"This is wrong," Sofia said the moment Rikkin walked into his office.
He was mildly annoyed to find her here, waiting for him, but unsurprised that she had caught him out. His daughter was indeed a clever girl, and she knew him well. Though perhaps not quite as well as she thought.
She was standing in front of the monitor, watching the mindless shells amble about the Infinity Room. Her arms were folded tightly over her chest in a hunched, anxious pose, and her large, expressive eyes were full of accusation.
Rikkin didn't even break stride as he brushed past her, heading for the bar and pouring himself a snifter of Hennessy Paradis Imperial.
"You left me no choice," he told his daughter. "He has to go in of his own free will. You said that. I had to negotiate."
"You mean manipulate."
Rikkin paused for just an instant. The words were accurate, but they stung, and that surprised him. Lifting the liquor to his nose, he inhaled the spicy, orange blossom and jasmine scent.
"I assured the Elders we would have the Apple for London," he said, too irritated to enjoy the cognac as it properly deserved and instead taking a gulp, feeling the warmth trickle down his throat.
"That's in two days!" She had turned to stare at him, her eyes even wider than he would have thought possible. Well, perhaps now she would understand his recent desire to push the murderous bastard.
"Sofia," he said, "he doesn't want to know his past, or his father. He wants to destroy them… both."
Sofia looked like a startled doe, Rikkin thought. One hand was wrapped tightly around her midsection, the other clenched into a fist. She was trembling; something he had not seen her do in years.
He felt a long-dormant desire to comfort her stirring, but he couldn't surrender to it. Sofia had to learn that cruelty was a tool, and a damned useful one at that, and that these Assassins she treated were not pets.
But her words made him realize that she wasn't shaking with fear or hurt. His daughter was furious.
"We're not in the business of creating monsters," Sofia said. She got the words out with an effort; an effort not to refrain from breaking down, but from physically lashing out at him.
He looked at her, kindly, but experiencing the barest hint of contempt for her compassion.
"We've neither created them nor destroyed them," he explained, rationally. "We've merely abandoned them to their own inexorable fate."
The orderlies saw Cal with the knife. They made no move to intervene. Rikkin had doubtless had a quiet word or two with them.
The man he approached was both larger and smaller than he remembered. Cal was almost of a height with Joseph Lynch, now. Such a thing had seemed impossible when he was a little boy of seven. Then, his father had loomed as a giant to him, in all aspects. In the intervening years, Joseph had put on bulk; not muscle, but soft, sad flesh that gathered around his midsection and tugged his now-beardless face downward toward his thick throat. The red-blonde hair Cal remembered adorning his father's head was now mixed with gray.
Cal moved silently to stand beside his father. Joseph turned toward him. Defeat was etched in every line of his face and stooped body as he said, in an Irish brogue that had not lessened in the thirty years since Cal had heard it shouting at him to Run! Go, go now!, "You are your mother's son."
The words were not at all what Cal had been expecting, and it threw him.
"What does that mean?" he asked in a rough whisper.
"The blood that flows through you is not your own." Almost the same words he had last said to Cal. Your blood is not your own, Cal. While crimson drops splattered on the floor.
"It belongs to the Creed," Joseph was saying. "Your mother knew that. She died, so the Creed may live."
Cal moved in an instant from standing perfectly still to placing the blade against his father's throat.
"Remind me how, exactly," he ground out.
His right hand clutched the blade. His mother's necklace was wrapped around the fingers of his left.
The room was empty, now. Sometime over the last few moments, the orderlies had ushered out all those who had suffered in the Animus. Cal and his father were alone.
Soon, it would just be Cal.
Joseph did not look afraid. He looked… resigned to his fate, almost as if he welcomed it. As if he had been waiting for this moment, and was relieved that at last, after so much torment at the hands of the Templars and their cruel machine, it had come.
"What you saw, I did," Joseph said quietly.
"You murdered her," Cal rasped.
Still calm, still quiet, Joseph answered, "I took her life, rather than have it stolen by that machine." His voice cracked slightly on the last word; the only sign he had yet given that any of this had affected him.
"A man grows with the greatness of his task. I ought to have killed you." His eyes, milky blue behind cataracts, stared into his son's. "I couldn't."
"Well, here." Cal flipped the blade in his hand, offering it hilt-first to his father. "Do what you couldn't do thirty years ago."
Joseph shook his head. "It's in your hands now, Cal. This is what they want."
"It's what I want."
But Cal knew he lied. He no longer knew what he wanted. The man before him was not the loving father, nor the heartless murderer. He was a pawn in the hands of the Templars, who had broken him so badly that he was now in the Infinity Room.
Cal was frantic for Joseph to make a decision, any decision, so that he himself could react.
"Spill my blood," Joseph said, the weight of the world in his words, "but do not go back into the Animus."
"Why?"
Joseph's eyes bore into Cal's, as if awakening from a long slumber. There was a fire in them, a flicker of life that belied the weariness in his frame. Whatever came next, Joseph seemed resigned to it, yet his words carried a weight of urgency and sincerity.
"The Templars want us all dead," Joseph began, his voice heavy with gravity. "The Apple. It contains the power to reveal Gensokyo's existence to the entire world. They seek to use it to force their vision of a utopia upon us all."
Cal's mind reeled, struggling to grasp the enormity of Joseph's revelation. Was this revelation the product of his own fractured psyche, a consequence of his prolonged resistance to the Animus? Or was it a stark truth, a glimpse into the machinations of the shadowy forces manipulating his fate?
As he contemplated the implications, Cal's thoughts turned to Sofia, the graceful and enigmatic figure who had drawn him into this labyrinth of deceit. Was she truly the serene angel she appeared to be, or was there a darker agenda driving her actions?
A tear traced its path down Cal's cheek, a silent testament to the tumultuous emotions raging within him.
"I'm going to find it," he declared, his voice trembling. "And help the Templars reveal Gensokyo...and put an end to violence and suffering once and for all."
Strangely, something seemed to soften in Joseph at Cal's words.
"That's not how it works," he said, as if he were speaking to a child claiming to kill a mountain. "People have to choose," he repeated softly, and then he spoke the last words that Cal had ever expected to hear from him: words from a poem Cal had last heard uttered by a young, sympathetic priest. Words about picking apples.
Cal's eyes filled with scalding tears, and he blinked them back fiercely. A lump suddenly swelled in his throat, threatening to choke off his words. He forced them through. It seemed important, now, that he say them to this man.
A faint, but genuine, smile touched Joseph's lips as his son recited the next line of the poem. "You do remember," he said, obviously moved.
A long pause followed. "It's all I have of her."
"Gensokyo is everything. The Youkai there survived on fear and conflict with humanity. The Assassins and your mother understood this truth. People must choose whether to accept this realm. But the Templars seek to impose it on everyone. Your mother died to ensure freedom of choice."
Cal's gaze shifted to his left hand, tightly grasping the back of his father's shirt, the necklace wound around his fingers.
"But she had no choice," Cal said, a newfound understanding settling in, wishing his father to grasp it as well.
Sofia and Alan Rikkin had warned Cal about the consequences of refusing to enter the Animus willingly. The evidence of their words surrounded him – people shuffling aimlessly or lost in vacant stares. For thirty years, Joseph Lynch had resisted entering the Animus without surrender. Despite his shattered state, he held onto his mind, his memories, refusing to relinquish them, even as they cut into him like a knife.
Cal recognized the resilience it must have taken for his father to endure. He himself had teetered on the brink of breaking in just a few days. He released his grip on his father's shirt and lowered his hand.
Carefully, Cal uncoiled the silver chain, noting the faint red marks it left on his fingers from the tight binding. He placed it around his father's sturdy neck, fastening it with trembling fingers that still clutched the blade with which one man had taken the life of the other's mother.
For a moment, Cal rested his hands gently on his father's shoulders, locking eyes with the cloudy gaze of his father.
"I do," Cal affirmed, a silent acknowledgment of their shared bond, forged by blood and love for the woman whose memory filled both their hearts.
Father and son, united in their sorrow and their resolve, exchanged a silent understanding before Cal turned away. Placing the knife on one of the beds, he walked calmly towards the door, knowing what he must do.
A guard intercepted Cal at the door. Cal relayed his destination, and the guard nodded in acknowledgment. Lost in a whirlwind of thoughts spanning past, present, and future—some not his own—Cal struggled to focus on the imminent events.
Stepping into a small, circular hub room with multiple doors, Cal recognized the familiar layout. One of the doors led to his intended destination. However, as the guard entered, a sudden flurry of movement ensued, and he collapsed instantly.
A thin, deadly instrument protruded from the guard's neck.
Instinctively, Cal reacted. His hands shot up to his throat, fingers desperately trying to pry the wire tightening around his neck. A fraction of a second later, and he would have met the same fate as the fallen guard.
In the struggle with his assailant, Cal observed that he wasn't acting alone. Lin and several others from the common room, who had previously eyed him with suspicion, now stood by, witnessing their fellow Assassin's attempt on Cal's life.
Among them stood the woman he had mistaken for an orderly, now revealed as one of the patients. Their orchestrated plan unfolded before Cal's eyes, threatening to succeed as the wire, while not slicing his neck, tightened, forcing him into his own suffocation.
Desperation fueled Cal's actions. Slipping his right hand from under the wire, he delivered a powerful elbow strike to his assailant's abdomen, eliciting a sharp grunt of pain. Swiftly switching hands, Cal landed another blow with his left elbow to the attacker's face, causing their grip to loosen momentarily.
Seizing the opportunity, Cal swiftly turned, grabbed Nathan, and charged toward the sealed doors, intent on escaping the perilous situation.
Despite Cal's efforts, Nathan stubbornly clung to the wire, tightening his grip even as Cal pressed his palm against Nathan's cheek, forcing him back. Cal, determined to break free, slammed down on the inner bend of Nathan's elbow, shattering the hold. Yet Nathan persisted, unleashing a flurry of blows in an attempt to break free from Cal's grasp. However, Cal held firm, wrapping a powerful arm around Nathan's throat in retaliation.
Just as the doors burst open, overridden by the guards, the Black Cross, Tadakuni, rushed toward Cal with his baton raised, ready to strike Nathan. Cal swiftly intercepted the blow, grabbing the baton before it could inflict harm and locking eyes with McGowen in a silent standoff.
As more guards flooded into the room, subduing the Assassins, even those who had merely watched, two of them wrestled Nathan into submission. Despite his struggles, Nathan managed to shout defiantly at Cal, accusing him of betraying the Creed.
"You're going to lead them straight to it!"
Cal watched as Nathan was dragged away, his words echoing in the chaos. Releasing his grip on the makeshift garrote around his neck, Cal dropped it to the ground. Tadakuni unwavering gaze bore into him as Cal, catching his breath, gestured toward the door he had intended to enter before the attack.
"Take me to the Animus," he demanded, his voice resolute.
