Chương 73: Talia

Talia stood at the edge of her two hundredth conquered outpost and felt nothing that resembled satisfaction. The work was done here. Her people moved through the wreckage with the unhurried efficiency she had drilled into them, sorting the living from the dead, the useful from the merely surviving, and she watched them and took stock the way she always did. Two hundred outposts.

She had walked into two hundred of these human settlements and walked out of each one having decided exactly who lived and who did not, and the tally of it sat in her mind cold and complete. Ten thousand humans. That was what two hundred outposts had held, fifty souls to each, scooped off their strange blue planet by the same system that had scooped up her own people once, on a world called Voss that felt a lifetime and a whole self ago. Ten thousand.

And of those ten thousand, five thousand remained, which meant five thousand did not, and Talia could account for every one of the missing without a flicker. Two thousand five hundred she had sacrificed.

That had been the first fifty outposts, the hardest and most necessary work, because her people had come out of the Abyss's grip carrying its corruption in them, and the only way she had found to cleanse it was the ritual, the circles, the arranging of human bodies in patterns the corruption could be poured into and burned away. Fifty of her own to cleanse, and it had cost fifty humans apiece, and she had paid it without hesitation because the alternative was watching the last of the Kharai rot from the inside.

That work was done now. Every one of her fifty walked cleansed, their eyes clear of the red, free of the thing that had ridden them since she surrendered them to it. She had bought their freedom with two and a half thousand strangers and she would do it again a hundred times over, because they were hers and the strangers were not, and that was the moral universe she had left. The rest of the dead were simpler.

A thousand killed to instill fear, because a population that had watched its neighbors die was a population that did as it was told. Fifteen hundred more killed for insubordination, for the ones who tried to run or fight or free the others, because an example made of the disobedient bought the obedience of everyone who watched. Five thousand dead, and the remaining five thousand as pliant as terror could make them. Of those five thousand living, one thousand were combatants, folded into her armies.

The other four thousand she moved constantly, outpost to outpost, and this was the elegant part, the part she was quietly proud of. She never let a family stay whole in one place. The children of one outpost were held in another, watched by strangers, and every combatant who might have thought of rebellion knew that his defiance would be answered not on his own body but on his child's, three outposts away, where he could not reach and could not save.

It was a machine built entirely out of love, the love these humans bore their children, turned into the chain that held them. She had not invented cruelty. She had simply understood, better than most, that the strongest leash you could put on a person was the thing they would die to protect. She felt no guilt about any of it. That was the thing the Abyss had left her, or perhaps the thing it had taken, she was no longer sure which.

Where guilt should have been there was only the work, and beneath the work, two things that had grown in the space the corruption vacated. An urge to rebuild, fierce and total, to take her cleansed people home to Voss and repopulate a world she had nearly emptied. And under that, colder and older, a hunger for vengeance, for the forces that had put her in the position of choosing between her people's bodies and their souls in the first place. Rebuild, and repay. Those were her gods now.

She loved her people with a love that had curdled into something a sane person might not recognize as love at all, a thing that would burn ten thousand strangers to ash without blinking if it bought the Kharai one more generation. But she called it love, and she was not wrong to. She had decided to split her strength into three.

Herself leading the main body north, and two more armies of a thousand each striking east and west, each built the same way, a core of her cleansed generals and their monsters wrapped around a mass of terrified human labor. The bosses were the key to it.

She controlled some fifty of them, taken from the Tainted outposts, and every one of them had been cleansed before she would let it near her, because she would not command a corrupted thing, would not have the Abyss's fingers anywhere in her army after what it had done to her own. The cleansed bosses could speak. They could reason.

And, strangely, they kept their command of their own Tainted even after the corruption was scrubbed from them, so that each cleansed boss brought with it a swarm of the monsters it had once led while still red-eyed. Any boss that could not be cleansed, that came out of the ritual still snarling and mindless, she killed. She would not compromise on that. The utility of the Tainted she would use, held at one remove through a cleansed hand, but she would not touch the corruption directly again. Not ever.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. She had learned, interrogating the humans, the thing about this place that changed everything. The planet was A-rank potential. She had made them repeat it three times before she believed it. Planets had ceilings, and the ceiling determined everything, how strong the beings born there could become, how much the multiverse would pay to own it. Most worlds capped low. Her own Voss had been a middling thing.

To be A-rank potential was to be one of the rare and terrible prizes of the multiverse, a world that could birth beings of staggering power, that could, in the right hands over the right centuries, be raised even further. It explained the tutorial. It explained why the system had built this whole elaborate machine specifically to strengthen these humans, why the place felt tilted in their favor at every turn. Someone, something, wanted these people made strong. And it meant this world would become a battlefield.

Not now, not for years perhaps, but inevitably, because an A-rank planet was a thing the whole hungry universe would eventually come for, and the beings it produced could be extraordinary. It was possible, she thought, standing in the wreckage, that there were beings already born on this world with affinities at the very top of what existence allowed, the perfect ones, the kind that showed up once in an age. She did not know if any such being existed here.

But the potential said they could, and that was reason enough to take the whole planet before anyone else did. That was the plan now, cold and clear. Conquer the tutorial. Conquer the world. Hold an A-rank prize against all comers, rebuild her people upon it, and make whoever had done this to the Kharai pay in the coin of an entire captured planet. She would need to move fast, and she would need to be strong, and the strange thing, the thing that puzzled her even now, was that she was.

Everyone in this tutorial was suppressed. She could feel it on the tainted, on the bosses, on everything, the system holding their true strength down to some baseline, stripping away the depth that made a veteran more than his level. She had felt it on herself too, at first. But less. So much less.

She had been extravagantly talented once, back when she was young and rising, and her galaxy was still something she meant to climb rather than survive, and some of that talent had survived the suppression in a way no one else's had. Her manipulation of the energies in a body, of her own and others', had come through the system's dampening almost intact, where everyone around her had lost theirs entirely. She did not understand why. She had stopped needing to understand why.

It was enough that in a world of suppressed strangers, she moved like something the suppression had forgotten to fully touch, and it made her, level for level, a monster none of them could match. Her two generals waited on her word at the edge of the wreckage. The first was the orc, Kul, and he towered over everything, cleansed now, the red gone from his eyes, but the fear very much still in them. She found it faintly amusing, the way a thing that size flinched when she looked at it.

The scars from their first meeting still marked him, the fight that had lasted seconds, that had ended with her boot on his skull and a question he'd had the sense to answer correctly. He had proven useful since. Prideful, brutal, desperate to prove himself something more than the failure his own tribe had made of him, which made him easy to point at a problem and trust to hit it hard. She would send him where she needed a hammer.

The second was a quieter halfling, slight and timid, who had surrendered the moment he understood what she was, the moment he'd watched her work and grasped that resistance was a form of suicide. He said little. He kept his eyes down. She had no strong feelings about him beyond his usefulness, and he seemed to prefer it that way, making himself small in her presence like a creature that had learned smallness was the safest thing to be near her.

She looked at the two of them, and at the wreckage, and at the vast machine of fear and love and death she had built across two hundred conquered outposts, and she made her assignments. She would go north herself, toward the densest concentration of outposts, toward whatever strength this tutorial had managed to gather. The western army she gave to the halfling, with instructions to sweep and hold.

And Kul she sent to the region her scouts had flagged as strange, where the outposts had gone quiet in a pattern that wasn't the quiet of the dead. Something out there had been clearing the monster nests, aggressively, competently, in a way none of the other human settlements managed. Something out there was growing instead of dying. She did not know what it was.

She sent her hammer to find out, and to break it, because a human settlement that grew was the one kind of thing that could eventually become a problem, and Talia had not survived the emptying of her own world by letting problems grow.

"Go east," she told the orc.

"Destroy any resistance" Kul bowed his cleansed head, and did not meet her eyes, and went to gather his thousand.

And Talia turned north, toward the rest of the work, carrying no guilt and a great deal of purpose, a woman who had done monstrous things for the people she loved and would do a great many more, and did not spare a single further thought for the camp she had just pointed her hammer at, or for the man who protected it, who was, though neither of them knew the other existed yet, the closest thing to a mirror she had in all this world.