"Didn't you eat or something?" Kai'Sa asked, rubbing her sore backside with a look of surprise.
After how furious Zihark had looked a moment ago, she had honestly expected a spanking so hard she would not be able to walk. Instead, the final blow had been unexpectedly light.
"What, was I not hitting hard enough for you?"
They had burned through too much strength while escaping, and Zihark had not recovered yet, so naturally he had not put much force into it. Besides, he was never really going to beat her senseless.
Kai'Sa hurried to explain herself. "That's not what I meant. I'm just worried about you. Let's go find some monster hearts so you can recover some energy."
"But I want to rest first."
Zihark waved her off and stayed seated on the ground, showing no intention of getting up.
After what happened with the burrowing worm, his punishment for Kai'Sa had been mostly symbolic.
Maybe he should find some kind of tool to make the pain sink in deeper, but there was not even a single branch down here.
Life really was making things difficult for him.
Kai'Sa had already started drifting away from the girl he had imagined in his head. Her sense of right and wrong was going crooked in a very strange direction.
He felt like something had gone wrong with the way he was disciplining her, but what was he supposed to do? How was he meant to shape this reckless, naughty little girl into a fierce, cool-headed, decisive Void hunter instead of an impulsive little menace with the temperament of a husky?
Zihark had no answer at all.
He had never raised a daughter before. He had no experience with this sort of thing.
Better to wait for the right moment a little longer. A lot of growth happened in an instant.
Maturity came in an instant. Love came in an instant. Even growing old came in an instant...
Zihark did not let himself think any further. No matter what Kai'Sa turned into in the end, she would still be the girl who had shared life and death with him. He would never resent her, despise her, or mistreat her.
Kai'Sa's original path had been one of loneliness, misunderstanding, and tragedy. If that could change, then surely that was not a bad thing. But once fate's course shifted, where would it lead instead?
And speaking of turning points, nearly dying to the burrowing worm had been one.
It had awakened a desire in Kai'Sa to become stronger, and she had started accepting the fact that the Void living armor was growing across her body. The way the traces of the Void kept spreading over her no longer weighed on her as heavily as before.
Without the armor, she would not be able to protect herself.
She would not be able to protect Zihark either.
The needle-prick pain was not the worst part. What hurt her more was losing some of the sensations that had once made her feel human.
But if giving that up meant the two of them could go on living, then maybe it was worth it.
In a place as dangerous as the underground, though, people often had no control over what happened to them.
A massive swarm of voidspawn suddenly entered the edge of Zihark's senses, and the instant he relaxed, he grabbed Kai'Sa by the wrist.
The moment he confirmed the creatures were heading straight for them, he yanked her up without another word and set off running again.
Not a moment of peace.
"What now?" Kai'Sa asked, still half lost as she ran beside him.
"Weren't you the one who wanted to go dig up hearts? Well, they came to us," Zihark said irritably.
"Is it that same swarm from before? The one that climbed out of the lake?"
"Probably."
"How is that possible? I blocked them with fire. How are they still catching up to us?"
Kai'Sa stared in disbelief. Had those voidspawn smashed through her wall of flame? Or gone around it and picked up their trail again? They had put so much distance between themselves and the swarm. How could it still have found them?
"How should I know? Just run."
Talking it over with Kai'Sa would only distract him. He needed to figure out how to shake the swarm, fast. If either his stamina or his energy ran out first, then they really were dead.
The truth, unfortunately, was simple.
Humans could not outrun Void creatures.
Their very existence was a violation of natural law. They never tired, never seemed to hit a limit, as if conservation of energy was nothing but a joke to them.
"Do these things ever get tired?"
Kai'Sa came to a gasping stop. A slit opened in the living armor on her palm, and several plasma bolts shot out, crashing into the tightly packed swarm and blowing the smaller voidspawn into nauseating chunks.
Without the fist-blade to channel her firebolts, the power was noticeably weaker.
"Don't waste energy. There are too many. You'll never kill them all," Zihark warned her at once.
But Kai'Sa had already summoned the fist-blade again, firing a rapid stream of blue-violet firebolts at the larger creatures in the swarm.
The hideous things were blasted off their feet. Their broken bodies burned as they screamed, limbs thrashing and twisting at impossible angles.
Their bodies had collapsed, but they had not died.
Who even knew what death meant to creatures like that? They did not even have souls for Kindred to carry away.
One of the larger bodies sucked in the blood spilling from the surrounding corpses through its limbs, devouring their essence.
Its huge frame convulsed as lattices of light and writhing pale matter stitched its flesh back together. Its old weak spots hardened into something even tougher.
And from the wounds that could not heal, black-flamed tentacles pushed their way out. They cracked against the ground like whips, and solid stone melted like wax beneath them. Even things that seemed eternal could still be broken down by those horrors.
Kai'Sa understood these Void creatures less and less.
She spat out another wall of flame to block the passage behind them, then forced her leaden legs into motion once more.
After another ten-plus minutes of desperate running, Kai'Sa felt like her thighs were about to snap. Her legs no longer seemed to belong to her.
At last, they had no choice but to stop and recover their strength.
Kai'Sa instinctively lifted a hand to wipe away the sweat itching across her face, but Zihark caught her wrist at once.
"Wait. I think I know why."
With the vision of his abyssal eye, he saw faint traces of magic leaking from Kai'Sa's panicked tears into the air, mixing with her sweat so subtly they were almost impossible to notice.
The traces were weak. Tiny. Almost nothing.
But the Void's predators could still sense them, and they would swarm in from every direction like desert flies finding dung.
That was why they could never shake pursuit.
"Your tears are giving us away. No fear. No panic. Understood?"
"I understand." Kai'Sa nodded hard, suddenly frightened by how close they had come.
Zihark had originally meant to wipe the tears off her face himself, but then he remembered how many times she had used her clothes to wipe away sweat and tears already. By now, her shirt was soaked through with the scent of fear, so he pulled his hand back.
"Use your sleeve and wipe your face clean. Then take off your shirt," he ordered.
"Ah..." Kai'Sa froze.
She might not understand the special feelings between men and women, but she was old enough to know boys and girls were different. By the time she was eight, she had already stopped acting like the boys who peed wherever they pleased. Now he was telling her to strip off her shirt in front of Zihark, and for a moment she simply could not accept it.
So she chose what she thought was the lesser evil.
"Then... you should just spank me instead." She looked like she wanted to cry but did not dare, her face fallen and pitiful.
"You—" Zihark actually laughed in exasperation. At a time like this, that was what she was worried about?
What a bizarre way of thinking. To avoid embarrassment, she would rather get spanked and keep her clothes on. But was getting spanked somehow not embarrassing?
Just then, he felt those malicious presences closing in on the edge of his senses again.
Without another word, Zihark stripped off his own filthy upper shirt.
"Hurry up and take yours off and throw it away. You can wear mine."
[End of chapter]