As Kai'Sa ran through the tunnel, she said, "We should stop this before it happens. We have the power to do it."
It had nothing to do with justice. The Void wanted to destroy all living things, and that meant they had no choice but to stand against it.
"The power?" Zihark glanced at his own body, still that of an eleven-year-old boy, and rejected the idea immediately. "No. Not yet. But you can start by thinking about what you'll do when the time comes."
"Me?" Kai'Sa began to think, but before she could answer, Zihark answered for her.
"You're planning to lure the Void creatures away by yourself, so they don't discover the humans on the surface, right?"
"How did you know?"
After spending a year down here, Kai'Sa felt she had grown familiar with the underground world. With this voidskin protecting her, she had escaped from the encirclement of Void creatures more than once.
And monsters ruled by hunger were always easy to bait. The moment she dangled herself in front of them, they took the hook.
"How could I not know you?" Zihark snorted.
In the original course of events, that was exactly what Kai'Sa had done. That was why he knew. But even without that knowledge, he still knew it was the stupidest possible choice.
"You silly girl. There are too many people up there to save. Your method won't save them all. It'll only drag you in too deep."
"You'll spend your whole life either saving people or rushing off to save more people. You'll never have time to do anything you actually want to do, like traveling the surface and seeing the world for yourself..."
"If we can't deal with the Void itself, then we deal with the people helping it."
"If you ask me, the only real way to prevent more tragedies is to wipe out that cult that worships the Void. And while we're at it, we can avenge our village and our dead families."
The moment she remembered the night their village fell, the flames of revenge blazed in her violet eyes.
"People like that don't deserve to live. The first thing I'll do after I return to the surface is hunt them down."
"Now that's the kind of hunter you'd expect to come out of the Void." Zihark reached out to pat Kai'Sa on the head in encouragement, but her shell-covered helmet dulled any sensation.
He knew that was what she said now, but when the time came, there was every chance she would hesitate or go soft in front of a human enemy.
Killing people was not the same as killing monsters. She would have to cross that line in her own heart first.
Just as Zihark was thinking about returning to the surface, alarm bells suddenly went off in his head.
"Danger! Something's wrong!"
He shouted the warning at once, but Kai'Sa had no time to stop.
A huge shadow lunged out of the darkness of a side passage, and its swinging claws slammed straight into Kai'Sa.
She was knocked flying, and Zihark was thrown off with her.
The force sent him tumbling and skidding across the rocky ground, the uneven surface scraping his bare upper body raw. He barely managed to stop himself by digging his claws into the ground.
"Kai'Sa!" Ignoring the pain of his injuries, Zihark called out immediately to make sure she was still alive.
A violent cough came from the dust cloud not far away, followed by Kai'Sa's voice, distorted by the mask.
"I'm fine..."
She stepped out of the haze. Part of her voidskin had been shattered away, exposing the skin beneath, pale and drained of life, her flesh carrying that same deathly, insectile look.
And that was supposed to be fine?
Zihark pushed himself upright against the wall. This was the first time he had ever seen Kai'Sa hurt this badly. Fortunately, her voidskin's resistance to impact was still strong enough that she had not lost the ability to fight.
"I thought I'd shaken them off."
Kai'Sa snapped both hands forward, light blades springing out before her fists. She wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand, and the voidskin calmly absorbed the blood that had seeped out.
Her face hardened, sharp and vicious, like a hunter entering the kill.
"Looks like I was very wrong."
The dust stirred unnaturally, and then a massive skeletal goat head burst through it. It loomed directly above Kai'Sa, its great triangular maw aimed straight at her skull.
"Behind you!" Zihark threw up a hand.
He did not need to remind her. Kai'Sa had already noticed. She spun into a side flip and avoided the snapping jaws just before they crashed down, leaving the hunter biting empty air.
Then she burst forward, stepped on the beast's skull, and vaulted onto its back. Dropping into a crouch, she drove both fists against its spine, her twin blades plunging through the gaps in its ribs as she blasted purple flame into its chest.
The fire flooded the monster's ribcage and even erupted from its throat, melting the rock in front of it.
Kai'Sa sprang off the skull and flipped down to the ground. Under the torment of the flames, the hunter's huge body exploded behind her into a mangled mass of blood and flesh.
Her voidskin rippled restlessly, absorbing the loose energy released by the monster's death and slowly repairing the gaps in her armor.
"What a waste. I blew up the heart too." Kai'Sa retracted her blades with infuriating calm.
A powerful Void beast like a hunter had to contain far more Void energy in its heart than an ordinary Voidling. And she had just blown it to pieces. What a pity.
"Why would you say something like that..." Zihark let out a bitter laugh.
He did not know whether heaven simply could not stand seeing Kai'Sa show off, but every time she said something bold, something even worse appeared right after, as though fate itself could not wait to slap her in the face.
If they were not underground, Zihark would have suspected lightning was about to strike her on the spot.
"That big heart you wanted is coming right now," he warned, rubbing at his brow. "Get tight against the wall."
Sure enough, a stinging warning pulsed across Kai'Sa's skin the very next second.
She immediately flattened herself against the rock wall like Zihark. In the darkness at the twelve o'clock and six o'clock positions, two terrifying violet lights flared at the same time. Then two beams shot out and crossed through the junction in a crisscrossing sweep.
The underground tunnel blazed as bright as day. The lasers shot straight into the bend of the passage, and the whole underground space shook violently as the rock walls burst apart and collapsed with a thunderous crash.
Kai'Sa, pinned at the angle of the intersection, narrowly escaped the crossing beams. Even the residual energy in the air left her shaken.
If she had failed to dodge just now, the result was obvious.
"Damn it. How did they flank us?" The harsh light outlined the massive forms of the hunters. Kai'Sa clenched her fists and edged along the wall until she reached Zihark's side.
This time, she did not choose to attack first. Two hunters were closing in from opposite directions. If she rushed one of them, then Zihark would inevitably be exposed to the other.
"What do we do? Our retreat's cut off."
Kai'Sa realized the collapsed stone had already blocked both routes behind them, while the two remaining paths of the four-way junction were occupied by the hunters' huge bodies. Breaking through would be extremely difficult, and panic tightened in her chest.
"We fight. I'll hold one of them back. Hunters are far stronger than Voidlings, so I won't be able to control it for long. You have to kill the other one as fast as possible and come back to help me." Zihark stayed relatively calm and immediately gave her the only way out.
"You can control them? For how long?" Kai'Sa's eyes lit up in surprise. She had thought Zihark could only watch from the sidelines. He had hidden his true cards for too long.
"Around half a minute."
The number Zihark gave was not actually his limit.
He could not afford to state the exact maximum. He had to leave himself a margin for error in case something unexpected happened.
[End of chapter]