PoV Daniel
"I think we shouldn't interfere with his life." Nassus said.
"It's not nice to butt in someone's life without their permission." He continued.
"I think they deserve their closure. It will give peace to both of them." I answered.
"Are you sure he's not going to try and kill her? Forget Florine; if Kane really gets his memories back, the one truly in danger will be Hyung! We still need his ability as of now."
"Now that you say it... it sounds possible, knowing him... Can't you stop him if he tries to kill her? " I asked.
"That's not the problem; I can't leave your side, so stopping him is out of the question. Florine… She has a reality morph as her ability, so she shouldn't have much problem, but Kane is a lot craftier than he may appear at first glance. Do you remember what he did when he failed to kill both of them?"
"Just like you... I guess that's expected from the top three most powerful. Hyung really messed up with the wrong person." I said I was surprised.
"His greed might get him killed." He added.
"What about Kane?" I asked while opening one of the portals I placed around the house. The portal transported us to one of the many flying ships flying above the capital.
"He still needs time to calm down; in his current state, he's too emotional to make a sound decision." Said Nassus.
He accompanied me into the portal. Our job was to keep an eye on our units and make sure they were behaving well.
"So what! Are we going to pretend that everything is fine? He doesn't deserve this! We're just keeping him on a leash! This is no way to treat our dear friend!" I protested.
"What do you want me to do then? He went overboard! We should be glad he's even allowed to live after all the lives he claimed in his stupid tantrum! And let's not forget those two idiots who almost jeopardized our mission trying to avenge him!"
"But-"
"I know you have the best intentions, but you can't force him to do what you think is right." He interrupted me while also checking out something in his backpack.
"So where are we supposed to go now?" I asked him.
"I don't know; pick a random city; that'll probably do. One at a time, and we'll be done with this before lunch time."
"Did his majesty prepare a plan to evacuate all these civilians?" I asked him.
"Nope, everything is in the hands of Hyungtae." Responded Nassus.
"They're doomed. Should we do some-"
"And where are we supposed to send them? The eleventh will slaughter them all, the seventh, sixth, second, and third will enslave them, while the rest might not even let them in. It's an evacuation on such a large scale that it might as well be considered impossible." he said, cutting me off.
"The genetically gifted ones will survive, but the rest will die. This was the kind of place the tenth originally was, Daniel." he continued opening the exit door.
"The first remains our priority." He later added.
'I know, I'm not stupid, but why aren't you hesitating? We're dooming not only this planet but everything near it as well; the shockwave should be enough to kill at least half of the population of the tenth realm! Can you really bear that weight on your conscience?'
"I'm sorry. I know you have good intentions, but this situation is simply too difficult for us to handle." He apologized by bowing to me.
"Don't apologize, I'm the one that's being unreasonable with my naivety." I responded, stopping him from bowing even further.
We then arrived on the planet. The cities were engulfed in flames. The local warriors were using aura and didn't seem to really care about their city when they were fighting.
"Nassus, I think this is your area of expertise." I said this while pointing at the many warriors on the ground fighting for their lives.
"Nassus has started his assault on planet BX-102; we pinged our location on the maps. I suggest you retreat as fast as possible if you don't want to get caught in the crossfire." I said it on the radio.
I saw most other soldiers struggling to even deal with one warrior, mainly due to the absurd limitations of the golden set. As soon as they heard my message, they started to fly away from the battlefield.
"Try to go easy there; we're not here to-"
"If they don't survive this, then they will not survive for much longer anyway." He responded before leaping to the ground.
He probably focused most of his aura on his arms since they caught fire. The skin in his arms also changed color to a gray-ish tone, and then he punched the ground with all his might, leveling half of the city. From the crater, a large wave of flames flooded the remains of the city, slowly melting it in its wake. Whatever creature tried to escape by flying away was killed off by him personally, using his aura to create skies and impaling them all. Once the capital was completely erased from existence, Nassus gathered all the fire aura back and created a massive pillar of flames where he was standing.
'I even told him to go easy on them; the shock wave probably killed them all already.'
I was so focused on watching Nassus that I didn't realize someone was after me. He was one of those warriors. He had a flaccid, long nose; his skin was yellow; his eyes resembled those of a chameleon; and he had three arms and four legs. He was the kind of centaur you would only see in nightmares.
He was charging me while shooting with a weird staff. The pillar of flames then transformed into a massive blade and cut him off cleanly.
"Sorry!" I shouted at Nassus.
"Keep your eyes open!" He shouted back.
"These bastards Cut them off- destroy them- We got one injured here- We found the civilians, what do we do with them?" The radio was catching several messages at once.
"Guys, I think you forgot to switch channels." I responded.
"What are we supposed to do with the women and children we just captured?" Asked one of the soldiers.
"Destroy their aura channels and destroy every evidence of aura in their mind. Also seal their mana and magic veins. Make sure to burn every book that teaches aura and other magical abilities." shouted Nassus on the radio.
'I didn't expect the gods to put up so much resistance, they even warped some of their warriors here... I guess this confirms it: they fear the emperor more than they fear their own administrator.'
"Teams 19, 43, 75, 40, and 55 request permission to take off the armor."
'Those are two-digit teams; what kind of monsters have they unleashed on this planet?'
"Permission granted." Answered Nassus.
'To think our soldiers would struggle this much against the servants of some unknown god that abandoned the path of combat and war... no, our soldiers are simply not used to an atmosphere with so little mana.'
"Daniel, let's go to the next city." Shouted the pilot.
"Sure!" I said while creating the next portal.
When we arrived at the next location, I was surprised. In front of us was a master of aura. He had trained so hard that his body had now become made of flames. As soon as he noticed Nassus, he started trembling.
The city was completely devastated, and our soldiers were flying around him, trying to use their range to kill him.
'He's seriously trying to fight against us alone? He's not even using his full strength, but still... To think he has already reached that stage of power means that not everyone here has forgotten about how to use aura. It's unfortunate that he has to fight in such disadvantageous conditions.'
For an aura master who can turn his body into aura, fighting in an environment that lacks mana is probably the most unpleasant thing he could possibly do.
"How humiliating for you this must be, to be forced to send the strongest one to deal with me." He said it in our language.
"You really think you are something, showing off your power against our recruits." Nassus was clearly pissed.
"Certainly I'm-" He couldn't finish his phrase because Nassus was already in front of him, and with one touch, he simply made him explode.
"It's weak, spineless people like you that doomed your world." he said while spitting on his ashes.
"Daniel next!"
As I started to prepare the next portal, Nassus blitzed in front of me and killed a woman who was armed with a weird weapon by crushing her skull. The weapon looked like a rifle, but it had so many weird tubes popping out of it. It also looked like it was made out of flesh.
He buried her head in the ground and then created a barrier around me.
"This is odd." He thought out loud.
We then used the portal to head to the location where team 43 was.
It was a coastal city that was being flooded by our soldiers. I noticed a couple of them were trying to heal one of them that was badly injured, so I headed towards him. I then put him in the cocoon.
There were some of our warriors still fighting in the city, but Nassus ignored them, simply took control over the nearby water, and created many floating streams of water that devastated the city, dragging everything it caught to the bottom of the ocean.
Thankfully, our soldiers managed to emerge safely thanks to the armor's anti-magical properties.
"So have you figured it all out?" I asked him.
"Probably, there must be someone with a similar ability to yours that is trying to mess with our plans."
"How annoying. Shall we head back and leave this for another day?" I said, pointing at the ground.
"The problem is who, in his right mind, is bold enough to challenge his majesty. After what happened 300 years ago, I thought everyone learned their lesson when challenging his authority."
"If I had to guess, it's probably the fifth." I suggested while creating a portal that headed back to our new home.
"Your homeland?" He was genuinely surprised by my response.
"Since no one can declare war against them, they might be using this to their advantage."
"But they are extremely loyal to-"
"Maybe there's a new set of kings." I cut him off while pointing at the portal.
"We have to report this immediately." He said this before a giant tidal wave clashed against our barrier.
Nassus froze it immediately, and he killed the one who made it by simply shattering the wave and piercing him multiple times with the shards created.
"If they truly are from the fifth, why aren't they using their abilities?"
"If you take into account their mastery over aura, they seem more like the hunters from the sixth." he continued while creating a dome around us with the shards.
"Is this a planet with a seal?" He then asked.
"Yep." I responded before entering the portal.
"These goddamn restrictions are extremely annoying." I noticed that many chains appeared on Nassus's body and then disappeared as fast as they appeared.
"Nassus, are you-"
Before I could even finish the phrase, he broke free of the restraints and went on a rampage against the inhabitants of the planet, slaughtering every single one with ease. He would cause hurricanes to appear in the deserts, tsunamis in coastal areas, and earthquakes on cliffs; he was a walking natural disaster.
PoV John
Kane wasn't an ideal teacher, but at the very least he was better than my previous ones. In the first lesson, he simply made us sing the alphabet and tried to make us memorize the colors in that weird language.
For homework, he simply said that we should memorize all the letters, their pronunciations, and the primary colors.
He never mentioned handwriting, but I guess we won't really need it unless it is to sign documents.
Back to present times, and we're out again. We're running around the building.
'At least he's running with us.'
After a couple of laps, he let us rest, then we started doing sit-ups, three sets of fifteen, then push-ups, three sets of five, squats, three sets of ten, and lastly, the twenty-second plank.
Nina did around three times as much as we did, and while she was exercising, we had to play catch.
"Keep going!" Kane was shouting at Nina.
"You can do it. If you really want to learn how to fly, this is just the bare minimum!" He continued.
'Wait, what? Is that the sort of deal he made with her to get her to make her run.'
She kept groaning every time she finished a set. Kane, instead, was constantly healing her. He would also chop her head off whenever she did one exercise wrong, and then he would add more exercises.
When she finally finished, she screamed "I DID IT" multiple times.
Marcus and Manni were still chasing each other while I was sitting at the front door.
"Next up are math lessons and geometry!" Announced Kane.
'How boring… Where is everyone? Everyone's suddenly gone; I haven't seen another human or hybrid in weeks, not even a glimpse of a car.'
When he accompanied us back, he started teaching mostly how to calculate the areas of various objects, mainly the right triangle. The lessons were particularly slow because of Manni. One thing that surprised me was the fact that he let us use the calculator.
After three hours of pure torture, we were finally left on our own for another hour. Nina and Manni went upstairs to play and rest while Marcus remained outside with Kane. I had returned to my apartment by that time.
I then decided to take a peek at them, and I saw that Kane was training Marcus. He was showing him some basic stances and making him imitate them, then he would correct whatever he was missing.
I got bored quickly, so I decided to watch something. It was hard to find anything new that was also interesting. There wasn't much drama worth listening to, and a lot of content creators stopped posting altogether, while some others simply changed their whole focus to gaming content.
The homepage was filled with videos talking about the cancellation of most shows, and there I learned that most people weren't able to leave their houses. People were speculating that it was "their" doing.
Another odd thing I noticed was the lack of female streamers doing yoga. Usually, that category is filled to the brim.
The city I was currently living in was left almost untouched. So far, most buildings I've seen have been unharmed; the majority of the damage has been to streets and government-related buildings.
I also saw Nina's channel, not because it was recommended; she simply asked us to follow her in the group chat.
She was streaming herself studying the new language, so I decided to drop a "Hi" since her chat was empty.
"Oh, hi Mr. Ricefrost." She was extremely excited. I almost felt bad about it.
'Should I tell her that's me?'
"Who's Mr. Ricefrost?" Asked Manni in the background.
"He's a viewer; I'm streaming. Say hi to the camera." She said, while pointing the camera at him, that he was playing some really old turn-based anime rpg and had his eyes glued to the screen.
"Hi!" He said this without even looking at the camera.
"Anyway, what are you doing?" she asked, quickly pointing the camera back at herself.
'Watching you? I mean, what kind of question is that?'
As I looked more into it, I noticed that she had very few followers, no subscribers, and at the time she had about 3 viewers. It was probably due to her stream title "Studying a New Language *smiley face*".
'It's so lame. If she wanted to get more views, she should've put some more effort into her title. Something like "learning the language of the Golden Soldiers" would've been way better. Probably.'
As I started typing, a message popped up in the chat.
"Why don't you look at your kitchen window for a second."
She found Kane and Marcus flying in front of the window. Kane gave her a small soda and then went back to train with Marcus.
She then went back to her room, where she kept one of those translators. She would then say one of the primary colors and try to write it down. Afterward, she would check the file to see if she got it right. Since she didn't know much, she would struggle a lot to write down even a single word and had to listen to it multiple times, even at lower speed, to properly guess which letters were being said.
It was boring to watch, so I checked if she had any bots or some kind of point system to make everything a bit more entertaining. She had nothing of the sort.
"What language is that?" Said Ice_Wallow_Come
"Oh hi, Ice- I'm not going to fall for that."
"I don't really know the name of the language, but it's what they speak." She said.
"Are you going to save the VoD?" he asked.
"I don't know how to, so probably not." She said this while pointing her camera at her notebook.
Her writing was incomprehensible. The letters were a bit hard to write, but she completely butchered them.
"So far, I'm trying to learn the alphabet and the primary colors." She said while opening drawing software on her computer, shortly after she simply switched POV and started using her webcam while drawing some of the characters they showed to us today.
After that, the viewer left the stream.
She seemed a bit disappointed, so I decided to press follow at that moment, and the notification popped up.
"Thanks for the follow, John." She said.
"So you knew."
"I was not really sure about it." She responded while creating another file.
"Gtg, you should watch a guide on how to improve the quality of your stream anyway."
"Ok, thanks for sticking around so long. I wouldn't have expected that from you."
"No problem." I replied before going back to the home page.
As I was searching for something to watch, I turned my head to watch the man still buried alive. They were doing just fine. Most of them were relatively healthy until Christian came crashing down like a meteor and accidentally killed one of them.
Blood was splattered all over the place.
Kane immediately headed there to scold him while Christian did something to bring the man back to life. He seemed tired, and after bringing the man back to life, he laid on the ground and shouted something at Kane.
Kane then burst out laughing, lifted him, and brought him back to the house while burying the man with dirt once again.
'What the hell is wrong with them? How can they kill so easily and joke about it?'
Was the only thing I could think of. I wanted to puke. I felt something heavy spinning in my stomach. They had just killed a man and shrugged it off like it was nothing.
Soon after Marcus followed the two inside, he didn't react at all to the sight of blood, guts, and weird pieces of flesh scattered all over our entrance.
'Am I going crazy? Why is everybody ignoring the blood and guts splattered around the floor! Like… Hello? Someone was murdered in our yard! By our new "adoptive parents" nonetheless!'
I wanted to rush down and ask something, but my body instinctively jumped out of the window.
I'm sure my heart skipped a beat when I saw myself falling down. I thought about the pain that falling would cause, and I'm pretty sure I was about to piss myself off.
Luckily, Kane caught me with his weird power. He then made me float towards him and asked me.
"What do you think you are doing?" He was dead serious. His gaze was terrifying.
"I don't know—I wanted to come down- but my body- I don't know." I had a hard time finishing a sentence, and I was trembling like a newborn fawn.
Kale sighed. He then gave me a small slice of a fruit filled cake. It had many weird fruits I had never seen before, and they were all surprisingly sweet.
Christian was lying on a couch, drinking a cold drink with ice cubes in it. He was also drenched in sweat and was constantly talking with Kane with the translator turned off.
I waited till he returned to his own room to ask Kane: "Why did he kill those people?"
He stood silent for a moment, then said.
"He didn't mean to kill them, he was simply tired and landed on the front without looking. He often does that. If you look at him properly, you'll see him bumping into corners out of laziness." He chuckled when he said that.
'But there's a difference between bumping into corners out of laziness and just killing somebody!'
"And it's mainly due to the fact that this is the tenth universe. This is supposed to be the universe of power." As usual, the translator shut down mid sentence, but for some reason, I still managed to understand what he said, even though I didn't even memorize a single letter of the alphabet.
"- So that's why we kept you here. We honestly want to help you and already consider you part of our family, and that's why we want the best for you. We don't want you to make a living out of fighting and killing. That's just horrible!" I couldn't hear the first part of his speech because he was busy trying to turn on the translator.
"So you can relax. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Christian is your teacher. I mean, he was the one assigned to teach you. But if you don't want to, you can vote for whoever you want as long as it's not Daniel or Nassus." He added this while taking out a soda from a random shelf.
He then proceeded to drink it all in one go and then had the loudest burp I ever heard. He threw the bottle in the bin and went back outside with Marcus.
Later, we had another math lesson. This time, we were mostly practicing what we studied earlier. It was a long test. If we managed to get 75% of the answers correctly, we could've had the entire evening to ourselves. If not, we would've had to clean our own apartment and wash our own clothes and sheets.
The results were: Marcus 58%, Nina 93%, me 80%, and Manni 76%. Manni's test was significantly easier than ours, obviously. He couldn't possibly be smarter than a thirteen-year-old, could he?
We were so caught up in the tests that we didn't realize most of them had returned home, and Daniel was already cooking our lunch.
Today we were eating deep fried chicken nuggets accompanied by some chips, spinach, and some other weird purple salad.
After lunch, I simply went to sleep since I was completely drained of anything else.
When I woke up, the men in front of our gates were gone, Kane was sleeping on a deckchair on the side of the building with Christian and Daniel.
As I got out of my apartment, I saw Hyungtae furiously screaming at Nassus. The translator was off, so I couldn't understand what he was saying, but from his hand gestures, it seemed important. He frequently pointed outside, then pointed at himself, thumped his chest a couple of times, and then finished by punching the wall.
Nassus remained silent and only responded a few times with short sentences, then grabbed Hyung by the neck, whispered something at him, and left him at that.
As I approached the stairs, I saw Nina hiding in the corner with the translator in her hands, while also filming herself.
"Shhh" was the first thing she did after noticing me.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"Nothing, I'm just streaming the house." She said.
"Are you streaming the house from there?" I said while pointing at her.
"Any problems with that?"
"Nope." I said as I immediately started running down the stairs.
I spent the rest of the evening observing Kane train Marcus and then watching him train himself. It was interesting to see him practicing his techniques; the way he moved and the choreography made it all look like a dance.