Chương 25: Soul Attunement

Lo-Xing failed in the end. Strictly speaking, Kaelvorn had actually bought them more time than they should have gotten. Three months later, a Viltrumite two years older than him found the place. Maybe it came down to Kaelvorn's consistently strong performance and steady power growth over the past decade, but this Viltrumite from the same graduating class didn't suspect a thing.

"Hey, why're you sitting on a few tens of thousands of these... whatever, I'll clean it up." He flew past Kaelvorn carelessly, back fully exposed, no guard up at all. Kaelvorn killed him from behind, right in front of the handful of Lo-Xing survivors left in that final shelter. About half a month later, another Viltrumite, this one lazier in temperament, drifted in from the distant sky, calling out Kaelvorn's name once, almost bored.

"Zente? Don't tell me you went feral again? We're supposed to be regrouping!" This one was a little sharper, more guarded than the last, and Kaelvorn only managed to kill him after paying a real, if minor, cost. The Lo-Xing survivors couldn't make sense of what Kaelvorn was doing. They kept rushing the escape ship's construction while watching him, hatred and wariness both, hovering silent in the sky, staring off at nothing.

Because Kaelvorn had also personally slaughtered an army of several million defenders guarding this last stronghold, right in front of them. Two Viltrumites gone with no word back finally raised real suspicion in the group that had been planning to regroup and withdraw. This time, a young Viltrumite whose record ran close to Kaelvorn's own showed up, along with the instructor who'd haunted his nightmares for years. The escape ship was finished by then, though its power core hadn't fully charged.

Kaelvorn watched the instructor and his old classmate close in fast, shouting demands, closed his eyes, and let out one long breath. Then he flew straight at them without hesitation. The shockwave from that fight alone caught the last few tens of thousands of Lo-Xing survivors in its wake, wiping out nearly all of them. Kaelvorn, already running on two rounds of drained stamina, was never going to beat both of them together.

His body got thrown through the sky like a sack of laundry, blood scattering down like rain. The instructor screamed at him, calling him unreasonable, out of his mind, and Kaelvorn just pulled himself back up, not even bothering to wipe the blood pouring from his mouth and nose, and squared back into a fighting stance. A second later, the other Viltrumite from the same ceremony, sneering, put a fist straight through him and sent him flying again.

"Zente's done. Look at his eyes, he's not even tracking anymore." But as the escape ship's indicator light finally clicked on, both of them watched in shock as Kaelvorn, already teetering on total exhaustion, took a hit that should have ended the fight outright and shrugged it off completely, pulling out strength even the instructor couldn't stand against, despite barely being conscious anymore. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Half an hour later.

Kaelvorn, one foot in death, tossed aside the instructor's head, still wearing an expression of pure shock, torn clean off his shoulders, and staggered his way onto the ship that had finally finished charging. He looked at the last dozen or so Lo-Xing survivors, weak, barely upright, and something crossed his face that hadn't shown up once in over a decade on Viltrum. A real smile.

"Come with me. We'll dodge them. I can protect you. Lo-Xing's civilization still has a chance." Reduced to barely a dozen people out of an entire population, the Lo-Xing survivors traded looks with each other. Then one of the men, holding a weapon, stepped forward.

"Get off." The one speaking for the group spat the words out with open hatred.

"If you're coming with us, we'll blow this ship up ourselves first." Kaelvorn froze. The smile drained slowly off his face, his head dropping low enough to hide every expression left in shadow. He was hurt too badly right then. Even with a Viltrumite body, he could have dropped dead at any second. And he had exactly zero time left to argue the point.

The moment any other Viltrumite from that ceremony showed up, even just to run a routine check, the thing he'd been quietly hoping for across almost ten years would pop like a soap bubble. He lifted his head. Whatever had flickered behind his eyes went hollow and dark again.

"Then... I'm sorry." This was the base note sitting under Kaelvorn's soul. Even Raven couldn't fully untangle how complicated the flavor actually was.... Raven pulled her finger back, staring at Kaelvorn a little dazed, an unnatural flush still sitting on her cheeks, the exact look of an addict who'd just gotten their fix. Kaelvorn looked completely different. The girl hadn't lied to him. This magic wasn't just harmless. It ran both ways. He'd seen a slice of Raven's past too. Which meant he now knew her full name.

Rachel Roth. And he understood exactly what Trigon actually was now, too. If Viltrum's whole thing was conquering different planets, Trigon's whole thing was different planes of reality and different dimensions entirely. Worth noting: a chunk of Raven's own experience and inner journey lined up almost exactly with his own.

"That explains why you help the homeless. You're not just handing out food. You're using it as an excuse to get close enough to smell the old ones' souls." Nobody would've guessed that particular quirk. Not Batman, not Nightwing. They probably just filed her under surprisingly kind kid and left it there. An elderly soul might be aged, sure, but to Rachel, decades of a full life lived gave it a depth close to fine, aged wine.

Kaelvorn's soul, though, thanks to reincarnation, the collision of two entirely different worldviews, years of suffocating pressure, and a dozen other tangled factors on top of it, had hit Rachel's scale of impact and appeal at an entirely new level. The strange flush on Rachel's face slowly faded, something briefly satisfied crossing a face that usually ran on exactly three settings. Then it dropped back into that same flat, dead-fish expression.

Except when Rachel's flat eyes landed on Kaelvorn again, something rare surfaced in them. Real feeling. She hadn't expected much going in. Just a taste of the strongest-flavored fragment sitting in Kaelvorn's soul. But Kaelvorn had shown her, completely without holding back, some of the most violently conflicted stretches of his time on Viltrum.

That kind of reckless openness broke every rule Rachel understood about how this worked, and while she was watching and savoring the second half of his memories, she'd slipped, unguarded, and gotten pulled in. Her own soul had gone briefly defenseless in return, and Kaelvorn caught a slice of her own past. Some of the same emotions she'd been suppressing for years, right along with it. In short: Rachel, without meaning to, had briefly attuned her soul to his in return.

Kaelvorn quietly avoided the confusion in her eyes. Honestly, in his own head, it was the years before this life, the ones from his previous world, that held the secrets he couldn't afford to reveal. As for the decade-plus on Viltrum.

"Been holding it in too long. Gets tiring." Even after Doctor Fate's outright hostility a few days ago, even after Diana's direct questions, Kaelvorn still hadn't been willing to hand over the full account of his time on Viltrum. Just the coming-of-age ceremony alone had been more than Diana could process in the moment. Laying out over a decade of everything else, start to finish, wasn't something he could even imagine the fallout from.

Seeing that Rachel wasn't pushing for more, Kaelvorn steered them back to the original topic himself.

"So. Can I get you to help with my... problem now?" He was still a little hung up on her earlier claim that something was actually wrong with his soul. Rachel's flat, dead-fish stare cut sideways at him, then she gave a small nod.

"I don't know much. Soul magic and teleportation are pretty much the extent of what I've got. But your problem happens to sit right in my wheelhouse."