“You want to train me further?” Denor asked. “What a relief.”

A grimace twisted Ledo's face as he was forced into surveying Denor’s uncomprehending face. The boy genuinely didn’t have any idea what was coming.

"Alright, Denor," he grumbled, his voice rough enough to make a particularly skittish Aurox wince at fifty paces. "Today's the day you learn the fine art of taking a punch. No point in being a walking target just because you're practically unkillable."

“Practically unlikeable too,” Tycho muttered, agreeing with the general sentiment of his son. “Nobody wants the start of the hero’s journey where he’s a whiny child.”

Despite this assertion, the story and its narrator doggedly continued, describing the men closing the distance on the boy and cracking their knuckles.

“Well, that’s less promising,” he said as his stare was upgraded from ‘blank’ to ‘vaguely comprehending’ at the sight of the two approaching men. He was slowly piecing together the rather unpleasant puzzle of what he had just walked into. "Ledo," he piped up, his voice small and hopeful, "wouldn't it be more useful to learn how to dodge a punch instead of you mushing me into a fine paste? I don’t know how to do that."

Ledo frowned. “Denor, what you don’t know could fill a warehouse.”

A guttural laugh, like rocks tumbling down a scree of grit and sandpaper combined into a rough shute for maximum guttralness, or gruttalitude if you’re feeling cool, erupted from Tycho. "Besides, where's the fun in that?" he boomed, his voice echoing across the hastily established training ground like the ghost of a particularly noisy cannon that had then proceeded to tumble down a rough shute of… well, you get the idea. Tycho had a very gruff voice, the sort you could describe for ages. "Stand tall, boy! Let's see what you're truly made of!"

With terrifying speed, Tycho launched himself at Denor. His fist, the size of a large rock and twice as unforgiving, connected with a meaty thud that would have made even the most bloodthirsty audience wince. Denor, caught completely off guard, flew backwards, but fortunately his fall was broken by the solid wall he connected with. Stars began swirling in his vision, and he realised the last thought wasn’t that sensible on account of the speeding vehicle that had just hit him.

The fact that Denor actually realised his last thought wasn’t sensible was a true admission of how scrambled his brains had been from the hit.

"Excellent form!" Ledo boomed, clapping Tycho on the back with enough force to give an ordinary man a dislocation.

Apparently there was a bloodthirsty enough audience to enjoy this after all.

"Feeling dazed, son?"

“Tell me when he gets up again, Ledo,” Tycho growled, trying to affix some brass knuckles onto his arthritic hand.

Denor groaned, pushing himself upright with a wince, and then collapsed again.

“Well?”

Denor tried to right himself, but his legs failed him.

“I’ll let you know, old man,” Ledo smirked.

"Does it have to be like this?" Denor whined, finally wobbling to his feet. "Can’t we just continue the other drills?"

“He’s up,” Ledo informed his father.

Tycho spat, safe in the knowledge that someone else (possibly named ‘Denor’) would be cleaning his floors. “You’ve done the easy part of your training. Now me and your father are going to test a little theory.”

"That's the spirit!" Ledo declared, his grin as wide as a crocodile's and twice as alarming, as he watched Denor shift into a fighting stance. They didn’t agree much, but the sport of beating Denor into a pulp was a shared bond that both men appreciated. "Now, get back over here! We've got more work to do!"

Well, at least the loss of the village had been temporarily pushed to one side thanks to the dawning realisation that Ledo had a solid excuse to beat his son. Unfortunately for Denor, that silver lining didn’t prevent the pain to come.

The next few hours were a blur of punches and a rather large amount of discomfort, punctuated by occasional whimpers of despair. Denor, despite his best efforts at retaliation, ended up absorbing the bulk of the blows with a growing grimace. Occasionally, a desperate instinct kicked in, and he'd manage to dodge a swing or land a kick, earning him an approving grin from Tycho.

"Fancy footwork won’t save you, boy!" Tycho bellowed. "The goal here is to beat you to death, not dance around after you! Here, take some of these herbs and sit there like a good victim."

Denor, feeling like this was another trap, reluctantly stretched out and placed one of the buds from the herbs in his mouth. "But Grandfather," he winced, rubbing a particularly sore spot, "what good is a tough body if the brain inside it is too useless to use its strength?"

Tycho, mid-rant about the virtues of a good punch, stopped short. He scratched his head, a thoughtful frown creasing his weathered face. "That's a fair point, lad," he admitted, his voice unsurprisingly gruff, as previously established. "But last I checked, clever quips never won a brawl in any of the taverns I was in."

“He’s been in a lot,” Ledo supplied, happy to play the henchman and cracking his knuckles like a fly fisher spotting ripples in the water.

“Tell you what, boy, if you’re able to wake up and tell us you want to go off and be an adventurer like I was after what we do to you, then we won’t stand in your way.”

Denor had no choice but to accept this proposition. “Okay,” he stated, with the dejected sound of a man realising that the last hurdle in the way of his dreams had spontaneously sprouted barbed wire and caught fire for reasons unknown.

“Now, where were we? Ah yes, the merciless beating to build your character.”

The men advanced with the inevitability of an avalanche, and their kicking started long before his grandfather’s ‘special’ herbs kicked in.

***

He awoke to see the old man seated on a stool just inside the door. There was no sign of Ledo, but a washbucket and mop the colour of blood indicated that someone had drawn the short straw and been assigned clean up duty. Judging from the man’s grin, it wasn’t his grandfather.

“That hurt a lot, didn’t it, boy?” The weathered face of Tycho, seasoned by a thousand squints into a thousand suns, prompted Denor, whose nod was more eloquent than any inevitable stupidity he could conjure up.

“Do you want to be free, boy?” Tycho asked, shifting on his stool with the grace of a man who knew arthritis on a first-name basis.

Denor didn’t feel much sympathy for self-inflicted injuries as a result of beating him to death. “Truly free,” Tycho added, seeing the boy’s mind wander in real-time.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“I wasn’t aware I was for sale, grandfather,” he helpfully supplied.

“Free as in freedom,” the man quickly corrected.

Another nod from the boy, this one loaded with the unspoken plea to avoid repeated beatings masquerading as familial love and initiation rites.

"I don't mean free from our fists, either." Tycho's eyes twinkled with some sort of memory that Denor wasn’t privy to.

The boy frowned, his brow furrowing in an attempt to grasp Tycho’s meaning with all the mental dexterity of… well, Denor.

Tycho pointed around the room with a sweeping gesture that took in the peeling walls, the creaky floorboards, and the general ambiance of neglected housework. "This place is the result of your village not being strong enough to survive. If your goal is to become the man who can destroy those responsible, you might succeed. But that man will destroy your life. The man who can defeat him is forged out there, in the universe and among the stars. The boy who remains trapped in this house will never be that man."

"But I need a place to stay," Denor said, more practically than dramatically. “You’re not seeing it through my eyes.”

“Well I can't gouge out someone else's eyes and look through them. I’ve still got my own!”

The boy had found out the hard way that Tycho was perfectly capable of doing the first bit. “Why can’t I just stay with you?”

Tycho nodded. "I know, trailing us like a lost puppy seems sensible. Your own words have sealed your fate to be otherwise. Blood demands blood. But blood feuds solve nothing. Do you know why I live here, in the north, far from others, even though I belonged in the south?"

“Because nobody likes you and you smell bad?” Denor ventured, proving that diplomacy was another skill eluding him.

"A blood feud," Tycho said, his voice weighted with the ghosts of the past and completely ignoring the insult. "Ghosts, a fiery girl, and heated words. It all ended in blood. I killed a few more who sought revenge, but they never stopped coming. So, I left. And that’s just on this planet, there are countless others that hate me even more. If you go the way I think you will, half the galaxy will be after you, and you will have no rest. Is that what you really want, to be hounded every waking moment of your life?"

"It is," Denor declared, his voice tight with the determination of someone who hasn’t quite figured out what they’re getting themselves into. "Even if it means being kicked to death or loads of other terrible things.”

“The Temrit and Trunians hunt us like sport, much like how your father and I made a big showing of beating you to death. Do you understand? They prey on the weak, it’s a game to them. Only by becoming strong enough to oppose them and others like them will you ever get out of this hovel.”

“I am ready."

Tycho shook his head with the patience of a man who has seen it all and then some. "You’re not ready. Anyone who says ‘I’m ready’ with a voice that hasn’t even broken doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Besides, after you kill this man who torched the village, what will you do then? Travel aimlessly among the stars? You'd be useless afterward.”

“I will have destroyed my enemies, that’s all that matters.”

“Aye, and you’ll have done so without any forward planning. You’re unable to die properly, so you’ll end up drifting from planet to planet, system to system. You might think vengeance will fix it all, but that won't bring your village back. It won't bring any of them back. It won't even make them feel better about it, since they came down with a bad case of being dead. And you will have wasted your life and helped nobody."

Denor raised his chin defiantly, channeling the spirit of a particularly stubborn goat that had evaded his capture. "So I should just give up? The man who killed all those people and destroyed my village gets to live as if nothing happened? He just gets to fly about and search for his mask pieces and destroy others?"

"You didn't listen," Tycho said, stating the obvious, his gaze wandering out into what could charitably be called a courtyard, where the shadows played out old memories. "I told you, out there, you'll learn what it takes to kill that man. You'll learn what it takes to kill any man, and that will make you very useful. In the universe, you'll see wonders and have adventures that will make you forget one idiot with delusions of grandeur. The galaxy is full of them; you run into that sort more often than you do simple traders."

"I will never forget him," Denor vowed, the fire in his eyes burning bright with his trademark mix of enthusiasm and stupidity.

"Of course not, just like you won’t forget Litarn or the way Charan came back to life. You won’t constantly be thinking about them. From time to time you’ll muse over it, and then you’ll carry on living in the moment. Life is too big to focus on such a tiny thing. You want to live, kill, love—that's what you want, not to chase a single man who probably remembers you and your village as little as he remembers the first snowflake that landed on his face when he touched down on this Outer Rim territory."

“What if I find him, Grandfather? What if our paths cross?” Denor asked, grinding his teeth in frustration, the question escaping his lips as if each word were a reluctant prisoner.

The old man smiled, a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Then the man who tried to kill my son will see the fruits of my training. His life will spurt in red rivers from his mangled body. Be sure to kill his daughter and extended family too… don’t want them coming after you.”

Denor paled at the casual tone with which Tycho suggested offing entire bloodlines. What was more surprising was that Tycho actually agreed with him that it would be a good thing, instead of chastising him like Ledo undoubtedly would.

“To make all this possible, Denor, you will have to learn some lessons. Very important lessons.”

Denor frowned. “I want Val Madoon dead, but I'm not capable of doing that yet.” He nodded slowly, a rare spark of understanding dawning in his eyes.

Tycho stood up, a hint of approval in his own gaze. “Looks like Ledo underestimated you. You are capable of thinking after all. Just be aware that if you go after a being like that, you could suffer endless torment, terrible sacrifice…”

Denor had a blank expression on his face again.

“...and you might miss a few breakfasts.”

The boy’s eyes widened in alarm. “Not a few breakfasts!”

His grandfather smiled. “Still want to be free from the prospect of regular morning food?”

Denor looked up, his features hardening. “How do I free myself then?”

His grandfather laughed. “Depends on the shackle. I've been caught by a few myself, and I never liked them, especially when taken by slave traders. Temrit dogs don’t know how to treat a good fighter, and the Kilru? Better, but their methods are even more barbaric.”

The old man crossed over to his desk, rummaged around in a cabinet, and eventually threw a fist-sized object at Denor. “Stick that in your ear for starters. It’ll crawl up into you, so don’t be alarmed.”

Denor looked at the strange device. “That’s not going to fit in my ear,” he said, with a surprising grasp of anatomy and dimensions.

Tycho laughed. “Just press it against your ear. It’ll know what to do from there.”

Denor held the device in his hand, turning it over in his fingers. It was about the size and shape of a large apple, smooth and cool to the touch, with a faint blue glow emanating from its metallic core. It looked innocuous, almost like a child's toy, yet even Denor knew that this device was important.

With a deep breath, he pressed the device against his ear. It was surprisingly light, almost weightless. A moment of cool silence, and then a soft hum filled his head. It wasn't unpleasant, more like a distant thrumming. Then, something remarkable happened. The hum seemed to resolve itself into a language, a language he didn't recognize, yet somehow innately understood. Words flowed into his mind, clear and concise, devoid of the usual struggle of deciphering foreign tongues.

Denor blinked, a surprised laugh escaping his lips. It felt like a mental translator had been flipped on, seamlessly converting the alien sounds into comprehensible thought. He tried to pull the device away from his ear, but it slid out of his fingers and into his canal. The hum eventually faded into a gentle thrum once more, and then the silence of the room, save for Tycho’s breathing, reasserted itself. A grin spread across his face. This was a game-changer. With this little piece of technology pressed into his ear, the galaxy was suddenly an open book, every tongue whispering its secrets to him.

Tycho applauded. “Not the nicest of sensations, but well done on not tearing it out of your ear. They don’t make the older models like that no more. Had it for years but I’ve no use for it now.”

Denor smiled. “Thank you, Grandfather.”

The old adventurer waved away the compliment. “No sense in you blundering around failing to comprehend a situation because of a language barrier, when you could be blundering around failing to comprehend a situation because of your own stupidity instead.”

Denor frowned. “Then what is that... Oh.” His smile dimmed. “So this won’t make me more intelligent then?”

“Denor, you’re as clever as a bunch of rocks and twice as ugly.” Tycho stroked his unshaven chin. “We’ll try and teach you as much as we can, but ultimately we can only get you so far. The rest is going to have to come from either the galaxy at large and you learning from trial and error, or some incredible piece of tech or teachers with the patience of a Monarch.”

Denor leaned against the wall and stood up. “Good. I will learn everything you want to teach me. Then I will find a way off this planet.” He smiled grimly. “Then I’ll find my way to Val Madoon.”

His grandfather rolled his eyes. It was going to be a complete space wreck, but there was nothing stopping the boy. He just hoped he hadn’t inadvertently unleashed something upon the universe at large that would have been better contained in the Andron system.

Of course, he didn’t realise how close that thought was to his own son’s about the matter, and if anyone had told him so he probably wouldn’t admit it either. They were completely different people, after all.

As for Denor Kara? He might not die immediately, but he would die eventually, and in the process he’d make a beautiful corpse and take a lot of people with him.