POV: Sayaka
She had a pretty good idea what they would encounter, but didn’t want to say anything because Kai wasn’t attractive when he was angry and not hurting anyone. After hundreds of years of violence, often on her own in the decades between Demon-King assaults, the occasional act of savagery didn’t bother her. She’d seen worse, experienced worse, and delivered worse. Not as often as her superiors thought though. Sayaka thought the best way to kill demons and their allies was to do it quickly, so there would be more time for slaughtering others.
Kai’s ranting at the air was unimpressive. The air couldn’t fight back. Blowing up a lake and terrifying everyone? Genius.
And if Kai had any idea how much she empathized with being separated from one’s children, he’d probably express his emotions to her and get maudlin. What would she be expected to do then? Hug?
Sayaka was aware that she had no place in a peaceful society. As was expected of elven assassins and other elite forces, she changed her name. Had it changed, actually. She didn’t care what her new name would be, so she kept writing ‘X’ to sign for things until they gave up and someone chose for her.
It was all so absurd. Elven culture was gone. They were just long-lived humans now and she was too burned out to care about it or much of anything else.
As things were now, if Kai won and got to return to Earth, she’d go with him if he asked. She’d have to spend the rest of her life away from society (fine), frittering her time away on trivialities (fine), and suffer a severely reduced lifespan, dying like a human in a matter of a few decades (perfect).
He needed to control his temper though. Screaming pointlessly was stupid and it was only a matter of time before he assaulted or thrashed one of them. He was just under too much stress. That’s why the ancients didn’t want men like Kai coming to Tenka in the first place.
He’d boil over. If he assaulted Runa, it might be manageable, because she was twisted as a small intestine and probably would mistake it for actual courtship: low impact short-term, a travesty in the long-term. Runa’s atypical reaction would incorrectly teach Kai that Tenkan society had tolerance for such activity, he’d do it to another girl, and Sayaka would have to kill him. Likewise with thrashing. If he beat up Sayaka, he’d mistake it for sparring practice. He’d learn the wrong lesson and Sayaka would have to kill him when he messed up.
She thought it was likely he’d lose his temper on some villager. She had contingency plans for that, depending on how bad it was. A real shame too, because Sayaka understood violent fury. She’d know the signs and handle it. She could not allow him to rage indiscriminately, and she might have to take some of the hits in place of Baggage or Runa. Not ideal, though it would hardly be the first time she had taken a beating. She didn’t like beatings, they were just familiar, and pain was easier to handle than people. She’d found that out the hard way, the brutally hard way.
When Sayaka decided to become an assassin, she discovered there were many branches. Sects. Some were dedicated to killing one type of opponent, like goblins (or humans, but those guys were secret). Another group reported only to the queen. Another fought for ‘justice’, Sayaka was unsure what that meant. There were lots. She was rather uneducated and failed the entrance tests for each one. Except for the last.
There was a branch of assassins that they didn’t tell you about until you had failed all the others and still kept going. That last group was called ‘The Forgotten Order’.
The Order had only one question on their entrance exam: ‘?’ Sayaka told them to get fucked, which turned out to be an acceptedable answer. They had to physically subdue her first, of course, but that was common for the Order.
Then she was tortured. Her knives, if anyone looked close enough to find out, were made of bone. Her bone. The leather on the hilt and other parts of the weapon would not be wise to examine. One advantage was that the blade was easy to enchant. Another was that it was indistinguishable from Sayaka herself if anyone was using magic detection. Handy for an assassin. There were other benefits too. She loved her daggers more than she loved herself. Ironic.
The next thing the Order did to Sayaka was enchant her. All her bones, including the ones they had to grow back, were etched with engravings granting her superior strength and durability. Getting at those bones to engrave them had been a memorable experience. She had to remember it, they said the magic wouldn’t work if she passed out.
The assassin training came last because most people died or went insane before getting that far. Why train someone who was going to break apart the second you made a dagger for him?
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The Forgotten Order was a great fit for her. They allowed you to do pretty much whatever you wanted as long as it was beneficial to the elves. Sayaka mostly killed demons, but she’d take a break on occasion and do some criminal suppression.
Back when there had been more than a few human cities, she’d spend her evenings pouring wine over herself and then wandered the streets. She’d get some guys trying to roll her a couple of times a week. It never ended well for those men. After a year of doing that, word would get out that going after women was dangerous and she’d move to a new place. No one ever suspected her.
Was Kai that kind of man? She didn’t think so. Sayaka’s opinion, one still under construction, was that Kai Drake had been made, not born. Earth had lots of people. A lot of people meant a lot of rules. That’s just how it always seemed to turn out. Kai had been expected to walk in on his wife and her lover and say, “Goodness! How distressing! You two finish up while I file a civil complaint!”
Instead, he snapped and he never came back. As best as she could tell, Earth prisons rehabilitate with stress trauma, an odd policy. If his people really wanted to ‘rehabilitate’ him, they should have blamed the wife.
If Sayaka ran things, Earth would have less crime, and fewer citizens. What was the expression for that? ‘’ Maybe she got a word or two wrong, but that was the essence of it.
She’d asked Kai about his journey from Earth to Tenka. She hadn’t known what a ‘galaxy’ was and she had thought stars were the souls of elves, shining brightly and sitting very far away on massive thrones built into the world tree. Those souls were the ones who’d stayed behind instead of going to heaven so they could watch over future generations. It was discomforting to learn the truth, they were big fires larger than a city, no more important than an ember.
The news of the continent he called North America and the haze in the air he assumed to be ‘pollution’ was interesting. Sayaka asked him if he had seen pollution above the area and then ignored him while he described descending to Tenka at hypersonic speed. She was getting tired of asking him to define words. He answered her questions with phrases like, “I do not know, my life had been spent attending ‘scrum meetings’.”
Both of them were quite uneducated in radically different fields. She felt certain he’d never killed anyone before arriving here, not even in prison. Earth was a weird place. She still wouldn’t mind a quiet death there.
Occasionally they passed by a ruin of a settlement or defensive tower. Signs that Humans and Elves were losing this prolonged war. Gloomy.
They were coming up on the next bridge. She drew a dagger. A thin ivory blade that would never break so long as she lived.
“What’s that for?”, Kai asked. The gray in his hair made him look like a wolf in the sunset. She preferred clean-shaven men though.
“It’s in case I get bored,” Sayaka deliberately omitted what she found boring. Admittedly, it was a long list.
Sure enough, the next bridge had been destroyed too. Someone really wanted Kai to take the long way around.
It took about half a minute for him to work his way into a fury. It was behavior unbecoming of a man. She didn’t need stoicism all the time, but he’d already terrorized a village today. This energy should be out of his system, but it wasn’t. Not his fault, but it was his responsibility.
Sayaka went on the roof of the air sled and stole a protein bar from Kai’s backpack. She walked over to where Kai was kicking the remains of the bridge. She unwrapped it and began eating. She was curious how long it would take him to see her.
As expected, it was awhile for him to even realize she was there.
She had eaten half of the protein bar, it looked like a rectangular turd, but it tasted vaguely like coffee, an extinct beverage in these modern times. It was much like a sweet treat she had once as a small girl. Her father had brought it from… she shook the thought off. It was better to replace old memories with new ones. She focused on Kai while she savored the bar. Overwriting her father’s love with the hero’s tantrum.
“Hey!” he finally said. “Who the fuck said you could go into my shit?”
The number of words he could replace with fuck and shit was mildly impressive.
“I stole it,” she admitted. “If you had situational awareness, you’d have noticed.”
She took another bite while maintaining eye contact. She had two giant twin tails going down her back. Sayaka felt she was conspicuous. How does someone not notice that?
“Do not touch my gear again, you got it?” Kai was distracted by something behind her. It had to be Baggage looking at them out the window of the sled’s coach. Runa made conspicuous noise, probably as an attempt to convince Sayaka that Runa was a loud, careless person. Baggage was quiet because she was scared all the time.
“Get the fuck back in there! I don't want to see-”
*thwip*
Her dagger zipped past his head. She mentally called it back and it flew past the other side of his head and into her hand. She took another bite of the bar, it was good.
“Go take a dump in the bushes, Kai.” She pointed to the scrub brush to the side of the road. The farmland was getting rare out here and a thin forest grew in the place of food.
“Why? What’s that going to accomplish?”
“You won't have to crap anymore and you’ll get in a short walk.”
It was surprising how many problems going to the bathroom and taking a walk solved.
He spat on the ground and stomped off.
He was under a lot of pressure. A whole world here that he didn’t care about needed him and so did a tiny world of two people on his home planet. She’d snap under that kind of weight herself. It was unfair, so what? Billions of people on Tenka hadn’t had a chance to be born, that was unfair too.
She threw the protein bar wrapper into the ravine. She looked down there. Yeah. Dead wyverns with the gold mind control collars. That may be something to think on if a clearer pattern emerged.
She’d drive the air sled until the sun fell from the sky, moving away from the visible reminder of the second bridge's destruction would be a good idea. Maybe she’d beat him up sparring tonight, that should take some of the chaos out of his rage.
Then these people would be receptive to the notion that they were obviously being corralled into a trap.
