“First, presenting the challenger!” the master of ceremonies, a balding man in his forties, proclaimed. His voice, augmented and amplified by Feeling, rang out over the din of the packed stadium. “Hailing from the distant land of Otharia, she is called by some as the ‘Reaper of Redwater’, but to most Gustilians and Eterians, she is known simply as ‘The Monster’! I give you: Gabriela Carreno!”

A chorus of hisses and jeers showered down from the stands towards a woman standing just steps away from very center of the stadium, only to be cut short by the announcer.

“And now, her opponent!” A loud cheer rose up immediately from the massive audience surrounding the arena. There had to be at least a hundred thousand people packed into the stands. “The leader of this great nation, she is the bane of beasts, the slayer of sharp-ears!” The MC’s volume quintupled as the cheering rose into a roar, his words thundering over the crowd’s excitement. “People of Stragma! I give you: the one, the only, Akhustal Palebane-chos!”

The crowd exploded with noise, the thousands upon thousands of Stragmans hollering and stomping their feet, sending tremors that shook the very earth itself. Standing opposite her opponent with a lopsided grin, the giant woman raised her warclub high and soaked in the adulation.

Sitting in his cell, Rudra Kapadia gazed out through the slits in his cell and wondered how he had ended up in this situation. Though he had perhaps the best seat in the house for what was to come, he would have given almost anything to be anywhere else.

The stadium resembled cricket stadiums back home, with an oval-shaped arena in the middle surrounded by enough long stone benches to seat a small city. The only real differences were the size of the central oval—about seventy meters across and sixty meters wide by his best guess—and the massive stone platform in the center. At least fifty meters long and wide, the platform rose a little more than a meter from the ground, with large stone pillars jutting skyward every twelve meters or so in each direction.

And there, pushed flush with the side of the stone platform with the slatted end facing the center of the arena so he could see out of the top two-thirds, sat Rudra’s cell. He could see the entire platform and half of the stadium, but little else. Since his cell had only one wall with any openings whatsoever—the door on the left side of the wall and the vertical bars running down the right side from the top to the bottom—he could not see if anybody else was around him.

Apparently, the Chos had come up with a new way to utilize his abilities. With him around, she and her opponent could go all-out with truly deadly attacks without the fear of death or permanent disability. Needless to say, Rudra was not a fan of any of this.

Looking at the woman announced as “Gabriela”, he could see that she wasn’t a fan either. Everything about her, from her slightly slumped shoulders to the dispassionate gaze coming from her tired, bag-lined eyes, screamed that she was not so much looking forward to what was to come as much as she was resigned to get it over with.

Rudra had no real idea what to make of the woman. She sure didn’t look like some impossibly powerful warrior. Around average height for a woman—on Earth at least; he still wasn’t sure what counted as average in Scyria—with a modest frame, she paled in comparison to the immense bearwoman standing ten meters away. A simple ponytail of long black hair encrusted with sweat and dirt hung down her back. She wore an unimpressive outfit of light leather padded armor over a simple, thin brown shirt and equally uninteresting grey pants. Outside of the armor, the huge black crystalline sword in her grip—taller than she and about as wide—and the lean muscles on her arms, she more resembled a regular housewife than somebody with nicknames that contained words like “monster” and “reaper”.

The Chos, on the other hand, very much looked like how he would imagine a “strongest person in a country of over ten million people” to look. Towering over her opponent, Akhustal Palebane rolled her broad, brawny shoulders, looking down at Gabriela the way a starving man would look at an exquisite meal. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation in a way Rudra hadn’t seen since… well, since the day he’d declared himself a pacifist to the nation.

She wore fairly little. Her lower half was covered only by a kilt-like skirt made of furs and feathers, no doubt hunted by her at some point in her life, with thin, tight shorts underneath. Her feet were clad in thin, open sandals that laced up her ankle for support.

As for her upper body, she wore no armor, with only a thick wrap of tan bandages around her chest for support. Rudra immediately knew that while wearing so little would keep her relatively cool during the battle and help maximize her agility, she did it mostly to show off as many of her tattoos as possible. Long, complex patterns traced across her body like her head was a tree and the markings were the world’s most complicated root structure. As he looked, Rudra was sure that there was some sort of pattern there, but it was too intricate for him to make it out from this distance. These were the markings of the Chos, the tattoos that very few in history ever had the right to display.

“The rules are simple: the first combatant to kill or incapacitate their opponent five times is the victor!” the announcer cried. “For the safety of all you watching, all combat must be contained to the central platform! Any combatant knocked from the platform must return within the count of twenty or they will be deemed incapacitated! That’s all! May the best fighter win!”

The crowd cheered again as the MC quickly left the platform. The Chos hefted her club, holding it out in front of her with a single hand as she shifted her stance to something that almost reminded Rudra of a fencer. Meanwhile, Gabriela assumed a more basic two-handed sword stance, setting her left leg slightly forward and holding the blade in front of her with it tilted upward.

“You didn’t tell me we were going to fight in front of a crowd,” Gabriela complained.

The Chos scoffed. “Why wouldn’t we? It’s more fun with people watching, so let’s put on a show! Remember, death has no meaning during this fight, so give me everything you have!”

Rudra leaned up against the bars and stared out at the pair. Though he didn’t want to be involved with any of this, if he had to stand here and watch, at least he could, perhaps, gain some useful knowledge about the Stragman’s weaknesses. He needed something, anything, at this point.

The smaller woman shot forward, covering the distance to Palebane in under a second, causing Rudra to let out a gasp. What swiftness! She moved faster than any person Rudra had ever seen!

“Oho!” the Chos chortled, seemingly impressed as Gabriela swung her sword around with such speed and power that Rudra could hear it woosh through the air all the way across the platform. As she did, Palebane repositioned her club slightly to block the path of the massive blade.

Rudra felt a minute tremor run through the platform as the crystal sword met the wooden stick at tremendous speed and… the stick won? To the shock of both Rudra and, seemingly, Gabriela, the Chos’s club didn’t seem to budge when the blade rebounded off of it, sending the smaller woman spinning wildly away. The crowd howled with laughter as she tried to regain her balance as her feet slid along the flat stone.

“Great!” Palebane called to her. “You’re almost as fast as that Ubran guy on chimirin I fought at Crirada! But you’ll need more than that if you want to beat me!”

Gabriela gritted her teeth and sprang forward again, her weapon lashing out over and over in a ferocious assault. And yet, each time, she found as little success as the last as the Chos easily blocked each blow, moving her club about so quickly and dextrously that one would have thought it was made of Styrofoam.

In a way, it was.

On an intellectual level, Rudra understood what was going on. Tepin had told him one day when he’d asked about how she could lug such a large, heavy object around all day without getting fatigued. His love had figured out the secret long ago—she was so smart; he would never have guessed it on his own just by watching the Chos fight.

The secret was that her powers let her “cheat”, in a sense. He’d thought that she was merely a very strong Feeler with an impervious stick, but he couldn’t have been further from the truth. Instead, the large Stragman was actually an Observer who could somehow alter the inertia of inanimate objects. Lower the inertia to practically nothing, and you could move something like that massive club as easily as if it were a plastic straw. Increase it greatly, and suddenly it had the inertia of a mountain, easily repelling even the absurdly powerful strikes of her opponent and striking with a power thousands of times greater than what should be possible.

So yes, he understood how it was all possible. Still, seeing it in action was a different matter entirely. The ease as which the Chos could switch between various states, changing the inertia of the club from minuscule to gargantuan at the last possible moment before Gabriela’s blade struck it, then reverting to the light version before the club’s sudden “weight” could throw her off balance, boggled his mind. It pointed to an immense talent, one worthy of appreciation. Rudra just wished that talent hadn’t gone to Akhustal Palebane of all people.

Gabriela charged in for another flurry of attacks, but this time, her opponent decided to do more than just place her club in the way. For the first time, the Chos struck back, her club swinging out to crash head-on against the incoming blade. The force of the blow was so great that it nearly tore the crystal weapon from Gabriela’s hands, knocking her dangerously off-balance. The follow-up slammed into her side, crushing right through her arm as if it were made of paper and sending her hurtling into a nearby stone pillar. Gabriela’s head struck the stone with force great enough to crack her head open like a melon, leaving bits of blood and brain matter smeared down the column as her body slid to the floor.

The crowd erupted.

A team of Stragmans—fellow Shells by the looks of them—rushed out onto the arena to fetch Gabriela’s body and bring her to him, but their efforts proved unneeded as, in a single moment, this woman he’d met only once just the day before immediately became one of the most relevant people in his life.

Before the Shells could make it to the downed woman, a strange crimson mist manifested around the body. Rudra couldn’t tell from his distance exactly what was happening, but the mist seemed to condense into Gabriela’s corpse… and then she stood up, seemingly completely fine.

The Chos laughed joyously, clapping her hands with excitement. “So it’s real! You’re truly unkillable!”

The onlookers, for their part, murmured in disbelief. It was one thing for somebody to bring others back to life. This was another thing entirely.

Rudra was the most shocked of all, but for different reasons. In his mind, memories of a long, late-night discussion with Tepin bubbled up into his consciousness. She’d told him of talk at the top of the government of other people with strange, powerful abilities back before the night when everything had fallen apart.

He hadn’t known what to think at the time. The appearance of others with mighty powers that far exceeded what Scyrians could manage screamed “other people from Earth”, but part of him had wondered if the talk was just rumors spread by superstitious, gullible natives. In the end, he’d decided that it didn’t matter. Even if there were others like him in this world, he’d come to the conclusion that, locked away as he was in the middle of a giant rainforest, the odds of his seeing another person from his home ever again were so low that they might as well be zero.

And yet, against all expectations, here she stood, somehow miraculously unharmed. Speed beyond even the greatest Feelers, strength that possibly rivaled his own, plus the ability to return from the dead? There was only one explanation. Now he just felt stupid; her name alone should have tipped him off.

But now that he knew that a fellow Earthling stood just meters away, what was he supposed to do about it? Gabriela Carreno was not here for him in particular. She’d come to have a little catgirl child revived. If the Chos hadn’t demanded this battle as part of the payment, she would already be gone. She had no interest in him.

Palebane backed away, creating space as Gabriela set herself. Without a word, she hopped into the air and kicked off the pillar behind her, launching herself towards the Chos. The Stragman ducked behind an adjacent pillar in reaction. As she flew by, even though stone stood between her and Palebane, the Earthling swung at her anyway.

Rudra’s jaw dropped as, with a crystalline sching, the sword cut through the stone as if it were paper mache. The column toppled over, revealing a surprised and delighted Chos, a line of dripping red having appeared going from the top of her left shoulder across and down to just above her right breast.

“What a marvelous weapon!” she cried.

Gabriela didn’t respond, instead rushing in once more and bounding over the felled stone to deliver a mighty overhead slash. With a malicious grin, the Chos blocked it, kicking out with a leg to strike Gabriela’s airborne body before she could land. The Earthling tumbled but righted herself before Palebane could capitalize on it.

The rest of the round went much the same as the last. Rudra felt like the Earthwoman’s striking and movement speed seemed a bit faster than the first round, but it made no real difference. Try as she might, she couldn’t get through the larger woman’s defense. The Stragman roamed the stage, moving as she pleased while fending off the powerful but ineffectual swipes, every block and deflection announced by a loud ting as two weapons collided.

The crowd found the intense battle mesmerizing. They oohed and aahed with each blow, enraptured by the struggle of the two combatants.

Rudra, for his part, found himself blown away by just how incredibly impervious the Chos’s club seemed to be. Gabriela’s blade could cut through solid stone as if the stone were water, and yet Rudra watched as the Chos easily parried the smaller woman’s punishing strikes, the wood stopping the crystal blade without even a scratch.

Tepin said that it and the cage that held him were both grown from the Mother Tree Ruresni herself at tremendous cost. An impossible entity, Ruresni towered over the forest, reaching high into the sky. How many kilometers tall could it be? Just eyeballing it, Rudra guessed at least five, but probably closer to eight or nine. For the tree to be able to withstand its own absurd weight, its wood would have to be equally absurdly strong and durable. That explained why, no matter how hard he tried with his mammoth strength, Rudra could not even get a creak from the bars of his cell.

But still, no matter how much he understood this intellectually, the construction worker within him refused to accept it. It was still just wood! Wood had no right being that strong!

“Come on, Gabriela, are you even trying?” the Chos shouted over the din as her massive club zipped back and forth, blurring from spot to spot to neatly intercept every last one of her opponent’s strikes. Gabriela might have thought it a taunt, but Rudra knew that she’d meant it earnestly. He could see the shade of disappointment slowly creeping across her face as the battle went on.

“I thought you knew how to fight! You’ll never even touch me like this!” she snapped. She swung to bat away her opponent’s sword. As before, the blow sent Gabriela reeling, her upper body twisting back and to the right. This time, however, she managed to pull her sword back around, bringing up the flat side in front of her chest and bracing the back of it with her free left forearm. The club slammed into her guard like a freight train, driving the back flat side into Gabriela’s torso and flinging her like a rag doll into another pillar as a loud, ringing clang reverberated through the stadium.

Gabriela struck the pillar with her back first, followed by the back of her head. She let out a grunt of pain and tried to push herself back to her feet, but the Chos wasn’t willing to wait around and let her get up so easily. She caught up in a moment and swung her weapon like a cricket bat, driving it right into the flat side of the sword once more with another resounding clang. Gabriela braced the sword in front of her by gripping the handle with her right hand and bracing her left forearm against the back of her weapon. Somehow, through a feat of prodigious strength, she did not get crushed as the weight of a cruise ship pounded the flat side of her blade into her torso a second time.

The column she was pressed up against, however, did not fare as well. The club struck with such unstoppable momentum that it drove Gabriela through the hard stone as it swung through, breaking the column into pieces that ranged from several centimeters across to over two meters long. These new boulders plummeted towards the ground, many of them right where Gabriela sprawled face down on the ground, battered and discombobulated. Before she could recover her wits, the rocks landed on top of her, crushing her.

The crowd roared again, though Rudra couldn’t help but notice how the Chos did not seem to share their jubilation.

The crimson fog from last time returned a few moments later, and then the rubble began to move. A disgruntled Gabriela pushed herself free, clearly not enjoying herself in any way. She hefted her sword and rushed in once again.

Rudra watched as their dance entered its third verse, though the steps seemed little different than before. He could tell with certainty now that the Earth woman was moving significantly faster than before as she struck with almost wild abandon, her body almost blurring left and right as she rained down blows from every angle she could.

Still, it made no difference. The Chos moved with a grace no giant should possess, dancing around some of Gabriela’s attacks and blocking the others with the fluidity born of a thousand battles. It was her experience, Rudra realized, that let her keep up with her opponent’s frankly absurd physical abilities. Rudra’s sharp eye could see how she began moving to deal with each of Gabriela’s attacks before the attack had even begun, the Chos relying on years of honed experience to let her keep ahead of the Earth woman’s assault.

What’s more, her mass-altering trick allowed her to move her massive club without needing to reposition her body every time. Gabriela, on the other hand, had to set her stance properly every time so she could properly leverage her strength to swing her equally massive sword, meaning her body essentially tipped off every attack. Super strength or no, she still had to abide by physics to a large degree; the Chos did not.

It made an amusing contrast, he had to admit. If somebody without prior knowledge was asked to pick which of the two would fight like a bruising berserker and which would rely on finesse and experience, they would surely get the two backwards.

“You’re too linear!” the bored Chos complained as she contemptuously smacked Gabriela’s blade aside. “Is this really all you can offer? There’s no way someone this weak could take down Redwater Castle all by themselves! Why are you hiding your true strength? What happened to the legend that made every Nocend soldier piss their pants?”

“Shut up,” the Earthling replied, her voice dull.

The Chos sighed, lifting her club high. “You’re no fun at all!”

The club descended towards Gabriela like an avalanche. Wisely, the smaller woman, instead of trying to block it, just stepped out of the way.

It didn’t matter.

Rudra flinched as a shockwave ran through the entire stone platform and slammed into his cell, rocking it back and throwing him off his feet. When he finally managed to get upright again and look out at the arena, what he saw stunned him.

The massive stone platform, easily fifty meters across, was broken. Massive cracks ran through it like a spider’s web, one of them traveling right to his cell and running down the side of the stone. Bending down to look, he saw that the crack, wide enough that he could slide his entire hand into it with ease, ran all the way through from top to bottom. She’d split the entire thing into pieces!

One look out at the aftermath showed just how extensive the damage was. What had been a single solid slab of stone just moments ago was now at least twelve smaller shards, with the way many of them jutted out to one side hinting at possibly more pieces beneath. Some were just slightly tilted, where only the lean of their pillars was pronounced enough to show they weren’t completely level; others now slanted heavily to one side or the other, creating hazardous holes to fall into and protrusions to trip over. One particular shard right by the point of impact, about nine meters long by his estimation, now tilted upward at what looked to be at least a thirty-degree angle.

The Stragman leader stood in the center of it all, her chest heaving noticeably as she looked down at Gabriela’s corpse laying at her feet while the crowd roared its approval of her feat of strength. It seemed that this sort of thing taxed her enough that she couldn’t do it all the time, thank goodness. The woman was scary enough as it was without her being a walking earthquake.

A red mist told Rudra that Gabriela must have died again, but he didn’t know how as he’d missed the moment because his cage had bucked so suddenly. Judging by the crater in her rib cage, Rudra guessed that she’d fallen from the tremor, upon which Palebane had delivered another crushing blow.

Three to nothing, now. At the rate things were going, this dumb event would be over soon—or so Rudra hoped. While it hurt his pride a tad to see a fellow Earth native getting embarrassed by a Scyrian, he would gladly take it over the alternative. Almost anything would be better than the dreaded alternative.

“Perhaps I should have raised the price if this is all you can manage,” the Chos told Gabriela as the smaller woman rose unsteadily to her feet.

The Earth woman glared back but didn’t say a word. Instead of rushing in as she had the times before, she set her feet and closed her eyes for a moment. Akhustal waited patiently for Gabriela to collect her thoughts. Then, opening her eyes with renewed purpose, Gabriela charged forward.

The duel resumed, only this time on much more uneven terrain. Swing, block, swing, block, swing, block, even faster than before, a staccato barrage of tinging chimes as crystal clashed with wood over and over. As always, the Chos fended off her assailant until she saw an opening.

“Predictable!” she large woman scoffed. But this time, when she struck back, something different happened: Gabriela let go of her sword.

Akhustal’s giant bat smacked the black blade with the force of ten runaway buses, sending it hurtling out of the arena, where it embedded itself deep into the stone base of the stadium stands. But while her weapon went flying, Gabriela did anything but. She ducked in, just under the Chos’s swing, and stabbed a hand into the surprised Stragman’s gut.

Akhustal Palebane froze, a mix of shock and pain visible on her face as Gabriela’s hand pierced elbow-deep into her intestines. Rudra saw the Earth woman’s arm flex for a split second and a pop echoed across the arena. The Chos immediately collapsed to the ground like a puppet without its strings. Gabriela yanked her arm free, pulling out a rope of intestines as she did and tossing them haphazardly onto the ground before turning to go retrieve her weapon.

The Shells sprinted out towards the arena, quickly working their way through the rubble to retrieve the half-dead Chos as the crowd looked on in stunned, silent disbelief.

The dreaded alternative had come. Rudra took a deep breath as the team of Stragmans approached, trying to summon up courage he didn’t have. They arrived well before he could manage such a feat, depositing Akhustal Palebane on the other side of the cell bars.

He had a choice. All he had to do was not bring her back. Without her, the country would be thrown into chaos. The balance of power would be shattered, giving the Shells another opening to vie for a better life.

But Tepin would suffer. Those in power would torment her, making her wish for a death that she could never have. The image of the Chos’s husband, Caprakan Bloodflower, and his condition upon his revival flashed unbidden and unwanted into his mind. Would he do to Tepin what had been done to him?

Rudra looked down at Palebane through the bars and realized she was staring at him. Though bleeding out quickly, the woman was not yet dead. With only her gaze, she dared him to let her die. Though she couldn’t speak in her condition, she didn’t need to; her message was clear: “Do it and see what happens”.

In the end, his choice was really no choice at all. Was this some devious way to torment him? To rub his powerlessness in his face? Or did she just view him as a tool to be used however she saw fit? He didn’t know anymore. In essence, it didn’t make a difference either way.

He reached out through the gaps between the bars with both hands, bringing them close enough to do his work—after so much practice, he’d gotten to the point where he didn’t need physical contact with his patients anymore, if that had ever been a requirement at all. The pooling blood reversed, streaming back into Akhustal Palebane’s body. Her guts curled up within her as her pulverized spine reformed. In a moment, it was all over and the Chos sat up and looked around.

“What happened?” she asked him, looking herself over. “I lost?”

The last thing that Rudra wanted was to have to talk to Palebane more than necessary, but he knew that she wouldn’t take him ignoring her well. “Yes,” he told her.

“I… damn, I can’t remember! I can’t remember the good part!”

Rudra couldn’t believe his ears. “Did you not realize it would be like that? Did you not pay attention any of the thousands of times I’ve done this?”

“Of course I know!” she snapped back, immediately defensive. “I have a Many recording the whole fight for later, but… it’s just not the same if I don’t remember it! What happened! Tell me!”

“She let you knock her sword away, stabbed her hand into your gut, I think grabbed your spine and crushed it, then tore your intestines out.”

“Damn it, that sounds awesome!” she griped, pushing herself to her feet. “This is so disappointing.”

Without even a word of thanks, she stepped back into the arena to deafening cheers. “Now, that’s what I was looking for!” she said with a lopsided grin to the returning Gabriela. “Give me a challenge!”

Gabriela just scowled.

Rudra curled up in his thoughts for a little while as the two resumed their battle, the constant rhythm of tings fading into the background as he tried to think of anything but his depressing situation. At least healing Palebane had shown him that his powers were still working properly. Normally, reviving a person felt like the metaphysical or spiritual equivalent of pushing a well-oiled, empty shopping cart: easy, not especially taxing, and something he could do for a long time without tiring. Reviving that little girl had been like trying to push a boulder three times his size up a hill. He had barely managed it, and it had taken everything he’d had within to do so.

He’d spent the night wondering if something had gone wrong with him and his weird power that he still didn’t understand. However, Palebane had felt like a shopping cart again, so his only conclusion was that nothing was wrong with him, something was wrong with the girl.

A second loud sching pulled him back to the moment. He looked out through the bars just in time to see Gabriela catch a freshly felled stone column and hurl it at the Chos before rushing in behind it.

Instead of dodging, like a normal person, Palebane reared back and swung her club to hit the massive stone projectile head-on, shattering it into hundreds of tiny pieces and sending the majority of them flying back at Gabriela. Instead of dodging, like a normal person, the Earth woman just streaked right through the cloud of stone shrapnel at blistering speed, letting pieces strike her and even stab deep into her everywhere except the head, which she protected with her blade.

The nearly suicidal action got her to her opponent in time to strike before the Chos could pull back for another swing. However, Palebane still had just enough time to lift her club to block the incoming slash. It wasn’t until the two were about to collide that Rudra realized that Gabriela had rotated her sword to hit with the broad, flat side.

A thunderous peal rang out from the sword upon impact, the deafening note sending Rudra’s skull vibrating and threatening to burst his eardrums. He clamped his hands over his ears as fast as he could, but it barely made a difference as the sound bounced around the hard, flat walls of his cell, amplifying it further.

Meanwhile, outside his portable prison, the rest were faring little better. The crowd were all covering their ears much like he was, with their mouths open in what he assumed were screams. As for the combatants, the Chos lurched drunkenly about, desperately fending off Gabriela’s furious attacks. Unlike everybody else, the smaller woman seemed largely unaffected by the toll of her weapon.

Without her characteristic poise, the leader of Stragma faltered. Within a few moments, she stumbled over a crack in the floor and Gabriela pounced. With a quick swing, one whole Palebane became an upper and a lower Palebane.

Gabriela staggered on the follow-through, the vibrations still emanating from her weapon clearly throwing her off as well. Steadying herself, she rotated her grip so her blade faced the floor and stabbed it down into the stone.

The vibrations quickly bled out of the crystal and the ringing ceased, leaving the stadium in the blissful relief of relative silence.

The effort to get the Chos to Rudra’s cell took longer than the last time, partly because of the condition of the battlefield, but mostly because none of the Shells seemed able to walk properly. When they finally managed to drag her to him, Rudra looked down at the bisected corpse—she was actually dead this time—and noticed that blood was leaking from both of her ears. Her eardrums had burst. No doubt her inner ear had been decimated as well.

Rudra sighed. Another Palebane death, another example of the total power she held over him. He didn’t even get any real joy from watching his captor die over and over; relishing the death of another was not his way.

Once her body was whole again, Palebane sat up, looking around in confusion. She patted her ears with her fingers and they came back red.

Oh, right. He’d brought her back to before her death, but he’d forgotten that she’d been deafened before that. Reaching out from the cage, he pushed her back a little bit further.

“I lost again?!” the Chos asked with disbelief once he was done with the second push.

“Yes.”

“Damn it all! I want to experience it! This isn’t fair!” she snarled with a stomp. “Well? What happened this time?”

“She made her sword ring and it was really loud.”

“…what? Give me better descriptions than that! Ones that make sense!”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“I’m not your fight recapper or whatever,” Rudra grumbled. “Why don’t you ask her?”

The side of Palebane’s fist slammed into the bars. “Don’t push me.”

“You hit her sword, it rang like a bell incredibly loudly, you tripped, and she cut you in half.”

She turned back towards her opponent. “You can do that?!”

Gabriela shrugged. “The crystal makes it an amazing tuning fork if you hit it at the right spot.”

“You’ve been holding back on me,” Palebane accused. “I told you to fight with everything you have.”

“I am,” came the reply.

“Then prove it! Those tricks won’t work on me twice. Give me a real fight!”

The two took their positions again. Now that Gabriela had almost caught up, Akhustal no longer appeared bored or disappointed. Instead, she smiled to herself as she stared forward in intense concentration.

The two moved at the same time. Unlike before, the Chos didn’t just block and parry. This time, she struck first, forcing her opponent to abort her own attack early and spin wildly out of the way. Not letting up, Palebane kept up the pressure.

The two returned to their dance of death, but this time, the Stragman controlled the tempo. Gabriela tried to break through the assault, spinning, dashing, leaping around as she looked for a way in, but the Chos’s club met her each time.

The smaller woman even tried to swing her blade blunt side forward again, hoping to trigger another sonic attack, but Palebane was ready for the tactic and managed to adjust the path of her attack to hit lower on the sword. While it still rang, the sound lacked the incapacitating punch of before, leaving Gabriela spinning out of control with a vibrating weapon in her hands.

Gabriela couldn’t block the swings, as the mass difference would just send her and her weapon flying. Trying to counterstrike would just open her up for attacks. Every swipe of the stick could be deadly.

So, to counteract this, Gabriela did the only sensible thing: she ran. Sprinting around the arena, springing off protruding slabs and what pillars still stood, she used her unparalleled speed to simply avoid getting near the Chos and her death club altogether.

“Stop running and fight!” the Stragman growled as the crowd loudly expressed their displeasure through a serenade of jeers.

“I thought you told me to try to win?” Gabriela shot back.

The Chos muttered something to herself but seemed to admit her opponent had a point, as she didn’t reply.

At that point, it seemed that Gabriela decided to begin a counter-assault of sorts. As she ran, she bent down and grabbed a stray rock, twirled, and fired it like a bullet towards the Chos’s face. Palebane barely managed to get her club up in time to block it before it took her head off.

Another stone flew, then yet another. With a growl of annoyance, Akhustal held her club in front of her with the handle above her head and the rest pointed down to cover her body and charged. The weapon was large and wide enough to block most any projectiles coming from the front, but not all. Because she had to raise the club higher than her head so the thick shaft protected her face, her lower legs were mostly unguarded.

Seeing this, Gabriela scooped up a handful of smaller stones and, in one throw, fired them low, a blast of shrapnel aimed right at the Stragman’s feet. Most of the stones missed, but at Rudra saw that one clearly didn’t. It buried itself deep into Palebane’s left ankle, causing her to grunt in pain as she tumbled face-first onto her weapon behind a toppled pillar.

Seeing her chance, Gabriela shot forward like a bullet from a gun. Leaping over the pillar, she pulled her sword back against her left shoulder with the point facing forward and down, ready to thrust into her prone opponent.

“Got you,” Rudra heard the Chos cry triumphantly as she twisted, pulling the club out from beneath her with an ease that neither Rudra nor Gabriela foresaw, swinging it with the full power of her strong, thickly muscled arms. Unable to move properly as she was still in the air, all Gabriela could do was twist wildly to try to bring as much of her blade between her and the incoming bludgeon as she could.

A short but mighty clang rang out as the club impacted with the momentum of an aircraft carrier, sending the smaller woman zooming across the arena like a cannonball right... at him. Rudra leaned away, covering his head and face as the Earth woman and her sword slammed into the bars of his cell. The sword bounced off with a clang, but the woman... not so much. She struck the bars with a sickening squelch, rocking the cage back slightly and spraying the sticky wetness of blood and gore all over Rudra’s side and back. He fought back the urge to hurl his breakfast all over the cell floor. Though he’d seen myriad dead bodies since his arrival here, few had been quite so fresh and none had ever been so… messy.

This time, he got an up-close view of his fellow Earth native’s power in action. The fog seemed to form from the blood, guts, and other viscera as if the damaged bits of her body were evaporating into a mist that hung like tendrils of incense in the air. Quickly, those tendrils lurched towards the brutalized corpse on the other side of the bars, moving almost as if they were being sucked in by some invisible force.

Rudra found the sight downright miraculous, even more so up close this time. A power that worked even in death? Even in this weird world of wonders, how was such a thing even possible?

In just a few moments, Gabriela was whole once more. The woman blinked, looking inside and meeting his gaze for the first time as she pushed herself to her feet. She didn’t take in the sight of him, or look around, or anything like that. Instead, she spoke quickly and to the point, as if she’d had the question in mind the whole time and had just been waiting for the opportunity. “Do you need our help?”

A thicket of spears flashed in between them as a dozen or more guards came running, interposing themselves between him and her. They pushed her back towards the arena and though she still somehow held her massive sword in her hand, she did not resist them.

Yes, he needed help. Oh, how desperately he needed help. But the words remained lodged in his throat as images of a battered and broken Tepin strangled him. He could not, would not, take any action that risked putting her through more pain. He just couldn’t. A malaise fell over him as, not for the first time recently, his helplessness threatened to overwhelm him.

“Hey!” an angry voice snapped, bringing him back to reality.

Rudra looked up to find the Chos looming over him on the other side of the bars.

“Fix my foot,” she commanded.

Looking down, he saw that she did, in fact, still have a stone the size of his finger lodged in her left ankle, clearly sticking through not just flesh but bone. How she could stand there with little more than an air of annoyance, rather than rolling on the ground screaming in pain, he had no idea.

His head still swimming, he pulled the stone free, he closed his eyes, entering the state he had grown so used to after doing it so long. He felt her spirit, as he had twice already today, and pushed as he always did.

The Chos looked around, disoriented.

“I lost already? But wait, they’re cheering.”

“Your foot got hurt and you want me to fix it.”

“Hmmm,” she replied, seemingly distracted by something.

“Stop wasting time!” Gabriela impatiently called from the platform center. “I didn’t agree to do this forever!”

“Right,” the Chos mumbled, turning around and walking back out to the center for the next round.

Rudra could tell that something was off about her this time, but at first he wasn’t sure what. It wasn’t until the fighting resumed, the combatants bobbing and weaving, attacking and counter-attacking, that a persistent thought popped into his head and wouldn’t leave. Perhaps due to his scrambled mental state, he’d made a mistake and pushed her too far back in time. The way she fought, it was very similar to before, as if she’d forgotten at least the last entire round and likely more. Gone were the aggressive tactics she’d just used the previous round to secure a victory, replaced with the more defensive fighting she’d relied on before.

At least the Chos was enjoying it. Rudra didn’t know how Gabriela managed to increase her speed and striking power every round, but she did. This round was no exception. The woman was closer to a blur than a person at this point, but Palebane didn’t seem to mind—judging by the wide grin on her face, she was loving every second.

But just because the Stragman was loving life at the moment didn’t magically turn his misstep into a positive. That was the crux of the issue, the reason for the war now raging inside his mind. That issue was this: did pushing somebody significantly back past their moment of death without their expressed consent, be it by days, weeks, months, or even years, count as an act of violence?

Rudra always tried to bring somebody back as close to their death or time of injury as was possible for them to be whole and healthy, but it was something based on feelings and estimations, not science. Sometimes he wouldn’t go far enough and then he’d have to give them a little push to fix things up; other times, he would go back a little too far, and they’d forget things—things that they would never regain. Rudra always felt terrible about that, assuming it wasn’t some minuscule gap of a minute or two.

On a physical level, one could argue it would be a blessing for all but the most unfortunate. The subject, or perhaps “victim” was a better term, would be younger, and therefore, by and large, healthier than the alternative. But it would come at the cost of everything else. They would lose their memories, their experiences, maybe even their relationships… everything that made them who they were.

Hypothetically, if he were to not just revive a thirty-year-old dead soldier but also push them back to when they were fourteen, it would give them a second chance at teenage life. But it wouldn’t be like they would be able to tackle their newfound adolescence with any of the knowledge they’d accumulated since, since those memories would be gone forever, so what would they gain beyond their youth? Plus, what of the person’s significant other? Their family, their friends, maybe even their children, if they had any? It would break everything and many lives outside of the victim’s would be greatly affected. Would Rudra not be destroying a life with that act? Would he not be, in essence, killing the man in creating the boy, and therefore, inflicting a sort of murder upon the man’s family?

But… what if he could solve everything by just pushing the Chos back in time past the point where they’d first met? Was that the solution he had been looking for this whole time?

After weeks and months of frequently interacting with her, Rudra had come to the conclusion that Akhustal Palebane operated on two levels. He’d somehow managed to get on the bad side of both.

On the first level was her more impersonal side. That side viewed him as a threat to the social order of the country. It valued tradition and believed that too much change would be detrimental to Stragma’s future. Like others in this country, she’d been raised to believe that strength equaled virtue. This part of her likely considered the idea of the least-powerful people in the nation gaining rights to be completely at odds with the fundamental values of the nation. A Stragman only deserved the rights they could grab with their own strength, not some handout.

But then there was the personal side, the side he believed dominated her thinking and behavior. That was where the true problem lay. She’d asked him, begged him, to return her tortured and murdered husband to her, and he’d said no. Even worse, he’d used her loved one as a means of leverage against her for seasons on end, keeping Caprakan’s return in constant jeopardy until he got what he wanted. He could see, when he bothered to meet her gaze these days, that she’d never forgiven him for using her lover as a cudgel. That, more than anything, was what he now believed to be the driving force behind his current life and the way she treated him.

Pushing her back two years, perhaps, would not solve the dispassionate side’s objections to his goals of societal change, but it would erase the grudge she bore. While others could tell her of what had happened in the missing years, a grudge born of lived experience was something that burned far hotter and longer than one constructed of second-hand stories. With that out of the way, maybe there would be a path to move forward. Or maybe it would accomplish nothing at all—or, perhaps, it would just make things worse.

In the end, it kept coming back to the question of if he even could do anything of the sort. Oaths and promises weren’t things he made to honor only at his convenience. It all came down to how he defined violence, which, he realized, was an extremely depressing thought for multiple reasons. Anybody trying to rationalize actions by parsing definitions was already heading towards a cliff.

Another sching caught Rudra’s attention, dragging him back to reality. However, when he looked up, he didn’t find a falling stone pillar, he found a falling Chos—or rather, her two halves, split vertically right down the center.

The crowd gasped at the sight of their leader’s insides spilling all over the outside. Before, they’d been cheering raucously at the prospect of her inevitable victory, but now the seeds of doubt had sprouted with the score getting closer at four to three.

Despite his hope, Gabriela did not take advantage of the pause in the action to try to speak with him again. Instead, she spent her moment walking over to one part of the stands. There, a small special section, like a VIP area, had been cordoned off. In it sat not only such prominent figures as the Chos’s husband and General Fernfeather, who was maybe the second most powerful person in the country, but also the Otharian visitors.

The three Otharians each exuded a different vibe. The orange-haired one seemed to be watching the proceedings with interest. The thinner, black-haired one, the one who had asked his name the day before, looked three seconds away from vomiting. The smallest one, the dark feline child with the shining yellow eyes, he could see bouncing in her seat with a joyous grin on her face, not a single care in the world. Every so often, she’d take a bite out of something in her hands. Prekali, if his eyes did not lie to him.

Who- no, what was that little girl? The experience of trying to revive her had been one of, if not the, most trying times of his life, and he never wanted to experience anything like it again. But why her? He couldn’t see anything special about her; all he saw was just another Stragman child.

The Shells finished dragging one half of the Chos over to his cell, and Rudra didn’t miss the glances they gave him as they left. Many looked at him with pity, some with disappointment or sadness, and a few with… something else. Something darker.

Rudra ignored the glances, as he didn’t feel like he had the right to speak to the people he’d let down. Instead, he focused on the piece of Palebane they’d left for him. This time, he went carefully and made sure that he only pushed her back as much as needed and no more.

The Chos reformed, except this time she was almost naked, with only the one half of her shorts still on her body. An attendant of some sort rushed over with a replacement outfit.

“What do you remember last?” he asked as she quickly put on her kilt thing and the attendant wrapped her chest in new bandages.

“I blocked a slash from the left and she spun right with the momentum of the rebound, and I went to block the incoming strike from that way, and… hm, that’s where it ends.” Her eyes twinkled. “I lost again? How did I die this time?”

“I wasn’t looking,” Rudra told her.

“Tch.” She turned to her left and spoke to somebody Rudra couldn’t see, likely one of the guards around his cell that he’d seen earlier. “You! Tell me what happened!”

“Y-yes, Chos! She… uh…” He could hear him swallow from meters away. “…she cut through the floor and sliced you in half from the bottom up.”

“Oh? Wait, why did she wait until now to try that?”

Palebane turned back to the arena and addressed Gabriela, who had returned from her little visit with her group. “You’re just making this up as you go, aren’t you?”

The Earth woman shrugged.

“Are you even taking this seriously?”

“Yes, I promised to try my hardest and I am,” Gabriela testily replied. “Nobody has ever stopped my attacks before.”

The Chos snorted as she made her way through the rubble towards her dropped club. “Then I suppose you’re learning fairly well,” she remarked as she bent down and seized her weapon. “But don’t think you’re going to win! This round will be the last!”

Gabriela hefted her sword. “Good.”

For perhaps the final time, the two came to blows. Both of them pushed themselves as hard as they could. Rudra could feel each time the two weapons clashed like one could feel the beat of a bass drum, only heavier. Gabriela poured attacks down like rain upon Akhustal, who just barely managed to stay alive by the slimmest of margins. Pushing herself to her limit, the Chos was balancing on a knife’s edge, blocking strikes at the last moment, dodging others by a hair’s breadth, and occasionally pushing the smaller woman back with some well-timed counter-swings, all with an ecstatic grin plastered across her face.

It became clear fairly quickly that the Stragman leader would run out of steam first. She was only flesh and blood, after all; she would tire eventually, while Gabriela’s greatest power seemed to be her ability to just keep coming until her opponent cracked under the unending pressure. Soon, he could see signs of the Chos tiring as she started to take little nicks and cuts from attacks she’d dodged entirely earlier.

Palebane seemed to realize the same thing, though it seemed to only excite her more. The tip of Gabriela’s sword flashed down, leaving a thin cut running down Akhustal’s chest and slicing most of the new bandages. The Chos countered with a thrust of her club, driving the Earthling back for a fraction of a moment. The break wasn’t long, but it was just enough for the Stragman to grab her club with both hands, lower it towards the ground, and then thrust it skyward.

Gabriela sprang forward and her blade sang as it flashed through where the Chos’s torso had been, but her target was no longer there. Rudra, Gabriela, and the crowd watched with shock and disbelief as Akhustal Palebane rose into the air, or perhaps more accurately, was pulled upward by the inertia of the club to which she still clung with both of her large, strong hands. Three, seven, ten meters high she rose before the momentum petered out and she slowly tumbled in the air while gravity reasserted itself.

Using her club as leverage, Palebane adjusted her rotation, canceling out her tumble so she was oriented front-down and mostly parallel with the ground. Her body bent upward like a bow as she pulled the club back, winding up for a strike that would make the rest of her strikes today look like love taps.

Gabriela did not seem the type to run from a confrontation, and she lived up to Rudra’s estimation when she initially responded to the Chos’s absurd maneuver by setting her feet and twisting around, her muscles tensing like steel cables, to prepare her own punishing attack. Yet he caught her slight hesitation as she stared up at the plummeting Stragman. Given that she had lost every single time they’d exchanged blows head-on, Rudra didn’t blame her when, with her opponent staring down at her with wild eyes from less than three meters away, she abruptly changed her mind and threw herself out of the way.

“It’s over!” the Chos cried. Her body snapped forward, swinging her weapon towards the ground with everything she had just before she landed. The indestructible club crashed down like a meteor—unstoppable and inevitable in its finality.

KRAKOOM!

Rudra hurriedly shielded his head with his arms as a shockwave ran through the stone platform, shattering the boulders into pieces as it traveled. The blastwave slammed into him and the cell at the speed of sound, ramming the front of his prison with enough force to send it rolling backward. Rudra flailed desperately inside, trying to find purchase in the smooth interior as the floor became the front, then the ceiling, then the back. The light within the cell vanished momentarily as the only side of the cell with any openings found itself flat against the ground. Then the light came rushing back as the cell tipped some more as if trying to keep going and complete a full rotation, only to run out of momentum and fall forward and return Rudra’s world to darkness.

Grumbling to himself, Rudra crawled over to the right half of what was usually the front of the cage but was now the floor, blindly feeling for the bars with his hands. Running palm across them, he found the left-most gap, the one between the solid left half of the wall and the first bar. Gripping the bar tightly with his right hand, he stuck his left hand through the gap between the bar and the rest of the wall, placed his palm to the ground below, and shoved.

Having spent days carrying the cage on his back Rudra knew just how heavy it was, and he took that weight into account. Rudra’s prison tipped back, easily righting itself so that he could see the arena once more.

His jaw dropped. He wanted to say that his cell had tumbled at least fifteen meters, but he couldn’t say for sure because he could no longer find the edge of the stone platform to determine where the cage had stood just moments ago.

The arena had been, by and large, utterly destroyed, as if a large bomb had gone off in its center. The massive slab of stone, once a single solid piece and moments ago several still-massive chunks, was now little more than a pile of rubble. The blast had strewn much of it across the open area, with some of the pieces even landing in the lowest sections of the stands.

His eyes spotted a black-haired woman lying front-first against the foundation of one those raised stands, a large club pierced through her chest and into the stone of the stadium itself. Looking back towards the center, he found the Chos doubled-over and breathing heavily as blood flowed from a dozen scrapes and cuts, as well as what looked like a stone sticking out of the top of her right thigh. What had he missed while the cage was rolling?

The match was over, its end announced by the stillness that hung in the air. No announcers jumped in to proclaim a victor. No one in the crowd immediately roared their approval.

Eventually, the crowd stirred, their shell shock wearing off with time. Their voices banished the stillness as the air shook with deafening cheers and chants of “Strag-ma! Strag-ma!”. The Chos straightened up and raised a fist to the air, soaking in the adulation. Judging by her grin, her injuries barely caught her notice.

Meanwhile, Rudra watched as Gabriela’s remains again brought forth a red smoke. Slowly, the club began to move as if some invisible hand was pushing it out from inside the stone. After several moments, it clattered to the rubble below and the woman rose to her feet with a massive hole through her leather armor and undershirt centered around her sternum.

“Wonderful! Just wonderful! That was fantastic fun! You lived up to the hype after all,” the Chos declared with great enthusiasm as she carefully navigated the treacherous rubble beneath her feet. She grunted, placing her left hand on her right shoulder and rolling it with noticeable discomfort, but her smile never wavered. “You should feel proud. I try to avoid doing that technique because it nearly dislocates my shoulders every time I do it. You’re the second person I’ve ever had to use it on after that Ubran guy!”

She grabbed Gabriela’s arm and raised her hand up for the crowd. The Stragmans acknowledged her efforts with decent applause as well, but the approval only seemed to worsen the Earthling’s mood.

Rudra’s mood wasn’t much better. He did not get another chance to speak to his fellow dimensional castaway. Instead, he and his cell were carted away immediately upon the match’s end, leaving him to brood over his own failings. He should have said something, but he couldn’t risk it. He should try to do something when let out of his cage, but he didn’t dare. He was stuck, trapped eternally in a hole he’d helped dig, and the walls only seemed to get higher by the day.

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Rudra subconsciously tensed as the cell door swung open just enough for a small, slight woman to stumble inside. As he did every day at this time, he weighed the risks of bursting through the opening with Tepin tucked under an arm and making a break for it, and as he did every day just after, he decided it would put her in too much danger. With her frail body, he couldn’t even guarantee that she wouldn’t get hurt from the sudden momentum changes that he’d likely have to put her through to get away. And then, even if they did get away… where would they go?

Escaping to the Shell ghettos would surely be little more than a temporary measure. The Chos had the manpower to find them there if she needed to, no matter how well hidden they might be. But running away from the city would be even worse. The Stragman rainforest was likely more dangerous than all the jungles on Earth combined. How was he, with only several weeks of experience in the forest—if you could call doing little more than walking in a group and following the commands of the team leader for several weeks “experience”—supposed to not only survive out there on his own but protect Tepin at the same time?

A passionate kiss on the lips broke him from his spiraling thoughts. He’d been so wrapped up in his worries that he’d missed the door closing. Pushing those thoughts aside, he returned to the moment and swept his darling love into a gentle but firm embrace, lifting her easily off the floor and into his arms.

“I missed you,” he said, another thing that happened each day, though this time the words meant even more than usual. “I-”

A thin finger pressed against his mouth, bringing him to silence.

“I have some very important things to tell you, so we must not waste time today,” she told him in the barest of whispers, leaning forward so that she spoke right into his ear.

“Me too,” he whispered back. After so many visits, they’d gotten rather good at conversing as quietly as possible so not even the sharpest-eared eavesdroppers would be able to listen in.

She kissed him again as he walked to the far wall and sat down against it with her facing him as she straddled his wide waist.

“You first,” he said.

She told him of her visitors the night before, of what had been asked, and her thoughts on what it all meant. He then filled her in on Gabriela from that morning and, in a rare moment of pure candor, of what had gone through his mind the whole time.

Tepin sighed, leaning in and burying her face in his chest. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“Don’t.”

“No, no matter how many times you deny it, it’s true. I dragged you into this. I forced your hand. I made you as much of a culprit as I. If I had just left you alone, you…” She was crying, he realized with alarm. He almost never saw tears from the stoic woman. “…you would never have had to suffer like this.”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, as many times as I have to for you to stop with this,” he whispered back as he tenderly stroked her disheveled hair. “I made my decisions on my own, so please, stop blaming yourself.”

She grunted in reply and they both went silent for a moment, the only sounds left being the sounds of their breathing as his hand ran from the top of her head behind her ears down along her back to the base of her tail.

After several strokes, she pulled herself back a bit and rubbed her face and eyes before fixing him with a steadfast stare. It was like the tears had never existed.

“Unfortunately, your Earthling and her companions surely left hours ago; there is little we can do about them now,” she began. “Instead, we must consider what happens should they decide to return.”

“What do you mean?”

Tepin paused, taking a deep breath and seeming to consider her next words carefully.

“If I were to escape this place to somewhere else, somewhere out of this endless jungle where the Chos could never threaten me again, what would you do? Would you come?”

“I… but what about the Shells? Without either of us, the movement would be crippled! Would you really want everything you’ve worked for to go to waste like that, Tepin? What about your dream?”

“Why must you care so much about my dream? What about your dreams? Don’t you have any that are wholly your own?”

Rudra exhaled. “Back when I had Jaya, I was full of dreams. I was young and the world seemed limitless. I dreamed of having a family, opening up a shop, getting rich, even seeing the world with her by my side. But those dreams disappeared with her. I spent years of my life feeling empty. Even after I ended up here, I was just living every day for no reason other than to see the next one. It… it felt terrible.

“Do you remember back when I first met you? The real you? I ended up embracing your cause back then more because I wanted to fill the hole inside me with some sort of purpose than for any other reason, but it turned out that it filled that hole really well. The more I did it, the more I interacted with others, the more I liked it. Eventually it became my cause as much as it was yours. Isn’t that good enough? Even if you didn’t mean to, you gave me something to exist for.”

“Then, are you saying that you would stay here? Something tells me that your fellow Earthlings wouldn’t rescue me just so you can stay where you are.”

Rudra shrugged. “Eh? I don’t know what they might want. She didn’t ask me if I wanted to escape, she just asked if I needed help. That could be anything.”

“You are clouding your judgment for no reason.”

“What do you think I should do, then? I don’t have an answer. I would want to go with you, of course. But… do you remember what you said that first night? It was something like, ‘There are over three million Shells in Stragma, and neither of us is important enough to outweigh the salvation of three million people.’ Why should our happiness suddenly outweigh everything else? It wouldn’t be right to just abandon everyone.”

“I have no choice. My current existence only serves as a chain to tie you down, and I cannot let that continue,” Tepin reminded him. “Regardless, I lack the means of stopping them from stealing me away if they so choose. But you…” She sighed. “I want you to think, long and hard, about everything. You must not allow guilt to replace me as the next chain that binds you. You are not the only person who can do what must be done, and you must avoid the trap that is thinking otherwise. Make a list and figure out what must be addressed before you will be willing to leave. Identify the finish line of this race, and push towards it. Then, should events unfold so that they come for you, you will know if you can leave.”

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all any of us can do now.”

Their conversation faded into quiet for a while as they each retreated into their own thoughts. Rudra ran his fingers through his beloved’s hair as he breathed in deep. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, she smelled less than pleasant these days, probably because they didn’t let her wash often enough. He took a small amount of reassurance that, at the very least, they fed her well each day, but unfortunately, he knew that this could always change at a moment’s notice.

Regardless of what happened to her, he could only hope that the others from Earth could do what he could not and save her. He would take that, for now.

“What were they like?” Tepin asked, intruding on his thoughts.

“Hm?”

“The person from Earth and the Otharians. What were they like? I only met one of them, and it turned out to be somebody I’d met before.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. It’s a long, complicated story that I don’t feel like getting into.”

Rudra took the hint. “Well, there’s wasn’t much time to get an impression. There is this orange-haired woman who seemed largely calm and professional. She didn’t say anything while I was there, though. This other smallish, kind of thin woman seemed nice enough. She asked my name, which nobody else did, so that’s something, I guess. She seemed to really love the child. They all did, you could see, but especially her. And Gabriela seems rather dour and business-like. She pretty much outright said to the Chos’s face that she didn’t want to battle and was only doing it out of obligation. Still put up an amazing fight, though.”

“All that for a single child. It’s… remarkable.”

“Well, all I can say is that it was a very cute child. A beastkin like you, with dark skin and gleaming yellow eyes. Reminded me of a panther from back home. Adorable little thing, she was. It made me think that when we have children, they will be even cuter than she is.”

“W-what are you talking about, you moron!” she sputtered.

“You don’t want kids?”

“I…” She paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Bringing a child into this world, given who I am and our situation… I feel like it would be more of a curse bearing down upon them than a blessing. They would go through so much pain. I could never curse my child with a life like mine.

“But,” she continued with a scathing glare, “none of that matters, anyway! Bearing a child would probably kill me well before I could give birth. And even were that not the case, did you truly think that a human and a beastkin could procreate?”

Rudra shrugged. “Can’t they? I never really thought about it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Idiot!” she hissed. “We’re completely different peoples—I can no better conceive your child than I could an elf’s! Were you really making love to me thinking I would conceive?”

“I told you, I didn’t really think about it.”

“Sometimes I wonder what I see in you.”

He pulled her in close again. “Well, if that is how it is, then I guess we’ll just have to adopt,” he said lightly.

Tepin went stiff as a board.

They talked for a little bit longer of various things, but soon, as they so often did these days, they moved on to other, more intimate activities. Rudra couldn’t help but notice just how much more fervent his lover seemed this time.

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“Hope you had your fun for the night,” a male voice called from outside the cell. Tepin and Rudra looked up from their embrace as a familiar silhouette entered the illumination of the torches outside, the flickering light reflecting into the chamber off a pair of very shiny, very metallic legs. “Visiting hours are over.”

“You again?” Tepin growled. “Why are you here?”

“Why am I anywhere?” Caprakan Bloodflower asked. “Stop wasting time and get out.”

Never taking her wary gaze off of him, Tepin stood up and walked to the door. A squad of guards formed around her to escort her back to wherever they hid her away. Noticeably, the general did not accompany them.

“Leave us,” he said to the remaining troops. They seemed a little puzzled, but none of them dared to question the commands of a high-ranking Hono who also happened to be the Chos’s husband.

“I don’t think I want to talk to you,” Rudra told him once the two of them were alone. “I hear you’re not to be trusted.”

“And, do you believe it?” Caprakan asked, folding his arms across his chest with his hands on his sides. “Have I not always treated you well?”

“I don’t know if I would say you’ve treated me much at all. You haven’t spoken to me in months—since I revived you, now that I think of it, and you were dead most of the time before that.”

The Stragman’s hands tightened. “It is best that it happened that way. For some time after awakening in your cell, I was plagued by… difficulties. I avoided contact with everyone until quite recently.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Rudra said.

“Stop it. I am not here to receive the pity of a Shell locked in an inescapable prison.”

“Then why are you here after all this time?”

“I wanted to hear your answer to a question. What is strength to you, Rudra?”

“What kind of question is that? And why me?”

“Because I desire the perspective of somebody who is… untainted by this place, I guess you could say, which makes you perhaps the most qualified person I have easy access to.”

Rudra leaned back and thought for a moment about the general’s circumstances. It wasn’t hard to imagine and empathize with the struggles he’d faced. First, he’d been tortured—which was bad enough—but then, upon revival, he’d become a living embarrassment for himself and the Chos during the challenging recovery afterward. Rudra would have pitied him, but he knew that the only thing the Stragman would hate more than being an embarrassment or laughingstock would be to be pitied. Pity was for pathetic creatures, like Shells.

After a moment of consideration, Rudra decided to cooperate. Caprakan was correct, he had treated Rudra fairly well. Rudra found that his enmity towards the Chos did not extend to her partner, perhaps because he had not been a party in those tumultuous early clashes. No, he had been the weapon he’d used against her.

But still, that didn’t mean he had to cooperate for free.

“I’d be more than glad to discuss that with you, as long as you put a word in for me with your wife.”

“About what?”

“The way she treats me, the way she treats Tepin, the way she treats the Shells… pick one.”

Caprakan nodded. “Very well, if that is your price. However, know that my word means little with her when it comes to anything related to you. You know how stubborn she can be. But, I’ll try.”

“Yeah, I know,” Rudra agreed. He sighed. After a few more moments of consideration, he said, “I don’t know how to answer your question, to be honest. Things like strength are concepts too broad to be easily narrowed down to a few simple words. That’s where I think you all get it so wrong. There’s so much more to strength than just being able to win in a fight.”

“Is that so?”

“You have seen, firsthand, what I am capable of, physically. Would you say that I am strong?”

“I would not. A weapon is only as strong as the will to use it, and you lack that will.”

“And yet, without a single battle, I nearly brought this place to its knees. Just me and all the others you’ve all deemed so worthless. Could a weak person manage such a thing?”

“I wonder. That same person now cowers in a cell, meek as could be.”

“I made some mistakes. It happens to everybody.”

The Stragman cocked his head to the side. “You mean your silly ‘pacifist’ idea?”

Rudra shook his head. “No. Not at all. I’ve never regretted choosing to become a pacifist. It helps define me and solidifies who I am, and I am proud of my decision. But when you limit your options like that, especially in a place like this, you have to be even better than others just to stay afloat. I was too foolish and overconfident, and it led me to… to where we are today.

“I should have sought out more allies, people who could protect me and cover my weakness with their strengths. I should have pressed harder and been more proactive from the beginning. And most of all, I should never have stepped into this blasted cage.”

That drew a smirk from the man. “Quite a trap she laid for you, isn’t it?”

“I could break my first cell as if it were made of paper. It never occurred to me that something like this could even exist.”

“Yes, I imagine you were quite shocked.” He ran a hand along the bars appreciatively. “Given the size of it, it probably took every single one of our arbor Observers an entire season of nonstop effort to craft this, especially without my assistance.”

As his hand traveled over the bars, branches started to grow out of them, winding around the adjacent bars as little green leaves budded from the ends. Rudra stared, wide-eyed. Was his cage… alive?!

“You coax the tree to grow a small part of it into the shape you desire, you see,” Bloodflower continued. “The problem is, if you let it go, it will revert to its original shape.”

He removed his hand from the bar and indeed, Rudra could see the branches very slowly but surely withering and retreating back into their bars.

“You have to hold it, keep it in the form you desire, for days on end, until it becomes the natural shape. Only then can you sever it from the Mother and expect it to hold. It is an exhausting effort reserved for the rarest of items, done usually once a generation at most for the Chos’s weapon. You must have made her truly desperate to resort to something like this.”

“You know a lot about this sort of thing,” Rudra noted.

“Of course. I am the greatest arbor Observer of my generation. It is how I achieved my rank. Akhustal’s club is my personal handiwork.”

“So she didn’t have that thing until she became the leader, is that right?”

“Correct. Only the Chos has the right to a gift from the Mother Tree. It wasn’t until she was acknowledged as the next Chos that she received hers. Until then, she had to make do with an inferior version, which dented rather easily, if I recall correctly.”

“How did she become Chos, anyway?”

“Hunting dangerous monsters on her own that would normally take a team of ten to slay, as well as a very famous undefeated streak in combat tournaments for ten years running. It was a rather easy choice for her predecessor to make, really. Much easier than usual, if our histories are to be believed, though things rarely got so bad that the Challenge of Ruresni needed to be invoked.”

The man straightened, pushing himself away from the bars. He teetered slightly before his metal legs adjusted and steadied him.

“Well, this has been an enlightening chat, but I must go. A word of advice: consider your next actions very carefully. Akhustal prizes you more than you may know, and I cannot say what she will do to keep things as they are.”

With those words, he turned and began to leave, his arms moving in strange patterns as his mechanical legs took short but steady steps. Just before he receded from the torchlight, he stopped and looked back at Rudra for a moment.

“Thank you, by the way, for reviving me.”

And with that, he faded into the darkness.