"Let me go. Please."
"I won't dare!!!"
The traveler screamed and wailed and the sounds echoed off the cell walls and went nowhere.
He was a yai user. That fact meant nothing here. His reserves had been fully depleted before they threw him in and his body in its natural state was just a body, subject to everything a body was subject to.
Kallar understood that perfectly and used it perfectly.
The torture ran for a week.
Every method available was applied with the patience of someone who was not in a hurry and did not need to be.
The worst of it was the castration. That was not done just beause of excessive hositility or sadistic reason.
It was done with the same deliberate calculation that governed everything Kallar did, a specific message delivered in the most permanent way available.
At the end of the week they let him go.
Kallar Nelljan was not a simple man. He was sharp and resolute, possessed of the kind of foresight that came from genuinely understanding how power worked and who held it at any given moment.
He did not underestimate threats either. He did not dismiss variables because they were inconvenient to account for.
He knew the traveler would not forget this. He knew what a man carrying that kind of humiliation across decades was capable of becoming.
He let him go anyway not just out of arrogance, even though arrogance played a major role in it.
Without danger, he had once said, what was the thrill of life.
He believed it. That was the thing that made him dangerous and compelling in a different way than the traveler. Not just recklessness but with certainty.
The absolute confidence of a man who had never yet been proven wrong about his own strength.
The memory shifted.
"Head. It has been almost a thousand years since we took refuge here. I think it is time we finally focus on growing our population."
'So there are men in the village too.'
Atiya watched from behind Kallar's eyes as the councilman made his case. The council chamber was full, faces arranged around the table with full of people who believed the matter they were discussing was the most important matter in the world.
"I agree," another said. "Though it is not certain that Queen Castelle has given up her pursuit."
"That damn queen." The bitterness in the voice was old and settled, a thousand years of it compressed into a handful of words. "Her and her cursed cohorts. They wiped our race to near extinction and even now, this far away and a thousand years later, the fear has not left us."
"We had to limit our numbers to stay beneath her notice. But we are relatively safe now. The time has come."
The council continued in that vein, one voice after another, and Atiya could feel through the borrowed eyes that Kallar was thoroughly bored by all of it.
The man had already made his decision before anyone opened their mouth and was now simply waiting for the talking to finish.
"Hmph." Kallar's voice cut across the room. "If population growth is what you want then why all this deliberation. Go home and bed your wives. And if you are having trouble with that, bring them to me. Generous as I am, I will gladly assist."
'He talks like a proper villain,' Atiya thought. 'I just hope he does not turn into a generic one.'
The memory shifted.
'Actually, hold on. Did he follow through on that and fuck them or not.'
Atiya had questions. They were not the most important questions available to him. He was aware of that.
A woman stood in the doorway with a solemn expression, her eyes sharp enough that Kallar felt it on his face before she said a word.
"Kallar Nelljan. Do not think you can keep getting away with spending countless nights with those whores."
Her voice was cold and flat, the disappointment in it old and thoroughly hardened.
"If this is about that skill of yours, then perhaps you should first perform your wifely duties." Kallar's face darkened considerably. "Remind me. When was the last time you let me bed you, fourteen years. Fucking fourteen years ago."
"Is that why you would rather spend your nights with whores than with your own son."
Kallar looked at her.
"Tell me." His voice dropped. "Is Fredo actually my son."
She could not believe he had asked it.
"You are the strongest warrior left in our entire race." Her voice was tight, barely controlled. "Do you think I would cheat on you without fearing the consequences? I know what you did to that traveler when he tried to woo your mistress."
"Hoh. Is that so."
A hand reached out and took her chin.
'Damn,' Atiya thought. 'Someone get me popcorn. I have not watched porn in months.'
The memory shifted before he could see what came next.
'Did he abuse her, I do not think so. But hard to say with him.'
The vision settled into a new location. A large open space inside a cave. The same cave.
'Kallar knew about this place.' Atiya took that in. 'Well. They were not confined to the village back then. They had the whole mountain.'
Footsteps came from somewhere in the dark. Deliberate, unhurried, growing closer.
"Show yourself, mongrel."
Kallar's voice carried no particular alarm.
The intruder stepped into the light and complied.
She was the demonness from the statue in the village square, standing in the flesh. Five arms, one growing from her back, a sword in each hand. Naked and entirely unbothered by it, her expression giving nothing away.
Atiya stared.
'So the statue was modeled after the actual demon.'
Any other time, Atiya would have been mesmerized.
But he had spent the last two days being ravaged by an equally beautiful and considerably more unhinged woman, and the residual trauma of that had done something permanent to his immediate reactions.
He looked at the demonness and felt nothing but a mild repulsion that surprised even him.
"Do you know why your race can never stand up to the queen's forces?"
The demonness asked it wearing a mischievous smile, swords loose in her hands, in no particular hurry.
"I don't care," Kallar said. "I am going to beat the shit out of you and then fuck your ass."
*Come on,* Atiya thought. *She was about to drop lore.*
Kallar lunged.
The fight was not long. He was the strongest warrior left in his entire race and it did not matter. When it ended he was on the ground with one of her swords resting against the back of his neck.
"I cannot believe this."
"What can you not believe," the demonness said pleasantly.
She let the moment sit. Then she continued as though the fight had been a minor interruption.
"Anyway. Where were we. The reason your race can never measure up to the queen is simple. You are neither human nor vampire. And only those two races are permitted to ascend beyond Ascension 3."
The memory faded.
But those words did not fade with it. They stayed with Kallar, Atiya could feel that much through the borrowed vision, settling into him the way certain things settle, not loudly but permanently, like something that had been waiting for the right ears and had finally found them.
Here's the polished version:
He was the only one in his race who had reached Ascension 3, and even then only at stage 1 of it, with nine more stages ahead of him and no guarantee of reaching any of them.
Ascension 3 had ten stages. Beyond it lay Ascension 4, closed to his race entirely by the law the demonness had laid out plainly.
If he wanted dominance above everything then the only path forward was Ascension 4. And the only path to Ascension 4 was through every stage of Ascension 3 first, which meant skills, coding, and whatever his crest demanded of him to get there.
What crest does he have.
Atiya got his answer in fragments.
Kallar began disappearing at night. Kidnapping people, quietly, carefully, one at a time. His own race first, the males, the ones whose absence would raise the least immediate alarm. He tortured them.
Performed rituals. Analyzed the results with the cold patience of a man conducting research rather than committing atrocities.
His crest and yaicraft are tied to torture, Atiya concluded. Mine requires numerical coding, formulas worked out by hand. His requires enacting things. Doing them. The coding happens through the act itself.
Months passed. Then years. Males inside Inumaki began to disappear with regularity and nobody pointed at Kallar. He was too strong, too settled in his standing, and his known interests had always been limited to women and the reverence of those beneath him. No one looked further than that.
He never spoke to Fredo in all that time. Never acknowledged the boy at all.
Until he saw Screja.
She was young, her beauty outstripping everyone around her by a distance that made her conspicuous. Kallar's nature was what it was. It found her eventually, the same way it found everything that caught his interest, and claimed her.
Fredo found out.
Then Fredo found out about the missing villagers too.
He confronted his father directly.
"Brat. Is that how you speak to your lord father." Kallar looked at him without particular emotion. "Come to think of it, I have never once punished you in your entire life."
Fredo's mother stepped forward before he could answer.
"You killed those villagers to code your skill." Her voice was steady despite everything behind it. "You are the leader of this village. How could you."
"Hmph. I had no intention of soiling my skill with worthless women." Kallar looked at her. "But since you have found out, what else is there to do."
His wife's fate was decided in that moment.
She was tortured for days and nights without stop, and Fredo was made to watch all of it.
When that was done Kallar turned to Screja and raped her in front of Fredo too, and when he finished he looked at his son and told him plainly that if a single word of any of this left the room, the next session would be longer.
He spared both their lives.
That was the mercy he allowed himself.
Atiya watched all of it and sat with it quietly.
He did not possess emotions in the conventional sense, not really, and the things he had witnessed did not tear at him the way they might have torn at someone else.
He had written worse into his novels. He had done worse himself and walked away from it without losing sleep.
But a question settled in anyway and would not leave.
'Am I the same as him.'
He would kill the villagers of Inumaki if it meant getting home. He had already killed some of them and he would kill the rest if the road required it and he would feel no particular anguish about it afterward.
He knew why. The sin of murder lived in him, had lived in him since before he had words for what it was, planted in those early years in the 49th belt before Inteja found him and gave him a framework for the world.
It was part of his architecture now. It produced a particular kind of pleasure that he had stopped pretending was not there.
Kallar tortured his own people to code his skill. Atiya killed to survive and to return home.
The difference existed. He was certain it existed.
He was not entirely certain it was as large as he wanted it to be.
Other things pulled at his attention too. What skill Kallar had been coding through all of it, and whether it had ever been completed.
From everything Atiya had been told earlier, Kallar's name had simply stopped appearing in the story after the traveler returned and cursed the village.
Time moved through the memory.
Fredo grew up inside the aftermath of all of it. His mother gone. Screja taken and used and returned, repeatedly, by the man who was supposed to lead and protect them. The trauma of it settled into him and stayed.
The situation was beyond messed up.
And Atiya, for his part, felt something he had not expected when he thought about Screja.
Something quiet and uncomfortable. He had killed her. Chopped her body apart and burned the pieces to remove the evidence. He had done it with clear purpose and clean hands.
Knowing what she had lived through before he ever met her did not change what he had done.
It just sat differently now.
Then the traveler returned.
Fifty years of hatred behind him, a skill coded specifically and solely to destroy Inumaki Village, designed with the patience of a man who had spent every one of those years making sure it would work.