Kevin lay down on his back, staring up at me through the hole in his cell. Something about his blackened eye made me uncomfortable, more so than the other signs of his corruption. When I had first unmasked the Dark Lord, he’d already had a legendary case of heterochromia, his right iris as dark as his pupil. This was the same change, only magnified. The darkness had consumed the white of his eye as well, and I had a feeling it did more to change his perception than give him night vision.
“There were nine of us,” he said. “I was the ninth. A complete fellowship.”
“They were here before you?”
“Yeah, it was one guy first, and then two groups. But they were all together when I met them.”
“Did you all have the same spawn point?”
“No,” he shook his head. “Jason was here by himself for a while, I don’t know where he started. One of the other groups was in Thallaso. It had a different name then, I forget what. But he found them and helped them stop the entity that was eating the world there.”
“Eating the world?” I’d heard him say that name before. Jason was the man who had made my armor, and he’d mistaken me for him when we first fought.
“Yeah, it was some big worm thing or something. I don’t know, they beat it before I got here. And the second group started in Gondor.”
“Where is that?” There was no way I’d missed a kingdom called Gondor. It wasn’t on any of the maps in the war room.
“What do you mean?” He said. “That’s where you came from.”
“You mean the Free Kingdoms?”
“Pfff,” he scoffed. “Whatever, are you going to let me tell the story or not?”
I shut up. The cube was bright now, with torches running along all four walls and down the pillar that upheld the cell. The illumination that bled through the diamond cast Kevin in a bluish shade that somehow made his eye seem even darker. It reminded me of the way atreanum absorbed light.
“Jason found me in Dargoth, the old Dargoth. It looked a lot different before all the plants died. There was already a hero working for Towk, someone who was born in this world and started as a Templar. Kael Blackblade. Dumb name. He was a big problem, he ripped a hole in the veil and let a Pebbleheart in. We beat it, but we didn’t have anything that could break the core, so Jason, me, and the other Survivor built a monolith around it to keep it from growing.”
That was one question answered. I’d wondered how that monster had arrived on Plana. The Pebbleheart had been on an entirely different level than any spawn, even the demons. I wanted to know why the core was so hard to destroy, but held myself back from interrupting Kevin. Once he got started, it was like he couldn’t stop talking.
Maybe it was being confined for so long that made him want someone to listen to him. Or it could have been deeper than that. Kevin didn’t think of people without Systems as real human beings. They were NPCs to him, and he’d already griefed all the other players out of the game he imagined he was playing. He could have been waiting for someone to tell this story to for a very long time.
I’m a good listener. I’d met a lot of guys in prison who would monologue all day if you let them. As Kevin talked, I found myself falling into a familiar rhythm, nodding and giving small prompts when there was an opening, but otherwise just letting him go. We were even talking through a gap in a cell, just like old times.
The fellowship, as he insisted on calling it, eventually captured Kael. And then they didn’t know what to do with him. Jason had crafted their first anchor to keep him in place if he died, and Jason and the others wanted to try to convince Kael to be a templar again. Kael had been his mentor and only switched sides after absorbing an obscene amount of taint in the course of his hero career.
They tried using runes to cure him, a process I was extremely interested in hearing about, but Kevin barely mentioned it and refused to elaborate. The runes were his bargaining chip.
Kael had gone too far to be helped. Their attempts only hurt him, and Jason decided to seal the templar off until they could figure out a better way to save him.
“I told them it was a bad idea,” Kevin said, the frustration still fresh in his voice. “There was too much going on. Other bad guys, the demons, wandering monsters. We couldn’t just leave him somewhere when he might eventually get out. We barely beat him the first time.”
Kevin invented griefing, at least as far as it applied to this particular group of heroes. The demons probably could have told him how to do it, but he hadn’t joined them yet, and he came up with the idea all on his own.
“I did it myself,” he said, “with lava.”
While there was no gentle way of going about killing someone over and over, burning them to death fell hard on the side of excessive cruelty. But I couldn’t place myself too high above him on the moral scale in this instance. I’d considered doing the same thing to Kevin at one point. At least, it had crossed my mind as an option.
“They were total babies about it,” he continued, aggrieved. “After that, it was like we weren’t on the same team anymore. They didn’t tell me things. Jason and Jake made bases without me.”
“Jake?” That was a lot of J names.
“The other Survivor. He was older too, I thought he’d be cool about it. That he would get it. But he always did whatever Jason said, even though Jason was the youngest of any of us.”
‘I thought you said he’d been here the longest?”
“I mean this,” Kevin waved his good hand over his face. “He was like fourteen or something. Making him the leader was stupid. He was still a kid.”
“Wait…” I sat up, removing my face from the hole, “were all of you teenagers?”
“Yeah, who ever heard of an old isekai? Well, you, I guess. And that other guy later, Umb something.” Kevin kept talking, his voice floating up to me, and I looked around the cube, feeling lost. I’d just learned that young transmigrators weren’t the exception, they were the rule. Why would Mizu do that? Had Mizu realized how terrible an idea that was, or was I a fluke?
After Kael was gone, the fellowship continued fighting the forces of Discord, but their relationships with Kevin became increasingly strained. Listening to him reminisce, it was easy to imagine what it had been like. They’d called him out for what he’d done, and he’d resented them for it, refusing to acknowledge that there had been any other option. He was not the sort of person to mend fences.
The group had done around the world erecting monuments that helped to stabilize Plana, reducing the influence of Bedlam. They didn’t have to worry as much as I had about monsters appearing around them. They had runes, and one of them was a Medium. A class that came pre-equipped with a skill for healing wounds in the veil.
That had been one of Esmelda’s options. I wished we had known what it was good for when she was making that choice. Eight hundred years ago, however, heroes hadn’t been the only source of fresh mobs. In some regions, they were a naturally occurring phenomenon. Drom didn’t exist then, the land had been ruled by a demon.
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“He taught people magic,” Kevin said. “That sucked because they could teach it to each other after we killed him. I don’t think we ever got all of them.”
“Why was it bad for them to learn magic?”
“Demon magic,” Kevin scoffed, “It comes with side effects. If you use it long enough, it makes you crazy. Or maybe it doesn’t, but all the wizards I’ve ever met were batshit.”
That tracked. It also explained why, to this day, magic was not approved of in the Free Kingdoms. The magic they knew had come from Bedlam, though it only existed in legends now. A hero’s work was never done. The fellowship had continued beating back the darkness, erecting monuments, and seeing them fall. Two of their number, the front liners whose classes I didn’t know, had started talking about how chaos wasn’t all that bad.
“Greg was always a jerk, and Lisa wasn’t much better. They did most of the demon-slaying, and it got to be too much for the runes. They started to look like me and you.” He lifted his thin, scaly arm, and pointed at my horns, which were now tall enough that I knew my helm was not coming back on without adjustments.
The group split and Kevin went with Greg and Lisa.
“I needed to watch them,” he said. “Jason wasn’t going to do anything, even if they switched sides. He said it was their right to retire, that they deserved a rest..”
Instead of continuing to travel the world, the trio had set up shop in Dargoth, overturning the local hierarchy. Greg and Lisa were a couple, and they made themselves King and Queen, while Kevin, at least the way he told it, was treated as a tagalong.
“She was hot,” he said, “but she was a total bitch. Treated me like a kid.” His face twisted with old bitterness. “We were the same age.”
The happy couple had eventually been approached by Bael, through intermediaries at first, offering a way to manage their taint problem. Thus far, the changes to my own body had been manageable, but Kevin was quick to assure me that it would get worse. Greg and Lisa didn’t look like themselves anymore, and they were sick. Not dying sick, just miserable forever. The corruption had affected their minds as well, making them unpredictable and violent.
“He killed me once,” Kevin said, bleakly. “I called him stupid, and he killed me. They didn’t respect me, but I was the one supporting them. They couldn’t fix their gear without me. If I wasn’t there, they would have been losers.”
Casual murder didn’t end their relationship. Kevin continued to tag along, “undercover,” as the King and Queen of Dargoth plotted to capture the other heroes. That was Bael’s price, and in return, he gave them some kind of Bedlam fruit that made them pretty again, at least temporarily.
Jason still trusted them, and the fellowship got back together again for one last mission. A demon was gathering an army in eastern Dargoth and they set out together to wipe it out. That demon was Bael, and the fellowship walked into an ambush with three of their members as turncoats.
“I was seeing where it would go,” Kevin said.
Six heroes were captured, bound to anchors, and placed in separate prisons. Kevin did his lava trick, and two of them didn’t come back. The other four took longer, but the entire griefing procedure took less than a week. Jason took the longest, but he gave up when he realized that he was alone.
I was staring at Kevin’s face as he told the story, looking for signs of remorse, and there were none. Not in his voice, not in his eyes. He could have been telling me about a boring day at work. If anything, he seemed proud of the accomplishment.
“It would have been a mess without me,” he said, the hint of a smile on his thick lips. “Greg and Lisa were useless after the fight, and I told them I was out of potions. Had to get more ingredients from back at base.”
Now he grinned. “But I wasn’t out of potions. They were wounded, and they were stupid, and there were so many extra anchors. Lisa went back to base to fetch my potion stuff since we couldn’t leave until the fellowship was broken. And I killed Greg.
Bael watched me do it. I wasn’t afraid of him, because I knew what he could do and I’d prepped for fire. But he didn’t try to help at all, he just watched and asked me why, and I said ‘Because I hate him.’ And the demon was like, ‘That’s a good reason,’ and that was it. By the time Lisa got back, Greg was gone. He’d seen what happened to the others, and he didn’t even try to come back after he saw he was trapped. His prison had to be different because he could break diamonds, but I was ready for that, I knew everything he could do. What all of them could do. They thought I was the weakest, but I was smarter. That’s what they didn’t get.”
This was hard to listen to. A part of me had wanted to see Kevin as in some way redeemable. Some of his actions as Dark Lord had been due to the corruption of his mind from demons and the taint of Bedlam, but these events had taken place before all that. He wasn’t even oathbound, the other two had made a deal with Bael, not him. Yes, he’d been isekaied young, but young people could be sociopaths too.
“What happened to Lisa?”
Kevin went quiet. But there was still no remorse, not even sadness. His lips turned down in a pout, and his cheeks reddened.
“She wouldn’t listen. Had to kick her off the server.”
It was hard to get people to open up if they thought you were judging them, so I had to think about my response.
“I get why you got rid of Greg,” I said, keeping my tone level. “He sounds like a dick. But why’d you help him in the first place? You hadn’t made a deal with Bael yet, so what was the point? Weren’t you worried about being the only hero left?”
“That’s why I’m so smart,” Kevin said, the bitterness falling away, replaced by smug self-satisfaction. “Plana was fine, mostly. Jason had taken care of things, doing his good boy act. There weren’t that many demons and the biggest monsters were all gone. Mobs are easy. Every time things seemed like we might lose, it wasn’t because of mobs. It was heroes who had gone bad, like Greg and Lisa, and Kael. The fighting was going to go on forever because people were going to keep turning and make new holes in the world. And fixing them was going to turn someone else bad because that’s how taint works. But I stopped it. I saved the world, and I kept saving it. I stayed pure, holding the line. Had to give the demons a few things they wanted, you get that. You did the same thing. But look what happened. Plana’s fine. There’s been more trouble since you’ve been here than there was in the last hundred years. What do you think about that?”
There was a grain of truth in his perspective, but only a grain. Heroes were a net gain for the side of Harmony, despite the chaos they could cause. Kevin was an example of exactly the problem he was illustrating, though he didn’t see himself that way. By working together, heroes could drive back Discord, and overcome their individual flaws. Kevin, however, hadn’t wanted to work with anyone. Instead, he’d turned Plana into his sandbox.
“That stuff about NPCs,” I said. “Why do you think that? You were born on earth. Nobody on earth has powers. Did you think everyone in the world was an NPC but you?”
“Nah,” Kevin became thoughtful, turning over onto his side so I could only see his face in profile. “That’s different. Earth is Earth. But I can tell who's a person here and who isn’t.”
“How?”
“I see it. They’re just different.”
“Are you talking about the Aetheric sense?” His ability to feel essence had to be more developed than mine, and in some ways, I could understand what he was talking about. If I closed my eyes and reached out with my spirit, people without much accumulated essence felt less real. That didn’t make them any less human, though.
“Nah,” he said again. “I’ve got that. But I can see the difference. Players look like players, and everyone else is like, I don’t know, a doll that talks.”
His eye. This had to have something to do with his eye.
“How many demons have you killed?” I asked.
“None. The front-liners did most of the killing. I was support.”
“Then how did you start to change? You’ve gotten worse since you’ve been here, your eye was dark before, but it’s spread.”
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “That was in Bedlam. Jason and Jake took me to mine the orichalcum for my first full set. And I met someone. I didn’t know who it was, just a guy who saved me from some worms. But he gave me the eye, and then I could see better. Found my own way back. Jason was worried about it, but it didn’t do anything else, and I thought it looked cool.”
A guy. In Bedlam. Could he have been a previous hero? Someone like David, who left whatever world they’d been reincarnated on and struck out on their own? The connection was obvious. Whoever Kevin had met had turned him into a time bomb. A hero who literally saw the people he was supposed to save as objects. It didn’t relieve Kevin of the responsibility for his actions, but it did help me understand.
“I’ve told you enough,” Kevin said. “Are you going to make a deal with me or not?”
“I need to think about it.”
I couldn’t let Kevin out. He was a monster in human skin. Maybe he hadn’t always been that way, but that was who he was now. Of course, he was also still the one person who could tell me how to stop becoming one myself.