[ TT ] You are a superhero , and you just fought and killed your strongest nemesis after a grueling battle that destroyed most of the city and surrounding regions . You are left at the edge of death , then the villain 's child walks up to you , tears streaming down their face .

Nergui opened up her eyes and howled in pain. Her right leg had been shattered by thousands of shards of metal, the handiwork of that damned telekinetic from last night. She gargled the drool in her mouth, rinsing around at sand-filled cheeks before spitting onto the ground. 
 
 Weak and weary, she inched her right arm up and down, feeling the hard metal of her sniper rifle at the exposed bone of her elbow. Nergui swore loudly and hobbled up to stand upon her left leg. The Eastern mercenary hardly batted an eyelash as she looked at the aftermath of her bout with that corporate hitman who'd been handling defense out in the region. 
 
 Nergui gazed out at pits of gravel and fallen steelworks scoured all around her. When Zhang Corporation told her that they'd be helping her out with a `` minor airstrike,'' that'd been a vast understatement. The area had been all but devastated. The woman felt around for any trace of life still wandering. She'd heard only the minor pitter-patter of a child's footsteps and that was all there was within eight square kilometers of her location. There had been no cry of babies trapped under rubble or mothers screaming in horror of the sight of the many corpses in the street. 
 
 Nergui sighed. She hoped that the little sidekick she'd picked up made it out of Dhahran in time. It'd be a pity to go through all of this work just to lost the only friendly she'd found while doing her routine search-and-destroy work here. 
 
 Yeah, search-and-destroy, the hero thought as she propped the rifle up as a cane and began to move. 
 
 The pitter-patter of the child gave way to a sight of a young boy rushing towards her. He bore a strong resemblance to that superpowered hitman, Malik. Same eyes, lip structure. Even had the same widow's peak of a hairline right at the top of his head. Must've been his son, thought Nergui. 
 
 Nergui frowned and steadied herself on a single leg, using the other to stabilize the rifle at hip-level. There was no need to bother with the scope. Nergui could make the shot from there. Just a perk of having enhanced senses across the board. 
 
 The boy stopped before her, hot tears dropping on his cheeks. Neither of them exchanged a single word. They could n't, because of their tongues, and they would n't, for what happened last night. Nergui kept her rifle ready to fire, with her finger on the trigger, the safety off, and the barrel at the kid's center of mass. 
 
 Malik's son mumbled some words over and over again. Her basic, childlike grasp of the language allowed her to decipher it as some sort of mourning prayer. Though, whether it was for himself or his father, Nergui did n't know. 
 
 It was days like this that Nergui wished that she could hide behind a name like the rest of the heroes of the world. A good fake name would do wonders for people like Shadowedge, Ultraman, and Megagretchen. They get the right to distance themselves, to use their identities to represent their beliefs and codes. 
 
 Nergui was not one of those heroes. So, whatever she decided to do, whatever course of action that ended up killing tens of thousands, it was on her and not some mask or cape. The woman hero knew enough about situations like these, growing up with smuggled comic books and war stories that her father used to tell her back in his day. 
 
 She knew the gun was loaded, so she just did what she had to do. She emptied out the last few bullets in the magazine and hobbled off with the rifle as a crutch. She saw no one and felt no living thing for miles upon miles until she arrived at her transport ship at the port. As her dirtied vessel floated out to the Gulf, to return home back East, she looked out at the dead city and sighed, content knowing that Malik's son would never grow up to take his revenge against her. 
 
 She would not let a revenge story play against her.
