Chương 19: Four Billion People

Kaelvorn hung in midair, a cold wind dragging across his face with the chill of high altitude. Behind eyes that usually held nothing at all, something complicated was churning now. The dull ache of memory long since sealed away, and underneath it, a haze even he couldn't fully name. He didn't answer Diana right away. He just lowered his head slowly, looking down through the thin cloud layer at the unbroken sprawl of the city below.

Salem's afternoon carried a specific stillness, sunlight pouring down over the rooftops like melted gold leaf. Down in the streets, old-style cars moved along smoothly, kicking up thin trails of dust that settled again almost as fast as they rose. But in Kaelvorn's eyes, a different scene was surfacing underneath all of it. Planets burning under bombardment. The smell of scorched air. Screaming and shrieking that never stopped, breaking through whatever seal had been holding it back.

All of it sat in ugly contrast against the quiet stretched out below him now. His fingers curled without his permission, knuckles going pale, something heavy and choking settling into his chest.

"Ms. Prince." It took him a long while to actually speak. He turned his face slightly, eyes coming back to Diana, some barely visible hesitation in his voice.

"You know about Viltrum's coming-of-age ceremony?" Diana blinked, shook her head on reflex. She knew plenty of coming-of-age rites across countless civilizations in the universe. Solemn blessings, brutal trials, all kinds. She'd never once heard anything about Viltrum's version. She could feel the weight sitting in his voice, and found herself holding her breath, eyes locked on him.

"On Viltrum, seventeen is the legal age of adulthood. But only someone who passes the ceremony actually counts as a recognized warrior. Only they get the right to exist on that planet at all." Kaelvorn's eyes went distant, like he was looking at that planet again, the one already torn apart by war and its own hunger for dominance.

"But you'd never guess what the ceremony actually is. It was never some symbolic rite of passage. It was a straightforward massacre." He raised his right hand slowly, palm turned toward the sun overhead, gold light bleeding through the gaps between his fingers, throwing broken patterns of light across his face.

"The instructors take everyone about to come of age and drop them on some planet they've picked out, one that isn't fully conquered yet. And the native population on that planet, every single one of them, regardless of age, becomes our 'trial target.'" Kaelvorn's voice stayed unnervingly calm through all of it, no rise or fall anywhere in it, like he was describing something that had nothing to do with him at all.

That calm was exactly what made something in Diana's chest drop hard, a cold slowly climbing up her spine and spreading through her whole body. Her hands closed into fists on reflex.

"No rules. No line you don't cross. And absolutely no mercy involved anywhere in it." Kaelvorn pulled his gaze back, his tone still flat, though something suffocating had settled underneath the flatness now.

"There's exactly one requirement to pass. Survive. And kill every native classified as a 'resistor.'""Resistor?" Diana's voice came out dry, completely against her will. She stared hard at Kaelvorn, disbelief written all over her.

"Unarmed civilians. The elderly and children who had no way to fight back at all. In your eyes, that counted as resistance too?"

"In Viltrumite eyes, any native still breathing, who hadn't fully surrendered and dropped every last thought of resisting, counted as a resistor." Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! Something twisted at the corner of Kaelvorn's mouth. Something close to mockery.

"Simple logic. Bloody logic. And Viltrum itself was already deep into a civil war that nobody could say would end in years, let alone decades. Some people's minds had already gone considerably further off the rails than usual by that point." Lo-Xing. The single most extreme, most brutal trial ground assigned in Kaelvorn's own graduating class. Nobody questioned the choice.

The planet had been added to that year's trial roster specifically because its native population's stubborn resistance had lit Viltrum's leadership's hunger for conquest into something close to obsession.

"Lo-Xing's roughly three times Earth's size. Its people had lived and multiplied there for thousands of years."

"Technologically they sat somewhere around Earth's twentieth century. No interstellar capability. Almost no heavy weaponry to speak of." But unlike twentieth-century Earth, Lo-Xing's culture ran deep with an absolute refusal to yield their homeland, zero tolerance for invasion baked straight into how they thought.

"When Viltrum's advance forces first set foot on the planet and tried to force a surrender through raw intimidation, more than eighty percent of Lo-Xing's population refused to back down." Something complicated flickered through Kaelvorn's eyes.

"Their military picked up whatever crude firearms they had and dug in at the edges of every city. Ordinary civilians took up bladed weapons passed down from their ancestors. They built fragile, stubborn lines of defense out of nothing but their own bodies, fighting back against an invading force that outclassed them completely." That kind of stubbornness, close to pure obstinacy, enraged the Viltrumites completely.

In their eyes, a planet this primitive, this far behind, should have folded and bowed the moment they arrived. Its people should have been beneath notice. Resistance was a direct insult to Viltrum's authority. It only deepened their obsession with breaking this specific planet, grinding it fully under their heel. So Lo-Xing's conquest got folded directly into that year's coming-of-age assessment. And Kaelvorn's squad was one of the teams assigned to carry it out. Ten members total.

Everyone besides Kaelvorn was a full seventeen, led by two Viltrumite instructors with plenty of blood already on their own hands. He hung there in front of Diana, and let the memory he'd guarded so carefully until now come out, slow and even.

"Ms. Prince. Lo-Xing had a population of four billion people." Diana's breathing had gotten faster and faster, her chest rising hard, and she could picture the scene with brutal clarity just from what he'd described. A crowd of unarmed civilians, standing against beings capable of ending worlds, impossibly small, impossibly helpless. Their resistance would have meant nothing. Every charge would have cost another life, over and over.

"No... that's not possible..." Diana backed away several meters on reflex. She'd seen the brutality of war firsthand. Seen the blood that came with real killing. She'd personally ended more than a few genuinely vicious enemies with her own hands. But she had never once imagined a civilization that treated wiping out an entire planet's population as a coming-of-age trial for teenagers. That cold, inhuman set of rules broke something fundamental in how she understood the universe.

Silence stretched out between them for a long time. Long enough that even the wind at this altitude seemed to go still. Diana slowly lifted her head, looking at Kaelvorn with something complicated in her eyes. Shock. Pity. Disbelief. And underneath all of it, something close to scrutiny she couldn't fully hide. After a long while, she spoke again, unable to keep the shake out of her voice.

"On Lo-Xing. During that massacre. What was going through your head?" Hearing the question, the corner of Kaelvorn's mouth pulled up slightly, something exhausted bleeding through what was almost a smile.

"At the time, all I could think was that in nearly ten years, I'd never had a better shot at getting off Viltrum for good." He paused, his eyes drifting off into the distance again, like he was watching the smoke still hanging over that battlefield, seeing himself hovering above it near the end of the slaughter, still watching people point their last weapons up at him.

"What I actually felt, in that moment, was tension over whether I'd actually pull off the escape. And this desperate hunger for freedom. Past that, there wasn't room left in my head for anything else." BOOM. The line landed in Diana's mind like a thunderclap going off. Her whole body reeled, mind going completely blank for a second, her straight posture wavering hard against her will, every trace of color draining out of her face until she went nearly white.

Most of her face sat in shadow now, backlit by the sun, nothing left visible but a pair of eyes swimming with something close to disbelief. Kaelvorn didn't miss the way she'd lost her composure. He watched her quietly, some barely visible probe underneath it.

"Ms. Prince?" Diana didn't answer. She just held that rigid posture. After a moment, she lowered her head slowly, her eyes going hollow, fixed on the city below, an unnatural distance radiating off her whole body. That distance sat there like an invisible wall, cutting off every thread of connection between them in an instant. Something thick and impossible to cross had dropped between the two of them, all at once.

Kaelvorn looked at her like that, opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, then swallowed it back down. Silence spread out between them again, minutes passing one at a time. Kaelvorn let out a quiet breath and didn't linger any longer. He looked at her one last time, still frozen in that same rigid stance, then turned and flew straight out toward the horizon, gone into the cloud layer within moments. Leaving Diana standing there alone for a long, long time.

Behind them, over the skies of Salem, the golden tower built out of magic slowly turned transparent, and finally vanished from sight entirely. Doctor Fate stood at its center, watching the direction Kaelvorn had disappeared in through an unseen magical barrier. Behind the gold helmet, something complicated and unreadable sat in his eyes. Confusion, and underneath it, a pity he wasn't quite hiding.

"Nabu..." He spoke slowly, his voice low and rough.

"The slaughter wasn't his intent to begin with. Is a soul like that truly beyond saving?"..... +40 advanced chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOO