Chương 42: Talia Voss

The waiting was the insult. Talia sat on a rise of dead ground with the bodies stacked below her and counted days she had no use for. One hundred and fifty humans down there, arranged the way the ritual demanded, and nine more to find before the circle would even open its mouth.

Then the sacrifice itself, five days of standing in one place while the system consumed what she had brought it, and she had already spent seven days in this same stretch of dirt because moving the offering was forbidden and moving herself was pointless. Seven days. She had commanded armies that crossed continents in less. She had been free since the tenth day, in the sense the system meant it, which was the sense that mattered least. The shackles were gone. The counter had stopped.

And in their place had come this, an errand with a ledger attached, kill fifty but she got carried away, the the wait as though a being who had held a province by her own hand should be made to stand in a field like a farmer watching grain dry. The humans, at least, had not been difficult. They were newly integrated, all of them, and it showed in every part of how they moved. They swung weapons like the weapons were arguments they hoped to win. They stood in the open.

They ran toward each other's screaming instead of away from it, which was either the most admirable thing about them or the most useful, depending on which side of a hill she was standing on. She had not needed a weapon for any of the humans, not like she ever used weapons. Her hand, held flat and driven at the right angle, had come through necks the way a stone skips off water, barely slowing, and she had gone home at bliss of finally ending a life after bondage.

She was something in the range of the thirteenth or fifteenth level, judged against the things she killed, which was a humiliating way to measure a life. The system had a lock on her, that much she understood, a hand closed around her potential holding it shut, and she did not understand its mechanism and had stopped trying to. What she understood was the shape of the loss. She had been a C rank when they took her.

On Voss that was the ceiling, the top of the world, the number that made a person the last word in any room they entered, and she had reached it and held it and been proud of it in a way she was no longer permitted to be. Voss. She let herself have the name, and with it came all of it. The land she had held had been narrow and hard and hers, a stretch of the eastern flats that fed millions Kharai and had fed their grandmothers. She had taken it young.

She had held it for two hundred years, and the holding had not been gentle, and she had never once pretended otherwise. Three tribes had contested her borders. Two of those tribes no longer existed, and the third had shrunk into the hills and taught its children her name as a thing to be afraid of. Talia had understood exactly what she was. A brutal woman on a brutal world, all for survival in a place where softness was a kind of theft from your own people. And then the sea had begun to move.

The Abyss did not arrive on Voss the way an army arrives. It arrived the way rot arrives in a stored root, from the inside, in a place no one had thought to look. The tide came in wrong one season. The shore plants blackened and did not come back. Fish pulled from the water had wrong things in their bellies, and the herds that grazed the coastal grass began to birth young that had to be killed the moment they stood.

By the time anything crawled out of the water on legs, the corruption had been in the soil for a decade, and the food, and the water, and the wombs. They cleared any dungeon that existed permanent or temporary to attempt to cleanse the land but they never found the true dungeon that prisoner all of this. Her lands were the closest to the coast. Of course they were. She had fought it. That was the part no one had ever given her credit for and the part she still, in the quiet, gave herself.

She had fought the abominations for years with everything a C rank could bring to a shoreline, and she had won engagements, and she had lost the war a handful of miles at a time, because it did not matter how many she killed when the ocean itself was making more. So she had done the thing she swore she would never do. She had asked. The messages went out across Voss, to every tribe leader who could read one, and she had made them as plain as her pride allowed. The corruption is not a border dispute.

It will not stop at my dead. Come now and we hold the coast, come late and you will be holding your own. They celebrated instead. She had heard about it later, from a scout who did not want to tell her. Toasts raised in the western halls. A song, apparently, that got some circulation. The tribes she had bled for two centuries had received the news that the butcher of the eastern flats was drowning, and they had opened their good stores.

And the terrible thing, the thing Talia had chewed for a hundred years since, was that she could not entirely argue with them. She had earned it. Every one of those halls had a reason. But Kharai lived for centuries, and to a people who lived that long, a war forty years past was last week's insult, and there was no such thing as an old grudge, only ones you were still awake for. The alliance never assembled. Her coast kept dying.

And so, in a stone room with the sound of her own people's evacuation carrying through the walls, Talia had knelt and surrendered her tribe to the Abyss. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. There was no name for that in Kharai, because no one had needed one.

It marked you across the whole of the Multiverse, a blacklisting that followed a being through every world that had ever heard of it, and she had known that even as isolated as her people were, even as little as Voss cared for the wider order of things. She had known and she had done it anyway, because her pride was worth precisely one thing at that moment, and what she bought with it was forty million Kharai instead of dead ones. She had believed, kneeling, that she was choosing a hard life over no life.

She had not understood what she was buying. The Abyss did not take your mind. That was the lie inside it, the trap under the floor. It left you every part of yourself, your memory, your reason, your talent for planning, and then it reached in and replaced the thing underneath all of that, the appetite a being is built around, and after that everything you were became a tool aimed at one purpose. She could still think. She thought beautifully.

She thought about how to open a valley's defenses from two sides at once and which family would break first if she took the eastern well, and every one of those elegant thoughts was in service of the only hunger she had left, which was the death of living things. There was no describing it to someone who had not carried it. She had tried once, after, and the only thing that came close was thirst. Not ordinary thirst.

The last day of it, the kind that turns a person into an animal with a vocabulary, when every cell in the body has agreed on one thing and the mind's entire brilliance is bent toward water and nothing else exists. That, but the water was life, anything that had it, everything that had it, and it never ended because there was always more life in the world. She had waged war across Voss in that state.

Her whole tribe with her, forty thousand minds intact and forty thousand appetites rewritten, and the tainted things from the sea had walked beside them as allies, which was its own joke. There were no allies. The corrupted monsters turned on her people the instant they smelled weakness in one, and her people turned on them, and it was all the same hunger eating itself in a circle. The beasts at least had the mercy of being stupid.

There was nothing behind their eyes but the narrow line pointing at the nearest living thing. She had been that for a long time. Then the priest had come, and the tribes had gotten their song's ending, and Talia had watched Toran of Ogun walk through her people like a man walking through wheat. She remembered the clarity most. When the system's ritual finished, when the red went out of her eyes and the appetite dropped out of her like a stone through water, the first thing she had felt was not relief.

It was the arithmetic of what stood around her. Fifty. Fifty Kharai from a tribe of millions, blinking in a strange light on someone else's world, still carrying the hunger she had just been rid of. Which meant she had a debt with an exact number on it, and she had been paying it in humans ever since. The system's price for a cleansing was an insult wrapped around a mercy, and she resented both halves equally.

It had lifted the worst of the hunger off her people the moment they were taken, and she hated how grateful she had been for that, and she hated more that it had not simply finished the job. The ritual was theater. She had understood that the first time she performed one. There was nothing sacred in the arrangement of the dead, no mechanism she could feel in the circle.

It was a leash with steps, a way for the system to make a being kneel fifty times in a row and call it redemption, and every day she spent standing in this dirt was a day it was reminding her who held the other end. She hated it. She would keep using it. Both of those things could sit in a person at once. And under that hatred sat the older one, cleaner and simpler, aimed at the Abyss for what it had made her, and aimed at the gods for what they had made of her people.

Toran had killed millions of Kharai in an afternoon. Talia had sat with that for the whole of her captivity and arrived somewhere uncomfortable, because if she was honest, and out here with the bodies she could afford to be, the life those people had been living was so foul that she would have chosen death over it herself. She had said so, in her own head, many times. It changed nothing. They had been hers.

No other being in the whole of the Multiverse had the right to end them, and a god had sent a man to do it as a matter of hygiene. She would remember that. She had a very long memory and no shortage of years. The timestamp sat where it always sat, patient in the corner of her vision. [Tutorial Day 16] Sixteen days, and hundreds bodies, and nine to go, and the rest of it lay out in front of her in an order she had settled on weeks ago. First, the cleansing.

All fifty of her people, one ritual at a time, however many humans that took and however many days of standing in fields. She would not leave a single Kharai in that hunger. That was not strategy, it was the whole reason she had knelt in the first place, and she had not carried them this far to hand them to it permanently. Second, the humans. Not out of hatred, though there was some. Out of position.

When this tutorial closed, everything in it would be poured out onto the world these creatures came from, and Talia had every intention of arriving there with the humans thinned and her own people whole. Third, the world itself. That last one was not ambition, it was calculation, and that came from something she had learned young about how the Multiverse handled new planets. Integration was an event.

When a world came under the system for the first time, the news went out, and the bidding started, because a fresh planet was the only currency that mattered to the vast unlucky middle of creation. Old worlds were corrupted or hollowed out or held in a closed fist by whoever had gotten strong first, every dungeon claimed, every resource spoken for, and nothing left for a being born a century too late. A new world had none of that.

A new world had open ground, unclaimed dungeons, and an indigenous population that had never in its history known that mana existed. So they entered the lottery. Groups, families, single desperate beings, all of them bidding whatever they had for a chance at a place that was one part promise and one part war zone, and the odds she had heard quoted were somewhere near one in a quintillion. People prayed for it. People spent their lives' savings on a ticket to a war. Which meant this world was about to have visitors.

Not soon, perhaps, but not never, and when they came they would come starving. Talia intended to be holding the ground before they got here. She rose off the rise and looked down at the ones she had left, the fifty, standing in the treeline with their eyes still red and their hunger still on them, patient in the way only her people could be patient, waiting for her to tell them where the living were. They had followed her into the Abyss. They had followed her out of it.

Whatever else the last century had taken, it had not taken that.