Chapter 3 - CHAPTER II: The Weight of Worlds (Or: How to Make Friends and Dismember People)

CHAPTER II: The Weight of Worlds (Or: How to Make Friends and Dismember People)

THE FLESH PITS

The Flesh Pits smelled like ambition.

Specifically, the kind of ambition that had gone slightly wrong — sour at the edges, copper-bright at the centre, with an undertone of something that no respectable alchemist would ever admit to recognizing. Torches bled orange light across stone walls that had absorbed so much suffering over the centuries that the rock itself seemed to lean inward, as though listening. The shadows here didn't merely gather. They congregated. They pulled up chairs. They made themselves comfortable and refused to leave.

This was, Shang Tsung supposed, appropriate.

He stood over his latest creation — or rather, his latest attempt at a creation — and regarded it the way a sculptor might regard a block of marble that had personally insulted him. The thing on the table breathed. That was, technically speaking, an achievement. It had four arms, which were either a triumph of surgical artistry or a monument to hubris, depending on one's perspective. The Tarkatan blades jutting from two of those arms caught the torchlight and threw it back in jagged, broken pieces. The Shokan bulk of the other two lay heavy and wrong, fingers curling and uncurling around nothing, reaching for a purpose it had not yet been given.

It was barely aware.

Barely a mind behind the eyes. Barely a soul behind the mind. A body that breathed and twitched and occasionally made a sound like wet stone grinding against wet stone — and nothing more.

Flesh, Shang Tsung thought, is easy. It is the will that proves difficult.

He exhaled — long, slow, the breath of a man who had perfected the art of disappointment — and shook his head.

"So," he said to the creation, to the room, to no one in particular, "disappointing."

He turned from the table. He always walked away slowly — not from mercy, but because hurrying implied that the failure had rattled him, and Shang Tsung had not been rattled in four hundred years and did not intend to begin now.

It was in the turning that he saw, framed perfectly in the archway of the doorway like a portrait of absolute authority, the unmistakable silhouette of Shao Kahn.

Shang Tsung bowed before the next heartbeat had finished.

"My Lord."

Shao Kahn moved through the Flesh Pits the way a storm moves through a valley — not rushing, not pausing, simply arriving at each point in sequence, inevitable and unhurried. His footsteps fell like a verdict. His shadow preceded him. The torches, as though exercising a collective survival instinct, seemed to burn slightly brighter as he passed.

"Rise," he said to Shang Tsung, with a small gesture, "my friend."

Friend. The word sat between them like a blade balanced on its tip.

He walked, and Shang Tsung fell into step behind him, and together they processed through the Flesh Pits like two kings surveying a very specialised kingdom. The exhibits on either side of the corridor did not improve with familiarity. Inmates in various stages of experimental modification pressed themselves against the bars or hung limp in their restraints. The architecture of suffering was extensive here. Comprehensive. Award-winning, in certain circles that Shao Kahn had once moved through with the casual comfort of a man who had built those circles himself.

And yet.

He felt nothing.

That was the thing — the quiet, persistent, unsettling thing — that had been following him since the moment he'd arrived in this world. Not guilt. Not revulsion. Not even the small, polite discomfort of a person who knows they should be disturbed and is working up to it.

Nothing.

He watched a man sob behind iron bars and felt approximately what he felt watching rain fall. He passed a table whose contents he did not examine closely and registered them the way one registers furniture — present, noted, irrelevant. The horror here moved through him like wind through an open window, entering and leaving without purchase.

In the real world, he thought, and the phrase felt strange now, archaeological, like holding something that belonged to another person, in the real world, I would have been sick. I would have looked away. I would have needed three business days and a therapist to process any single room in this corridor.

He passed another exhibit. His breathing remained even.

But this is not the real world. And maybe — maybe when this world reached into wherever I was and pulled me through — it didn't just change where I stood. Maybe it changed what I am.

Maybe I became the character.

He was not certain whether that thought was liberating or terrifying. He filed it under both and kept walking.

He stopped at the crossbreed.

It lay on the table like a question no one had wanted to ask aloud — the confluence of two incompatible blueprints forced into a single, groaning architecture. Tarkatan and Shokan. Blades and bulk. The violence of instinct is married to the violence of dominance. It should have been magnificent. It should have been a weapon so pure in its brutality that even Shao Kahn might have paused to appreciate the craftsmanship.

Instead, it was sad.

Not tragically sad. Not poetically sad. Just sad in the small, deflating way that failed things are sad — like a soufflé that didn't rise, except with more claws.

Shang Tsung appeared at his left shoulder, impeccably composed, as though he had not just spent the past six hours attempting to coax consciousness into a pile of incompatible flesh.

"Forgive me, my Lord." His voice carried precisely calibrated contrition — enough to acknowledge the setback, not enough to suggest he doubted his own eventual triumph. "The Tarkatan-Shokan fusion proves... more resistant to refinement than anticipated. The Tarkatan-Outworlder integration was considerably more cooperative."

"Mm." Shao Kahn looked at the creation. The creation, insofar as it was capable of looking at anything, looked at the ceiling. "My daughter Mileena is half-Tarkatan."

A pause, neat as a blade's edge, and then: "You have my continued blessing to proceed. I would have preferred to hear of this endeavour before it was already bleeding on my table."

The emphasis on before was gentle. It was also a wall.

Shang Tsung moved to stand beside him. He appeared to deliberate momentarily — which, for Shang Tsung, meant his eyes moved slightly to the left before returning to their default position of serene self-assurance.

"My Lord, I never intended deception — neither toward you, nor toward Kitana. I believed..." A slight pause, a small diplomatic clearance of the throat. "I believed Kitana and Jade deserved a sister. That you deserved another daughter. And she is, if I may say so, quite a perfect —"

The smug expression arrived like a man who hadn't been invited but felt confident he could talk his way past the door.

"— weapon."

The Flesh Pits were very quiet for a moment.

Shao Kahn turned his head. Slowly. With the specific, patient deliberation of a very large creature that has all the time in the world, and several opinions about what will happen next.

"You will never," he said, each word placed like a stone in a wall, "call her that again. Sorcerer."

The last word landed like a coffin lid.

Shang Tsung bowed his head with the elegant speed of a man who has survived four centuries by knowing precisely when to stop talking. "My Lord. I meant no disrespect."

Shao Kahn looked away. He said nothing further on the subject, which was, in its way, louder than anything he could have said aloud. He had made Shang Tsung loyal. He had not made him simple. Loyalty and transparency were not, as it turned out, the same thing, and Shang Tsung had an artist's relationship with the space between them.

One day, Shao Kahn thought that will be a problem.

The thought arrived and arranged itself in the back of his mind beside several other thoughts wearing a similar expression.

A presence materialised behind them both — not dramatic, not thunderous, just present where it had not been a moment before, as though reality had quietly edited itself. Quan Chi had the gift of arrival. He appeared in doorways and behind shoulders and at the edges of conversations the way punctuation appears in a sentence — not ornamental, but structural. Necessary. You did not always notice the comma until the meaning changed without it.

His pale face, its crimson sigils stark and ceremonial as war paint, inclined in a bow.

"My Lord." The voice was the audio equivalent of a hand placed precisely on one's shoulder in a dark corridor. "I apologise for the unannounced arrival. There is information I believed warranted your immediate attention."

A pause, calibrated for maximum impact.

"We have located the Tarkatan camp."

Shao Kahn did not turn immediately. He let the words settle into the room, gave them a moment to breathe. Then, quietly:

"Where."

QUAN CHI'S LAIR

The lair breathed darkness the way lungs breathe air — necessarily, completely, without apology.

It was the kind of room that did not merely contain shadows but seemed to generate them, exhaling them from the corners and the high ceiling vaults where things that were not quite stalactites hung in patient configurations. Skulls lined alcoves with the quiet dignity of books on shelves. The air tasted of old iron and older sorcery. Every surface that could be carved had been carved. Every carving depicted something that a reasonable person would prefer to un-see.

Quan Chi had excellent taste in terrible aesthetics.

He led them to the scrying pool — a shallow basin set into the floor at the room's heart, its surface flat and lightless as obsidian until his fingers moved over it. Then came the green. Crackling, surgical, the colour of something that had once been nature and had since recanted that position entirely. It struck the water like a brand.

The surface shifted.

Images bloomed upward through the liquid — not projected onto it but through it, as though the pool were a wound in the floor of the world and these were glimpses of what bled beneath. A peasant village. Small, timber-framed, the kind of village that existed in ten thousand fantasy worlds and never asked for any of this. Its streets were chaotic. People fled in every direction with the specific, focused terror of people who have learned, very recently, that their walls are decorative.

Something was killing the soldiers in the streets. Efficiently. Without ceremony.

Baraka watched the images with his arms crossed and the expression of a man standing in line at an extremely disappointing butcher's shop.

"Dying peasants," he said, with the weary authority of someone who has been promised a main course and is being shown the garnish. "You brought me here for dying peasants." He turned to Quan Chi. "You said you knew where my people were."

"Patience," Quan Chi said, the word landing as smooth as oil on water, "my friend."

The word friend in Quan Chi's mouth had a quality not unlike the word fine in a situation that was clearly not fine. Baraka's arm blades twitched. Just slightly.

The image shifted again. Closer to the village — separated only by a dark throat of woodland, only several trees deep — the Tarkatan camp sat in its torchlit disorder, close enough that a thrown stone might have reached it from the village fence line.

Then the third image.

And the room went quieter than it had been before.

An undead figure moved through the trees on a heading that left no room for interpretation. Its armour was the armour of something that had once been a warrior and was now a warning — old iron, green-tinged, and absolutely indifferent to anything the living might feel about its presence. Not far behind it: an Elder Lich, moving with the unhurried certainty of something that has already calculated all possible outcomes and found most of them acceptable. An armoured companion walked alongside, helm down, posture saying yes, I know what this is, and yes, I chose to come anyway.

And then, as they approached the village edge, the Lich reached up, unhurried as a person adjusting a scarf, and pressed a mask over its face.

Hello, said the gesture, without saying anything at all. We are absolutely just passing through.

Shao Kahn leaned forward. His eyes had gone very still in the way that still things go before they become the opposite very much.

He knew what he was looking at.

He had known before Quan Chi said it.

"A Death Knight," he said.

The words fell out of the silence the way a stone falls out of a height.

"Indeed, my Lord." Quan Chi's voice carried the precise shade of concern appropriate to a man delivering genuinely bad news to someone capable of ending his existence. "Should it reach the Tarkatan camp — "

The sound that followed was the sound of every blade in Baraka's arms exiting their sheaths simultaneously. It was also, incidentally, the exact sound that the passage of certain irreversible decisions makes on its way out of the world. He stared at the Death Knight's image with an expression that bypassed rage entirely and arrived directly at resolution.

Shao Kahn looked at the image. He thought about the past — a past that now existed in the complicated grammatical tense of a story he had played through — and he thought about Death Knights. About what they were, what they could do, what it took to stop one.

He thought about the fact that this world was real now, and that he was real in it, and that power on a screen and power in the flesh were two very different propositions.

Only one way to know, he thought.

His war hammer arrived in his hand with the satisfied solidity of a thing returning to where it belonged.

"Quan Chi." His voice filled the room the way smoke fills a box — completely, from the bottom up. "Open a portal near the village." He did not look at anyone as he spoke. He was still looking at the Death Knight. "Daughters. Baraka. With me."

"Yes, my Lord."

A portal tore open in the air ahead of them — not opened, not appeared, but tore, as though the lair's atmosphere were fabric and Quan Chi's magic were a very determined pair of scissors. Through the ragged aperture: the dark blue-grey of a world on the edge of something violent.

They walked through without slowing.

THE VILLAGE

(Or: An Extremely Unfortunate Evening for Everyone Involved, Particularly the Noble)

The Death Knight had not announced itself.

This was, in retrospect, the first sign that things would go badly — not the usual badly, the kind that could be managed with sufficient bribery and structural engineering, but the deep badly, the kind that becomes a story that parents tell children as a warning and children retell to each other as entertainment.

It came through the village gate the way a bad idea arrives — suddenly, completely, and far too late to stop. Its sword moved. Soldiers moved faster, mostly in directions away from the sword, though a regrettable number of them moved in the one direction that ended at the sword, because that is the tragic mathematics of panic.

The Death Knight did not hurry. Hurrying implied uncertainty. It had none.

In the middle of this — in the absolute eye of this particular catastrophe — one Sir Something-or-Other, Knight of Presumably Significant Birth and Currently Significant Cowardice, performed the most spectacular social calculation of his brief and inglorious career. He took stock of the situation. He assessed his options. He concluded.

He dropped his sword.

"This cannot be happening," he announced to nobody, to everybody, to the specific soldiers closest to him, whom he then pointed at with the authority of a man who believes authority is a thing you can simply have regardless of circumstances. "You — you, man, come here. Get in front of me. Now. Move."

The Death Knight noticed him.

This was, as previously noted, approximately when things transitioned from bad to worse.

"Help!" he contributed to the general discourse. His voice had achieved a register that technically counted as music. "I'll pay — two hundred gold — no, four hundred, four hundred gold — " He stepped backward. His heel found a nightwalker's hand before his eyes did. The hand found his ankle. "No no no NO — "

He went down like a man who had always, on some level, suspected that gravity was personally opposed to him.

The Death Knight raised its sword over the fallen noble with the measured patience of something that has nowhere else to be.

And stopped.

It tilted its head — slow, curious, the way a thing that has not had instincts for a very long time tilts its head when something new begins to register. Its hollow gaze tracked to the right.

Everyone heard it.

Shhk. Shhk. Shhk.

The sound of steel being drawn across steel. Rhythmic. Patient. Intimate, somehow, in the way that only personal violence can be intimate. The sound that a blade makes when it is being made ready. The sound that preceded the specific kind of quiet that falls after.

Heads turned. A child screamed.

It was Baraka.

He stood at the entrance to the street with the comfortable, unhurried authority of a man who has arrived at a place that was always going to be his. His arm blades were extended. His yellow eyes were fixed on the Death Knight with the focused, technical attention of a craftsman examining a project. He did not look at the villagers. He did not look at the cowering noble. He did not acknowledge the soldiers or the screaming or the general atmosphere of absolute pandemonium swirling around him like a weather system around an unmoved mountain.

Somewhere, a knight yelled what many were privately thinking: "THIS VILLAGE IS CURSED!! NOTHING HERE BUT MONSTERS!!"

Baraka considered this feedback. He decided it was not relevant. He raised one arm blade and pointed it at the Death Knight with the simple, declarative finality of a period at the end of a sentence.

"You," he said, "will be among the first of my victims in this new world."

He ran.

It was not elegant. It was not the choreographed violence of kings or the calculated brutality of generals. It was the violence of a creature that had been doing this since before it learned to speak and had never once found it necessary to dress it up in ceremony.

Pure. The violence was pure.

The Death Knight charged to meet him — a wall of armour and dead conviction — and swung its sword in a horizontal arc that should have bisected Baraka cleanly at the sternum.

Should have.

Baraka was already right, already airborne, the blade passing through air that had held his body one clean heartbeat before. He came down with both arm blades, driving into the Death Knight's leg. The creature's scream was the sound of iron tearing — not organic, not alive, but resonant with something ancient and outraged. It swung its shield sideways in a crushing sweep.

Baraka jumped onto the shield.

The brief, suspended moment of a man standing on his enemy's own defense — and then he was gone, six feet backward, landing in a crouch so low it was almost architectural.

He raised one blade and examined it. Specifically, the part that had been inside the Death Knight's leg.

He looked at it for a long moment.

He licked it.

"No blood," he said, with the grave disappointment of a sommelier handed an empty glass. His eyes returned to the Death Knight. "A pity. I had intended to eat you after killing you." A pause. A slow, awful smile. "I suppose I will find other ways to be satisfied."

He charged again. The Death Knight raised its shield —

The arm blades punched through it with a sound like the world disagreeing with itself. Steel parted like paper. The shield became two pieces of the former shield. The Death Knight stared at the ruins of its defence with what might, in a creature capable of surprise, have been surprise.

Baraka was already in the air.

The crossing slash was almost gentle by Baraka's standards. Two blades. One arc. The head of the Death Knight described a brief, descending parabola and hit the cobblestones. The body remained upright for a moment — skeleton, armour, and the memory of menace — and then, with a sound like an exhaled century, disintegrated. Ancient armour clattered to empty cobblestones. The green fire at its core sputtered out.

The street went very quiet.

The noble, flat on his back, blinking upward at the space where the Death Knight had just been, processed the last fifteen seconds. Then he sat up. Then he stood up. Then he looked at Baraka and did what people do when they have survived something that should have killed them, and someone else made that possible.

"Thank you," he breathed. "Thank you, thank you, I — " He stopped.

Baraka was looking at him.

Just... looking.

The noble looked at Baraka's face. At his jaw. At the specific quality of focus that had replaced what had, moments ago, been combat readiness.

"G-good sir," the noble said, very carefully, with the measured precision of a man defusing something, "I have — I have gold, it's — it's yours, all of it, please just — "

Baraka's arm blade went through his chest.

He leaned close. Nose to nose. Yellow eyes to terrified eyes. When he spoke, his voice was almost contemplative.

"I don't want gold," he said.

A pause.

"I want meat."

What followed is perhaps best described in the way that natural disasters are described — in terms of scope and duration rather than particulars. Suffice to say that Baraka worked with a focus and a thoroughness that spoke to genuine professional pride, that the sounds involved were numerous and varied, and that several nearby soldiers discovered they had a much lower threshold for horror than their careers had led them to believe.

One knight, complexion having achieved the specific grey-green of a man who has eaten something and is reconsidering that decision, levelled his sword at Baraka's back and yelled with all the sincerity of genuine outrage: "You absolute animal!!"

He ran forward.

Two sai hit him in the head with the neat finality of a sentence ending.

He did not finish the run.

A silence. Then — the sound of heels on cobblestone. Light, rhythmic, coming closer.

She vaulted over a corpse like it was a garden ornament. She was spinning before she fully landed, one full rotation, the sai swinging outward and returning to her hands like they'd agreed on the angle in advance. She came to a stop, righted herself, and gave the assembled knights — those still standing, still breathing, still capable of processing visual information — a small, performative bow.

The bow was perfect. The bow was rehearsed. The bow was the kind of bow that exists entirely to precede something much worse.

"My," said Mileena, in a voice that managed to be simultaneously a purr and an open threat, "this does look fun." She tilted her head. "Room for one more~?"

The answer, had anyone been in a position to deliver it coherently, would have been absolutely not under any circumstances, please. No one was in that position. Several knights were experiencing what could clinically be described as conflicted responses — terror married to something their physiologies were processing independently of their better judgment, which was the kind of internal conflict that you simply did not expect from your Tuesday.

Mileena did not wait for a consensus. She closed on the nearest knight in three steps, drew a single sai across his throat in a clean upward arc, wore the blood like an accessory, rolled her neck once, and kept moving. The next knight barely had time to raise his weapon before she was on him — above him, then behind him, the sai buried in his shoulders, twisting, and his scream reached its peak exactly as her boot came down on his throat.

"What is happening?!" someone yelled.

A pair of bladed fans answered the question with the kind of directness that literary critics call cutting. The top of the question-asker's skull departed with a clean, decisive sound. His jaw made separate arrangements with the ground. The fans described a long, looping return arc and arrived back in Kitana's waiting hands with the quiet satisfaction of things returning to where they belonged.

Kitana did not acknowledge the kill. She was already moving toward the alleyway.

Jade emerged from it like a sentence arriving after a long pause — unexpected, precise, and carrying considerable weight. Her staff moved once. The world reordered itself around that motion. Three knights who had been retreating in three different directions managed, in their last collective moment, to demonstrate that geometry is not always on your side. The arc was not long. It did not need to be.

The bodies landed.

One knight remained. The captain. He pressed his back against the wall, both hands on his sword hilt, knuckles white, jaw set. A man who had clearly decided that dignity was the one thing left available to him, and he intended to spend it.

"I won't fall so easily," he said, and his voice only shook a little, which was, under the circumstances, genuinely admirable. "You're monsters, the lot of you — "

The war hammer came from above and to the left, which is the direction war hammers come from when they are thrown by someone who has had centuries to perfect the angle. It hit the sword and the arm behind it simultaneously. The sword became pieces. The arm became a different kind of problem. The hammer buried itself in the wall two feet to the captain's right, and the stone around it cratered inward like it had been waiting for permission to give up.

The captain's scream was still in progress when two sai found his remaining arm and his left side, pinning him to the wall with the casual efficiency of someone hanging a painting they've decided belongs there.

Mileena walked toward him slowly.

She always walked slowly when she had time to.

"Aww," she said, and the warmth in her voice was the most genuinely dangerous thing in the sentence. "Did that hurt, big boy~?" Her fingers trailed his chest — light, light as curiosity. Then they moved upward, found his chin, tilted his head until he had no choice but to look at her. Until he could see, behind the mask, what was looking back.

His face did a complicated thing.

"~Let me help you with that."

She was, at least, efficient.

What she did afterward with the head was something the remaining villagers would spend considerable time discussing — mostly in the specific, flat-voiced way that people discuss things that they are not yet certain they have finished being disturbed by.

"~My, he was tasty," Mileena said, when she was finished, and licked her fingers with the satisfied composure of someone who has just had a particularly good piece of fruit. She flicked the remains of her meal away with a sharp, negligent gesture.

A silence.

"Did you have to be quite such a spectacle about it?" Kitana asked. The temperature in her voice could have preserved the evidence.

Mileena raised her hand. She raised one specific finger.

Jade pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and breathed in through them. Out. "Could you both — just — not. Right now. Please."

Baraka, who had been using the tip of one arm blade to attend to something lodged between his teeth, looked up, considered the scene, and opted to remain neutral.

The hammer vanished from the wall with a clean snap of displaced air. Shao Kahn stepped out from the tree line. He looked at the square — at his daughters, at the blood, at the bodies, at the villagers pressed into every doorway and window frame like people who have been asked to witness a thing they had no language for.

He looked at his daughters.

"No arguments," he said. "We have somewhere to be." A pause. Then, almost quietly, almost to himself: "You've done well."

Three voices, overlapping:

"Yes, Father."

"Yes, my Lord."

"Yes, Daddy~."

He let the last one happen. He moved on.

He did notice — quietly, privately, in the part of himself that was still cataloguing everything with the faint, dispassionate thoroughness of a player examining a world's lore — that Jade had said my Lord again.

Not Father.

Later, he told himself.

As they passed the cage row, Kitana's fans moved without ceremony — locks fell in pieces to the ground, and she did not slow down. People streamed out, stumbling, weeping, clutching each other.

The last one out was the elder. Small, white-haired, the kind of old that carries its age in the eyes more than the body. He shuffled through the gate and found, to the considerable detriment of his already compromised cardiovascular system, that Shao Kahn was directly behind him.

A hand — enormous, unhurried — closed gently around the back of the elder's skull. Not crushing. Not painful. Precisely as inescapable as it needed to be. Shao Kahn leaned down until his voice arrived below the level of anyone else's hearing.

"Listen carefully, old man."

The elder's breathing stopped performing and started simply happening.

"Those people in the woods." A pause. "They are your neighbours now. Not visitors. Not threats to be managed. Neighbours. You will treat Baraka with the respect due a general. You will treat his people with the respect due to those who have just, without being asked, removed a Death Knight from your village." Another pause, and this one had texture. "You saw what Baraka did to that man in the street. That was him, alone. His people number in dozens, and they are, by nature, perpetually hungry."

He let that word sit.

"Human flesh is not, to a Tarkatan, meaningfully different from any other kind. This is simply a fact of biology. And you are — let us be precise — several trees away from a great many Tarkatans."

He made the elder's head turn, very gently, very precisely, until the old man's eyes found a group of young villagers standing at the far end of the square.

"Do I make myself understood?"

The elder's voice, when it arrived, had been wrung out of something deep and survival-oriented. "You have my word, my Lord. We will show them respect. All of them."

"Good." Shao Kahn released him. "We will return. It is — " a pause so brief it was almost nothing, almost not even ironic, "— good manners. To know one's neighbours."

He walked.

A figure stepped into his path.

Masked. Still. Robed in black so absolute it seemed to be making a philosophical argument. The mask was white and featureless and somehow, despite having no expression, managed to project an air of someone who expected to be listened to. Beside him stood a woman in armour that bore the marks of something that had not been forged in this world or any world adjacent to it, horns rising from her helm like a statement of intent. Her hand was near her weapon. Her weapon was, from the look of it, extremely serious about its purpose.

"Good day, sir," the masked figure said, and there was something in his voice — a quality, a resonance, the ghost of a register that suggested this was a man who was accustomed to being listened to, even in the voices of people who did not realise they were listening. "I was hoping we might —"

Shao Kahn walked past him.

His shoulder connected with the masked figure's in a firm, deliberate, unmistakable bump. Not a stumble. Not an accident. A statement.

"I'm busy," said Shao Kahn, and kept walking.

The silence that followed was the kind that has weight. The kind you could put on a scale.

Then:

"HOW DARE YOU."

The armoured woman's voice cracked across the square like a war declaration. She took two steps forward, one hand on the axe, face incandescent with the specific, righteous fury of someone for whom the person they serve is simply not a thing you treat this way.

"Do you have ANY IDEA who you just — come back here and apologise, you worthless MAGGOT!!"

Shao Kahn did not slow down.

His daughters did, however.

All three of them. Just slightly. Enough to look. Their gazes, moving across the armoured woman in sequence, carried the collective warmth of three open graves.

It was Mileena who drifted her pace just long enough to bring herself adjacent to the woman, and when she spoke, she barely spoke at all — just enough voice to carry.

"Say that," she said softly, "to my father again."

A beat.

"And I will pull your tongue out through a hole I make somewhere else."

She kept walking. They all kept walking.

Behind them, the masked figure and his armoured companion stood in the churned, blood-smelling air of the square, surrounded by its evidence, and thought — privately, separately, but in remarkable parallel — about who, or what, had just walked past them.

THE WOODS

The trees here did not merely stand. They loomed — an old word for an old action, the specific hovering presence of things that have been in one place long enough to form opinions about it. The canopy filtered what moonlight remained into long, pale shafts that fell across the undergrowth like interrupted sentences. Somewhere deep in the dark, something moved that was not them. It moved only once, and then stopped, which was in many ways more unsettling than if it had continued.

They walked in a silence that each of them wore differently.

Baraka walked it like armour. Kitana wore it like a blade's edge — clean, functional, shaped. Jade wore it like weather, like something she was patient with until it passed. Mileena wore it like a wound she was pretending not to tend. Shao Kahn wore it like a room he had furnished himself.

The branches thinned. The ground rose. They crested a small hill at the woods' far edge, and the tree line fell away, and below them —

The Tarkatan camp.

Torches. Movement. The sound of voices, too distant to parse but unmistakably present. Unmistakably alive.

Baraka stopped breathing for a moment. Or rather — he breathed, but nothing else moved. He stood on the crest of the hill with the wind coming at him from below, carrying smoke and cookfires and the specific, unmistakable scent of his people, and he was entirely, completely still.

Then he exhaled. Long and deep, and very quietly.

He jumped.

He hit the ground at the hill's base without slowing, the impact absorbed through his knees and carried forward into momentum, and he ran — actually ran, full-out, with none of the controlled economy of combat — toward the camp gate like a man who has been very far from home for a very long time and has just been given permission to stop pretending that doesn't matter.

"Baraka — wait — " Kitana started after him.

Shao Kahn's hand came to rest on her shoulder. Light. Certain.

"Let him go," he said. "This is his home."

She stopped. They descended the hill together, and the camp gates opened to them — and then closed around them, and the silence that entered with Shao Kahn was the particular silence that follows the arrival of someone who changes what a room means.

Every Tarkatan who saw him went still. The news spread outward from the point of his entrance in a ripple of stiffened postures and widened eyes and the very specific, complicated stillness of a people who are equal parts relieved, wary, grateful, and uncertain in which proportion to experience these feelings.

Mileena drifted slightly sideways, drawn by motion — a child. Tarkatan. Small enough to be new to everything, including standing steadily. Old enough to notice the newcomers. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and she raised one hand and gave a small, playful wave. The kind that says hello, I'm not sure what to do with my hands either.

The child flinched. Turned. Pressed itself against its parent's leg with its face turned firmly away.

Mileena's hand fell.

She looked at the space where the wave had been, and she did not say anything, and she did not move, and the nothing-happening on her face was more eloquent than most things that do happen on faces.

Jade was beside her in three steps, quiet as a closing door. Her hand found Mileena's shoulder.

"Sister."

Mileena looked at her. "I thought maybe here at least — " She stopped. She started again, differently. "I'm half-Tarkatan. And even here." She said it with a small laugh that wasn't really a laugh. "I don't fit anywhere, do I. Even among the people I'm made from."

"That child," Jade said, carefully, gently, the way you carry something that might break, "is in a forest he's never seen, in a world he doesn't recognise, after something happened to him that no one has explained. He is frightened of everything. Of the trees. Of the darkness. Of the strangers who arrived at his parents' side." A pause. "He didn't look away because of what you are, Mileena. He looked away because he was scared, and you are new, and scared children flinch at anything new."

Shao Kahn, who had not appeared to be listening, spoke without turning around.

"Jade is right." A pause — just enough of one to mean something. "Fear is indiscriminate. Do not take its misdirection as a verdict on your worth." Another pause. Then, quieter: "I don't believe they are afraid of you. I believe they are afraid of this. All of this. And fear passes."

Mileena was quiet for a long moment.

When she spoke, her voice had something in it that was smaller and more honest than she usually allowed.

"Thank you, Father."

He nodded once. He kept walking.

He found Baraka in the camp's centre. He stood forehead-to-forehead with a female Tarkatan — a greeting that carried everything it needed to carry in total silence, the entire grammar of I was afraid, and you are here, and that is enough. After a long moment, he straightened and turned, and his face, when he brought it to Shao Kahn, had been scrubbed clean of everything private.

"Is everyone accounted for?"

"Yes, my Lord." Baraka's jaw worked briefly. "But they are afraid. They were living their lives — mining, cooking, sleeping — and then, between one breath and the next, they were here. In an unfamiliar forest with no explanation and no warning. They don't know what this world is. They don't know what they are in it." He looked back at the camp — the fires, the faces, the blades never quite fully sheathed. "They are afraid," he said again, and this time the word was heavier.

Shao Kahn followed his gaze.

At the camp's far perimeter, he found the answer to his next question without having to ask it. A line of Tarkatan warriors stood at the tree line facing the direction of the village. Their blades were out. Their eyes were fixed. They sharpened their weapons with the patient, rhythmic focus of people who have already made a decision and are merely waiting for permission to act on it.

There was no drooling. No frenzy. No howling.

Just the steady, lethal conviction of people who love something and believe it is in danger.

"I take that," Shao Kahn said, "as a yes."

He looked at Baraka. "Tell them to stand down. No bloodshed — not yet. We cannot afford visibility. Not while we don't yet understand the full shape of this world." He paused. "They will trust us, or they will fear us — but either way, they will need a reason. Give them one."

Baraka inclined his head. Then: "My Lord. My people are hungry. The surrounding land offers little. A few animals. Some vegetation. It is not sufficient for what we are."

Shao Kahn was quiet.

He looked at the camp. At the warriors at the perimeter. At the fires, the children, the elders, sitting in the light with the stunned, careful expressions of people trying to make sense out of a world that had not asked for their input.

He thought about what hunger meant to a Tarkatan. He thought about the village, several trees away, full of dead people that nobody was currently using.

He thought about solutions.

He exhaled slowly.

"I have an idea," he said.

THE VILLAGE (AGAIN)

(Note: All Previous Residents Wish It Were Under Different Circumstances)

The elder did not refuse.

To his credit — and there was credit, genuine credit, the kind earned in the worst possible classroom — he did not refuse. He listened to Shao Kahn's proposal with the face of a man who was weighing two terrible things against each other on a scale that had not been designed for this kind of arithmetic, and at the end of the weighing, he nodded. Slowly. With his eyes closed.

And so.

The dead were given to the Tarkatans.

The fallen knights. The village's own lost. The bodies that lay in the square and the side streets, like the punctuation of a sentence, the village had not chosen to write. They were surrendered — not with ceremony, not with gladness, but with the grim pragmatism of a community that had just watched its strongest defenders be defeated by a single undead creature, and understood, with crystalline precision, what it would mean to make enemies of the people in the woods.

Some villagers stayed indoors. Kept the shutters closed. Told their children that the sounds outside were something else.

Some could not look away.

A woman stood in a doorway and watched, without expression, as the armour was removed from a body she recognised by the set of its shoulders. She watched, without expression, until the armour was gone. Then she closed the door very quietly and sat down in the kitchen, and did not speak for a long time.

Shao Kahn stood near the elder at the square's edge. They did not stand close together. They stood near each other, the way two people stand when there is no comfortable distance to be had.

"This was the wise choice," Shao Kahn said, looking at the square, not at the elder. "You know that."

"I know," the elder said. His voice was old in a new way. "Will it always be like this?"

"No." A pause. "They will adapt. Every creature adapts. This is a beginning — nothing more. You have given them something tonight that carries more weight than you know: the trust of a Tarkatan. That is not easily earned. You have also given yourself something." He glanced sideways, briefly. "Neighbours who have reason to remember your generosity rather than your fear."

The elder was quiet for a moment.

Then he pointed.

Shao Kahn followed the gesture across the square. Near the far corner, tucked into the shadow of a doorway, two girls. The older one had her hand pressed over the little one's eyes, gentle, certain, blocking the view. The little one leaned into it without pulling away, trusting the hand completely, the way small children trust the people who love them.

The older girl looked.

Across the square, a Tarkatan warrior crouched over a pair of bodies — a couple, by the look of what had once been their shared life, their shared table, their shared faces — and ate with the focused, unreflective satisfaction of something doing what it was built to do, entirely unaware that the older girl's eyes were on him, taking in every detail with the careful, terrible attention of a child who is old enough to understand what she is seeing and not old enough to know what to do with that understanding.

Shao Kahn looked at the scene.

In the world he had come from — in the world with fluorescent lighting and health inspectors and the specific civilised compact that said certain things do not happen in view of children — he would have looked away. He knew this about himself. He would have turned his head, felt the nausea rise, said something, done something —

He felt nothing.

He looked at the elder.

"Better the dead parents," he said, quietly, "than the living children."

He walked away.

The Tarkatan warrior finished. He ran his tongue across his fingers, slow and thorough, and glanced up from his work —

And saw the girls.

The little one's eyes were still covered. The older one was looking at him.

He looked back. He looked at the remains. He looked back at the older girl.

They've been standing here this whole time, he thought, with the patient, genuine concern of someone making a connection between two data points that are only connected in a world where your relationship to food is very, very different from most. They must be hungry. They don't know how to ask.

He cut a careful portion with one blade. He stood up. He walked across the square and held it out to them, his voice pitched gently, coaxing, the voice you use for cautious things.

"Here," he said. "Young ones must eat."

A hand closed around his wrist.

The Tarkatan turned.

A masked man. The same masked man from before. His grip was controlled, his voice was controlled, but under both of them was something that was not controlled at all.

"Have you not tormented them enough?"

The temperature between them dropped several degrees.

"Release my arm," the Tarkatan said, very quietly. The blades stirred at his sides. "Now."

The masked man did not release his arm.

What followed was the particular chain reaction of people who are loyal and who have excellent senses and who have been in this camp for less than an hour and already have very strong opinions about what constitutes a threat. Blades. Movement. The low, harmonic sound of multiple Tarkatans expressing displeasure simultaneously. The armoured woman arrived at the masked man's flank with her battle-axe at her side and a face that was having absolutely no ambiguity about its feelings.

"ENOUGH."

Shao Kahn did not shout. He did not raise his voice into the register of alarm, anger, or warning. He simply projected it — the full weight of a voice that had commanded armies, that had given orders that reshaped borders, that was accustomed to the specific phenomenon of everything in its vicinity immediately reorganising itself around whatever it had just said.

The camp went still.

He crossed the space between himself and the confrontation without hurrying, and when he stopped, he was close enough to the masked man that there was nowhere comfortable for the man's eyes to go except directly at him.

"Release him."

A pause.

The hand released.

The masked man straightened. He stepped forward until there was barely enough air between them for a medium-sized grudge.

"You would allow this," he said, with a precision that suggested the word had been selected very carefully, "in full view of their families?"

"He didn't know," Shao Kahn said. "He was offering the only kindness he had. That you find it monstrous is your problem, little man." He did not move. "Judging a culture by the measure of your own is the first evidence of a small mind."

The words went precisely where they were aimed.

The masked man went very still.

Between the two groups, weapons were held with the motionless intensity of things being held back rather than held. The armoured woman's battle-axe had a specific angle to it that communicated readiness without quite communicating action. Baraka stood just behind Shao Kahn's right shoulder, making a low sound in his chest that had no good translation in most languages but communicated clearly enough in all of them.

Shao Kahn glanced at the axe. Then, at the masked man.

"Stand your companion down," he said, "unless you are confident in how this ends."

"Her name," the masked man said, with a quietness that was somehow louder than shouting, "is Albedo." A pause that had architecture to it. "And you will address me as Ainz Ooal Gown."

The name landed.

Shao Kahn heard it. He processed it.

He heard it again, internally, against every association it carried — the game, the guild, the Great Tomb of Nazarick, the Supreme Being, the impossible, ridiculous, world-bending coincidence of —

He leaned forward. His voice dropped below the threshold of anyone else's hearing, below wind, below fire-crackle, below breath.

"...Yggdrasil?"

Ainz went very still in a way that was completely different from all the other ways he had been still. This was the stillness of a man who has just heard, in enemy territory, a word that should not exist.

"...Yes," he said, barely a sound. "Are you — a player?"

Shao Kahn gave the smallest possible nod.

The silence between them lasted approximately one second. It was, in terms of information density, approximately equivalent to a short novel.

Then: the sound of hooves, distant, closing. A group of riders on the village road, riding with the urgency of people who have heard things and drawn the wrong conclusions and are planning to do something about them.

Ainz exhaled. Almost inaudible. "We can't break character," he said, at the exact border of audibility. "Not here. Not with witnesses. We have to — I'm sorry, I hate this, but we have to play our roles until there's a moment to talk privately." A pause. "Rivals, for now. I think that's the cleanest narrative."

"Agreed." A pause. And then, at the same volume, with what might have been the very faintest trace of something that was almost, almost, almost apologetic: "I'm sorry in advance."

"For what — "

Shao Kahn's fist connected with Ainz Ooal Gown's stomach.

Not his full strength. Not remotely close to his full strength. But enough — enough for the sell, enough for the room, enough to fold Ainz forward with his hand pressed to his abdomen and his composure somewhat creased.

"LORD AINZ!!"

Albedo was moving before the sound finished leaving her mouth. She stopped only because Ainz raised one hand — flat, absolute, trembling very slightly with the effort of standing upright — and she stopped. After all, when he raised that hand, she stopped. That was simply the law of it.

He straightened. Slowly. He looked up at Shao Kahn.

What had been in his voice before — the fury, the precision, the quality of a man who was accustomed to being the most dangerous thing in his zip code — none of that was there now. What was there instead was something altogether colder.

Quieter.

"You will regret that," Ainz Ooal Gown said. And it did not sound like a threat. It sounded like a weather forecast.

Shao Kahn looked down at him with all the warmth of a very old glacier.

"Know your place," he said. "No one threatens the Emperor of Outworld." He let it sit. Then he turned his back — which was a statement, a performance, a deliberate provocation wrapped in sovereignty — and walked.

His daughters fell into step. His guard fell into step. Baraka fell into step.

Behind them, Ainz Ooal Gown and Albedo stood in the blood-scented air of the village square and watched them go.

Albedo was saying something. Several things. With considerable feeling. Her axe was still in her hand.

Ainz was not listening. He was watching Shao Kahn's retreating silhouette with the focused, calculating stillness of a mind that has just received a very significant piece of information and is beginning, very carefully, to understand what it changes.

Outworld, he thought. The DLC. The brutal one. The one where the lore was war and conquest and something ancient and immovable sitting at the centre of both. The Emperor of Outworld is not just a tyrant. He is the shape that tyranny takes when it has been given enough time.

And he is here.

And he is a player.

And I am not alone.

The riders on the road were getting closer. The fires in the village were burning lower. Somewhere in the woods, the Tarkatan camp murmured with the ordinary sounds of people trying to make sense of somewhere new.

Ainz lowered his hand. He rolled his neck once, with the composure of a man putting something away in a very secure drawer.

"Albedo," he said, in his measured, carrying tone, the one that filled rooms and ended conversations. "Stand down."

She turned to him. "My Lord — that man — "

"I know." A pause. He looked in the direction Shao Kahn had gone. His mask gave nothing away. But behind it, for just a moment, something that had been very heavy became, fractionally, lighter. "I know who that was."

He looked at the road. At the approaching riders. At the village around them, full of its ordinary terror and extraordinary evening.

"We have work to do," he said. "And — it seems — we are not entirely without company."

He began to walk.

I'm not the only one who is here, he thought, and the words felt like the first warm thing he'd touched since arriving.

He kept walking, and the night kept breathing, and somewhere ahead of him through the trees, Shao Kahn walked in the opposite direction with something remarkably similar written across a face he had deliberately ensured no one was positioned to read.

Company.

At last.

End of Chapter II

Next: Chapter III — "The Art of Neighbouring" (Or: In Which Multiple Ancient Powers Attempt Diplomacy, Baraka Attempts Lunch, and Everyone Is Slightly Surprised by the Outcomes of Both)