Chapter 132: Echoes of a Hungry Past
The silence that descended upon the tunnel was as heavy as the carnage it contained. The last of the black-suited assassins lay still, the unified rhythm of their charge replaced by the sporadic, final drips of water and the ragged, slowing breaths of the dying. Kai stood amidst the devastation, his white shirt now a stark, grisly canvas of crimson. With a flick of his wrist and a soft, blue glow of water energy, the blood peeled away from the fabric, swirling in the air before splattering onto the ground, leaving him pristine once more. Nearby, Daren downed a small, glowing healing potion in one gulp. The cuts on his knuckles sealed, his bruises faded, and the fire in his hair, which had dimmed during the fight, roared back to life. He stretched, his body returning to its peak condition.
They took a moment, a precious, quiet respite. The immediate threat was gone, but the air thrummed with the anticipation of what was to come—the leaders, the King-level threats. As he checked his sword, Kai's thoughts drifted to his brother. A silent hope flickered within him. I hope Moon performed well. I hope he didn't get too hurt. The worry was a familiar, cold stone in his gut.
It was then that Daren approached him. The usual confident swagger was tempered with something new: a grudging, profound respect.
"I underestimated you," Daren said, his voice low and sincere, cutting through the silence. "I am sorry for that." He paused, his eyes searching Kai's face, trying to decipher the enigma before him. "But tell me... you have to be from some legacy, right? A top-tier clan? A royal bloodline? I can't... I can't believe anyone could be this powerful without that kind of heritage in their veins."
The word "clan" hit Kai like a physical blow.
It was a key, twisting in a lock he kept sealed deep within himself. The word did not bring pride or nostalgia. It unleashed a floodgate of memories, not of grand halls or powerful techniques, but of pain. A sharp, searing memory of brutal, soul-crushing training sessions under a pitiless sky. The ghostly sensation of invasive, agonizing medical treatments that felt more like torture than healing, all designed to forge him into a weapon for a clan that would eventually cast him out.
His response was not a sentence he formed, but one that was wrenched from him, pulled from the depths of that pain. "No," he said, his voice flat, hollow. "I don't belong to any clan or any top-tier family." He met Daren's gaze, his own eyes like chips of ice. "I belong to the slums."
The word hung in the air between them. Slum.
Daren's brain struggled to process it. His expression twisted through stages of disbelief, confusion, and finally, a dawning, horrifying comprehension. The slums? The image did not compute. The man standing before him—calm, precise, overwhelmingly powerful—could not have emerged from the filth and despair of Nova Lumina's most neglected underbelly. But the raw, unvarnished truth in Kai's eyes was undeniable. A torrent of questions flooded Daren's mind, but they all distilled into one overwhelming thought: What kind of a hellish life did he have to claw his way through to reach this pinnacle of power? The respect he felt for Kai moments ago deepened into something else, something closer to reverence for his sheer, indomitable will.
But for Kai, the door was open, and the memories poured out, unbidden and cruel.
He was no longer in the tunnel. He was eight years old again, standing with his brother in the pouring rain at the edge of Nova Lumina's slums. The scent of ozone and decay filled his nostrils. They had been exiled from the only home they had ever known, cast out by the Alhuwalia clan with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The first night was a lesson in a new, brutal reality. They didn't know how to find food. They didn't know where to sleep.
He remembered, with a clarity that was physically painful, the single piece of bread they had found on the second day. It wasn't just stale; it was a hard, moldy crust, covered in grime, half-buried in the mud by a overflowing gutter. To their former selves, it would have been refuse, not food. Their stomachs, empty and cramping, had screamed at them. But their minds, still clinging to the ghost of their old life, had rebelled. They stood there, two shivering boys, staring at the filthy crust, caught in a torturous limbo. They couldn't bring themselves to eat it, but they couldn't bring themselves to throw it away. It was life, however debased.
In the end, hunger won. He remembered the gritty, sour taste of the mold and dirt, the desperate, tearing chews. He remembered Moon, just a little boy, forcing it down with tears streaming down his face. And he remembered the consequence. The violent, wrenching food poisoning that had gripped Moon later that night, his small body convulsing, his skin burning with fever. Kai remembered holding his brother, utterly helpless, listening to his whimpers of pain, the fear a cold, sharp knife in his own heart. The memory was a scar on his soul, a permanent testament to how far they had fallen, and the price they had paid just to survive another day.
A single, hot tear welled in the corner of Kai's eye, betraying his iron control. He felt its treacherous track down his cheek before he could stop it. He blinked, violently wrenching his consciousness back to the present, to the cold tunnel and the waiting Daren. He turned his face away, his voice rough as he ground out the words, "Forget all that. Let's just move. We haven't completed our mission yet."
Daren saw it all—the fleeting tear, the sudden tension in Kai's jaw, the way he violently pulled himself back from the edge of that memory. He understood. He didn't press. He simply gave a slow, solemn nod, diverting the conversation with a quiet, "Right. Let's go."
Together, they moved forward, their boots crunching on the debris of the battle. The tunnel, now more a ruin and a charnel house than a passageway, seemed to stretch endlessly before them. After about fifteen or twenty minutes of tense, silent walking, they could finally see the end—a distant archway leading into what had to be the central circular building.
It was then that Daren's instincts, honed by countless missions, began to scream. "My gut is telling me something's wrong," he murmured, his eyes scanning the shadows. "This was... too easy. To get this far, to the heart of their base, with only that army as resistance? It doesn't feel right."
Kai nodded, his own senses on high alert. "I've had the same suspicion. Something is off. Don't let your guard do—"
The attack came not as a movement, but as a consequence.
Kai's words were cut off as his superior perception screamed a warning a fraction of a second faster than Daren's. There was no time for an explanation, only for action. He threw his entire body weight into Daren, shoving the larger man sideways with desperate force.
It was the difference between life and death for Daren.
The attack, a blur of concentrated force that distorted the very air, missed Daren by inches. It did not, however, miss its secondary target. It connected with the side of Kai's head with a sickening, wet THWUMP.
The impact was not loud, but it was utterly devastating. It was a force designed not just to injure, but to extinguish. Kai's world exploded into white, searing pain, and then into nothing. His body was flung backward as if launched from a cannon, flying back down the length of the tunnel they had just traversed, his consciousness fading into blackness before he even hit the ground.
For Daren, it happened in a single, disorienting heartbeat. One moment, Kai was warning him. The next, he was thrown aside, and Kai was simply gone, replaced by a phantom force and the echo of a brutal impact. He scrambled to his feet, heart hammering against his ribs, his fiery aura erupting around him in a defensive blaze. The tunnel was empty. There was no enemy in sight.
The only sound in the ringing silence was the voice in his own head, cold and grim. That speed... that power... it has to be one of them. One of the three leaders.
The real fight had just begun, and he had already lost his ally.