Chương 5: My Past

"Where I'm from, strength is the only thing that counts. If you're weak you don't get dignity. You get to be a stepping stone, or you get to be a casualty." His voice was quiet. Something like rejection and disgust flickered through his eyes and vanished just as fast. Sunlight came through the window and landed on his face, carving out a strange outline that was young and worn down at the same time. He didn't hide what Viltrumite culture was. Bloodthirsty. Built for war.

He did edit his own history a little, trimming out the parts that were too red. Like the three older kids he'd killed with his own hands at the coming-of-age ceremony to stay alive. Like grinding out the last hope of an entire civilization for one shot at an escape pod. Those details were too much. So he leaned on a different angle instead: he'd never fit that planet, not from the beginning. He was the wrong shape for it.

"On Viltrum, being weak is the original sin. Every child spends their whole childhood killing to compete, to survive, and every adult warrior spends theirs celebrating the conquest of somebody else's civilization." There was a bone-deep exhaustion in his voice.

"As far back as I can remember, all I saw was fighting and killing."

"The adults throw us into training camps and make us tear each other apart. Whoever wins, or whoever's still breathing, gets invested in."

"I thought about pushing back. But their curriculum runs the same way. They despise weakness, and they don't allow you to show empathy or pity under any circumstances. They file all of it under cowardice." Kaelvorn tipped his head down a little, away from the shock and anger building in Tom's eyes. He'd cut certain things out of this. The parts about himself.

Because the way he thought had never matched the pure-blooded Viltrumites around him, and what he actually believed, down at the bottom, would have marked him instantly in that environment. He'd almost never let it show. Except once, at ten years old, when an instructor dragged him onto a battlefield and gave him the honor of conquest by ordering him to clear out the last survivors. The old, the frail, women, children. The screaming. The blood and bone fragments coating him from head to foot.

Kaelvorn had spent years compressed under that pressure, and that day something in him finally cracked. He turned and charged the instructor who, up until that moment, had actually thought quite highly of him. He learned very quickly how far a boy is from a Viltrumite warrior with a thousand years of conquest behind him. After that, he never showed a single flicker of anything abnormal again. In the eyes of those warriors, he only got more impressive.

At the beginning he'd been like every transmigrator in every story he'd ever read in his old life, sure that one day he'd find his way home. Then his hands got bloody, and got bloody again, and somewhere in there he stopped bringing up the idea to himself. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Somewhere deeper than that, he'd started being afraid of going home at all. The nightmare that pulled him out of sleep, over and over, was always the same one.

Kaelvorn as a standard-issue Viltrumite, coming down on his own hometown to execute a conquest assignment. In front of him, elderly relatives from a life before, who didn't recognize him. Behind him, the squad leader telling him to hurry up. None of that went to Tom. He just laid out the last ten years of his life in a flat voice, like reading a report. Tom listened without interrupting. His hands on the table had closed into fists without him noticing, clearly hit by what he was hearing.

It had never occurred to him that in some corner of the universe there was a civilization that treated slaughter and conquest as glory. Looking at the kid across from him, silent again, Tom felt his sympathy tip further over. He could feel that helplessness, the kind that sits in the marrow. You only get it from real suffering. Tom let out a small sigh and stopped asking. He just waited. If Kaelvorn wanted to keep going, Tom figured he should have the room to do it in his own time.

After a while, Kaelvorn started again.

"I kept looking for a way out of that place." There was a survivor's relief in it now.

"The coming-of-age ceremony gave me the opening. I took an escape pod from another planet Viltrum had already conquered."

"Other Viltrumites came after me on the way out. That's where these came from."

"I don't know how many light-years I drifted. The pod was basically out of power. Maybe it was fate. I ended up at Earth." He didn't mention killing his own during the ceremony. He also didn't mention that whatever he thought of Viltrumite culture, he'd been on track to graduate as one of the standouts of his class. All he needed was for them to understand one thing. He was Viltrum's defector.

Fully severed from that war machine, zero threat to Earth, and possibly in need of shelter because his home planet wanted him dead. Everything he confessed was nine parts true and one part hidden. He knew Superman, and whatever organization stood behind him, would treat a civilization like Viltrum as a serious threat. Which made him, the anomaly who ran, their way in. Their opening on a problem they couldn't otherwise see. If it came to it, he could hand over a portion of what he knew about Viltrum.

Because a defector who volunteers intelligence on his own people is a much better bet than an alien of unknown origin. More importantly, he needed access to whatever advanced technology this planet almost certainly had. He had to find out whether Viltrum existed in this universe at all. If it didn't, he could heal here in peace and build something new. If it did, he needed a head start, and a plan for the day the hunters arrived.

"I know whoever saved me is powerful. You can feel it, the strength and that warmth coming off him. I think he protects this planet. I think he's its guardian."

"I'm not looking for anything. I don't want to cause problems for you."

"I just want somewhere safe to live. Somewhere far away from all of that." His voice dropped lower and lower, like he had no standing to ask for any of it. Please let this Tom be cut from the same cloth as the man he says he's friends with. If Tom believed him and passed it along to Superman, that bought him room to breathe. Tom tapped the table lightly. His tone was warm.

"Kid. You've been through hell." There was pity in his eyes, and something firmer underneath it.

"Don't worry so much. Superman's a good man. He's helped a lot of people in your position."

"You don't have to think about any of it right now. Just heal up. It's safe here. Nobody's going to bother you." The weight came off Kaelvorn's chest at last. He picked the spoon back up and started working through the soup slowly. What he didn't notice was the old locust tree outside the attic window, and the miniature listening device tucked into it. The receiver was buried in the grain of the trunk, silently pulling in every sound that came out of the house.

It converted all of it into encrypted signal and pushed it a few hundred kilometers, to a cave outside Gotham City. Inside the Batcave the light was low, and the only illumination came off the cold glow of an enormous display. The screen was running a live transcript of the conversation between Kaelvorn and Tom, annotated in real time with vocal stress patterns, heart rate variation, respiratory frequency, and a column of other physiological data.

A smaller window in the corner played the feed from the micro-camera bundled with the listening device. The image was grainy and the angle was bad, but it was enough to make out Kaelvorn's movements and the general shape of his expression. Batman sat in the high-backed chair in front of the display, black armor dissolving into the dark around him, only his eyes catching light under the shadow of the cowl. His fingers rested on the keys without pressing anything. He held that position like a statue.

The console gave off a faint electrical hum, tangled up with the screen glow, making the specific kind of pressure that only exists in that cave.

"Viltrum..."