The figure approaching through the dark was reflected in Kai'Sa's bright eyes.
It was a shape she knew.
"Zihark?! How are you—" Kai'Sa's mouth fell open in shock. She tried to call his name, but she was so overwhelmed that her voice failed her.
One of Zihark's eyes had turned into something like a violet abyss, flickering with an eternal, unreal light. An unknowable energy radiated from it, keeping the swarm of Voidlings still beneath his gaze. But the sight of it was unsettling all the same.
"Cough... didn't I tell you not to do anything stupid?" Zihark shot Kai'Sa a look. Seeing the blood running from her head left him furious and heartsick at the same time.
By the third day after transmigrating into this world, he had said some version of that line so many times he was sick of hearing himself. Kai'Sa simply refused to listen, always rushing off to do the exact things he had warned her not to do.
Maybe it was because he still looked like a child. In Kai'Sa's eyes, he had no authority at all.
"Was that you? Were you the one who made them stop? How did you do it?" Kai'Sa shrank back a little as she stared at his strange eye, though whether from fear or something else, even she could not have said.
Zihark's arrival had made her forget she was still in danger. He sighed inwardly. This silly girl really was better suited to surviving alone. She would grow faster that way. Give her a little hope, and she would start drifting immediately.
If he had been less attached to her, he might have quietly slipped away after this and let her fend for herself.
Seeing Kai'Sa still glancing around at the frozen swarm, he snapped again, "Move. Now. I can't hold them like this for long. They could wake up at any second."
He kept his voice low, as though afraid of disturbing the sleep-talk of those Void creatures.
"Hss..." Gritting her teeth against the pain, Kai'Sa used the spear to push herself upright. Then her gaze slid to the Voidling with the ruined head.
The memory of what had just happened hit her all over again. Furious that the thing had refused to cooperate and nearly gotten her killed, she gave in to a sudden vicious impulse and thrust the spear straight through its heart.
Void creatures did not mourn their own, but the death of one of their kind still sent a ripple of threat awareness through the air.
The swarm stirred.
Zihark's strange eye flickered again and again, forcing the disturbance back down.
Feeling the warning in his stare, Kai'Sa sobered up at once. She used the spear to lift the corpse, slung it over her shoulder, and limped out of the cavern into the deeper tunnels.
...
The moment Kai'Sa set the spear down, Zihark grabbed her arm.
"When did your arm get better? Did my blood work?"
Kai'Sa was so startled by the fact that his deadened arm was moving again that she did not notice the look in his eyes, hot enough to burn.
Her desperation on his behalf took some of the edge off his temper. He did not answer. Instead, he lowered his gaze to inspect the damaged armor on her arm.
A knife mark had appeared across it.
That cut was the reason nearly half the plate had shattered on impact. The structure had already been weakened.
"You're hurt. Does it hurt a lot?"
He was angry and distressed in equal measure, and he could not help worrying whether this might affect Kai'Sa's evolution later on.
"It does..."
Zihark reached out and brushed the tangled hair away from her face. Kai'Sa immediately went quiet and answered in a small voice.
The wound burned, but honestly, it still did not feel as bad as the constant stabbing pain from the armor.
"You scraped your head too. You weren't that bright to begin with, so try not to make yourself any dumber."
He saw where the skin on her forehead had split and the blood had run down to her eyebrows. He wiped it away, and for a moment their eyes met. Kai'Sa found herself staring blankly at his strange left eye.
"What else hurts?" he asked.
"I landed on my butt. It really hurts."
Kai'Sa answered weakly, then added, "Back there."
She could not name the exact spot, so she reached behind herself to show him, somewhere near the waistband of her trousers.
To Zihark, Kai'Sa was just a little girl. He did not feel any need to get embarrassed about it. He tugged the waistband down a little, checked the area, and saw some swelling.
"Nothing serious. You just banged your tailbone. It's not broken."
That was a relief.
But then his eyes drifted to the Voidling corpse still hanging from the spearpoint, and he remembered the reckless stunt she had just pulled, nearly waking the swarm for no reason except to vent her anger.
He decided she needed a lesson.
Smack.
The sharp sound cracked through the dark, silent tunnel. Kai'Sa let out a strangled little yelp, then whipped around and glared at Zihark.
"Why did you smack my butt?"
She clutched at herself, eyes already glistening with tears.
The pain was nothing to her. But at her age, being spanked was humiliating beyond belief.
"Because you don't listen," Zihark said firmly, showing not the slightest shame.
"You were only born a few months before me! What gives you the right to spank me?!"
Kai'Sa answered by punching him straight in the nose, looking ready to fight him for real.
"I'm disciplining you for your parents!"
Zihark had not expected her to be this wild. She had gone straight for his face. The worst part was that, right now, he could not beat her in a fight. All he could do was shield his head with his arm and keep arguing back through sheer stubbornness.
"You don't listen."
"You're too reckless."
"You act on your own."
"Keep this up and one day you'll get both of us killed!"
That last line hit home.
Kai'Sa stopped throwing wild punches.
She knew the two of them were tied together now. Hurting Zihark meant hurting the fragile little world the two of them shared. She could not keep acting however she pleased.
In just a single day, one of them had supplied the brains while the other had supplied the strength. They had saved each other, relied on each other, and become tangled together so completely that it was hard to tell who owed whom anymore.
But as far as results went, Zihark had always been right. Listening to him was obviously the safer choice.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have hit you." She tugged on his sleeve, looking miserable.
"Oh, so you hit me and then say sorry? Great. If apologies fixed everything, what would we need the police for?"
Zihark could not establish authority by force, not when Kai'Sa could beat him up. But he could still establish rules. And until he did, he could not just let her off because she apologized first. Otherwise, he would have taken that punch for nothing.
"Police?"
Kai'Sa had no idea what he meant. For a second, she wondered whether she had actually punched his brain loose.
"From now on, if we disagree about something, you listen to me. No arguments."
Zihark glossed right over it. Outside a place like Piltover, there really was no such profession as police anyway.
"Fine."
Kai'Sa did not think too deeply about it. It sounded easy enough, so she agreed at once. The second rule, though just as simple, made her instinctively resist.
That, however, was exactly the point. Zihark wanted that discomfort there, so she would stop and think before doing something reckless.
"And if you break the rule, I spank you, and you don't get to complain."
"That's not fair. What happens if you mess up?" Kai'Sa shot back at once.
"Then I'll pee squatting down," Zihark declared, as if he were making some great sacrifice.
"Deal!"
Kai'Sa agreed instantly. She hooked a finger with his to seal the promise and grinned. "You'd better not let me catch you making a mistake. If I do, I'm going to kick you in the butt while you're squatting there peeing!"
Girls who spent all their time running wild with boys usually went through a stage of wondering why they were not allowed to join in those standing contests. Of course, they could not demand everyone else squat down just to make it fair, and some of them stayed bitter about it for a surprisingly long time.
Kai'Sa was exactly that type. She had spent plenty of time running around with the boys, so the moment she heard Zihark's punishment, she found it deeply satisfying. There was a prankish thrill in dragging someone else down into the same embarrassment.
But in the end, she was still too young.
Zihark had her spinning in circles, and she was pleased with herself the whole time.
As someone who had already lived one life, how could he possibly make mistakes? And even if he did, that punishment meant nothing to him.
Besides, once the two of them completed symbiosis and stopped eating normal food, their metabolism would slow to a crawl and practically stop. By then, he would not even need to pee anymore.
So how exactly was that punishment ever supposed to happen?
On the other hand, he really ought to treasure these days when he still could spank Kai'Sa. Once her living armor spread over the rest of her body, even that small blessing would be gone.
After the two of them finished laying down their rules, Zihark's gaze shifted to the Voidling Kai'Sa had brought back.
If they left it any longer, the Void energy in its heart would keep leaking away. Wasting food was shameful, and for the living armor, this stuff was practically staple food.
But that raised an immediate problem.
Who was supposed to absorb this heart first?
[End of chapter]