Here's the polished version:
It cannot be. The tale of the curse was incomplete after all.
What the memory showed was brief but it filled the gap cleanly. It aligned perfectly with everything Leishna had told him about the curse's conditions, and it answered the question that had been sitting underneath all of it without a clean answer.
The curse had done exactly what the traveler designed it to do. The barrier sealed the village. The immortality stripped everything from them that made life worth living, thirst that never quenched, hunger that never satisfied, the body going numb by degrees until the sensation of being alive was simply gone. Not death. Something the traveler had decided was worse than death.
But Kallar was untouched.
Ascension 3, and whatever skillset he had been coding through years of torture and ritual, had countered it. The curse found nothing to hold onto.
The traveler saw it and ran.
Kallar gave chase.
It was a long chase through the mountain, through passages Atiya now recognized, and it ended here, in this cave, with Kallar's hand on the traveler's collar and the traveler pinned against the stone with nowhere left to go.
"What was that skill." Kallar's voice was not loud. It did not need to be. "What did you do to my village."
The traveler said nothing.
"Answer me." The grip tightened. "If the village stays like that it becomes my problem. So you are going to tell me what you did and how to undo it."
Then familiar footsteps came again.
Kallar knew immediately who it was. The demonness had taken a different appearance this time but the presence behind it was unmistakable to him, the same entity that had defeated him in this cave years ago.
She stopped and looked at the scene in front of her with clear amusement.
"How interesting the things have turned out." She glanced at the pinned traveler. "Go ahead and kill him. But hear my suggestion first."
The memory ended.
Atiya felt himself thrown out of it, the borrowed vision cutting off cleanly, and he was back behind his own eyes with the cold of the cave against his skin and his own breathing loud in his ears.
"If you have been paying attention, boy, then you already understand what is happening." Kallar's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, filling the space around him without a visible source. "And if you have not, I will tell you."
Atiya said nothing.
"I killed that bastard the same day and began the final stage of my skill. The demonness gave me the last piece of it. Simple enough in principle." After a pause the voice continued.
"To ascend to Ascension 4 I had to discard my identity entirely and be reborn as human. That required the refinement and suffering of my own race across a sufficient span of time."
"For more than a thousand years I held the situation exactly as it was. I took my own life that same day."
"But I will be reborn within days. From the egg you have just placed."
The voice settled into something almost pleasant.
"To show my gratitude, I will kill every last villager of Inumaki on your behalf and let you walk free. You only have to wait for my return, boy."
Then silence.
Atiya gasped and came back to himself fully, his body lurching forward, one hand finding the cave wall.
He was back. The lava river, the carved walls, the cold light of the cavern, all of it solid and present around him.
Atiya stared at the oval hole where the egg had been.
"Hah." His whole body was shaking. "So I just have to survive a few more days."
He looked at the egg sculpture sitting where he had placed it, and one thing settled into him with complete clarity. There was no going back from this.
The village was doomed and he had just been the one to set the clock running. He was a contributor to it whether he had intended to be or not.
"Are you good? You were in a trance for about a minute." Leishna was looking at him with barely contained excitement, her teeth no longer chattering, her expression complicated and bright at once. "Did you get a flashback? Did you get a power up?"
She was genuinely excited. Standing in a freezing cave with a lava river behind her and a hundred villagers closing in and she was excited.
Atiya looked at her and said nothing for a moment.
She was really a strange person.
Then the yai signatures flared.
He ran the numbers quickly. Neutralizing Sera and her brother, changing clothes, dragging the bodies, the trance, all of it had consumed roughly fifteen minutes.
The siblings had arrived ahead of the main group specifically to slow them down, which meant they had bought time but not much of it. The main group was close now.
"...Let's fuck them off and get rid of them, shall we."
About a minute later the first of them came into view. Roughly a hundred villagers, with more arriving behind them in intervals.
Atiya looked at them and felt something settle in his chest that was not quite calm and not quite fear.
They would not kill him easily. He was the sacrifice and the ritual was still weeks away and they needed him alive.
That was the one card he held and he was aware of it and intended to make full use of it.
What happened after his time as sacrifice came due was a different question entirely.
One problem at a time.
****
She had borrowed money from Cale and cleaned out every vending machine within range.
By the time she was done she was genuinely exhausted, the kind that came from the combination of battle output, time yai expenditure, and the sheer physical labor of eating that volume of food in one sitting.
She found a half burnt public bench and sat down on it and that was as far as she got. Within minutes she was asleep on the soot covered seat, head dropping, completely gone.
Yawn.
She came back to herself slowly, the cool night air on her skin pulling her up from sleep. She sat up and stretched, working through the stiffness in her neck and shoulders, and became aware of two things simultaneously.
Her yai reserves had replenished considerably while she slept, the familiar fullness of them sitting comfortably around her body again.
And she was not alone.
Aninke Ezhaloch was leaning against the lamp post a few meters away, lance gone, arms loosely crossed, watching her with a mixture of curiosity and something that landed close to cautious respect.
"You have been out for four hours," he said. A faint crackle of static ran across his hands as he shifted his weight. "My siblings wanted to leave. I told them to go ahead and waited for the heroine to wake up." He paused. "Though I did not expect you to sleep on a pile of ash."
He tossed her a canteen.
Water. The exact thing her body had been demanding before she lost consciousness.
She caught it and drank all of it, her throat finally getting what it had been asking for.
"So," she said, lowering the empty canteen. "What are you doing here."
Aninke pushed off the lamp post slightly. The static followed the movement, small sparks catching the dark around him. "I thought you people knew what was going on. Did that old bastard not tell you anything?"
"Hmph. Tell me, who do you like more? Bai Ning Bing or Fang Yuan?"
The question caught him completely off guard. He stared at her for a beat, trying to find the trap. "Fang Yuan, of course. Why do you ask?"
"I like Bai Ning Bing," Zelaine declared firmly.
"Is that important right now?"
"Who knows. Discussions like those are why life is worth living," she said, her voice trailing off into the cool night air.
Aninke's eyes twitched in acknowledgment. He felt it again—the sensation that this woman was dangerous, not just because of her power, but because of her unpredictable mind.
"The person behind all of this was attempting to ascend to Ascension 3," he said, pulling the conversation back. "His algorithm and coding were fundamentally wrong. That is what produced this mess. Or at least that is what the old man told us."
Zelaine looked at the charred remains of the street around them, the burnt benches, the debris, the empty storefronts with their windows blown out.
"Isn't it surprising how far humans are willing to go for a measly amount of power, and in that process, constantly ruin themselves?" Zelaine smiled meekly. "Humans are insufferably stupid. But that's what makes life interesting."
"You talk big, surprisingly," Aninke muttered. "Anyway, that old man is nowhere to be found, so I will provide the payment later."
"Payment? Okay, give me enough for 100 kg of meat."
Aninke looked at her. "Huh? 100? Why?"
"Please," Zelaine asked, looking at him with wide, pleading puppy eyes.
Aninke sighed, unable to argue with someone who had just helped save a district, and processed the payment.
Of course, Zelaine had already "borrowed" cale's card earlier; she simply had Aninke transfer the funds directly to that account.
"If anything happens, consider reaching out to our family. The Ezhalochs."
Once the transaction was done Aninke left with his siblings, their footsteps fading down the dark street until the sound of static went with them.
Zelaine stood where she was for a moment longer. The plaza stretched out in front of her, the fallen laid out in a row, the quiet of it sitting differently than the quiet before a battle.
She looked at them without saying anything. Then she turned and walked.
She found Cale and the rest of the Odd Jobs crew at the temporary rally point, a space cleared of debris, makeshift and functional.
"Good work," Ngamba said. "Congratulations on your first job." He looked at her with an expression that suggested he was not entirely sure what to make of her sudden helpfulness.
"What job."
Zelaine genuinely had not registered that part of it. Cale stepped in before Ngamba could respond.
"We are joining them for now. At the very least it gives Mavine somewhere stable."
Zelaine looked at him. She was too tired to think through the implications and too tired to argue with anything that was not immediately threatening her survival.
She nodded.
Someone pointed her toward a row of empty seats. She found one, sat down, and was asleep before she had finished the motion of leaning back, her body simply taking what it had been owed for hours.
No dreams came.
Only the dark, and somewhere inside it, a thought that surfaced once before the sleep took her completely.
'I miss you, Atiya. I wish you were here.'