"No." Zihark shot down Kai'Sa's request on the spot. "You still can't come into contact with humans. Not until I can control the voidskin well enough to separate it."
If he had known they would be able to see a human settlement from that rock pillar, he never would have agreed to let Kai'Sa come up in the first place.
"I'm just going to look. I'm not going to interfere with their lives."
Kai'Sa knew perfectly well that she would frighten people. After what had happened before, she had already given up on ever convincing others that she was not a monster. But surely there was nothing wrong with looking from a distance, was there?
"There are too many eyes in a settlement. You can see them, and they can see you. Once that happens, they'll all turn on you!"
"Not necessarily." Kai'Sa vanished into thin air and reappeared again, as if performing a magic trick. "Don't forget, I can turn invisible."
"Uh..." Worry really did make people stupid. Zihark had actually forgotten that. "Fine, but what if you get exposed?"
"Then I just run back out. They won't be able to catch me." Kai'Sa planted one foot on a higher ledge of rock, showing off the perfect line of her thigh.
Zihark let out a long sigh. "Do whatever you want, then."
In the end, he could not win against Kai'Sa. If she refused to listen, there was nothing he could do to stop her.
Forget the pain as soon as the wound closes. He thought maybe it would be better to let her see the coldness of human society properly after all. Maybe then she would finally learn.
Kai'Sa, on the other hand, paid no attention to the helplessness in his voice. She only heard that he had agreed.
She jumped with delight and kissed him again, but this time Zihark felt nothing from it.
The good mood he had been in vanished. All that was left was irritation.
"You can go, but we're taking the underground route," he reminded her.
The moment he said that, Kai'Sa came over, wrapped herself around his arm, and started urging him to hurry, more impatient than anything else.
Zihark had no idea what she was in such a rush for. Going underground meant that by the time they reached the area beneath the settlement, it would already be the next day.
Before the last traces of light on the land were swallowed completely by darkness, the two of them climbed back down into the underground world through the shaft.
To their surprise, when they returned below, something was waiting for them at the bottom of the shaft.
A monster they had never seen before.
It looked like a living corpse, mummified by years of desert wind, hunched and shriveled, its blackened skin hard and cracked with dryness. Its limbs were so thin they looked like bare bones, drawn up before its chest like withered branches, the five fingers curled into sharp talons like an eagle's claws.
It had once been a human.
But its face was barely human anymore.
A filthy headscarf hung crookedly over one side of its face. The exposed half showed a dark, blackened eyeball. It did not quite fit the socket, being slightly too small, so the purple light inside its skull leaked out around it, making the eye socket glow faintly.
And beneath that one eye was a huge mouth packed with needle-like teeth, so large it took up most of the face, squeezing out the place where the nose should have been. The corners of its mouth split all the way back beneath the ears.
"Graaak!"
The creature saw them and staggered forward, letting out a hungry rasping cry as purple motes escaped from its mouth.
Neither of them looked happy to see it.
Not because it was strong.
Quite the opposite.
It was weak, almost laughably so, no stronger than the lowest kind of Voidling. The sort of cannon fodder Kai'Sa could blast apart with a casual plasma shot, or Zihark could kill by stabbing its heart with a finger.
No, what made them both grim was what it reminded them of.
Kai'Sa recognized the clothing immediately. This was the bird seller who had fled. He had refused to heed her warning, and in the end he still had not escaped the fate of becoming a monster.
And for Zihark, this was the first time he had seen what a human looked like after being consumed by the Void. A chilling thought struck him: if he had failed to form a successful symbiosis back then, maybe he would have ended up looking just like this.
"What do we do with it?" Zihark looked at Kai'Sa.
He already knew who it had once been.
What he wanted to see now was what Kai'Sa saw.
A person?
Or a monster?
Kai'Sa answered with action.
"May you find the endless spring... and never again be turned away from its waters."
Her lips moved softly, like a prayer, or perhaps a blessing for the dead.
She raised her right hand, aimed her palm at the staggering creature, gathered energy, and fired a single light shot into its chest.
As expected, the living corpse exploded into a grotesque heap of flesh, purple fluid splashing across the ground.
Kai'Sa felt as though something inside her had finally been laid down. She called Zihark over and walked straight past the remains without the slightest hesitation.
...
Traveling underground was far more complicated than traveling on the surface.
A distance that looked less than ten kilometers aboveground took them three whole days to cover below.
There was not a single tunnel down there that led directly beneath their destination. They had to keep changing routes, making choices at half-deceptive forks in the path, stumbling forward until they finally found the right direction.
After living underground for so long, both of them had developed a kind of instinctive sense of direction that could not really be put into words. It kept them from drifting too far off course, or at least warned them immediately when they had gone the wrong way so they could correct it.
That was not the only problem.
They also kept running into swarms of Voidlings blocking the way.
If the swarm was small, they slaughtered their way through. If it was too large, they had no choice but to find another route.
The journey was winding and troublesome, but in the end, they still made it to the area beneath the human settlement and began searching upward for an exit.
The comings and goings of Void creatures had widened and smoothed many of the tunnels, like the way constant traffic reshaped a tourist path.
So the dangerous routes, the twisted narrow passages, the cramped and awkward tracks no creature wanted to use—those became the ones the two of them focused on.
They were like flies finding cracks in an egg, deliberately squeezing into the roughest little side passages and probing whatever lay beyond.
After a few more days, they had more or less mapped out the area. Zihark had discovered many routes unknown to the monsters, and a clear three-dimensional map was already fixed in his mind.
Some of those paths were dead ends, but even those ended very close to the surface. In some places, they could even feel vibrations coming down from above. Still, Kai'Sa did not force her way through any of them. She believed there had to be a hidden exit somewhere.
A few more days passed.
Most of the tunnels had been explored and eliminated as dead ends.
Only the last few narrow passages remained unexplored. By now, Zihark was barely able to keep his energy up, while Kai'Sa was still as enthusiastic as ever.
And it was in those final few paths that they found something new.
They were climbing through a narrow, slanted tunnel, with Kai'Sa in front as usual and Zihark close behind.
"Zihark, do you smell that?" She suddenly stopped, shouting in excitement.
Zihark looked up. Three feet in front of his face was Kai'Sa's pert backside. Hearing her words, he had one awkward moment in the darkness, then twitched his nose and sniffed.
It was not the smell of fear.
It was not the smell of magic.
And it definitely was not the smell of hydrogen sulfide.
Heh. As if a beautiful girl would ever fart.
What he smelled was roasted meat, animal dung, and the thick scent of spices.
Those were the smells of life.
The texture of the world above.
And the reason that smell could drift down here meant only one thing—
this tunnel led to the human settlement above.
[End of chapter]