Chương 24: Viltrum

"Close your eyes. Just don't let anything inside you push back too hard." Kaelvorn spent a full several minutes actually thinking over Raven's proposal before agreeing to it, reluctantly. He warned her, too. Better not try anything extra.

"The second I feel anything close to danger, whatever magic you're running won't get the chance to finish casting." Raven nodded, unable to hide how eager she was, and promised she'd stay fully lucid the whole time. They found a different spot. An abandoned warehouse. The girl extended one finger, careful, slow, aiming it at the space between Kaelvorn's eyebrows. Right before skin actually made contact, Kaelvorn thought he heard her swallow again.

A second later, memories blurred by Viltrum's crushing environment and the drag of time started sharpening back into focus inside his own head.

"Huh?" It felt like the two of them were watching a film of someone's entire life together. Under Kaelvorn's deliberate control, everything from his previous life stayed buried. Raven could only see an unbroken stretch of dark, though she could sense a soul slowly maturing somewhere underneath it. She glanced at him once and didn't say anything. After a long stretch of that darkness, the memory finally began to unfold.

"Oh? Another elite. And this one's awakening level is genuinely impressive." Kaelvorn, not yet able to fully open his eyes, was passed hand to hand between a rotation of large adults, some of whom seemed openly pleased with certain things about him.

"This one's got real strength. Nearly snapped my finger... Here, take him. Put him in the elite incubation ward." A short infancy, most of it spent floating in a nutrient tank. Marked as elite from the start, but after that, not many adults bothered paying him much attention at all. Occasionally he'd get let out for air, handed some strange, misshapen toy to play with. Kaelvorn had zero interest in any of it. Whenever they let him out, he just sat there in silence.

Raven's eyes narrowed, something close to pleasure in them. Right around here, the flavor of Kaelvorn's soul started picking up strange, mixed notes underneath it all. The top note was pure, drowning loneliness. Starting at age one, Kaelvorn had to watch scheduled footage every single day, handed down by the adults. Complicated content. Some of it was straight Viltrumite ideological programming, some of it Viltrumite warriors showing off their power on other planets.

Kaelvorn finally understood where all those misshapen toys had come from. Trophies, picked casually off the corpses of civilizations already wiped from the universe, collected by adults with blood soaked into their hands. At two, Kaelvorn had left the nutrient tank behind, but every day still came with scheduled testing. Tracking his ability's growth curve. Blood draws for physical checkups. The footage got denser too. Viltrumite history, language instruction, and, alongside all of it, combat and killing technique.

Something in Kaelvorn's soul shifted. At three, Kaelvorn got dropped into a group of children. Mixed ages. Some looked close to his own age, others as old as seven or eight. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The adult who'd brought him there spoke, harsh.

"Zente. You're elite. Everyone around you was flagged as substandard Viltrumite from the moment they were born."

"Your assignment is to kill every one of them." Then, turning to the other children:"Every one of you started life exactly one step above defective stock. But thanks to your glorious Viltrumite genes, you can still handle gravity twenty-five times heavier than a standard living world."

"Which means you've all got real combat potential in you too. And if you don't want the word substandard stamped on you for the rest of your life, use every ounce of strength you have and kill that elite standing among you!" Something in Kaelvorn's soul convulsed hard. Words designed to demolish thirty years of a worldview built in his previous life, all at once, hit the flavor of his soul with a violent, jarring impact.

Raven's face had gone flushed by now, though shock, real disbelief, sat underneath the flush in equal measure. In the real world, she found herself sneaking glances at Kaelvorn, whose eyes had already come back open, and found something in them she couldn't put words to. A hollowness. Three days later, the door to that room finally opened. Kaelvorn, soaked head to toe in blood, was pulled out by the same man, visibly pleased. He got his first official praise on that planet.

"No surprise, an elite through and through. Let me check whose bloodline you're from... huh. Lord Thragg's line. That explains it." The man carried Kaelvorn, eyes hollow, dangling from one hand, the way a swordsmith might carry a raw blade blank that happened to be a legendary sword in the making. At five, Kaelvorn entered that year's elite training class. At eight, Kaelvorn stood in front of a spotless white incubation room, an instructor behind him laying out the rules close to his ear.

"Remember the categories. Elite, substandard, defective. I'll pull out the first two myself. You stay here and destroy every defective." Looking at the small bodies curled up sobbing inside the incubators, something dead and gray crept into Kaelvorn's already hollow eyes. Raven's whole body had started shaking too. This particular image hit her with a force close to what she'd felt watching Trigon corrupt other worlds. And right here, Kaelvorn's soul seemed to age a decade in an instant.

At ten, Kaelvorn, top of his class among the elites, got selected for the honor of an observation assignment. He boarded a ship. After several light-years of travel, he flew through an open sky under a natural sun for the first time in his life, watching a Viltrumite strike team, already flexing with eagerness, fly past overhead. Then bring total annihilation down on a planet home to fifty million thinking lives.

A month later, an instructor flew back in, blood-soaked, grinning, and brought an expressionless Kaelvorn to the planet's last remaining refuge point.

"Zente. My best student. I saved this one specially for you. The elites who stayed home don't get to feel this for a long time yet." The instructor pointed at a group huddled in the corner. The last thousand or so survivors, already so far past despair they couldn't even manage to cry anymore. A rough hand shoved Kaelvorn forward from behind.

"Go on! Go enjoy your honor!" Ten minutes later, Kaelvorn, drenched head to toe in blood, suddenly let out a raw scream, tore straight through a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, and turned into a streak of red lightning, driving one fist straight at the instructor's chest. But the man had fought for Viltrum for over a thousand years. After a brief flicker of shock, one open-handed slap sent Kaelvorn straight into the ground.

"Gone feral? You dare raise a hand against me? A Viltrumite who can't stay calm and think clearly through the killing is defective stock too!" Later, at fourteen, Kaelvorn got specially selected to join the coming-of-age ceremony of Viltrumites who'd already turned seventeen. Hearing that this particular conquest target was unusually far out, and that clearing the entire planet's population was mandatory to actually pass, something flickered back to life for the first time in ten years behind Kaelvorn's dead eyes.

Faint. But there. Wiping out an entire planet, if the population sat above a certain threshold, meant the assessment cycle for this specific ceremony would run for a very long time.... The memory's final scene: Kaelvorn descending slowly from the sky, hands folded behind his back, standing in the middle of a massive crowd. Every eye around him burned with hatred and something close to madness, thousands of stares landing on him like knives. Kaelvorn seemed entirely unbothered by any of it.

He looked around once, and spoke, his voice flat and dead.

"Lo-Xing is already lost. In three months, Viltrum will have finished cleaning out this entire planet. Keep resisting, and you won't even leave behind a seed of your civilization." Underneath all that bone-deep hatred pointed at him, something like confusion started to surface. Kaelvorn held out his right hand, palm open. A square storage chip sat quietly in it.

"Your unity here is rare. Your warriors threw everything they had into the front lines without holding back, which means almost everyone left in this shelter is one of Lo-Xing's top scientific minds."

"This chip holds the blueprint for an escape ship, designed by another civilization that no longer exists, using the last of their strength in their final hours. Their tech level sits close enough to yours that it'll match whatever production equipment you've still got standing." Kaelvorn's voice stayed level.

"We're running a sector-by-sector sweep for this extermination. These three months are the last window you have. Save some seed of your civilization. Go find some corner of the universe far enough from Viltrum to actually be safe.".... 🎉 Annual Memberships Are Finally Here! 🎉 To celebrate, I'm giving away an exclusive 80% OFF on the Annual Membership! + 2 free chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOOO Not satisfied? Full refund, no questions asked.