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The Story:
The sun snuck over the hills and splashed her face with light. She felt like she had just laid down, but never catching enough sleep to erase the stress of her everyday life was part of the job.
She tossed dirt onto the embers of her campfire and took in the mountain view from her bluff. Such beauty could only reside in the vast landscapes she often hunted through. The human heart was too small to contain beautiful things.
A movement on the opposite hillside caught her attention. She sighed. They always tried to run.
It had been over a decade since the revolution that destroyed the tyrannical clans that terrorized their villages, but most of the leaders had fled. It was her job to hunt them down and kill them. And she was good at her job.
Picking up her crossbow and taking aim, she fired an arrow with a cable attached across the divide of the two hillsides. It embedded itself deep into a tree trunk on the other side. She secured her end of the cable and fastened a device with handlebars to it.
With a thermal imaging eyepiece covering her left eye, she zip lined to the other side. Halfway through her trip, she saw the man she was hunting on her thermal imager, so she pulled out a handgun and fired one shot. A scream reverberated throughout the mountain range.
On the other side, she dropped from the zip line and sprinted up the hill to where her target had fallen. It was John Stroll, former leader of Reaper Clan. He was bleeding from the thigh, and holding his hand out for her to stop, but she lifted her gun, intending to fire straight through his hand.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?”
A small boy came running over to Stroll. She hadn’t even noticed him.
“No, son. No, just go on home to your mother and sisters. Just go. Go!”
The boy ran off, and they were alone. Some invisible force was preventing her from pulling the trigger, like she had so many times before.
“A family?”
“A decade is a long time for change,” Stroll replied helplessly.
She slowly put her gun down and turned to walk away.
“Don’t let me catch you again.”
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