A long yawn escaped his lips as he slowly came back to consciousness, his eyes opening to dappled sunlight filtering down through the leaves above and warming his face in a way that was almost pleasant.
He raised his hand and flexed his fingers one by one, as if confirming they still worked, then looked down at the ground below and frowned.
"Did someone drop a nuclear bomb here?"
Everything beneath him was charred black.
He dropped down from the tree, misjudged the distance, and landed with an ungraceful grunt before dusting himself off and looking around properly. The full scale of the destruction became clear almost immediately, because where a dense forest had presumably stood the night before, there was now nothing but ash and the occasional glint of bone scattered across blackened earth.
Ether beasts, most likely. It was the only thing that explained destruction on this scale.
He started walking deeper into what remained, his footsteps crunching over brittle remnants with every step. Everything had been leveled completely and thoroughly, with nothing left standing except, curiously, the single tree he'd been sleeping in.
"Ahh, haah, AHHH."
The sound of broken, desperate sobbing drifted through the air somewhere ahead, and he followed it without much thought, his curiosity getting the better of any caution he might have otherwise shown.
He found an opening where the destruction had stopped, and everything there was frozen, literally, with ice coating the ground and the surrounding wreckage. At the center of it all knelt a girl, surrounded by the frozen corpses of creatures that had clearly been flash-frozen mid-lunge, and she was crying with her hands clutched around her throat, gasping for breath that seemed to cost her something each time.
Her appearance wasn't good. Most of her pink hair had been singed away, her clothes were little more than charred scraps clinging to her body, and her eyes had the hollow look of someone who had been pushed well past their limit.
He walked toward her without hesitating.
She looked up as he approached, her eyes going wide with terror, and she scrambled backward immediately, though her movements were clumsy and slow from the pain. The state she was in was impossible to miss, but he felt nothing about it, no desire, no embarrassment, no discomfort of any kind, as if those particular responses simply weren't available to him anymore. All that remained was a cold and focused clarity, and one thing at the center of it.
Revenge.
"I feel strange," he murmured, looking down at his palm where a tattoo was glowing with steady intensity. "I wonder if I can still feel sexual pleasure," he added, the question entirely academic.
Before she could put any more distance between them, he coated himself with ether, grabbed her by the neck, and slammed her against the ground without ceremony. "Look at me," he said.
Tears ran down her face and she was shaking, completely vulnerable and exposed, but as she looked up at him she realized something that frightened her more than her situation did, which was that he wasn't looking at her with any desire at all. His gaze was empty and clinical, as if she were an object he was deciding whether to keep or discard.
"I can kill you," he said, stating it the way someone might state the time of day, and she stopped fighting.
There wasn't much point in fighting anyway. Her body had been betraying her since the beginning, refusing to let her harm him no matter what she tried, and the realization that she had become completely subject to this seemingly ordinary young man was almost harder to accept than the physical pain.
"You can obey me and spare yourself the trouble," he continued in the same conversational tone, "or you can keep this up and we'll be here all day. Your choice."
Was there really a choice? She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, more tears falling freely, because she hated this and she hated how helpless she was, but she couldn't take the pain anymore, not after a full night of it, not when her mind was already starting to come apart at the edges.
"Please," she whispered, barely audible, "make it stop, I beg you."
He studied her for a moment, then said one word.
"Breathe."
And she did, her eyes rolling back with something close to relief as air filled her lungs properly for the first time in hours, her whole body trembling with it.
"Hm," he said, then pulled clothing from a spatial ring and tossed it to her. "Wear this, quickly."
He walked over to a nearby tree, folded his arms, and looked up at the sky while she dressed.
After a few minutes he glanced back to find her in a form-fitting white gown with blue trim at the middle and hem, paired with a jacket-style top and a prominent belt, all of it clearly expensive and clearly designed with a very specific kind of attention in mind.
"Were you planning to wear that for someone special?" he asked.
She looked away without answering, shifting uncomfortably, and it became apparent fairly quickly that he'd only handed her the outer garments and nothing else underneath.
"Good," he said, moving on without dwelling on it, "where are we?"
She paused for a long moment before answering. "The border of Montelia."
"Montelia, you brought me all the way out here?" He seemed genuinely surprised, though not bothered. "That actually makes sense, no one lives out here, you can do whatever you want, worst case is ether beasts."
She kept looking away and he couldn't figure out why. "Do you have a way back?" he asked.
"Yes."
"A scroll?"
"A spell."
"Teleportation?" His attention sharpened slightly.
"Not exactly, there have to be anchors where we," she started explaining, but he'd already heard what he needed.
Get a teleporter, then head to the north pole, he thought, already working through the next steps. "Let's go," he said, then paused when she continued fidgeting. "What now?"
She looked increasingly agitated, biting her lip and working up to something, and his patience was thinning, because if she turned out to be useless or tried anything again he'd simply move on without her.
"You didn't give me all the clothing," she finally said, her face flushed.
"Huh?" He looked her over with the same detached assessment as before. "I don't see the issue."
A vein visibly throbbed at her temple. The fabric was practically transparent in places, and without proper undergarments she might as well have had nothing on at all, and she genuinely couldn't tell if he was blind or doing this deliberately.
"My," she started, then bit her lip again and couldn't finish the sentence.
"Let's go," he said, clearly finished with the conversation, "use the spell and get me to the nearest city." He turned and started walking without waiting for her.
"WAIT!" she called after him.
He stopped and looked back. "You're not to speak unless I ask you a direct question. Your only job is to cast spells when I tell you to. You can't go further than twenty meters from me, and if I die for any reason, you die too."
Her teeth ground together audibly as she stared at his back, because she couldn't walk through a city like this, she couldn't maintain any dignity in a transparent gown with nothing underneath it, and the humiliation of it all was sitting on top of everything else she was already carrying.
But she looked at him walking away and followed anyway, because there wasn't anything else she could do.