[ sam doesn't wince, exactly, but he does hear the defensiveness in viktor and yeah, okay. he deserved that. the stakes viktor had been working against and the decisions he made while fighting them are not something that sam would argue.

he's seen men make much worse decisions when faced with their own mortality. and he's got a feeling viktor knows that more than anyone else.

still - sam can't shake that feeling. what happened in thorne, what happened in that attack, was because of the hexcore. so what were they supposed to do now? ]

I'm not saying destroy it. [ sam shakes his head. ] Whatever they're were gonna have, they have. I just mean if we end up on the other side of a line of these guys, are we going to know what to do.

[ it's hard not to have his immediate thoughts go straight to war, but given everything they've seen as of late, it'd be foolish not to see it on the horizon. ]