Before Battle (Kingdom Hearts, Heartless)

Scratch that. The second worst part of the job was waiting, the worst was dying. Not that he really had much to live for… or anything that he wanted to live for, he just knew that living was supposed to be important. Or was it the way one died that was important? It didn’t matter, since right now he was still stuck in the waiting part.

241 shifted on his feet, resting a little more of his weight on his sharpened sword – sharpened thirty-seven times so far, for lack of anything better to do – and watched the ridge. He’d been watching the ridge for what the one knight who’d thought to bring a watch assured him was approaching two weeks.

He hoped the kid hadn’t gotten lost. He was starting to get impatient. Worse, what if the kid had already died?

The superiors would have told them… maybe. The superiors were a bit… whimsical in the information they shared. Like this job, for example. They, all thousand of them, had one job. Kill a kid. Seemed simple. But while the superiors had given them a place, they hadn’t set a time.

Go here, wait. That was their job. Go here and kill, or be killed. It should have been an easy job. It should have taken them an hour, at the most. Leave it to some stupid little kid to mess it all up by not showing up. Some days, the lack of consideration really irked him.