Episode 21 - Nightmare, As Always

That night.
With Conquere laid to rest in the bed, Kaftin sat in a chair with his eyes closed.

His usual sleep amounted to no more than four hours, so dozing upright in a chair posed no particular problem.

For most living creatures, sleep was precious rest. For Kaftin, it was something else entirely.
To him, sleep was nothing more than an irritating stretch of time spent facing unwelcome nightmares.

The moment drowsiness pulled him under, the sound of applause reached him.

As his vision brightened, he found himself surrounded — translucent evil spirits packed tightly around him, striking the backs of their hands together in applause, grinning.

"You lot never quit, do you. Every single night... don't your wrists get sore?"

He had long since grown accustomed to the sight. He shook his head and waved his hand dismissively.
Get out of the way.

At that, the spirits threw their eyes wide and reached toward him with outstretched hands.
But an invisible wall surrounding him held them back, their fingers falling just short.

Weeping, tears of blood streaming down their faces, they clawed frantically at the barrier with their nails and unleashed curses at him in voices he could not hear.

A sight that should have raised every hair on his body — and yet Kaftin simply yawned and walked forward.
How many years had he been watching this scene... it had grown so tiresome it made him yawn.

Once the spirits had finished their welcoming reception, darkness swallowed everything again.

Kaftin paused, drew a slow breath, and kept walking.

The real thing started now.
It was time to face the fragments of the past — fragments he had never once been glad to see.

The first scene that came was a subterranean research facility carved from stone.

Forty-six large cylindrical glass tubes stood fixed in a semicircle, and at the center of the floor sat something like a circular pool, filled to the brim with a suspicious yellow-green liquid.

With each step closer, screams and cries of anguish reached his ears.
What this place meant to him was something even he could not say — but he knew, with certainty, that it was an important memory.

Every time the recollection of this place surfaced, phantom voices would ring through his mind.

[Stop...!]
[No...! Don't kill—!]
"...Tch."

He shook his head against the phantom voices.
Whether it was the spirits from before or something else entirely, it made no difference.

Anything attempting to meddle inside his mind was unforgivable — so he left the place behind and walked back into the dark.
After that came more of the same: screams he somehow recognized, the sound of flesh being torn, floors drenched in blood — horrific scenes he passed through one after another, until at last the darkness brightened and changed around him.

"...Tch."

A scorching desert.
An arid, sweltering expanse stretched out before him, heavy enough to make breathing difficult.

The place he arrived at, nearly every night, at the end of his dreams.
Each time, he had explored it piece by piece — and found nothing of consequence.

Nothing but sand, sand, and the occasional fragment of bone.
The only thing that stood out at all was the tower rising from the very center of this space.

Enormously tall, yet bent and twisted in places, it looked deeply unstable.

The material was impossibly thick metal, its surface bristling with spikes of every size — not even touching it was a simple matter.

What was strange was that something of that scale ought to have a door, an entrance of some kind — and yet there was nothing. No door, no window, anywhere.

It had been the first thing he investigated when he arrived here — and to this day, he still had no idea what it was.

He had eventually abandoned the tower and turned his attention to the desert itself. That had been roughly a year and a half ago.
What he had learned: the desert was far larger than it appeared, but it was unquestionably a walled-in space.

And the reason it was this hot despite no sun — heat was rising continuously from the ground itself, though he had no idea why.

Today, his task was to find out what lay beneath the sand.

The sand was thick enough to swallow his feet, but with each step, something soft and yielding pressed back through the soles — a faint sensation of something underneath.

It had unsettled him enough that he'd been leaving it alone — until now.

He lowered himself and began digging with his hands.
He had been working through the deep-packed sand for some time when he stopped.

"This is—!"

Something black and soft made contact with his fingertips.
And in that same instant, he pulled his hand back and stepped away.

"Damn it...!"

He understood.
Why this desert was so hot.
What lay beneath it.

"...My hatred... hatred that lost its way...!"

A vast, living hatred.
Something that had drifted without direction until it pooled and congealed — something terrible — was burning quietly beneath the surface.

"...I shouldn't touch this carelessly."

With an instinctive certainty that it might consume him whole, Kaftin kicked sand over the hole he had dug and filled it back in without hesitation.

He was Kaftin.
Apprentice of the Torture Martial Arts master Vesren Painroad, and the blade of his vengeance.
That was enough, for now.
He could not surrender his body to whatever his past self had been, nor to the hatred smoldering beneath that sand.

Not until this revenge was finished.

"Hm...?"

Dawn.
When Kaftin quietly opened his eyes, the scene before him was almost amusing.

An assassin, face masked save for exposed lips, had a reed tube in his mouth — the other end pressed to Kaftin's lips — and was blowing in short, desperate puffs, doing everything in his power to push the poison inside the tube into Kaftin's mouth.

"......?"
"......!"

Their eyes met. The assassin broke into a cold sweat and froze — then, brazenly, resumed blowing with even greater intensity, puffing harder than before.

"......"
"Hff—...! Hff—...! Gkk!"

Kaftin immediately seized him by the throat, then turned to check the bed first.

Conquere appeared unharmed.
Quietly relieved, Kaftin turned back to the assassin and gave him a slow, crooked grin.

"...Mph—?!"

Then he let go of the throat entirely —

"Hff—!!"
"?!?!?!"

— and in the instant the assassin gasped for air as the grip released, Kaftin blew into the tube with full force, driving the poison back down into the assassin's throat.

The assassin choked, dropped the tube, and collapsed to the floor in agony. In under a minute, his face had gone a sickly blue, and he was dead.

"...A dull one. I'll give him marks for nerve, at least..."

Kaftin looked down at him for a moment, then apparently decided the body needed to be disposed of before Conquere woke. He grabbed the assassin by the throat again and stepped out into the hall.

Another failure.
This one hadn't been particularly skilled — but his infiltration and poison-handling had at least been serviceable.

And now he was a corpse, dragged out by Kaftin's hand and dumped in the street.

"Damn it all..."

Did it have to come to this — handling it himself?
Given the man's peculiarities, the risk was enormous, and it was the last thing he wanted. But at this rate, there was no other way.

No — against that man, conventional assassination itself might not be viable at all.

"...Mmmm..."

He reorganized what he knew about Kaftin in his mind.
His weaknesses... there had to be something exploitable.

As he turned it over, Veilslayer's eyes curved into something resembling a smile.

This time, he would kill him.
No matter who he was...

*

Kaftin left the inn after breakfast.
Today, as always, he set off at a brisk pace to hit another operation under the Four Gang Lords.

The past few days had been trying — at worst, Veilslayer's people had been coming at him nearly every hour, making it increasingly difficult to manage his time.

"Nuisances, the lot of them..."

Not that cutting them down one after another wasn't satisfying in its own right.

Even with Veilslayer controlling the better part of this underworld's assassin guild, assassins were high-grade personnel — the kind that took years to cultivate.

Throwing that kind of manpower at Kaftin, who simply couldn't be killed, only to have them whittled away piece by piece — Veilslayer's forces would weaken on their own.

"Well. I'll leave them be for now."

As long as they weren't touching Conquere, he had no particular inclination to do anything more on his end.

If Veilslayer let this go on as it was, that alone would prove his incompetence. And if he tried something different — Kaftin would simply crush it, same as always.

He turned down the alley where the Four Gang Lords ran an illegal gambling den.
He had heard it wasn't particularly large — but then, Kaftin had never been methodical about any of this.

He simply took whatever Whispermere pointed him toward and hit it at random, whenever the mood struck.

The first few times, he had gone after the larger operations that would hurt the Gang Lords the most — but lately he had been attacking smaller spots like this on a whim as well.

Perhaps because of that, the Gang Lords' people had already plastered wanted posters bearing Kaftin's face all across the district, and were tightening their watch by the day.

Even now, the moment he stepped into the alley, four members moved to block his path.

"You're not getting through."
"Who knows — maybe you'll get through as a corpse."
"Hahaha! On your hands and knees under my legs!"

They didn't seem to know much about him — chattering away as they pleased, brandishing knives and iron pipes with theatrical menace.

Kaftin answered their laughter with his own peculiar, unnatural smile.

"How convenient. I was just thinking I could stuff your friend's head between your legs."
"What...?"
"Bwahahaha! This guy's hilarious!"
"Right?! Who does he think he is?! Well — I mean, someone worth forty gold, technically!"

—To be continued—