"Zihark! Zihark!"
The first thing Kai'Sa did after waking up was call Zihark's name like someone possessed.
She found herself pinned beneath the chest of a giant beast, lying in a pool of thick purple sludge. Even moving her arm pulled long sticky strands through the air.
"Disgusting."
Kai'Sa felt a wave of nausea, though she could not deny that her body was absorbing nutrients from it.
But this was no time to feed. The first thing she needed to do was check on Zihark.
At some point, her broken legs had already healed, along with the bite marks on her voidskin. Bracing herself against the ground, she dragged her body out from under the monster. As she walked toward where Zihark had fallen, the slime coating her body was greedily sucked dry by her voidskin, leaving her skin dry once more.
When she reached the hunter's corpse, she found Zihark there too, unconscious beneath the collapsed beast. His situation was almost identical to hers from just now, except one whole arm had been buried inside the hunter's chest.
"Zihark, Zihark! Wake up!" Panicking, Kai'Sa pulled off her helmet, climbed over the beast's thick forelimb, and called his name at close range.
Zihark gave no response. Only the faint rise and fall of his chest told her he was still alive.
"Thank goodness." Seeing him like that, Kai'Sa started crying again, but quickly wiped the tears away with her fingers and absorbed them.
She could not let the corpse keep crushing Zihark's frail human body. Sliding both arms under him, she dragged him out from beneath the hunter, and with him came the arm he had jammed into its chest.
Kai'Sa laid him down and noticed the inside of the monster's chest was dim and hollow, with no sludge spilling from the wound. When she leaned closer and looked inside, she discovered that the heart and flesh had already been completely absorbed by Zihark's voidskin, leaving nothing but an empty shell.
To help him wake up faster, she carried him over to the other corpses, then ripped them open so the energy-rich blood slurry could spill out for him to absorb.
She repeated that several times before Zihark suddenly started coughing.
The moment he opened his eyes, he saw the markings on Kai'Sa's face and the earring half-hidden in her hair. She was holding him so tightly it felt as though she wanted to crush him into herself and make them one.
"Kai'Sa, please use your head a little! I told you before, don't hug me that hard. You're going to squash me flat..."
Hearing his ribs creak in protest, Zihark hurriedly patted her back, urging her to loosen up.
But she refused. No matter what he said, she would not listen. Instead, she leaned forward and pushed him back onto the ground.
"Ow!" He had only just sat up, and now he was down again.
There he lay beside a monster's skeleton, with an emotional Kai'Sa sprawled over him, desperately holding back tears. Zihark silently endured this painfully heavy love and found himself wondering what exactly Kai'Sa's feelings for him were.
Was it romantic love between a man and a woman? Friendship? Family affection?
Or...
All three at once?
They had started out as childhood friends who grew up together. Then they had suffered the tragedy of losing everything, and after that they had relied on each other in the underground world for so long that what existed between them could no longer be described with any single, simple word.
Maybe in the beginning, Zihark had only seen Kai'Sa as his guarantee of survival, as an investment for the future so he would not end up alone. Maybe Kai'Sa had only wanted the comfort he gave her, a way to chase off the loneliness, the one light she could cling to in the endless dark.
But after living side by side for so long, they had already become each other's entire world.
He did not know how Kai'Sa saw it, but he could sum up his own feelings like this:
Back then, without her, he could not survive.
Now, without her, he would not want to live.
The battlefield was in ruins. Monster corpses lay scattered everywhere. The two of them were holding each other after surviving disaster. The mood was perfect.
To test what Kai'Sa really felt, Zihark leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, carrying all the guilty nerves of a boy falling in love too early.
As expected, he got a mouthful of dust. The two of them had not washed their faces in over a year.
Kai'Sa froze for a second, loosened her arms slightly, then turned her face to look at him.
"Did you just kiss me?" she asked, eyes wide, studying his lips curiously as if searching for proof.
"What, was I supposed to bite you instead?" Zihark turned his head away awkwardly. He might have had some experience before, but being stared at that directly still made him uncomfortable.
Kai'Sa showed none of the shyness he would have expected from a young girl. For a moment, Zihark felt he might have been overthinking things. Maybe she did not love him that way at all. Maybe she only saw him as the one family member she had left.
Was it because they were too familiar with each other? Or because she was still too young to even understand these things?
So it had all been for nothing...
But just as he was sinking into disappointment and preparing to start the long campaign properly, one sentence from Kai'Sa yanked him right back out.
"Then kiss the other side too."
She brushed her hair aside, exposing the other cheek, the one he had not kissed yet, and leaned toward him on her own.
Zihark had barely turned back before he bumped straight into her.
He did kiss her.
And got another mouthful of dust.
Looking at the satisfied smile on Kai'Sa's face, Zihark finally understood.
He had been wrong.
Wrong again.
It was not that Kai'Sa felt nothing for him. He had just assumed she was more complicated than she really was.
In truth, she was completely straightforward.
"So I gave you way too much credit, huh? I came in using tactics for Iron rank, and now you're telling me even a bot has more game than you do?" Zihark groaned, rubbing at his throbbing temples.
When it came to feelings, Kai'Sa was almost completely innocent. She acted entirely on instinct.
Normally, when a man and woman started getting close, there was a process. They tested each other first, went back and forth a few rounds, and the more experienced they were, the more probing there was before anyone finally made a move.
None of that existed with Kai'Sa.
She was a complete beginner. Whatever she said was exactly what she felt. There was no difference between the inside and the outside with her.
And in matters of love, she was like a blank sheet of paper. She had fallen into the crack between two worlds at the age of ten. No one had taught her any of this before that, and afterward, Zihark had not taught her either.
So she had stayed exactly as she was at the beginning, expressing her feelings openly and without a shred of concealment, just like that nearly fatal hug a moment ago.
She understood nothing, and her personality was as direct as a straight line.
That was why Kai'Sa never went out of her way to do cute or charming little things. In that regard, she was even more passive than Zihark, who deliberately held himself back because he was still too young.
Zihark had always assumed Kai'Sa's affection meter capped at one hundred, and that every ten points would unlock a new stage of progress. What he had not expected was that Kai'Sa's max affection was only five.
More than a year had passed, and because her attitude had not changed much on the surface, he had thought he had not even started making progress yet.
If he had not tested her just now, he never would have realized the meter had already been full for ages.
"I thought you'd get shy. I didn't expect you to be this direct."
It was over before it had even begun. The whole process had contained none of the usual thrill of romance. Zihark looked at Kai'Sa with a complicated expression, then patted her on the head.
"Get up already. Stop lying on top of me. I'm exhausted, but we still can't rest here. We could get surrounded by Voidlings at any moment."
At the mention of monsters, Kai'Sa finally got up. She reached out to help pull Zihark to his feet and asked, "What does direct mean?"
Zihark reached for her hand and answered gloomily, "It means idiot."
Trying to deal with an idiot was...
Using Kai'Sa's hand, he pushed himself upright, never expecting her to suddenly let go halfway through. He immediately dropped hard onto his backside.
"What was that for?" Zihark was stunned. He had trusted Kai'Sa completely.
"Hmph. That's what you get for insulting me."
Seeing Kai'Sa sulking in that stubborn, tsundere little way, Zihark suddenly shouted, "Ah, that's the feeling! My youth is back!"
Humans really were strange and complicated creatures.
[End of chapter]