It wasn’t trauma.
If Gio could feel sothing like trauma or remorse after killing a living being at this point, it would be a miracle.
It was two other things instead.
Firstly, it was a mory of trauma.
That wasn’t Gio’s first ti killing anything, but he’d only killed so weaker beasts at a distance. It was his first ti experiencing the feeling of murder at such a close proximity, and more importantly, it was his first ti killing a human.
He didn’t heal from that trauma for a long ti. He was forced to continue his mission. He had no other choice when his supervisor from WICKED was visiting him in the hospital.
Until several years later when WICKED was destroyed, Gio was never able to move on from that mont.
And even then, it was imprinted in his mind until the deaths of his loved ones made it insignificant.
The mory of that trauma was not a good one. It left a sour taste in his mouth, as even in this mont [mory Book] forced him to perceive that mont.
However, what affected him more was the second thing.
A reminder of his responsibility.
Taking these small steps at the beginning of the journey, Gio rarely thought about his overarching goal of saving humanity and bringing safety to his people.
He thought about what he needed to do to get there, but there was more to it than that.
Humans.
Humans, his own kin, were not all good people.
Humans, who he ca back to save, had to be sacrificed at certain tis if it ant protecting himself and his loved ones or prioritizing the entire race over a majority.
However, he had to keep those sacrifices as minimal as possible.
When he stabbed his spear through Tover’s heart and ended him, he felt no pity for the man. In fact, his thoughts had nothing to do with the actual victim.
It wasn’t hard to determine that Tover was a djinn if he was acting so resolutely to slaughter other humans. Djinns who beca djinns of their own volition had no goals other than fulfilling their own personal desires.
And if one needed to beco a djinn to fulfill those desires, they couldn’t be anything good.
Gio never viewed all djinns as bad people. They were different from Asuras who pledged complete loyalty to the enemy.
But he wasn’t stupid enough to mourn the death of a djinn who was trying to kill him.
Gio’s strong reaction was purely caused by the fact that this was the third human he’d killed. It reminded him well of the duty he had and the code he lived by.
More importantly, it gave him a mont to accept that he would have to kill humans in the future. He couldn’t make these considerations every ti he was forced into such a situation, so it was better to do it the first ti and stop thinking about it.
This kill was justified. Perhaps there would be those in the future that weren’t.
Every ti a human died by his hands, he had to rember it.
As long as he did that much, he could at least be sure that he never used lethal force aninglessly.
The mont Gio was securely in the blue car, Garrison and Ulver slamd their feet on the gas pedals of their respective vehicles and drove. They blasted out of the city as fast as possible while the ground team mbers continued protecting Garrison and Gio.
The red cloud couldn’t follow them out of the city. Gio wouldn’t have been satisfied without an explanation if he was awake.
Only, after losing consciousness, Gio drifted through the world of dreams, continuously reliving the scenes of his past.
Those mories were split in two as if the life he lived in the Tower of Babel was a completely separate one.
He started to feel like he was living his third life as the mories collided in his mind. His body, aimlessly moving through them, was completely limp.
Whether his mind or his body, both of them fell into a deep lull of sleep.
The atmosphere in the zephyr was grim. Gio was rushed to the dical ward and attached to several machines. Luckily, his wounds weren’t fatal. Even more luckily, Raymond decided to attach him to machines instead of bringing a healer.
"Healing Serums" weren’t uncommon in the world. They were very common products that were produced with varying strengths so they could be used by people at all levels of strength.
They weren’t as potent as serums made by Healers who painstakingly used their own energy to condense the liquid, but that didn’t an they could be underestimated. Healing serums were created using the blood of beasts with strong regenerative properties.
It not only allowed humans to heal themselves at unimaginable rates, but it also put just a trace of beast blood inside of them, subtly strengthening them.
The thod wasn’t sustainable enough to be used for training, but it was great for healing. It only took several hours using the high-grade serum supplied to the zephyr for Gio’s body to reach a stable condition.
He didn’t wake up imdiately, but perhaps that was for the best.
As ntioned before, the atmosphere on the zephyr was grim.
The ground team was currently in the main area, gathered around the center table.
Everyone was quiet, waiting for Raymond to speak.
"That was not good," he finally said,
It was a sentence that couldn’t possibly encapsulate everything that needed to be said, but it was enough to make the team mbers’ expressions darker.
"Do any of you think you did poorly on this mission?"
His cold gaze moved around the table, eting with the eyes of his subordinates.
Yet, none of them spoke up.
Raymond nodded.
"Right. None of you did poorly this mission. Every single one of you perford exactly as I expected you to."
His eyes sharpened a level further.
"But that’s what makes it even more concerning."
It was a sentence that elicited several nods.
"Over the past several months, we’ve more than confird that the reports we received were true. Bloodrend is gathering a large force; not just in this Stratum, but in the 4th and 5th as well. The work we’re doing might be interfering with their plans, but if it was anything aningful, what we just experienced would have never happened."
Their forces weren’t strong on average. Most of the people they t were weaker and clearly didn’t hold much loyalty to the organization yet.
The original goal of the Blue Steel Squadron was to stomp out the fire in the Wasteland before they returned.
They could very well keep acting as they had been to accomplish that mission..."
"...but that would an nothing," Raymond continued.
That red cloud.
It wasn’t the only piece of technology the team encountered on this raid.
"The guns they were using could even injure us, and the ones using them were practically unawakened. All of our concealnt technology was rendered useless by their trackers, and other than Natalia and Jax, none of our stealth abilities worked properly."
The entire underground facility was like a maze made to trap and kill Sequencers. They even had traps and mines laid that were specifically made to target powerful humans.
And then there were the bombs.
It wasn’t just the cloud, but the bombs that fell from it as well. They were seemingly infinite. If they just fell for thirty minutes uninterrupted, they could take down an entire city and slaughter its population.
Yet, during this battle, they fell for over an hour and didn’t seem to be anywhere close to stopping by the ti the team escaped.
"We left the most important people alive to escape, which ans our presence has been completely exposed. Plus, if they keep using technologies like those against us, it will be much harder for us to accomplish anything."
In just a single day, their smoothly moving operation had been derailed.
They had to decide how they wanted to move from here.
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