Chapter 26

  The undergrowth shook with heavy snorts and the tearing of roots. Raime approached, breath steady, eyes fixed on the beast pushing through the trees. It was a hulking boar-like creature, but instead of coarse hair it was covered in chitin plates, a norm he found in most of these rift creatures, tusks curved like scythes and dark with dried sap. He remembered its kind—how one had charged him before. Back then, it had been doable. Now, it was just plain easy.

  When it lifted its head, Raime moved. His will tugged the lever, metal cutting the air in a clean arc. The weapon struck the eye clean, burying deep into the thick head. Not even a cry escaped the beast before it staggered, legs folding beneath its bulk.

  Raime stood over the fallen beast, chest rising with calm breaths. Just days ago, this thing would have had a shot at killing me. The thought clung to him as he wrenched the lever free, warm blood steaming in the Rift’s air. Now… it’s almost too easy.

  He tested the weight of the carcass, grunted, and dragged it back toward the ruins. The body left a deep furrow in the soil, and though it was heavy, the task no longer seemed impossible.

  On the way, his eye caught the flicker of red at the edge of the forest—herbs he knew, their names whispered into him by Ithural’s knowledge. He plucked a handful, their sharp scent already promising a sharper taste than bare flesh.

  Back at the temple’s ruins, Raime set the carcass down, lighting the wood he had stacked before. Sparks caught, flames spread, and soon the smell of roasting meat mingled with the clean bite of herbs crushed into the cuts. He tore into the first pieces with hunger that surprised even him, then he practiced, mind moving little stones through the patterns he had learned. The cycle repeated—eat, train, repeat—until a quarter of the beast had vanished into him.

  By the end, he sat back, hand pressed to his stomach, full but unsatisfied, the plainness of the food lingering despite the herbs. Still, his body needed the nutrients, he lost too much weight in too little time, mainly after being envenomed and the mess of an experience that followed, but even just the creation of the new threads took a lot out of him. The brain already consumes twenty percent of the total energy the body produces just to function, the extra use of his newfound psychic capabilities exacerbated that consumption even more.

  Now at least I can eat without feeling too guilty about getting fatter, if only I had some chocolate at hand though… I’m going to raid a supermarket as soon as I go back. He surprised himself at the thoughts of “when” instead of “if”.

  His gaze drifted to the shadows of the forest. His good mood didn’t fade but the System’s task still pressed on him. Three beasts to kill. His choice was simple.

  “The centipedes first,” he murmured to the fire. “The easiest.”

  He rose, the Tetra Unum sliding into motion beside him while Thunk rested on his shoulder, and stepped into the forest where their territory waited. The trees swallowed him once more, the shadows thick and restless, branches whispering in a language Ithural alone seemed to know. He moved in the direction of his last ambush, where white eyes and snapping mandibles had once meant terror. Now they meant opportunity.

  It took less than five minutes before movement in the canopy betrayed them. Two of the centipedes slithered from the trunks above, metallic chitin scraping bark, purple pupils locking on him. Raime didn’t hesitate. With a flick of his mind, Thunk spun forward, the weapon slamming on the first creature’s armored head before it even touched the ground. It spasmed once, then stilled.

  The System whispered the partial completion of the objective. Raime’s lip curled. Again, so easy. I clearly outgrew this place, especially as soon as I’ll digest all the thought knots and create more threads. Now you, my dear centisnake.

  He didn’t know the name of the beasts, maybe they were a new kind that developed after the System arrived on Ithural, because there was no mention of them in the lessons he learned. Still the second one remained, hissing, its segmented body coiling in rage. Raime’s thoughts didn’t turn to killing. The System’s silence pressed against him, not quite words but suggestion. He felt it—the push toward something more. Control, not slaughter.

  “Let’s see what can I do with you.” he muttered, and thrust Thunk down. The lever pinned the beast’s body into the soil, chitin cracking, ichor bubbling. It thrashed violently, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Raime tried to keep awareness of his surroundings, and at the same time reached inward, drawing on his new Thread, extending it outward like a finger probing a locked door. The centipede bucked harder, white eyes blazing with alien defiance. The attempt felt… wrong, not the natural merging he’d experienced when two entities bonded voluntarily. The fragments of their culture had been clear: psychic dominance without consent was a line never crossed, a taboo carved into their very practices. But the System hadn’t said don’t. And while ethically wrong, he wasn’t going to avoid practicing an ability with such high potential, especially against these bloodthirsty creatures. Against sapients though, that was a repulsive thought, he wouldn’t stoop so low.

  He pressed harder. His will became weight, a foreign tide slamming into the beast’s mind. The creature screeched, body convulsing under the pressure. Its thoughts—jagged, instinctual, venomous—lashed against him, resisting every intrusion.

  You won’t yield willingly… then I’ll make you.

  Trial and error. Forcing threads where they didn’t belong. The process felt crude, dangerous, like breaking open a lock by smashing the doorframe instead of finding the key.

  Still, Raime pushed. Raime hissed through his teeth. Sweat dampened his temple. He tried again, forcing harder this time, shoving his will against the storm. Yield.

  The only answer was a keening screech that rattled through his skull. The centipede thrashed, nearly wrenching itself free despite the weight of Thunk and his grip. The harder he pushed, the wilder it fought, until the clash of their minds was nothing but a stalemate of fury and pain.

  Finally, Raime broke the connection, breath ragged. The creature sagged for an instant, then renewed its struggle with undiminished hate.

  He released his grip and stepped back, weapon ready. “Damn stubborn thing…”

  The thought-knots had given him plenty—rituals, insights, the foundations of control over himself—but not this. Not the art of bending another’s will. That path had been forbidden, taboo, struck from their records.

  No matter, I’ll find the trick.

  He rose, gave a curt nod, and ended the creature with a clean strike. Thunk moved away from its twitching body, and the forest swallowed the sound.

  Deeper he went, leaving carcasses in his wake. Again and again he tried. Each time he pinned one down, extended his will, and met only chaos and refusal. The exertion left his skull aching, the Threads flickering thin as if stretched too far. When his mind faltered, he turned to the Tetra Unum, practicing its shifts, drilling the forms of blade, shield, and spear, his movements cutting through silence like patterns traced in water. In those downtimes he steadied his breath, regathered strength, then returned to the hunt.

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  Six times the cycle played out. Six failures. Yet each failure taught him more than the last. He learned the texture of resistance, the subtle ways alien thoughts slid away from his grasp, the pressure points where a will could be levered. It was ugly work, without the clarity of the thought-knots or the dignity of consent, but necessity drove him. If they can resist, then they can break. Everything breaks.

  On the seventh attempt, when another centipede writhed under Thunk’s crushing weight, something shifted. Raime pressed in—not with blunt force, but with a wedge of intent. He didn’t try to blanket the beast’s mind. He speared it. The Thread stabbed through, cutting between coils of instinct, and in that breach he planted himself.

  An anchor.

  The centipede-beast writhed in place, its plated body quivering under the weight of Thunk pinning it to the earth. Raime’s breath rasped, not from the strain of battle, but from the invisible pressure clawing against his mind. His Psionic Thread dug deeper, prying into fissures of thought that were not his own. Each push was like pressing a hand against wet clay, reshaping what resisted being reshaped.

  And then when he reached what he thought was the core of the beast consciousness—something gave way.

  The creature’s mind folded beneath his will with a jolt so sharp it left his stomach hollow. One moment, rage and instinct surged from the beast like coiled fire; the next, silence. Its many eyes turned glassy, all wild hunger drowned in still obedience. An anchor lodged, tethering it to him.

  Raime staggered back, yanking the lever free. The centipede twitched once, then stilled, waiting. Waiting for him. For his command.

  He could feel it now—its breathing, its hunger, the muted pulse of fear that had nowhere left to go.

  A wave of nausea rose in him.

  Killing had been different. Straightforward, brutal, but honest. The creatures attacked, and he fought. He survived and they didn’t. It was simple and old as the world. But this?

  This was theft.

  The beast no longer lived for itself. Its choices, its instincts, even the flicker of its thoughts—all of it sat in his grasp, like strings dangling from his hand. He hadn’t merely won. He had hollowed it out.

  The glassed-over eyes tracked him with unnatural stillness, waiting for command.

  Raime’s jaw tightened. What am I doing?

  He’d told himself these things were monsters, that their snapping maws and venomous fangs justified whatever methods he used. But looking at it now, broken and bound, the argument curdled. The creature wanted release, he could sense it—a desperate thread of self curling inward, praying for an end. And he was the one denying it, forcing it to linger in this purgatory.

  The realization pressed heavier than the forest’s air.

  He swallowed hard, bile burning the back of his throat. Killing was cruel, yes, but it was final. This… this was cruelty without end. Even death, if it came, would not belong to the beast anymore. It would be his choice, his hand deciding when that line was crossed.

  Raime let out a shuddering breath and pressed the thought-anchor deeper, severing the last spark of resistance. The beast collapsed, its body curling like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

  He didn’t end the beast, after a minute the alien centipede stirred and ran away as fast as he could, injured both in body and mind after the experience. He let it. For a long while, he just stood there, staring at the forest shadows. His hands trembled faintly, from the sick weight of the truth of what he did. If this was what control meant, he would sooner face a hundred snapping maws than hollow out another mind.

  He wiped his weapon clean, but the stain clung deeper.

  This is worse than slavery… Now I understand why it was considered taboo, and why Aelorin revolved the entire culture of the planet towards empathy and understanding. Fuck…

  The System hadn’t warned him. It had nudged, pushed, guided—bond or kill. The way it presented it made bonding seem like just another weapon, another option on the table. No reminders of taboo, no restrictions, no morality. Just… function. Efficiency.

  That was what chilled him most. How simple it had been.

  It hadn’t required years of meditation. It hadn’t demanded esoteric training or the wisdom of monks. Just persistence and willpower. Less than an hour, and he had done it.

  His stomach twisted. What could someone like Aelorin have done with this? Or one of those tyrants the monks wrote about, the ones who bound thousands into hive minds? If I can figure this out on accident…

  He didn’t finish the thought.

  Raime forced himself to move. He had to. Dwelling would break him, and he couldn’t afford that—not here, not now. He started walking, deeper into the centipede territory, though more slowly now, each step weighted with hesitation. He wasn’t hunting anymore. Not really. He was searching for something he couldn’t name—absolution, maybe, or at least proof that he hadn’t damned himself already.

  The forest stretched endless, thick shadows twisting between gnarled trunks. At some point, he sat on a mossy rock and tried to breathe, cycling through the meditations the thought-knots had shown him. Inhale, draw in. Exhale, release. Open the flow. Let the thread rest.

  The rhythm steadied his racing thoughts. A thin calm returned—not forgiveness, not clarity, but enough to quiet the worst of the nausea. His psychic energy, once shredded by the failed attempts, began to replenish faster under the guided patterns. A small mercy.

  Still, his mind refused to stay still.

  What had he really proven today? That he could dominate a beast’s will? That the System’s suggestions could push him into places Ithural itself had forbidden? That power, once touched, was far too easy to abuse?

  The centipede’s glassy eyes lingered in his thoughts. That was what broke him most. He could still feel that tether, that moment of absolute dominion. For an instant, he had been a god to it. And he had hated it.

  Raime pressed his palms to his eyes. No more.

  He whispered the words aloud, as if speaking them could etch them into something permanent. “No more. Never again, unless there’s no other choice.”

  It felt weak, a promise made to empty air, but it was all he had. He needed to believe it. Needed to believe that he wouldn’t slide further down this slope, that he wasn’t already halfway to becoming one of the tyrants he had read about in Ithural’s histories.

  When he rose again, the forest hadn’t changed. The shadows still hung heavy, but something inside him had shifted. A line had been drawn. He didn’t know if he could keep it, not with the System whispering and survival pressing on him from every side—but he would try.

  He made his way back toward the temple. After a couple of minutes, the forest shifted. First a heavy crack of splintering wood, far away but getting closer fast, then the shudder of branches and undergrowth thrashing aside. He heard little explosions, not different from the sound of the wood burning in his camp, white light flared in time with the sounds filtering from the trees. The sound didn’t belong to anything he had fought so far. His grip tightened around Thunk, while the Tetra Unum hovered close, a quiet shadow at his side.

  The air grew wrong—charged, pressing down like a storm about to break.

  Behind him, the rustle became a roar of movement. Raime spun, heart lurching, just in time to see the creature he had forced open, the one whose eyes still glimmered with that glassy, broken sheen, slither from the underbrush. Its body coiled weakly, as if drawn here against its will.

  But it wasn’t alone.

  Two more followed, bursting into view with the weight of inevitability. For a heartbeat, Raime thought they were of a different breed compared to the others—until his mind registered the scale. These were something else entirely. Their bodies were thick as a car, armored plates gleaming with a hard, metallic sheen. They were long—fifteen meters at least, maybe more—and the forest bent beneath their passage. In that moment he understood something, until now he only met juveniles. These were the normal-sized centipede in their adult form.

  Worse than their size was the way they moved. Not bound to earth, not crawling or slithering like their offspring—these leviathans rode the air. Their segmented bodies rippled in long undulations that lifted them above the underbrush. Psychic force, or maybe something else was keeping them aloft.

  And they were enraged.

  Raime didn’t need his Insight to feel it; their fury was a tangible thing, thick and suffocating. His pulse stuttered. He had thought himself strong, thought himself untouchable after the easy slaughter he had performed lately. But this meant something difficult to accept, it meant that for all his growth he was just above a child in strength here. These instead, were parents, and he had just hurt their child.

  The broken centipede twisted on the ground, torn between obedience to his will and the call of its blood. The sight sickened him. The thought of using it as a shield, as a pawn, made bile rise in his throat.

  The two titans spread out, their armored backs brushing the treetops, their purple-pupiled eyes locking onto him with a clarity that froze him where he stood. For the first time since awakening his psionic thread, Raime understood what it meant to stand in the path of something truly monstrous.

  And they were coming for him.