A cyberpunk soldier isekaied into a background character of a dating sim
The protagonist approached her, sobbing. "Why?" she choked out, her voice raw. "Why would you do that? You didn't need to kill them."
The woman who had done the killing was, by any conventional measure, unremarkable. Short, stout, with eyes far too old for her young face. She was drenched in blood that was not her own, though less than there might have been, given the circumstances. Her torn shirt hung loose, exposing scandalous amounts of skin yet she did not shy away like a maid in her situation normally would. She did not care. She regarded the weeping girl with an expression of mild, clinical detachment. Then, as if she had heard a strange noise in a familiar house and found it to be nothing, turned away, uninterested.
The handsome prince and his retinue of male leads, the swordsman, the mage, the rogue, the strategist, moved to loom over them both, positioning themselves in a loose arc. They watched, silent judges in an impromptu tribunal.
"Are you just going to ignore her because she's a commoner?" the prince demanded, his voice carrying the easy authority of one who had never been truly challenged. "Answer the question."
The woman sighed, a sound heavy with the weight of a thousand exhausted explanations. "Because the conversation would be meaningless, your highness," she said, her tone flat. "I would give my explanation. She wouldn't ultimately care, because she is young and good and has never stood at a crossroads where every path led through a swamp of consequences. She would respond, predictably with, 'That doesn't matter. You shouldn't have killed them.' Because she believes, in her innocence, that all men can be reasoned with, that every conflict has a solution where no one gets hurt. Perhaps she's right, in the abstract. Perhaps there was a theoretical world where diplomacy prevailed."
She paused, her eyes distant, seeing something the others could not.
"But the reality, as I saw it, was this; there were forty-five of us. You six were designated as high-value assets, worth a fortune in ransom, or exchangeable for pardons. Untouchable. The rest of us? We were the garnish. The sons and daughters of lesser nobility, useful enough to hold, expendable enough to lose. They were going to make a point, a demonstration of their seriousness. It would have been one of the sons from our section. A spare heir, a backup. The women, however, would likely have been spared the initial killing."
She let that sink in before continuing, her voice dropping lower.
"But the crew? Twenty-six men, all of them months at sea. And men who have power over women, in such circumstances, almost invariably use it. And before you think, 'Oh, that's terrible, but at least they're still alive,' let me tell you about the man I saw scratch his groin every few seconds. A near-certain indicator of a venereal disease; most likely a strain of necrotizing syphilis that causes the skin to rot from the bone. An agonizing, disfiguring death, with no cure and no treatment. A death that would have been preceded by humiliation, terror, and pain."
She turned now, fixing the protagonist with a gaze that was not unkind, but utterly unflinching.
"The reality is that whether you're highborn or lowborn, your value as a woman is quantified by a single, brutal metric; whether a man has ever penetrated you. You may think that's extreme. You may think I'm cynical. But I want you to think back to every story you've ever heard about a woman having sex, willingly or not, outside of wedlock. Did you ever dismiss it as unimportant? Did you ever continue to treat her exactly the same way? If she was highborn, was she not suddenly 'damaged goods,' unmarriageable, her entire life's trajectory derailed by something that was done to her? And if she was lowborn, did she not become an object of pity at best, scorn at worst? The highborn woman, raped or not, becomes a political liability. Her purpose, the one society has drilled into her since birth, evaporates. Her options narrow to two, sex work, which carries the same risk of disease, or a life as a social pariah. A life of pity, of cutting remarks, of isolation. And often, a life that ends by her own hand."
There was scandal on all of their faces, it meant nothing to her, she continued.
"People think violence is a sudden act. A flash of rage, a single moment of madness. But it can be slow, indirect, systematic. Those men didn't have to kidnap us. They didn't have to threaten to kill us. They didn't have to lock us away like cargo. They chose all of it. And when you choose to put someone in a situation where they don't know what will happen to them, you forfeit the right to complain when they fight back, even if that fight entails killing you. They created those circumstances. I simply responded to them."
The prince opened his mouth to speak, but she held up a blood-slicked hand, silencing him. And like the boy he still was, he complied.
"But you'll say, 'You didn't have to kill them. There could have been another way. Sneaking, knocking them out, incapacitating them.' Let me disabuse you of that notion. We were on a ship. Tight, narrow corridors. An unfamiliar layout. An unknown number of crew. Several of the boys here had trained with swords since they could walk, and you might think that would have been enough. But the reality is that a sword is useless when you have no room to swing it. In those confines, the pirates had shorts words and knives, weapons made for close quarters. And a swordsman trained in the dueling style of a court is about as effective in a hallway without a sword as a fisherman is in a ballroom. They would have been cut down in seconds. Their deaths would have been swift, but not silent. The rest would have panicked and complied, and more hostages would have died as a deterrent. Sneaking was impossible. Forty-five people cannot move in silence. Someone would have made a sound, and the body count would have begun."
She looked at the group, her gaze sweeping over each of them.
"I'm used to killing. None of them are. I've been doing it since I was seven years old. I don't enjoy it, it's a tool, nothing more. A tool I can use when the situation calls for it. I can remain calm. I can speak with direction and authority. I can act decisively while others freeze. And I did. And not a single hostage was lost. Not one."
The protagonist was silent, tears still streaming down her face, the women knew that no matter what she said, the protagonist would not waiver. They never did. They were stagnant in their ways unable to grow. She would be a girl until she’s 60. But she continued regardless, because the prince of this world, the male lead of this story, demanded it.
And who was a background character compared to the keystone to it all?
"So to recap," her voice sharpening. "If we had done nothing, hostages would have been killed, and the women would have been violated. If we had tried to sneak out, we would have been caught, and some of us would have died in the attempt or been killed as an example. And if I had let anyone else take the lead? They would have died. They would have taken a life, or watched a friend die, and the psychological trauma might have destroyed them. Survivor's guilt, PTSD, self-medication, eventually an early death from their own hand or from liver failure as the result of a lifetime of trying to forget. I took the only path that eliminated the threat, because people tend to stop doing things after they die, and I absorbed the psychological cost so that no one else had to."
She squared her shoulders, meeting the protagonists innocent eyes.
"I will never regret what I did on that boat. No matter what you say, everyone here is alive, and as whole as they can be, because of what I did. So, respectfully, fuck off."
She turned to the prince, her expression hardening into a sardonic mask.
"Was my conversation with your whore sufficient, my prince? Or would you like to hear it again, slower?"
