Chapter 20: Captive Asset
Time, in the deep places of the world, was not measured by the sun. It was measured by the slow drip of water from stalactites, by the rationing of stored food, and by the shallow, ragged breathing of the thing in the cage.
Ten cycles of the cavern's designated sleep-wake period had passed. Ten times the bioluminescent fungi on the walls had been dimmed under woven covers to simulate night, and ten times they had been uncovered to cast their eerie, blue-green glow.
The cage was a masterpiece of desperate ingenuity. It was built from the scorched and twisted struts of the Saiyan's own ruined healing tank, reforged in a scavenged-nomad kiln and hammered into a crude but effective lattice. It was anchored deep into the solid rock of the cavern wall, and the door was sealed with a heavy lock fashioned from the gears of a broken mining drill. Inside, the Saiyan hung suspended by his wrists from the ceiling, thick vines cutting cruelly into his flesh, his feet dangling an inch above the cold stone floor. The posture was one of constant, aching stress, designed to prevent rest and remind him of his absolute helplessness.
His body was a map of ruin, slowly being redrawn. The terrible burns from his crash had crusted over into a grotesque, shiny scab. The deeper wounds from his fight with Vegeta, the once-shattered chest, the broken arm, had knitted with a shocking, alien rapidity, leaving thick, ropy scars that writhed across his skin like pale worms. The women had done the bare minimum. Crushed herbs with a faint numbing property were packed into the worst burns and held in place with strips of hide. A deep gash on his thigh had been stitched with thick, black animal sinew. It was not medicine of compassion; it was maintenance. Preserving a weapon.
He had not awakened.
This fact was becoming a central tension in the hidden community. The initial, terrified energy had curdled into a simmering, anxious impatience.
Lyra stood before the cage, her arms crossed, her delicate features sharp with frustration. She watched the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest. "Nothing," she spat, her voice a sharp whisper in the cavern's hush. "He is a rock. A piece of meat. We waste our food and our watch on a coma."
Another female, Shera, a robust hybrid with the leathery hide of the plains and the sharp eyes of the avians, sharpened a bone knife on a whetstone. The rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape was a counterpoint to Lyra's anger. "Kael says he is an asset. I see a corpse that hasn't stopped breathing. We should have left him in the wreckage for the carrion-eaters."
From the entrance to the smaller chamber where the children slept, a young boy of about six, named Jax, peeked out. His features were a soft blend of both tribes, but his eyes were wide with a fear that had not faded. He stared at the suspended figure, then quickly ducked back into safety.
Kael emerged from the shadows, her presence a calming, authoritative force. She carried a waterskin and a small strip of dried, salted meat. "He breathes. That is enough for now," she said, her voice low and even. She unlocked the cage door, the clang of the metal echoing sharply.
"Enough for what?" Lyra challenged, not moving from her spot. "Every day he sleeps is a day we risk everything. We listen for their Saiyan pods in the sky. We jump at every shadow. For this?" She gestured dismissively at the prisoner. "He is a beacon of death, and we have brought him into our home."
Kael didn't answer. She entered the cage and approached the suspended form. With a practicality that was brutal in its indifference, she pinched his nose shut. After a moment, his mouth opened reflexively, gasping for air. She poured a trickle of water into it. He choked, coughed, and swallowed instinctively. She repeated the process, then placed the strip of meat between his teeth, forcing his jaw to work on it weakly. It was not feeding; it was refueling.
"He is a source of answers," Kael said, wiping her hands on her hide leggings as she exited and re-locked the cage. "When the others come back, if they come back, he is the only one who knows their weaknesses. Their numbers. Their plans."
"If he wakes up," Shera countered, stopping her sharpening. "And if he decides to talk. He is a Saiyan. He would rather die than help us."
"Then we will find a way to make death the less appealing option," Kael stated, her earthy brown eyes holding a glint of cold steel. The other women fell silent. The unspoken threat hung in the air, a dark promise.
The children, emboldened by the days of his inertia, began a new, cruel game. Jax, the brave one, led them. They would dare each other to approach the cage. At first, they just stared, their small hearts hammering. Then, they began to whisper.
"Monster."
"Killer."
One of them, a girl with tiny, vestigial wings, found a small, hard pebble and threw it. It bounced off his ribs with a dull thock.
He didn't stir.
Emboldened, others joined in. A hail of small pebbles and bits of hard dirt clattered against his body, pitting his skin, bouncing off his head. It was a pathetic assault, but it was a profound shift in the natural order. The predators were throwing stones at the apex predator.
Lyra watched this, a bitter smile on her face. "See? Even the children know what he is. They are not afraid of a sleeping monster."
Kael watched too, her expression unreadable. She did not stop them. Let them get it out of their system. Let them learn that the thing that had terrorized their world could be rendered harmless. It was a necessary lesson in courage, however cruel its teaching.
The women's conversations around him became a form of psychological torture. They spoke of him as if he weren't there, their words carefully crafted blades.
"The scar on his chest is ugly," Shera remarked to no one in particular, as she mended a net. "Like a faulty seam. It looks like it would tear open easily."
Another time, Lyra sat nearby, honing the Saiyan-metal tip of her spear. "This is sharp enough now to take a hand. Or a foot. It would make him easier to manage. Less of a flight risk."
They discussed the possibility of infection in his wounds, not with concern, but with clinical interest. "If the leg festers, we should amputate before it poisons the blood. We have the saws from the mining rig."
They were trying to deconstruct him, piece by piece, in their words, reducing the myth of the Saiyan to a simple, manageable problem of logistics and control.
On the fifth day, the crisis Kael had prepared for arrived, but not from the sky.
Jax collapsed. One moment he was playing quietly, the next he was on the ground, his small body wracked with violent shivers, his skin burning to the touch. A deep, wracking cough tore from his chest. A fever dream gripped him, and he cried out for his mother, who had been vaporized in the first Saiyan bombardment.
Panic, cold and sharp, seized the community. This was not a enemy they could fight with spears. This was a sickness, and they had no healers left. The old ones, the knowledge-keepers, were all dead. They had herbs for wounds, not for fevers of the lungs.
Kael held the trembling boy in her arms, her face a mask of grim despair. Lyra and the others stood by, helpless, their weapons useless.
It was then, from the darkness of the cage, that a sound emerged.
It was not a groan of pain. It was a word, raspy, cracked from disuse, and slurred by weakness, but unmistakable.
"Broot."
The sound was so alien, so utterly unexpected, that everyone in the cavern froze. All eyes turned to the cage.
The Saiyan's head was lolled to the side. One eye was open just a slit, a glimmer of dark consciousness in the gloom. He seemed to be looking at the shivering child.
Lyra snatched up her spear, aiming it at his heart through the bars. "Silence, monster!"
Kael held up a hand, her eyes locked on the prisoner. "What did you say?"
He took a ragged, painful breath. The words were a struggle, each one costing him. "The… blue… fungus. On the… north wall." He managed to lift a trembling finger, pointing weakly towards a damp, shadowy corner of the cavern where a specific type of phosphorescent moss grew in thick clusters. "Broot… it. Make a… paste. For the… lung fire."
A profound, stunned silence filled the cavern. The women stared from the dying child to the monster in the cage and back again.
He was not threatening them. He was not begging. He was… advising.
Kael made a split-second decision, a gamble based on a flicker of something in his bloodshot eye that wasn't malice. She nodded to Shera. "Do it."
Shera, her face a mixture of suspicion and desperation, hurried to the wall, scraped off a handful of the moist, blue fungus, and crushed it with a stone, mixing it with a few drops of their precious water.
They applied the poultice to Jax's chest. Within an hour, the boy's violent shivering had lessened. His breathing, while still labored, lost its terrifying, ragged edge. He fell into a deep, exhausted, but natural sleep.
The women did not thank the Saiyan. They looked at him with a new, even more confusing emotion: a terrifying, wary awe. The monster in the cage was not just a weapon of destruction. He was also a repository of knowledge. And he had, for a reason they could not fathom, chosen to use it.
Kael approached the cage once more. She did not bring water or food. She simply stood there, studying him. His eye was still open, watching her. The raw, arrogant hatred was gone, replaced by a deep, unfathomable exhaustion and something else, the first faint spark of a calculation that did not involve their immediate slaughter.
The balance of power in the cavern had not shifted. He was still their prisoner. But the nature of his captivity had just become infinitely more complex. The god in the cage had spoken his first word, and it had been the name of a cure.
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