“So…I’m not a natural at social interactions. Should I humiliate him or just kill him? Where do you draw the line? I assume killing him is off the table, but if there’s some kind of no-holds-barred clause on the Incha Huala agreement, I think I should know about it.”

“it’d be best if you don’t kill him.”

“Well that makes things harder. What’s his name and which Yurt is his?” Cal asked.

“Goeha, and that one.”

Calvin rolled his shoulders. Getting in pissing contests wasn’t exactly his style, or something he was comfortable with at all, but when the alternative was death, it really put things in perspective.

“Hey Goeha!” Calvin shouted, walking over to Goeha’s tent, chains tinkling against the obsidian studded ground as he walked.

The young man glanced over his shoulder, then frowned as Cal undid the buttons of his fly.

Calvin freed his cock and started pissing all over Goeha’s yurt. Pissing contests were called pissing contests for a reason, and when unfamiliar with the culture or the context, the easiest way to bait someone was to piss on their stuff. Nobody liked that.

“When you fall asleep tonight, you can breathe deep and think of me, eh?” Calvin asked the already sprinting Goeha.

Calvin was shaking the last drops off the tip when Goeha collided into him at full speed.

Calvin jumped straight up, letting the chains between his manacles wrap around the young Genosian’s throat. Goeha’s momentum flipped Calvin over and suddenly the two of them were back to back, with Goeha’s face pressed into the piss-soaked leather wall of his home.

Need a better grip.

While Goeha gasped with surprise and reached up to his throat, Cal slipped down and pirouetted as quickly as he could stomach, winding the chains into a tight double helix, until his wrists and Goeha’s neck were both experiencing an awful amount of torque.

Goeha tried to say something, but it only came out as a rasp. His grey skin turned silver as he triggered what Cal assumed was the Iron-skin tribe’s proprietary Ability. It didn’t help him breathe, though.

“So, do I have to rape him or steal his food bowl or anything culture specific? Cal asked, putting his knee on the back of the muscular young man’s head as he tried to push himself up, forcing the suffocating warrior back down into the growing yellow puddle on the ground.

Aoehe seemed like he was at a loss for words.

“Please, I want to do this right the first time.”

“Rubbing his face in your piss is pretty universal.”

“That’s what I thought,” Cal said, glancing over where Ella had exited her hut to investigate the sound of the crowd. Cal smiled and waved a tight little wave, as his wrists were bound in place.

She seemed impressed.

Oh man, I should humiliate people all the time. It’s not that hard.

“I think he’s dying.” Aoehe said, pointing to where Goeha had slumped to the ground limp, his face purple.

“So he is,” Cal said, unwinding the chains.

Goeha’s unconscious body gave a swift gasp and then resumed breathing normally, face down in the puddle.

Finish the Job. Some part of Cal’s subconscious seemed to speak to him.

Since he’s not going anywhere, might as well finish the job. Can’t let them think I’m a pushover.

Whistling, Calvin retrieved a chip of sharp obsidian from a tool bench nearby and was about to start carving his name into Goeha’s back when Aoehe caught his hand.

“I think that’s enough.” The Maje said.

“Are you sure? Because I really don’t want to get challenged by everyone with a hard-on for your daughter.”

“I’m sure. Putting scars on his back would not win you any friends here.”

Cal glanced around at the watching tribesmen with intricate scarification and tattoos. Yeah, I guess they wouldn’t like that.

“Alright then,” Cal said, tossing the obsidian flake aside and dusting off his hands before standing up. “Show me where you want me to work.”

Cal was directed to an elderly man who painstakingly tanned leathers, and left the two of them together.

“Nice to meet you,” Cal said, “My name’s Calvin.”

“Sit there,” the old man grunted, pointing at a little wooden stool before handing him a bloody piece of pelt and a stone scraping tool.

“Start scraping.”

Cal shrugged, sat down and started scraping.

In the next six hours, Cal learned more about tanning than he’d ever wanted to know. Once the work day was over, Aoehe came and brought him back to his home and secured his manacles to the tree in the center again.

“How long do I have to keep wearing these?” Cal asked, gesturing to the iron cuffs around his wrists.

“Until Guya ceremony. Sleep well.” Aoehe turned and left.

To the hells with that. Cal thought.

He’d built up a single Bent since the sludge this morning, and he wanted to try a little trick that had been tickling the back of his mind since the first night.

If he could deliberately avoid Splitting some parts of an object to make changes to it, like with the sawblade, was it not also possible to make entirely new objects as long as their entire form could fit inside the original object?

Take Cal’s manacles for example. They had a large flat area where they came together to form the lock. If Cal could Split only a portion of the flat area that conformed to the shape of a key, he could in essence, make a key.

Cal closed his eyes and pictured a key. He didn’t know exactly what it looked like, since he was unconscious when he’d been captured originally, but Ithelans weren’t exactly known for their complex lockwork. A simple one or two toothed key should do just fine.

Cal stared at the manacle, and pictured a key with two teeth on one side and one on the other, and overlaid it on the flat spot.

Right there.

Splitting

0/10 Bent remaining.

A two-sided key landed in Cal’s palm, made from the dull iron of his restraints.

I am the lord of all creation! Mauahahahah!

Cal didn’t celebrate aloud for obvious reasons, but it was very exciting to expand his knowledge of his own abilities.

It took a lot of finagling, a sprained wrist, and nearly dropping the key several times, but after a good ten minutes, Cal opened the lock on his left hand, followed shortly by his right hand. It was a one-tooth lock, the absolute easiest to pick.

Once the manacles were off his arms, Cal did the ones on his legs, and then began creeping toward the door.

He heard the noise and laughter of the Genosians having their end-of day gathering, where they sat around a fire and chatted.

Their night vision probably wasn’t too good.

Cal peeked his out the door of the yurt and didn’t see or feel anyone looking his way, so he darted out and into the cold mountain air. No gazes landed on him as he slunk through the shadows.

Suppressing a shiver, Cal made his way to the back of the yurts, that narrow space between the leather and the rock, working his way around to the Freezer.

He wasn’t trying to escape. He was looking for a way to resist the Guya. Maybe if he could find a barrel of the stuff, whatever it was, he could build up a tolerance, or something. If worse came to worst, maybe he could make some kind of tube and have the stuff pass through his jaw rather than his stomach.

Cal crept into the narrow cave and was amazed by the fact that he could still see.

Interspersed with the obsidian were little blinking blue lights lining one side of the ceiling, casting the freezing cold cavern in an icy color.

The cold in the freezer was intense, and Cal hugged his arms around his chest as he continued through the tunnel. He would have to make this a quick trip.

Without warning, the cavern opened up, revealing a wide, chamber coated in thick frost. On the left, Cal spotted the blinking blue lights, and a strange silver steel outcropping jutting from the ceiling. There was a gash in the steel and a long black tube hung out of it, dribbling a black-green fluid into a barrel placed beneath it.

Curiously, Cal crept forward and sniffed it, his nose wrinkling in distaste. Noeula, or a main ingredient of it. Cal wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about drinking an unidentified liquid that poured down from a mysterious object embedded in the obsidian ceiling, but he didn’t exactly have a choice, and he hadn’t gotten sick yet.

Beside the barrel were dozens of strange centipede-like creatures on a rack, with their pincers torn off and shells stripped away.

The other side of the room was dim, as all the blinking lights seemed to be on this side. But Cal could make out supplies, untanned pelts on pilfered barrels and shelves obviously made by non-Genosian carpenters.

Cal snuck through the cold blue air, trying not to shiver as he investigated the darker part of the freezer.

It was there that Cal found the answer to resisting the Guya.

Kahm the carpenter was Bent forward, frozen into an awkward position where he’d been unceremoniously dumped in the corner of the room. He sported the same neck wound he’d had last Cal had seen him.

The man had helped him build his hut in Deinos.

Kort and Persei were laid out against the far wall, their expressions at the moment of their death frozen in place by the chilled air of the freezer. Kort was covered head to toe in wounds, as if he’d taken many blows before finally bleeding out. His face was fixed in anger.

Persei was naked, her left arm and a large portion of her ribcage was missing, chiseled away for Genosian cook-pots. Her expression as she was slowly carved away was one of absolute terror.

Seeing his friends like that created an iron core of hatred inside him. It didn’t burn, or chill. It was simply the solid, weighty determination to live long enough to escape and come back to rain down hell upon them.

A more enlightened man might have thought of some way to end the cycle of violence, or teach them to grow their own sheep. Something. They would eat him.

“..I’m saying I agree with the Maje, the outcome is all that matters. He took down Goeha handily enough.” A voice echoed form down the hall, causing Cal to dart behind a shelf in a panic, wincing as he pressed up against the frozen stone.

“All he did was jump around like a monkey. How is a skinny thing like that supposed to wrestle a Couna into submission or fire a warbow?” Another voice said as they emerged from the tunnel.

“You’re just saying that because Goeha is your son,” The first woman accused.

Two older women chatted with each other about the state of Ella’s Incha Huala as they carved off more of Persei’s corpse to take to the night’s gathering. They didn’t spot him hunkering behind a shelf.

Cal closed his eyes so he didn’t have to watch, but the tap, tap, tap, of the sharp obsidian chisel felt like it was forcing its way through his heart. Cal waited until they were done and emerged from behind the shelve, shivering uncontrollably now.

He forced himself not to look back at Persei as he followed the two women out of the cave.

It wouldn’t make a difference.

Cal was able to slip back into his temporary housing and relatch his manacles, cold iron settling in the core of his being.

It took a long time to fall asleep that night, so when Aoehe came to wake him up in the morning, he was bleary and out of sorts.

Genosian language has reached Level 2! 10% correction.

“What?” he asked, the Maje’s sentence not quite registering in his mind with the voice of the System talking at him at the same time in Gadveran.

“You have been challenged to a duel!” Aoehe said, looming over him and grinning with his usual shark-toothed enthusiasm.

"Five more minutes," Cal said, rolling over.