Chương 14: A Barbarian, Me

Diana had Kaelvorn out at the training ground first thing the next morning. The car cleared the city and ran out toward the suburbs for a solid half hour before finally pulling up in front of an open lot ringed with black fencing. There was nothing marking the entrance. Diana tapped a metal cuff on her wrist against a sensor, and the fence slid open slowly. The instant Kaelvorn stepped through, something close to shock crossed his face.

The training ground stretched out far wider than he'd expected, easily the size of a full golf course, the surface laid with some kind of purpose-built elastic material. A handful of training dummies stood scattered in different shapes further out, and several transparent energy barriers shimmered faintly under the sun.

"Superman and Batman helped set this place up together." Diana walked him through it as they went.

"There's anti-gravity generation built in, can simulate a vacuum environment. Also an impact simulator that scales attack intensity." She reached over and hit a control panel button, and Kaelvorn suddenly felt his whole body go light, the gravity around him dropping by more than half in an instant, the ground under his feet turning soft, almost spongy. Over the week that followed, Kaelvorn settled into actual structured training. Diana's method had nothing in common with Viltrum's brutal trials.

She never once asked him to go for a destructive strike. If anything, she pushed him toward precision, over and over.

"Strength can be used to destroy. It can also be used to protect." Diana held his wrist, guiding the force through his arm to land exactly where she wanted, on a specific point on the dummy.

"You need to learn to feel where the strength is actually flowing. Make it do what you want, instead of just following instinct." Kaelvorn took the training seriously. He'd discovered that Diana's actual strength ran well past what he'd assumed. Even holding back deliberately, she could put him on the ground using nothing but centuries of accumulated combat experience. Fighting purely off skill and experience wasn't new to him. Viltrumites trained in combat technique too, technically.

But since Viltrumites already sat physically above almost every species in the galaxy to begin with, Viltrumite fighting style was built for one purpose: kill something at your own tier as fast as possible. Every strike went in at full commitment, aimed straight at the kill zone. What Diana was teaching him was closer to the fighting style used by the weaker native populations on planets Viltrum had once conquered. People without the raw physical advantage.

Which, bluntly, meant none of it would have worked at all against an actual Viltrumite throwing haymakers. Most of those natives never even tracked a Viltrumite's speed before a fist went straight through their chest. But what Diana was showing him worked differently. When the raw power on both sides was actually even, Kaelvorn's brute-force style got him nowhere against her at all. Between training sessions, Diana occasionally got called out to handle some crisis kicked off by a supervillain somewhere else.

Whenever that happened, Kaelvorn either kept training alone at the grounds or threw on a hoodie and wandered Boston's streets on his own. Boston's streets carried this specific blend of old and new all at once. He walked the Freedom Trail slowly, watching eighteenth-century buildings sit comfortably next to modern storefronts along the red-brick path. He stopped at Quincy Market, breathing in the smell of grilled lobster and clam chowder.

He sat on a bench along the Charles, watching sunlight scatter across the water while a few students paddled by, messing around in a rowboat further out. This kind of peace was something he'd never once gotten to experience on Viltrum, and it slowly worked out over a decade of tension he'd been carrying in his shoulders. Sometimes Kaelvorn watched Diana handle a villain from a distance. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

She fought with the God Killer sword in hand, gold light flashing off the blade under the sun, and never once landed anything lethal. Every strike she threw cut a nerve cluster or a tendon with total precision, stripping the target's mobility, then finished with a nonlethal blow to knock them out cold. Kaelvorn stood in a shadow at the corner of the street, brow furrowed hard. By everything Viltrum's education had drilled into him, this whole approach was basically volunteering for a slow death.

Holding a blade sharp enough to kill a god and only ever hitting nonlethal targets. It cost more effort and handed the enemy openings to fight back. Every instinct in him screamed to just charge in and end it the fast, brutal way. He held himself back anyway. The sheer competence Diana showed, that steady, controlled state of mind under it, forced him to admit something. This kind of "nondestructive" fighting was its own mark of a genuinely powerful warrior too.

What he didn't notice was the figure in black robes hiding behind a cloud bank, watching him with a pair of eyes glowing an unsettling red.

"My dear sister. When did you pick up such a fierce little pet?" The stranger reached out with magic, probing carefully, and grew more startled the deeper she went. This kid, who looked barely more than a teenager, was carrying combat power that ran genuinely frightening, wrapped in the thick smell of blood. Through a magical lens, Kaelvorn was tangled head to toe in red and black, a staggering weight of restless, wronged spirits clinging to him.

Purely by volume, it wasn't far off from her own brother, Ares, god of war. And yet a mortal capable of carrying this much horror had left absolutely no trace anywhere in divine record. Like he'd stepped into this world out of nothing at all.

"Interesting little thing." The robed figure's mouth curled into something unsettling, calculation flickering behind her eyes. Diana had spent years cutting off her access to the energy she needed to draw from the mortal world, and she'd been waiting a long time to hand her sister a lesson that actually stuck. Maybe this kid, appearing out of absolutely nowhere, was exactly the "material" she'd been looking for.

That afternoon, once training wrapped for the day, Kaelvorn wandered Boston's North End in a gray hoodie. Little Italy, more or less. Pizza places and cafes lined the street on both sides, the smell thick in the air, murals in loud color splashed across the walls. He was crouched at a street vendor's stall, looking over some handmade jewelry, when a shape cloaked in magic dropped lightly into place beside him.

Kaelvorn's senses caught the sudden presence and he turned on reflex, and found himself looking at a bald white woman. She had strange green eyes, a pair of gold hoop earrings, and wore a black skin-tight dress that left absolutely nothing about her figure to the imagination. Kaelvorn frowned, some instinct flagging her outfit as a little much, half-assuming she worked some kind of adult trade, and shifted his weight to step around her.

"Excuse me."

"No rush, little thing." Her voice carried an odd, magnetic pull to it as she opened her palm slowly. Resting in it was a golden apple, its surface throwing off a soft gold light, like countless tiny runes were circling just under the skin.

"I've got something good. Thought you might want it." The instant Kaelvorn's eyes landed on the apple, his pupils blew wide. Something close to desire rose up from somewhere deep in him, unmistakably the Viltrumite instinct toward possession, that absolute hunger for raw power and rare objects. His breath came a little faster, his eyes locked on the apple, and the destructive urge and killing instinct he'd been holding down started screaming at him all at once. Something like triumph flickered in the woman's eyes.

She could feel the apple's magic already taking hold. This thing was a genuine artifact. Even Zeus in his younger days hadn't fully escaped its pull. One more push, and this kid was going to lose it completely. What she hadn't accounted for was how direct, and how straightforwardly violent, Kaelvorn's actual reaction would be. The instant that hunger rose in him, he didn't hesitate for even a fraction of a second. His body exploded into motion, fast enough to leave a smear in the air behind him.

Before the woman could process what was happening, his fist, trailing a sharp crack of displaced air, had already punched clean through her chest.

"Ugh..." Whatever triumph had been in her eyes froze solid, replaced by something closer to disbelief. She looked down at the hole in her own chest and had no idea how any of this had gone this direction so fast. Kaelvorn didn't wait around for her to process it. He reached back in immediately, going straight for the apple in her palm.

Blood spilled from the corner of her mouth, panic flooding her expression now, and she threw up a reflexive burst of magic that let Kaelvorn's hand pass clean through the apple itself. Like the two of them existed in entirely separate spaces, unable to actually touch.

"Damn it! Where did this barbarian come from!" She'd started to relax, thinking she'd bought herself a second, but Kaelvorn's follow-up came just as fast as the first hit. He pulled his arm back out of her ravaged torso and closed his fingers hard around her spine. He'd never seen magic in action before this, but his combat instinct, sharpened to its absolute limit right now, told him exactly what he needed to do to walk away with that apple. Disable her first.

She was one of the minor goddesses of misfortune, her divine body durable, but she wasn't built for combat in the first place, and she had nothing that could stand up to raw Viltrumite strength. Crack, crack, crack. Several hundred thousand tons of force bore down without mercy, her spine giving out under the strain with a sound like something shattering. The pain tore a scream out of her, and whatever protective magic had been sustaining the apple's ward collapsed the second her focus broke.

A heartbeat later, Kaelvorn had the apple in hand, having torn her spine apart at the same moment. The cold, metallic weight of it against the warmth radiating off the apple's surface made for a strange contrast, and the pull of its magic sank deeper into his eyes. Under Viltrum's survival code, finding something good meant taking it, full stop. Whatever happened to whoever had it first was never part of the calculation.

The woman's body started going translucent, the confusion in her eyes curdling into pure hatred and resentment, before she finally dissolved into a thread of black smoke and scattered into the air. Kaelvorn stood there holding the apple, the fog in his eyes slowly clearing back into something like awareness. He looked down at the glowing gold thing in his hand and scratched his head, a little lost.

"What even is this?"