The bird seller had fallen from a great height and, by sheer luck, survived.
But he quickly realized he would have been better off dying from the fall. At least then he would not have had to witness the horror in front of him.
Tentacles from another realm writhed their way into the Skallashi's body. The gentle pack beast let out a scream, its whole body convulsing as the thick fur rose and fell, with dissolved organic matter sloshing beneath it like amniotic fluid.
Those tentacles gave off a venomous purple glow as they kept pumping Void energy into the Skallashi. In the midst of matter dissolving and reforming, visible energy spilled outward and spread to the birds in the cages.
In the blink of an eye, the sand falcons were reduced to skeletons, then twisted further from there.
Their golden feathers vanished, replaced by a single vertical eye opening in the center of each skull. Their lower beaks lengthened, needle-like teeth sprouted inside like the teeth of a comb, and feathers grew back over their wings, only now they were black, as if they could swallow light itself.
When the bird seller saw the iron cages bending and twisting under the monstrous strength of the black birds clawing from within, he finally understood that disaster had truly struck. In a panic, he spotted a tunnel and bolted into it.
...
When they resumed hunting, Zihark took Kai'Sa's hand.
There was no brown sugar water down here, and he could not even get her a cup of hot water. The only care he could give her was simple companionship, and holding her hand on top of that.
Besides, having her period did not mean she had been sealed away and rendered useless.
For someone like Kai'Sa, whose body had already gone far beyond normal human limits, the physical effects were minimal. The bigger change was in her mood. Inevitably, she was a little more sluggish than usual.
A sudden resistance tugged at his arm. Feeling Kai'Sa stop again, Zihark turned back and asked, "Is your stomach bothering you again?"
"No..." Kai'Sa's voice came through the helmet. "Do you smell that?"
"Smell?" Zihark lowered his helmet into place. The voidskin caught a trace scent in the air and analyzed it, stirring up a distant memory.
This was...
the smell of fear.
"Something alive came down here again," Kai'Sa said.
Behind his helmet, Zihark's expression turned grim. Right now, he did not want her coming into contact with surface dwellers at all. But only intelligent living things could give off fear like this.
And judging by how strong it was, it was probably a human. Only humans had emotions rich enough to produce fear this intense.
"We should go take a look." Kai'Sa had already started moving before he could argue, leaving him no chance to make excuses.
Watching her run ahead, Zihark had no choice but to hurry after her.
The voidskin rose and fell over Kai'Sa's body, forever yearning to feed and kill, while she herself mistook that urge for an instinct to seek out life. She raced through the tunnel, closing in on the source as fast as she could.
At the far end of the tunnel Kai'Sa was running through, the bird seller was fleeing for his life, his eyes full of a terror beyond understanding.
Behind him were several grotesque black birds, mutated from the sand falcons.
Their dark wings beat as they pursued him relentlessly, like death descending from the sky. The sharp intelligence once shining in their long, narrow triple eyes was gone, replaced by naked malice.
"Damn it all, I never should've taken the shortcut!"
Those sand falcons should have been sold at the market for a tidy profit, but now they had turned into man-eating monsters, flapping through the darkness with eerie, rasping cries as they tried to devour him.
"Nasus, protect me! Please let me make it back alive!"
The threat of death had pushed the bird seller to the brink of collapse, but the true nightmare that finally crushed him came from the front.
Ancient purple light flared from the gouges in the rock walls on both sides of the tunnel, illuminating the silhouette of something monstrous flashing through the darkness ahead.
Like the last straw that broke the camel's back, that hopeless trap with no way forward and no way back shattered his mind.
His legs gave out beneath him, and he crashed onto the jagged stone floor.
Pain was proof that he was still alive.
The sharp agony yanked his soul back into his body. His unfocused eyes cleared enough to see the darkness again.
The terrifying shape ahead closed the distance at a speed beyond imagination, shoving the air aside in front of it. The fierce wind it kicked up forced the bird seller's eyes shut, and he thought he might as well leave them closed and wait for death.
But to his surprise, the figure did not attack him. Instead, it flashed right past him, then slammed to a crouching stop behind him.
It lowered its body. The armor plates fixed over its shoulders shifted and unfolded, and a glowing shoulder pod split open. A blinding light shone from within as it aimed at the oncoming black birds.
In Kai'Sa's vision, the three birds blending into the darkness were marked in red patterns. She could lock onto them at a glance.
Then, with a sharp shout, a swarm of spinning light missiles streaked out, carrying searing destruction straight at the flock.
Shiu! Shiu! Shiu!
The missiles locked onto all three birds with perfect accuracy. In a burst of blinding violet light, they were blasted from the air and torn apart into grotesque heaps of flesh, their hearts destroyed in the explosion. Only a few intact black feathers drifted slowly down.
With the threat eliminated, Kai'Sa started toward the bird seller.
The moment he saw how effortlessly she had killed the birds, he shrieked like a cat with its tail stepped on.
"Don't! Don't come any closer!"
Kai'Sa froze for a second, then seemed to think it might just be her appearance frightening him, so she removed her helmet.
"Begging won't help you down here. If I wanted to kill you, you wouldn't even know I was the one who did it."
She reached out a hand—or rather, a claw—trying to help him up from the ground.
"M-Monster! Don't come near me!"
But it was as if the bird seller had not heard a word she said. Fumbling in panic, he yanked out a dagger and pointed it at her, tears of terror streaming down his face as he frantically kicked backward across the ground, desperate to get away.
"I may be covered in Void skin, but inside I'm the same as you. I'm human too." Kai'Sa's brow drew tight as she tried to explain. "The Void gives people a thousand ways to die, but only one way to live, and that's to become one of them. I had no choice..."
No matter how she tried to explain, this human being, crazed with fear, kept muttering the same word over and over.
Monster.
Each time it was like a steel needle driving into her soft heart.
"I'm not a monster!" The irrational misunderstanding made Kai'Sa, who had approached him with hope in her heart, angrier and angrier.
Perhaps thinking he simply could not see her human face clearly in the darkness, Kai'Sa made her shoulder pods shine even more brightly to illuminate herself.
But to the bird seller, it only looked like she was about to fire another barrage of explosive light and kill him. He threw up his arms and covered his eyes on the spot.
In that moment, Kai'Sa remembered something Zihark had once told her.
Humans were full of prejudice. They only believed what they saw, and then treated it as the truth.
The man in front of her saw only the monster on the outside and ignored the human being within.
That was prejudice.
And her own naive belief that people on the surface would understand her, that they could speak to each other like normal—
that was prejudice too.
Roar—
A beast's howl came from behind her, and Kai'Sa had no choice but to tear her attention away from the bird seller and turn around.
[End of chapter]