Zihark pulled out the spear, then used the dagger to pry open the belly plate and cut it off in one intact piece, setting it aside.
After that, he carefully slipped the blade into the sticky chest cavity, severed the pale cartilage, and carved out the damaged heart, placing it on the belly plate.
That egg-sized lump of energy core was their dinner.
And there was only enough for one person to "eat."
What had happened to Kai'Sa earlier had already proven that splitting a Voidling's heart in half was nearly impossible.
The Void was greedy.
The living armor would absorb all of the energy. It would not obey its host and leave half behind for someone else. At least, not yet.
"Kai'Sa, you take it first. Your armor needs energy to repair itself. I'll just eat the jerky."
Zihark carefully held the heart out to her. It was not a casual decision. He had thought it through.
As someone from another world, he knew how Kai'Sa's living armor was supposed to evolve. She would grow into a highly efficient Void hunter.
In other words, a fast, high-damage ADC.
As for his own path, that was still unclear. So far, all he knew was that it had something to do with brainwaves.
At the moment, Zihark had only shown two abilities: radar-like sensing and light mental control. The second one had only awakened when Kai'Sa was on the verge of death.
That made him feel more like a support—warding, scouting, and throwing out control.
For now, his abilities were already enough to deal with large groups of Voidlings. And since their teamwork mostly came down to him making plans while Kai'Sa did the fighting, he had decided to feed resources to her first.
If one of them could grow strong quickly, the two of them would be able to face stronger threats that much sooner.
And down here, Voidlings were far from the only danger. They were just the bottom rung of the underground ecosystem, like worker ants in a colony. No one cared how many of them died.
There were countless horrors below that neither of them could even imagine yet.
But plans never survived reality for long. After all that thought, Kai'Sa still refused to appreciate it.
"No. You eat first." She stepped back half a pace, clearly afraid she might accidentally spill the "egg yolk in the bowl."
"But you're hurt. Your belly plate needs repairing." Zihark noticed her rubbing her arm again and again, like she still wanted to peel the armor off.
"Oh, I get it. You think if you starve it, you'll get rid of it, don't you? Let me tell you right now, that won't work. If it gets hungry, it'll start feeding on you instead. If you don't satisfy it, you'll end up weak and worn out. Eat it. The longer you wait, the worse it'll work."
Zihark sounded utterly confident, but that was not enough to bluff Kai'Sa. She might not be especially clever, but every now and then she still had a sharp moment.
"How do you know all this? We barely spent any time apart, so why do you know so many things I don't?"
"The Void changed your hand first. It changed my brain first. So me knowing things you don't isn't that strange, right? The Void taught me."
Zihark had already prepared that answer long ago. Any question like this in the future would be blamed on the Void.
After hearing that, Kai'Sa stared at her arm for a moment, then looked back at him with a deeply strange expression.
"So you're saying... there's a shell in your head?"
"..."
Children's bizarre thought processes left Zihark speechless. He nearly dropped dinner.
"Hurry up and absorb it!" Even the prettiest girl was equally annoying in her bratty years. Zihark finally lost patience and could not be bothered explaining anymore. "What did you promise me earlier? When we disagree, whose call is it? Absorb it now, or it'll go to waste."
This proved once again that making rules with little kids did not mean much. When they decided to be stubborn, they did not care about anything else.
"No! I'm not taking it! I brought this back for you, so you're eating it!"
Kai'Sa's stubborn streak showed itself in full. No matter what Zihark said, she flatly refused to absorb the energy core.
It was not because she found it disgusting, and it was not because she wanted to starve the armor. She simply wanted to make it up to him.
Objectively speaking, she needed the heart more right now. But if Zihark did not use it, then her charging into the swarm alone would have been nothing but pointless stupidity.
To Zihark, changing the order solved everything. She could take this one, and he could take the next. The result would be the same.
Kai'Sa refused.
Her meaning was simple: maybe it made sense, but she did not care. I don't care what you think. I care what I think.
"Fine. Then I eat this one. The next one and the one after that are yours. Happy now?" Zihark hated wasting resources, but in the end he still lost to Kai'Sa's stubbornness and had no one to blame but himself.
"Mhm." Kai'Sa nodded hard, making a little sound through her nose, then turned her face away in a show of temper.
But when she saw Zihark lifting the heart in front of him, her eyes widened and fixed on him at once.
That was what she had wanted all along.
She wanted to see how he absorbed the heart's energy.
Otherwise, she was afraid he was lying to her again, acting like he was beyond saving and leaving all the good things for her. The thought alone made her feel awful.
Only after seeing him complete the symbiosis properly would she be able to accept his arrangements in peace.
Zihark held the leaking Voidling heart up in front of his face, too preoccupied to notice Kai'Sa's little scheme.
Purple slurry spread across the belly plate, but aside from the plate itself, he could barely feel any extra weight in his hand.
A wave of nausea and worry rose in him.
"Don't tell me I actually have to dip my eye into it to absorb it. That's disgusting."
"What about the tissue around it that hasn't changed? Will my eyelids get corroded?"
"What if my face rots off? I don't even know what I look like yet! Damn it!"
Fear of the unknown made him hesitate. But when his eyeball came close enough to the heart, a strange pull suddenly awakened in the violet abyss of his left eye, drawing the purple energy backward into it.
It was an indescribably strange sensation.
Within that violet abyss, he saw emptiness—true nothingness, the kind that would swallow time itself.
He felt his consciousness sinking fast, dropping into a bottomless pit, into another dimension beyond the far shore.
Was that the real Void? This weightless feeling is awful...
The disturbing vision faded as quickly as it had come. When Zihark's sight returned to normal human perception, every last drop of energy on the plate had already been drained away.
Thinking back on that terrifying illusion, he shuddered and muttered, "It'd be great if I didn't have to use my eye every single time."
The moment the words left his mouth, they turned into a curse.
A ripple, invisible but real, spread out from his eye. The now-useless belly plate still in his hand suddenly began dissolving on its own, bubbling like something dropped into boiling water, turning into a tar-like grayish-white substance that stuck to his skin.
The reflective fluid, glossy as amniotic slime, spread across his whole hand. He panicked, convinced his hand was about to melt, and desperately tried to fling the disgusting stuff off.
He failed.
The gray slurry seemed to react with the air, blackening and hardening at high speed before finally setting in place.
Zihark began to feel the same stabbing pain Kai'Sa had described.
But feeling pain was better than feeling nothing. At least it meant his hand was still there.
He instinctively clenched his fist. With that extra layer of purple skin over his hand, his movements felt completely unhindered. The material was incredibly flexible, and somehow his grip felt even stronger than before.
This seemed to be...
the Void living armor.
[End of chapter]