The Child Was Ruined

Only then did Lin Mo come back to himself. He looked up at her and said in a low, grave voice, each word clear: "You almost killed him."

Joanna froze. A flicker of shock crossed her eyes. She had never imagined that protecting Lin Mo would earn her that tone, that judgment.

"He was trying to take you." She pressed her lips together, sounding hurt as she instinctively defended herself.

"That still doesn't mean you can kill him," Lin Mo said firmly.

Joanna's brows drew tight. "Why?"

"Because he couldn't hurt us anymore."

"But he tried to take you first." She clung stubbornly to her reasoning.

"So you could stop him."

"I did stop him!" Joanna looked up at him, her gaze open and honest.

"Then you tried to hit him in the head." Lin Mo went straight to the point.

Joanna turned toward the dent in the wall. After a moment's silence, she said evenly, "He's still alive."

"That's why I said you almost killed him." Lin Mo stressed the words, trying to make her understand where the line lay.

"If I killed him, he couldn't take you."

She sounded so natural, so calm, as though she were stating something utterly ordinary.

Lin Mo felt a headache coming on. Perhaps he simply wasn't a good teacher or guide.

The truth was, if Joanna hadn't been there and those men had come for him, Lin Mo might have killed them all. That was the exact opposite of what he wanted to teach her.

It was his own idealism at work. He wanted Joanna to become the person he wished he could be, though he couldn't manage it himself.

In the past, he had used simple little stories to teach her, bit by bit, to be gentle, to treat the weak kindly, and to value life.

But when real danger and real conflict arrived, those gentle, simple lessons all but stopped working.

The instinct rooted deep in Joanna was still to choose the most direct, most extreme solution: destroy the threat completely so it could never return.

"You can't do that." Lin Mo breathed out softly, his expression growing graver.

Joanna looked up at him, her eyes full of confusion. "Why?"

Lin Mo faltered and fell silent.

Countless answers circled through his mind: a life could not be replaced; a response should be proportionate to the threat; the person carrying out an order should not bear all the blame for it; rules and laws existed to restrain people...

But those abstract principles, rooted in society, human nature, and law, were too distant for Joanna. She had never lived in ordinary human society. She knew nothing of laws, social ties, or the bonds between people.

She did not know that the guard who had done wrong might have been forced into it. Beneath his protective suit, he was someone's family, someone they cared about, with a life and vulnerabilities of his own.

The world as she saw it was terribly simple: someone wanted to take Lin Mo away, so that person was an enemy and had to be eliminated.

By her most straightforward cause-and-effect logic, she had done nothing wrong.

"He was going to hurt you," Joanna said again, utterly sincere.

"I protected you."

She watched Lin Mo quietly, hope hidden in her eyes. As she had so many times after doing some small task, she waited obediently for his praise and approval.

She waited for Lin Mo to rub her head, to tell her she had done well, to praise her for learning to protect him and control her strength.

But no praise came.

"You weren't wrong to protect me," Lin Mo said slowly, acknowledging her pure intentions first. Then his voice grew solemn.

"But you can't just kill someone because you're protecting me."

The hope vanished from Joanna's eyes. Their light slowly dimmed, and the innocent expectation on her face gave way to bewilderment.

"He isn't just someone."

"He's a bad person."

"You don't know him. You don't know if he had a choice," Lin Mo explained patiently.

"He tried to take you. That makes him bad." Joanna's logic was simple and stubborn. She would not budge.

"Someone might have ordered him to do it."

Joanna's eyes darkened. "Then the person who gave the order is bad too."

For a moment, Lin Mo had no answer.

This sudden confrontation had been a scheme orchestrated by Vought from the start. The guards were only pawns following orders.

But he could not follow Joanna's logic to its conclusion. If he agreed, she would classify the entire bunker—all the researchers and guards involved in the test—as "bad people," threats that needed to be eliminated.

"Even if he did something bad, that doesn't mean he has to die now." Lin Mo kept his patience and tried to guide her.

Joanna tilted her head slightly, confusion all over her face. "Why?"

The same simple question left Lin Mo completely at a loss. He could not find a plain answer that would make her understand at once.

"Because people aren't like broken toys," he said at last.

"You can't just replace them, and you can't break them because you don't like them."

Joanna pursed her lips and answered bluntly.

"I don't like him."

"So?" Lin Mo looked at her, his brows faintly furrowed.

Joanna lifted her head a little and fixed her eyes on him. Her voice grew stiff, edged with the hurt of being misunderstood.

"And he hurt you."

She took half a step forward, her gaze locked on Lin Mo's face. She spoke slowly, solemn and stubborn.

"I protected you."

After that, she watched him in silence. The light in her eyes faded, leaving confusion and disappointment she could not hide.

"And you're still upset."

That was the one thing she could not understand.

She had never been troubled by hurting the guard, nor had she felt the slightest fear at nearly taking his life. To her, eliminating a threat was only natural.

What she could not understand was why, after doing everything she could to protect Lin Mo, she had received silence and stern criticism instead of his approval.

"I'm not angry because you protected me."

Lin Mo let out a soft breath and slowed his words, explaining with care.

"I'm angry because you kept attacking him after you'd already stopped him."

Joanna stubbornly defended herself on instinct.

"I was afraid he'd come back."

"You could have watched him, held him down, or waited for the others to come in."

Lin Mo raised a hand, making a small gesture to show the difference. His voice was stern but gentle.

"But you couldn't just kill him."

Joanna pressed her lips tight and fell silent for a long time.

Lin Mo's words and her own understanding pulled against each other in her mind. At last, she looked up.

"You're helping him."

"I'm trying to stop you from making a mistake," Lin Mo corrected helplessly.

He understood now. Homelander must have been just this stubborn, forever digging in his heels.

"You're helping him."

She repeated it word by word. Her voice had gone cold, stripped of all softness and filled with unmistakable hurt and displeasure.

Lin Mo watched her expression turn cold. At last, he understood: to Joanna, this argument had never been about whether it was right to kill someone who could no longer fight back.

It was an absolute question of sides. Whose side was Lin Mo on?

She had thrown herself in front of him without hesitation, struck down the attacker with her bare hands, checked at once that he was safe, and used all her strength to protect him.

But Lin Mo had not soothed her fraught nerves. He had not cared about how frightened and tense she had been. He had not acknowledged her wholehearted effort to protect him.

Instead, the first person he had spoken up for was the stranger who had tried to hurt them.

In Joanna's simple, pure, black-and-white world, where there was no room for anyone outside her circle, that was betrayal in its plainest form.