Dorian had visited many a leader’s home. They went by various titles—Chief, Clan Head, Patriarch, King, Emperor, but their rooms were all the same: monuments to excess, lathered with enough golds, silvers, and gemstones to inspire jealousy in dragons.

But Chief Rust’s room almost could’ve belonged to any of his tribesmen.

Two humble jugs lay in a corner, a big leather chest, a cot; the same stuff Dorian and Kaya had. The floor was raked sands, nothing else. No paintings adorned the walls, no prized weapons-racks stood by the entrance, no exotic pet lounged on no shining rug. The room was bizarrely ordinary, if bizarrely clean, and neat. Everything was set at straight angles to everything else. Simple and functional.

Only three things set the room apart.

The first was the bookcases. All manner of tomes, leatherbound, lined the walls; written in a plethora of languages, ordered by height and series in cascades. There was not a speck of dust or sand on any of the shelves. Dorian could count on one hand the number of people in Rust Tribe who owned enough books to warrant even one such shelf.

The second was the desk. It was massive and made entirely of bones. Four giant thigh-bones were its legs, and the massive skull of some feline beast, caved in over the top, was the desk’s surface. Two gaping eye-sockets, chipped into perfect empty circles, stared at Dorian from the desk’s front.

The third was the man behind the desk.

Here was a huge body of precise geometries. A golem of a man. A square torso, a square head, bulging spheres of muscle on his arms, cords of it running down his legs and chest. His face was a sheer cliff, his eyes the dark-blue of a moon seen through nighttime mist. There were no soft edges to him, every part exact, as though all his fat had been pared away by a scalpel. A perk of his Vigor physique?

For the first time since Dorian’s reincarnation, he was on guard. Adrenaline prickled at him. This was the first man he’d met in this life who he’d be hard-pressed to beat. That also made Rust a man he needed to treat with special care.

A fierce, taut aura emanated from the Chief, like a cord pulled tight, almost to breaking. Once inside the room the pressure was even stronger. Palpable. It seemed to infect Tocho—he stood rigid and still.

Rust’s eyes had been fixed on a book on his desk. The moment Dorian and Tocho entered, they flickered up. Only the eyes; nothing else on him moved. “Yes?” He said. The word was deep, resonant, and clipped. It was the sort of voice that effortlessly drew the ear. He seemed to not even register Dorian’s presence; he looked at Tocho like Tocho was the only thing in the world.

“Venerable Chief!” said Tocho. He bowed to his waist. “I’ve brought you new talent.” He cleared his throat. “This is Io, a lad in basic training. This morning I discovered he’s got Heaven-grade Martial Talent.”

Rust’s eyes snapped onto Dorian instantly. His gaze seemed to hold a physical weight, pressing down on the head, the shoulders. There was a subtext to the gaze, a sharpness Dorian couldn’t quite place…

“I recommend him for immediate promotion to Chosen—that is, to become a hunter-in-training,” finished Tocho. Dorian made his brows jump up at the words, like he hadn’t expected them. Then Rust’s eyes left Dorian, screwing back onto Tocho, and a pressure lifted. That’s a Vigor physique ability, for sure. Nifty.

Silence. Rust’s gaze seemed to bore into Tocho, adding a layer of invisible weight. Tocho was a scarred veteran, hardly the type to cave easily, but now he buckled a little and hunched in. Still Rust said nothing.

Then his eyes narrowed. That little gesture seemed to speak the world; Tocho took a quick step back. “Or… perhaps I’m hasty,” he said, his hands mauling one another in fidgets. “Certainly it’s subject to your approval, Chief. I only mean to groom our best talent. For the good of the Tribe.”

Rust grunted. The sound broke his gods-awful silence, and Tocho breathed out.

"Heaven-grade," said Rust, eyes flashing. "You're certain of it?"

Tocho jerked a nod. Rust's eyes swiveled back to Io.

“Io,” he said, rolling it on his tongue, savoring the syllable. He looked up at the ceiling, frowning, like he was searching through a library in his mind and picking out a file.“Io… son of the deceased Yvelta, defector from the Ugoc clan, and the deceased Nakai, blacksmith of Rust Tribe. Brother to Chosen Kaya.”

Dorian blinked. He searched Io’s memories, but couldn’t recall meeting the Chief once—he’d only seen glimpses of the man from afar. From what he knew, Kaya hadn’t met him either.

Does he have the bios and geneology of his two-hundred-odd tribesmen all memorized?

When Rust’s eyes drew back to Io, they took on a strange quality. Arresting.

"I know of your sister, and your father, and your mother," he said, "But I know nothing of you. You are merely a name, a footnote in other peoples' stories."

His book snapped shut. He leaned forward with deliberation. Then it felt Dorian was caught in a full-force winter gale, the sort that seeps down to your bones. There was a wonky dissonance, too; outwardly there was no force, nothing physical, but inwardly he felt like he was trapped in a blizzard. Dorian shivered involuntarily and gritted his teeth. Hells, is this a useful physique! An awful weird one to have, too. Cold, in a desert?

Then—Ah. Dorian finally placed what that sharpness in Rust’s gaze was. Subtle, but unmistakable.

Rust looked at Dorian with the opposite of patriarchal warmth. He looked at Dorian the way an alpha wolf sizes up an upstart, as though he was deciding whether to off Dorian before he became a threat to Rust's own rule.

Only now did Dorian fully appreciate the danger he was in.

He stilled, then mentally facepalmed. In hindsight, he'd been naive to expect he’d be rewarded. If he was the only Heaven-grade talent in the tribe outside the Chief's lineage...that also made him dangerous. In the future, he might make a fiendish challenger. He could practically hear the morbid calculus running through the Chief’s thoughts—Let him grow into a possible threat? Or off him where he stands?

There was a sheer intensity in the Chief's gaze now. Dorian had been around far too many killers to know that the man would have zero qualms wiping him off the face of Ylterra.

Still, a part of him felt only chagrin. What kind of Chief treats his own men like this? Even slapping around Tocho, a model subordinate. He winced.

The Endspider head. That was an obvious first clue...

"Who are you, Io?" asked Rust slowly. Hidden in the question was another question: Are you an asset, or a threat?

The nice thing about playing the frozen-up, foolish boy was that it gave Dorian a good five-second window to consider his options.

At this stage, he was far from a match for the Chief if things turned sour. Hell, he wouldn't give himself even-odds with Tocho in his current state. That left only softer options—and with the way Rust was staring, he’d need to be soft indeed…he ransacked Io’s memories with haste, searching for things to pull from.

His next words were chosen very carefully.

“Er. I’m… not sure what you mean, Chief, sir,” he gulped. Pretend all the subtext—the gaze, the pressure, the question, has flown over my head. “That is, um, I’m just a boy, sir.” No threat. No designs.

There was a pause. Rust held it over Dorian’s head like an executioner’s blade, stretched on and on, wordless, and then Dorian knew that Rust’s pressure was only his third-best weapon, his eyes his second. Rust had turned weaponizing silence into an art form. It was impenetrable, and that made it all the more deadly. Did it mean displeasure, or was he waiting for Dorian to go on?

Now Dorian pretended to find his voice. He tamped down on the warbles. “I’m Io, of the Rust Tribe, Kaya’s brother.” My allegiances, my ties. Tribe first. He bowed deep, past the waist, even deeper than Tocho’s bow had been.

“It’s a great honor to meet you.” His eyes watered a little. Just a little. No tears; tears can be crocodile’s, but a little watering never hurt anyone. Then he looked to Tocho, eyes wide, before returning to Rust’s gaze.

“If Chief would have me as a Chosen, I would be honored!” Repeat honor. Give it a veneer of spontaneity.

Rust’s face could’ve been a mountain’s for how much it moved. Dorian had lived a great length of time. He’d met a great deal of people. He seldom met people he couldn’t read. He loathed those people the most.

Thankfully, the Chief chose not to milk this silence. “The minimum level for Chosen is Origin Level Three.” A coolness brushed over Dorian like a giant hand. “You are only of the first Level. You have just Awakened. Why are you worthy of an exception?”

Shit.

Deeper. He grasped for something at Io’s core, something real. He clenched one hand into a fist. There was a sharp jab in his intestines—leave it to now for that blasted poison to act up!—and, through sheer will, suppressed a coughing bout. No. Right now total control was imperative, but control was slipping from his grasp by the second. He needed something. Fast.

Then a memory flashed to mind, deeply held in Io’s mind. Instantly, he ran with it.

“Well…I always wished to be a hunter, sir,” he said. His voice hitched, choked a little, and he threw himself into that emotion. That scene.

For an instant he was Io again.

I’m six years old. It’s dusk. There’s been a beast attack but all I hear are sickening bangs, cracks of qi-techniques, crunches of bones breaking, and shrieks from outside my tent; it’s hell to a child. Especially one as sensitive as me. I’m screaming, too, if only to drown out the noise. Kaya has dragged me inside; she swaddles me in blankets ’til I stop screaming, hugs me ‘till I stop trembling. She speaks to me so calmly, so soothingly that she convinces me everything will be okay. She’s so convincing it takes minutes for me to notice she’s trembling too.

We wait there in the dark, and in the quiet following the dark, and at last the tent flaps crack open. It’s father. He has mother's body.

Her eyes, stunning sky-blues, are still wide. Unfocused. Her lips are torn strings of flesh. Her chest is a grisly lattice of bone and blood, caved in. Her heart is lost under a sheet of hardened blood. The sandwolves caught her as she was out gathering, he says. His voice is broken.

He says she went down fighting. Kaya and I nod numbly. We both know it’s a lie. Mother was sunshine in a woman, not a fighter. She hadn’t even had time to remove her gatherer’s gloves.

Oddly, that’s what I remember most of the scene—her hands, thin, nimble, dextrous. She lived through her hands; they were always in motion, patting heads, twirling in frenzies as she joked around dinner fires… At first I don’t believe she’s dead. I can’t bring myself to believe it, even when I’m confronted with her body. I’m convinced it’s all a joke. Only when I remove the gloves—when I see her fingers grasping, smashed, limp, do I know it’s true.

Father says the hunters did their best. He did his best. It was not enough. He tries to hold himself back from tears; he tries to be strong for us. He does not manage it. Not sixth months after, he passes too.

A year later, Kaya breaks through to Origin Level 1. She’s the first girl in the tribe to sign up for hunter training.

I wish, more than anything, to follow in her footsteps.

But I never break through to Origin. I cannot. And it kills me.

Dorian drew it all in. Soaked in it. Reveled in it. And spoke, channeling the truth.

“My mother was killed in a beast horde, sir,” he said. Now his voice was firm, with just a slight waver of emotion. He spoke with a conviction that truth deserved. “There weren’t enough hunters to protect us.”

He paused. Give him a taste of his own elixir.

“Since then, I always wished to be a hunter, just like my sister. So nobody in Rust Tribe would have to lose anyone like that again.”

Both of his fists clenched white-knuckle tight. He met Rust’s harsh gaze evenly.

“If you give me this chance, sir, I’ll work harder than anyone. I swear it!”

The way Rust’s face was, Dorian got the feeling gravity could reverse and he’d still keep his deadpan expression.

The words are simple. Pure. He doesn’t need to believe the words. He just needs to believe the feeling behind the words, the sincerity. It says: I am no threat. I desire most of all to serve, not to seek power.

The pressure was so thick Dorian was convinced he could breathe it in. To his side Tocho was sweating through his shirt. The harsh mid-day sun hadn’t squeezed so much as a droplet out of him, but now he’d become a fountain. Live a million years, and Dorian would never quench that spike of instinctive unease in these moments, that natural jump of heart rate in an untempered body. What he could control was his reaction to them.

Which was to deny fear any quarter in his mind. To snuff it out the instant it was birthed. If he was to die, it would never be on his knees. Never cowering. Especially not to a self-important lower-realm psychopath.

Respect you? In your dreams, junior. You are but a speck to my eternity.

The only psychopath he respected was himself.

At last, Rust uttered two words.

“Very well,” He nodded. "Tomorrow, Tuketu shall initiate you as a new Chosen of Rust Tribe. You may join the hunters-in-training—for now.”

Dorian gasped. Intentionally.

Rust turned to Tocho, who looked ready to collapse. “Tocho, you shall supervise this experiment. You determine if he is up to par. I hold you responsible."

Then the pressure vanished abruptly. It was like someone let the air back into the room.

Rust lifted an arm and flicked his wrist in dismissal. “Leave me.”

Tocho bowed.

“Certainly, Chief, certainly!” He spluttered. He latched onto Dorian’s arm and backpedalled, dragging him out of the tent, back into daylight.

Somehow, that was that.

There was a five-second-pause where he and Tocho both stood there, silent, like they were creatures adjusting to gravity on a different plane.

Now that he was out, the sunlight felt like a caress. Dorian breathed in deep. He allowed himself a smile.

The first part of the plan—establish Martial talent—is fully in motion.

Onto the second part—establish Alchemical talent.

He looked to the setting sun. The day was not yet over. He still had a little show to perform…

Time Elapsed: 14 hours