As I killed the mantis pinned beneath me, I wondered if that was a cry for mercy forming on her palps. First of all I brandished my knief (for I had disabled her with only my natural instruments), and watched it make fear on the face of the mantis below me, and her companion now halting a few strides away.
(I like to think I had the menace to make such a simple weapon chilling to behold.)
Then, one smooth motion drove the blade through the gushing lower flesh of the compound eye, hilting on ommatidia, and piercing the brain stem. They died, and I pulled the knife out with no further florishes.
I brandished the knife, but I did not twist the knife. For all that I injected fear, there was no flash to protracted suffering. I make it quick.
// I had a vesperbane’s speed. This means that while I used all my natural instruments – my legs, raptorials, dextrous tarsi – it as not my natural musculature that impelled it.
I didn’t believe in mercy. It lacked committment; if a fighting a vesperbane was a question, then the answer was death. I don’t like excusing mantids from following logic.
Think of it this way. Dead bandits mean this road is safe – safer – to travel for those making an honest living. Their protracted list of victims ends here. A living bandit – what does that get you? You scared them off, but the conditions that made the bandit remain, and no one ever chose to be a bandit if they could get by doing something else. So that just makes a bandit somewhere else; you’ve just made it someone else’s problem. Me, I kill them, and now it’s no one’s problem.
I’m considerate like that.