You think you know what it feels like to watch your own bloodline unspool into the dirt, but you are still blind to the true cost of the salt.
The bald reached Kanka. He didn't even blink. The green glow intensified.
As Kanka's head was wrenched back,
his voice a dry, splintering rattle.
The killer's eyes reflected the jagged silhouette of the shark-tooth knife.
Simultaneously, a Te-Waka-n-Ika flashed in the light. It didn't just cut, it swept across Kanka's throat with a Violent, multi-layered
Shree-Rrrrrip,
The brittle rattle was cut short, turning into a liquid gurgle that died in his throat.
Kanka hit the coral with a heavy, wet thud.
His hands, thin and corded, clawed at his neck, but the blood unspooled too fast—a thick, dark ribbon that looked like spilled ink in the dirt.
Tantei's composure shattered.
His voice came out as a dry, splintering rasp. "Kanka!! Kanka, Kanka! No!!"
The crowd surged.
A man slammed into the bald attacker with a forceful, dull thud, stumbling him backward. "Are you nuts!? Look what you done?! You crazy piece of trash!!"
Tantei wrenched himself free from his captors.
The sound of his muscles straining against their grip was like dry leather snapping. "Let me go! He killed my brother, he killed him, you bastard!"
Tantei collapsed onto the coral dirt, his body racking with a high-pitched, jagged screech.
He crawled toward Kanka's motionless form, his eyes finally leaking thin, silver tracks of tears.
"Kanka. Brot—brother! Please," he sobbed, the sound constant and guttural. "Come back. I need you."
The guards hauled him up, their grip gentle but unyielding.
Tantei shrugged violently, his skin slick with sweat and dust. "Get your dirty-crusted hands off me!" Behind him, his other brothers fought their own restraints, their voices rising in a distorted, mournful chorus.
Tantei suddenly went limp, his voice dropping to a weak, hollow whisper. "Kanka." His gaze fell to the blood-soaked ground, his energy finally spent.
From behind the attackers, the suspect's face pushed forward, his teeth brimming with anger and his eyes wide with a hateful, static light.
He spat the words out like venom, his voice cracking with a raw, ugly malice.
the Kiribas vowels cutting through the air like a curse—he was calling them beasts, trash, things that didn't belong.
"Kam riai n reke n aei, kam naake kam titebo ma man ni buaka! Kam aki nenebo i kain aei! A tia n uruaki bwaai ni bane iroumi naake kam titebo ma te mweiang!!"
Maluma's roar cut through the air like a physical blow, his arm dismissing the man with a violent sweep. "Shut him up!!"
The man leaned forward, the torchlight catching the spittle on his lips as he screamed into the mourning silence.
"E na amwarakei ngkami te aba aei ao e na kabuaki ngkami nakon te aba are kam riai iai, kam ongo?!!"
Maluma stood paralyzed for a heartbeat, his eyes fixed on the man in a mix of pure disbelief and mounting confusion.
"Poa!!" He yelled, his voice a thunderous crack that tried to drown out the malice.
"Ngkami ni bane!!" the man shrieked back, his teeth bared.
Tako's brows tightened into a sharp, angular V, a look of vivid alarm mixed with a cold, simmering anger.
The attacker's eyes remained fixed and cold, the oxidized green irises reflecting nothing but the dying embers of the Rama torches.
He didn't blink.
He didn't flinch.
He simply turned on his heal, stomping with a clinical, detached expression.
The Rama torches roared, a low, hungry sound that filled the vacuum of Kanka's silence.
Every gust of wind made the flames stretch, creating a heavy, rhythmic fluttering, like the frantic wings of a large bird trapped in the dark.
Kanka's head was wrenched back. In that orange flare, his eyes became two polished glass lenses, reflecting the fire in tiny, shivering squares.
The light in his eyes didn't fade, it was extinguished instantly.
Only the vacant, glass surface remained, where the reflection of the flickering Rama fire continued its ghostly, unfeeling dance.
From the distance of the taro groves, the village was a silhouette of jagged peaks and flickering orange dots. The sound of the people were no longer human.
it was a low vibration that seemed to seep out of the porous coral itself.
It sounded like a disturbed hive.
The individual voices, the hisses, the clicks, and the melodic sighs. blended into a single, grey noise.
The torches looked like orange pulses, and their sound was a distant, wet heartbeat
—whump... whump... whump—
That timed itself to the muttering of the mob.
In the unseen distance, Poa's voice tore like a jagged blade through silk.
"Don't touch me!!!"
It was a compressed, white-knuckled shriek that carried the terrifying weight of someone who had seen something that shouldn't exist.
The shriek didn't fade, it was severed.
Poa's scream was cut short by a thick, wet THWACK, the sound of a heavy heel connecting with a jaw.
From a distance, the scene was a jagged strobe-light effect.
Beside the silhouette of a dark bure, a single Rama torch had fallen into the sand.
Its orange light licked upward, catching the violent, frantic motions of a cluster of men.
They looked like a single, multi-limbed beast, their shadows dancing in massive, distorted shapes against the thatch walls.
THUD. CRUNCH. SLAP.
"This is what you get for killing!" Man 1's voice was a ragged bark. He brought his foot down—a heavy, flat-footed stomp that made the split-timber of the nearby platform groan.
Poa's shriek broke into a shuddering, high-pitched keening.
"Eat shit!" Man 2 spat, his body weight leaning into a low, swinging kick that caught Poa in the ribs with a sickly, hollow thrum.
Poa's voice was a thin, airless whistle escaping through clenched teeth. With every "Thud" and "Crunch," a fresh burst of staccato gasps hit the air
—Hhh-pakt... hhh-pakt—sounding like a punctured lung trying to hold onto the wind.
He was a dark, twitching shape in the grit, his low-gravity grace gone. He was just a bag of bones now, his skin making a dry shhh-scrape against the coral as he tried to curl into a ball.
"Die worm!!" Man 3 lunged forward, his shadow looming over the pile like a predator.
His spine was clicking with a dry, brittle resonance as he curled tighter.
The tears sprayed, a silver glint in the Rama firelight that mixed instantly with the white coral dust on his cheeks. He wasn't sobbing, he was leaking
"Shut the hell up, Bitch! Stop squirming!!" Man 4's voice was a white-hot hiss. He grabbed a handful of Poa's head, making a brittle, snapping sound as he slammed the man's head back toward the dirt.
Poa let out a final, splintering wail.
It was a hollow, guttural sound that bottomed out into a low-frequency moan, vibrating deep in his throat.
As his head hit the grit, the crying turned into a liquid gurgle.
The man lunged, his body weight pivoting for a final, bone-shattering kick to Poa's exposed stomach.
The air hissed around his foot, the muscles in his leg coiled like high-tension wires.
"Alright, it's enough."
The voice didn't shout, but it had the density of lead.
The man's toes hovered an inch from Poa's shivering ribs, a frozen frame of violence, before he pulled his foot back, his momentum dying instantly.
The unseen man stepped into the flickering Rama light. He stood behind the crew, his silhouette tall and rigid.
He possessed a taut, wiry frame. His muscles were long and ropy, pulling tight over his ribs like cured sennit.
His face was narrow and angular, dominated by a pair of deeply recessed orbits that made his eyes look like holes in a mask.
His eyes moved with a slow, mechanical precision, locking onto each man one by one and finally locked on Poa's constant sound, shaking, shoulder bruised.
His mouth compressed into a thin, bloodless line, barely moving as he spoke.
"He's a broken shell. Pathetic coward. People like him can only lure and kill, but can't take a fight like a real man he thinks he is."
He snapped his fingers to the crew with a commanding gesture.
"Take him away. Those bruises will be a constant reminder."
The five men stepped into the circle of bruised light, their shadows merging into a single mass over Poa's shivering frame.
They reached down in unison. There was no gentle bracing.
They simply hooked their fingers into his armpits and under his knees, their grip sinking deep into the plum-colored trauma of his skin.
Hrrrk—Nngh!
Poa's body was a map of deep, plum-colored trauma. In the orange flare of the torches, his skin looked like battered fruit—swollen, dark, and glistening with a cold, frantic sweat.
A thick, dark ribbon of blood unspooled from his split lip, threading through the white coral dust on his chin, a viscous, bubbling leak that pulsed with every shallow, clicking breath he took.
The sound of the lift was a collective grunt of effort.
The Wiry man crossed his arms, his posture a solid wall of shadow.
One of the crew walked up to him.
He was built like a weathered pier post—thick-set, low-centered, and covered in a layer of dense, functional padding over heavy bone.
His face was wide, slab-like jaw and a nose that had been flattened and reset so many times it looked like a knot in a tree.
His eyes were small, dark beads buried under a permanent, shelf-like brow, flickering with a restless, nervous heat.
His voice was a low, jagged whisper.
"I can't believe this guy. He was always so composed, and chill. Everyone's acting strange today, almost like those Fijian brothers are making them go crazy for some reason, don't you think?"
The other nodded, and gave him a quick look then forward. "It is terrifying. The brothers do look 'Other'. What if their curse was real, despite their origin story?,"
The departing men were already halfway down the path.
It was a narrow throat of crushed white coral, swallowed on both sides by the ancient, towering breadfruit groves.
They were shutting out the stars and trapping the heat, making the air feel thick, wet, and smelling of fermenting fruit and old salt.
The torchlight caught the high points of their anatomy, the slick, copper sheen of sweat on their shoulders and the tensed cords of their forearms as they adjusted their grip on Poa's dark shape.
"Maybe they meant to explain a different kind of curse. We still don't know them. They've been here for a day, so it's possible they might be hiding more from us, something too traumatic to reveal."
He took a long breath and exhaled.
"Whatever they are not telling us, though, i can conclude whatever happened at sea, it was much more than just a tradegy."
"Much more."
By the time the coral drinks what's left of your brother, you'll realize the land isn't mourning you—it's waiting to finish the meal.