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SCL Chapter 104: Empathy Is a Curse
🕑 Added 2025-06-04 00:46:39 +0000 UTC“Your father, who witnessed all of this with his own eyes, eventually lost his mind,” Augustus said. “A few years later, someone told you he had taken his own life.”
“In the prison filled with psionics, your peers were labeled madmen, monsters, and freaks. But you… you were the freak among freaks—a super-monster.”
All around Kerrigan, the steel framework of the floor began to bend in unnatural arcs. Large marble fragments hovered in midair, and the steel bars writhed and twisted like serpents.
The soldiers nearby began to hear sharp psionic screams—not through their ears, but deep within their minds. Bloodshot eyes. Blood seeping from ears. Some collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
The wave of telepathy stemmed from a collective resonance, echoing through everyone’s consciousness. Kerrigan’s own grief—raw, uncontainable—poured into their hearts. Tears streamed from their eyes, tinted red with blood.
Kerrigan’s psionic level surged exponentially under the emotional strain. A human-born psionic storm was forming.
Direct psychic trauma could push a high-level psionic into full meltdown. And once control was lost—nothing would survive the outburst.
“Are you the Devil?”
Kerrigan nearly remembered now. In her hometown of Tarkossia, it was by her own hand that her family had been destroyed.
Her fate was a cruel, absurd tragedy.
She yearned for something beautiful—yet destroyed everything she touched. She longed to bring salvation and hope—yet ruin and despair followed her like a shadow.
“What are you waiting for, Corporal Faraday?” Augustus switched to another channel and issued the order to his commander. “Take her.”
With tears streaming down his face, Corporal Faraday snatched a heavy sniper rifle from one of his men—who was sobbing uncontrollably—and took aim at Kerrigan. The other soldiers, too, struggled to raise their weapons.
Fortunately, before a single shot could be fired, Kerrigan—completely drained—collapsed to the ground.
The floating stones dropped with her. Everyone was spared.
“How did you know all this?” asked the Shadow Guard from Umoja standing at Augustus’s side.
“It came from my loyal and reliable Korhal Intelligence Bureau,” Augustus replied calmly.
The Shadow Guard tilted his head, instinctively filled with awe for this enigmatic agency—one that might not even exist.
...
The sobbing had quieted a little.
Kerrigan clutched her blanket tightly.
But the blanket was gone—everything had already slipped away.
In her sleep, scenes from the past resurfaced, like memories reborn—
A small town, a garden with a greenhouse, and a verdant lawn in front of the house.
The sky was warm-toned, a soft yellow like flower petals.
Suddenly, the sky and everything around it were stained blood-red,
As if someone had splashed the same-colored paint across the scene.
In front of such a house, with a red dome roof—
A five-year-old Kerrigan, still completely ignorant of the world, had a sudden emotional outburst.
Unintentionally, she used her psionic powers to detonate the head of her mother, who was scolding her at the time.
Just like her father, who was preparing to drive the family into town—
Kerrigan, who witnessed the entire incident, fell into a prolonged state of shock.
But unfortunately, she didn’t go insane like her luckier father, Patrick Kerrigan.
Kerrigan numbed herself in pain, desperately trying to escape.
Yet her reawakening memories kept surging back.
During her graduation training at the Ghost Academy, fifteen-year-old Kerrigan infiltrated a politician’s home alone.
The politician had spoken the truth at a government press conference and was executed for it.
His wife and young daughters were killed alongside him.
Afterwards, a flood of sex scandals involving the deceased suddenly surfaced.
Police detectives and the sheriff conducted what appeared to be a strenuous investigation,
Eventually declaring, with visible regret, that the poor man—nearly decapitated by a single slash—had committed suicide.
A year later, someone finally spoke up for him.
Enraged by the groundless slander, people with strong emotions spent a few days remembering this great man,
Typing away on websites with passion.
And it wasn’t just this one family.
Since becoming a Ghost operative, Kerrigan had killed over a thousand people—
Most of them the innocent families of her assassination targets.
Each time she killed, the memories of those people were permanently imprinted onto the neural cells that stored Kerrigan’s memories.
The instructors at the Ghost Academy had lied to her.
Technologically, humanity could only overwrite memories with fake ones—never truly replace them.
In a certain sense, it was the psionic inhibitor that saved these Ghost operatives from going mad under such weight.
Yet ironically, the ones giving them the kill orders were the same people who created those inhibitors.
Whenever Kerrigan recalled the faces of the innocent and the thoughts they had right before dying, she felt profound pain.
As a powerful psionic, Kerrigan was more sensitive to emotion than others.
Others’ sorrow and suffering were infinitely amplified within her.
In fact, psionics are excellent listeners.
They are naturally empathetic, capable of deeply understanding the emotions of others.
This sensitivity makes them more loving toward their own kind, more inclined to care about others.
And yet, their fellow humans universally feared and rejected them.
Ghost operative Kerrigan was a walking contradiction.
Because of her mother’s death and her inherently kind heart, she held an intense aversion to killing others.
But the Confederacy had taken control of her—and ordered her to kill.
'I am unforgivable.'
Suddenly, Kerrigan jolted awake from her nightmare.
She heard voices nearby but didn’t open her eyes to see where she was.
There were low hums from nearby machines and the crisp clinking of glass containers.
Her body still ached faintly.
She endured the searing pain, forcing herself to remain silent.
At the same time, she sensed changes within her body.
Almost immediately, she realized that the psionic inhibitor implanted in the back left of her brain had been removed—
And done with exquisite precision.
Yet back at the Ghost Academy, her instructors had insisted that no one in the world could remove a psionic inhibitor.
Any attempt to forcibly extract it would lead to catastrophic consequences.
How strange.
Sixteen-year-old Kerrigan resolved, in her heart, to curse the Confederacy that had inflicted such endless pain upon her—
To prove that the inhibitor had truly been removed.
But Kerrigan wasn’t very good at cursing.
Her vocabulary was limited.
All she could manage was to call them pigs… or stupid little cookies.
“It’s quite similar to the process used for re-socialized soldiers,” a stranger’s voice said.
“This type of psionic inhibitor—or rather, neural controller—functions just like re-socialization programming.”
“Once this device is implanted, even a powerful psionic with strong telepathic abilities—someone previously deemed uncontrollable—can become a perfectly obedient soldier.”
“So you’re saying… whatever I want them to do, they’ll do?”
A smooth, magnetic voice spoke, accompanied by the sound of fingernails scraping against metal.
But without a doubt—it was the voice of a devil.
Words once spoken by a teacher at the church school resurfaced in Kerrigan’s mind:
“God said that those are the devils who walk among us—fallen from the one-third of angels. They are around us. They are killers.”
To drive out devils, one must buy—
Just like many remote frontier worlds within Terran Confederacy territory, far from the core systems and central planets,
Kerrigan’s homeworld had harsh living conditions.
And people placed far too much hope in religion.
Religions, once banned during Earth’s era, were flourishing again.
Ancient 'holy texts' were freely distorted and reinterpreted, spawning all kinds of sects—
Some derived from these texts, others worshiping bizarre creatures or malevolent gods.
But Kerrigan was an atheist.
“Is it mass-producible?” the devil asked.
“You mean the psionic inhibitor?” the previous voice replied.
“Not yet. We’re also unsure whether it’s even effective on ordinary humans.”
“It’s difficult to say whether the researchers from the lab that eventually became the Ghost Academy of the Terran Confederacy rushed to apply this technology after the advent of re-socialization... or if re-socialization itself was born from this.”
“Alright, another question, Doctor.” The devil spoke again.
“After the psionic inhibitor is removed—will Sarah Kerrigan return to normal?”
Kerrigan tried spreading her psionic field, attempting to pick up on the brainwaves produced by people’s thoughts—
To figure out what was happening.
But the result was catastrophic.
Without the control of the psionic inhibitor, Kerrigan’s suddenly unleashed power far exceeded anything she’d imagined.
With the sound of shattering light bulbs, glassware, and eyeglass lenses,
The surgical room was instantly plunged into semi-darkness.
Everyone looked… rather awkward.
Kerrigan, like a little girl who knew she’d done something wrong, covered her face.
After a brief moment of silence, she finally opened her eyes.
But when she brushed away the fiery red hair from her face and looked toward Augustus—
She nearly screamed in shock.
“You’re awake?” Augustus was shining a flashlight-like device directly under his chin.
Those cold gray eyes stared at Kerrigan.
“The surgery was a success.”
“You’re free now.” He bared his sharp teeth in a grin.
“Don’t forget who saved you.”
