Heimweh

Shahanshahi Shahrivar 2576 ——-9/2017 On the frozen border of Georgia, where the air carried a strange scent of soil and cold, and the chill permeated the very bone, a heavy, ominous silence had replaced the screams and barrages of gunfire. The scene was a harsh and brutal canvas; a genuine sea of blood flowed upon the hard ground, and the lifeless bodies of Zhang Chanyeol’s men were scattered like the shattered waves of a mighty storm. In the midst of this devastation, the poised and flawless silhouette of a woman utterly commanded the surrounding space. Mahi, with a dazzling beauty that concealed its danger behind light, like a polished sword, had aimed the weapon precisely at the head of Dr. Zhang Chanyeol. This absolute, inhuman calm in the face of a massive volume of blood and death was not born of courage, but was the progeny of that hidden flaw in her cerebral cortex's amygdala: a cold void that allowed her to view death merely as a solved equation, not a catastrophe. With the composure of a statue, she stared at the bloody vista, as if merely observing the repainting of walls. Then, with an indifferent tone, she spoke in English: "You truly were a bad nuisance, Dr. Zhang." Mahi never bothered herself with learning many languages; in her world, people were merely tools to reach a goal, and she preferred the language of efficiency and power over conventional tongues. Therefore, one of her team members standing nearby—Joongkook—instantly translated that final message into Korean with the same coldness. This itself was a symbol of her absolute power: she would not trouble herself to speak the enemy's language; the enemy had to die in the language she chose. A brief moment, broken only by the sound of the translation, and then, the end of the nuisance arrived. Precisely in the fraction of a second that Mahi's finger felt its weight upon the trigger, the sudden, digital chime of her watch—a wholly jarring and irrelevant sound—tore through the deadly silence of the Georgian border. The sound of that alarm, with its superficial and cheerful tune, harshly summoned the outside world to this frozen slaughterhouse. It was her birthday night. She was the daughter of the September Persephone; the very Goddess of Beauty who must forcibly journey to the underworld and darkness at the beginning of autumn. Mahi gritted her teeth until the sound muffled in her own ears; with a voice slightly tinged by personal anger and loneliness, no longer strictly professional, she addressed the vanquished Dr. Zhang: "Because of you, Dr. Zhang, I am away from my family on my birthday night." Without further hesitation, she fired a burning shot, lethal and direct, straight toward Zhang's heart. Mahi cast her gaze over the corpse of Zhang Jimin, surveying the three loyal shadows who had functioned as inseparable members of her body throughout these years. Savaş the Turk, Joongkook the Korean, and Sonia the Indian, were the very ones whose shared fire of operations had fused them together; a four-person operative unit whose bond was firmer than any organizational mandate.