is slammed against the trunk, black blood splattering along the wood. A single stream leaks from the hole now boring through the center of the man's forehead.
The gun had been so cleverly hidden against his black battle suit, and the man had been so focused on his own pain and the knives that he didn't even note Cole was carrying it. If he was even familiar with it at all.
Though the man didn't tell him anything verbally, Cole noted the way his eyes always snapped to his left whenever mentioning Encanto, or his family.
Cole just needed to continue the torture to be sure. And yes, the man's eyes always snapped to his left.
Cole looks to the sky, noting the northern star.
West it is.
Looking to the man, he hasn't moved, and the blood has now dripped onto the front of his shirt.
Cole lifts his gun and pulls the trigger two more times, aiming between the eyes each time. Just to be safe.
When the man's body flops onto its side, Cole holsters the gun and adorns the full-face mask that has become like a second skin, and begins walking.
To Encanto.
To answers.