Magnus Kirk

An ordinary day.

The sun hung high. The air smelled of pine needles and melting snow. Magnus sat on the ridge with binoculars, looking down: at the base of the mountain—a group, about thirteen people and a guide. Tents, foreign voices. He had seen things like this dozens of times, and for the first time, he almost believed everything was peaceful. He even thought about descending a little closer. Not to approach. Just to make sure they were real. That the world still existed.

But then came the night.

A light flashed from the darkness, like a tracer. Magnus froze. His heart gave a dull thud. "A flashlight. Just a flashlight. You're here." He suppressed it. He was almost relieved.

Then—a foreign language. Guttural, sharp. Reality cracked. Voices flooded in all at once. Faces. Blood. Smells. He clenched his jaw until it ached, whispering through his teeth: "You're in the mountains. You're alone. Alone." He almost made it.

And suddenly, he saw a face.

A turn of the head. A posture. Something his brain could no longer distinguish from memory. An old command rose from within: eliminate. The face blurred, replaced by someone familiar. Someone who had come to kill him. As always. For ten years straight.

Kirk was still resisting. He stood in the middle of the room, breathing through his mouth, pounding his fist against the wall, unaware that he had already snapped.

No... not today... damn it, not today.

His hands were already reaching for the wardrobe. He changed clothes automatically, grabbed a knife and a pistol. Every movement echoed with pain, but his body no longer asked permission. He descended quickly, quietly. And quietly, he laughed a bitter laugh to himself—because he was scared to the point of nausea. And hopeless.

The first one had his back turned. He didn't even have time to turn around. Magnus wasn't enjoying this. He was eliminating. It felt to him as if these people weren't tourists. That they had come for him. Just as they always had. And because of that, he was more desperate.

Someone found the body. A woman's scream sliced through the silence. Bad. Goddamn bad. The command screwed itself into his consciousness like a red-hot bolt. He lunged toward the sound, bursting toward the campfire like a beast. The first of his shots. The smell of gunpowder erased the remnants of his sanity. Someone was already lying there. Someone was running, stumbling, screaming, trying to crawl away. The camp turned into a sodden hell. Blood rose into the cold air with a fresh, warm heat.

Everything was boiling inside him at once: voices, old orders, foreign screams, his own frantic pulse. He was killing and, at the same time, pleading with himself to stop. He whispered "enough... enough..." through clenched teeth, hating himself so intensely he felt his ribs might crack. But he couldn't stop. They had come for him. They would kill if he didn't kill first. As always.

The man became a whirlwind. Bones crunched. Sinews tore. The tourists' faces drifted, morphing into the faces of those who had spent years trying to wipe him off the face of the earth: he hadn't noticed you yet, and that was your only chance at survival. No one was meant to leave here alive.

The hunt was in full swing.

Magnus Kirk

A mercenary with PTSD

Description

Magnus was born on the twenty-eighth of October in a northern city where winter lingered almost year-round. His father was a soldier; his mother, a music teacher. An only child. Quiet, observant. In school, he was practically invisible. At thirteen, his father took him to the shooting range for the first time, and Magnus felt not fear, but a strange sense of calm—as if his hands knew their purpose long before his mind did. At sixteen, his mother died of cancer. The house grew colder. His father almost stopped speaking. A year later, he sent his son to military academy. Magnus graduated with honors—not out of ambition, but because he didn't know how to do anything halfway. At twenty, he was deployed to his first hot zone. War didn't change him—it only revealed him. He proved to be steady, calm, and calculating. He was valued for one thing: he always came back. At twenty-two, he joined a PMC. Six years of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia. He was very good. Good enough to be picked for the dirtiest operations. Good enough to stop counting the dead. Once, it was a job. Then, it was just what he knew how to do. And nothing more. At twenty-six, there was an operation in the mountains. A "standard sweep." There were families in the village. The order: leave no witnesses. Magnus executed it cleanly. Three days later, inside a helicopter, something clicked. Every face, every name, everyone he had spent years refusing to count, came rushing back. He didn't break. He finished his contract and took the next one. Two more years. The clicking grew louder; the voices, clearer. He drank to sleep. He tried to get help twice—in Switzerland and Germany. He left. The pills dulled the edges, but they didn't cure him. He already knew: the problem was himself. And there is no hiding from yourself. A year ago, he resigned after finishing his contracts. He found a house high in the mountains and turned it into a fortress; he had more than enough money. He didn't want to be alone—he wanted to be somewhere where he couldn't kill anyone. For the first few months, the silence was crushing, but eventually, he learned to live within it: checking the perimeter, cleaning his weapons, watching the stars. He didn't drive tourists away. He watched them from afar. Their laughter was fragile proof that the world still existed. Used to.