Chương 14: Talia

The system was still grinding through her foundation, and Talia felt every second of it. It worked the way anyone would dread, her cultivation being unmade layer by layer from the ground up, decades of careful building dismantled by something that did not even have the decency to hate her while it did it. That was her punishment. She endured it the way she endured everything, with her jaw set and her tail still, and she reminded herself for the hundredth time that she did not deserve this. It wasn't her fault.

The system had failed her people first. When the Abyss came for her planet, the system had watched, and she had done what a chief does, she had found a way for her tribe to survive. That the way had teeth in it was not her crime. The system, cold and unthinking as it was, could not weigh need. It only weighed rules. She exhaled through her nose and looked over the rest of them. Forty Kharai, give or take, placed across the pale holding ground the system had penned them in. Pitiful was the kind word.

They lounged and paced and picked at each other, slim through the shoulders and chest, heavy through the hips and thighs, big padded feet built to throw a body forward faster than anything else alive. Speed was what her people had been known for, once. It had not saved a single one of them.

Every set of eyes that turned her way glowed the same dull red as her own, and every one of them belonged to a criminal, because only criminals and desperate chiefs had accepted the Abyss when it was offered, and the Abyss did not care which you were. She could feel what they felt. The urge sat under her skin day and night, a low constant whisper to kill anything that lived, anything that moved, and loudest of all anything that carried the system's touch. The others barely fought it.

She fought it constantly, and mostly won, and hated that mostly was the honest word. Her gaze settled on the one sulking nearest to her, and she let her eyes do what her eyes did. [Tainted Kharai, Kariro - Level 3] The level did not bother her. Her own power sat barely a handful of rungs above his right now, which was its own humiliation, but levels came back.

The word in front of his name was the thing that left a sour taste at the back of her throat, because the same word sat on her own status like a stain that had soaked through to the skin. Tainted. As if she were spoiled meat. There was a way out of the word, at least. She had turned the terms over enough times to know them cold. Kill enough of the system-touched humans in this tutorial and the taint could be cleansed, burned out of them by the system's own accounting. But cleansed was not the same as free.

Cleansed criminals still had sentences waiting, and a cleansed slave was still a slave. The count that bought cleansing was one number. The count that bought freedom was a much larger one. So the arithmetic of her situation was simple, and she had never once been bad at arithmetic. Kill enough to be clean. Then keep killing until she owns herself again. She would have to drag their corpse back to their settlement for it to count tho. annoyance. She did not know these people she had been penned with.

That part almost made her laugh. Her tribe had been one of the largest on the planet, hundreds of thousands strong under her word, and out of all of them the system had scooped up forty strangers and one chief. Most of them had probably never stood close enough to know her face. They had learned it fast enough here.

The first day, when a few of them had looked at her the way males look at a female they think is alone, she had torn the ears off two and the tail off a third and let the screaming do her introductions for her. The rest had submitted within the hour. Kariro had submitted last, a full day after everyone else, out of pride or stupidity or both, and for that he had earned the honor of being her favorite. Ten days.

That was the number the system had given them, ten days penned in this pale nothing while their shackled levels seeped back like water into cracked earth, and then they would be released into the tutorial proper. She could feel the return happening if she sat still enough, strength trickling in a drop at a time, maddening in the way a healing itch is maddening. Nine of those days still remained, and Talia was already so bored she could have chewed through stone.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. So she trained.

"Up," she said. Kariro got up. He had learned that much. She rolled her shoulders once, let her movement skill catch, and crossed the space between them faster than his eyes tracked, planting a foot in his ribs that sent him skipping across the ground like a stone on water. He came to rest in a heap, coughed, and got up again without being told, which was why he was her favorite.

Both of her working skills sat at Novice rank, the movement art and her mana manipulation alike, and the tag offended her every time she looked at it. She wrapped raw mana around her leg on the next pass, clumsy, wasteful, the coating bleeding off her like heat off a stone, and swatted Kariro out of the air mid-dodge. Once she had shaped mana the way other people shaped breath.

That knowledge was gone now, and this was the part of the punishment that actually hurt, worse than the levels, worse than the word on her status. The system had not taken her life from her. It had taken the parts of her that knew things. Her mastery, her techniques, the ten thousand repetitions that lived in a body's memory, even the memory of what rank she had stood at, all of it scooped out clean, leaving the events of her life intact but hollowed where power used to sit. She remembered learning.

She no longer remembered what she had learned. If she still had those memories, both of these skills would climb back to where they belonged in days instead of years. She put Kariro down again, harder than the lesson required, and called it training. No one present was foolish enough to call it anything else. The rhythm of it, strike and step and strike, dragged her mind backward to the last time she had moved like this with her full strength behind it, and to the man who had ended that life.

She had been celebrating. The jaguar tribe had refused the Abyss and kept their system's mark, and so the jaguar tribe had ended, and Talia had stood in the middle of that victory with their blood still wet on her arms, back when she had been, by her own honest accounting, somewhat less calm than she was now. Crazed, some would have said. The Abyss had been louder in her then. The man had simply been there, the way rain is suddenly there.

Dark as a starless night, bare to the waist, a plain robe knotted at his hips, and metal everywhere on him, a round shield across his back, a straight sword at his side, small pieces of iron hung about his arms and neck like jewelry that was not jewelry. She had smelled it on him before she understood what she was smelling, the system's touch, or a god's, she never learned to tell the difference. It had made her mouth water and her vision narrow, the urge rising in her like floodwater. He had bowed.

That was the absurd part, the part she still turned over on bad nights. He had bowed his head to a blood-soaked chief of the Tainted and introduced himself, Toran, priest of Ogun of the Orisha, and said that in his god's name she would be coming with him. She attacked him, of course. She learned afterward that he had not been asking.

Chains of black iron poured out of the empty air and took her arms, her legs, her throat, faster than she could burn mana to slip them, and from inside them she watched her people die without ever once seeing him kill. That was the thing she could not make her memory let go of. Hundreds of millions of her kind on that planet, every Tainted soul the Abyss had claimed, and the metal simply went out from him and came back, out and came back, and where it went, her people stopped.

Her strongest warriors, champions she had watched track prey birds out of the air by eye, lost their heads to a thread of iron moving faster than her sight could follow. She had thrown herself against the chains the whole time, not out of love for a single one of the dead, she barely knew them, but because the smell of him filled the world and the Abyss in her wanted him more than it had ever wanted anything. He was tiers beyond her. Several, at the least.

She had no way to be precise about it, since her own rank at the time was one of the things the system had since carved out of her head, but the gap had been the kind you feel in your bones rather than measure. When it was done he held his ritual in that field of bodies. All adults, every one, because the Abyss gave power with one hand and took the future with the other, and no Tainted had borne a child since the day they accepted it.

She watched the blood and the flesh of millions pull inward and change, watched it become metal, watched the metal gather itself into a single vast sphere of dark iron that hung above the field for a long moment and then was simply gone, taken wherever a god of iron takes such offerings. Toran had stood, looked at her and her forty penned strangers without any hatred she could find, and put her to sleep with a touch. She had woken here, shackled, stained, and bored.

Talia flexed her hand and watched the mana wrap it, thin and imperfect and hers. Her planet had never dealt much with the wider multiverse, but even her isolated corner of it had known how the Tainted were treated out there, and it was nothing gentle. Fine. Nothing about her had ever been gentle either. She would kill what the system's ledger demanded, scrub the word off her status, and then keep killing until the leash came off with it.

Kariro picked himself up one more time, wobbling, and she waved him off before the urge could talk her into finishing him for nothing. Nine more days, and then the humans of this tutorial would learn what her people had been known for.