The void had been absolute.
For two years, seven months, and fourteen days, I drifted through the infinite black. A perfect organism suspended in perfect nothingness. No air to breathe, though I needed none. No warmth to sustain me, though my body had transcended such weaknesses. No stimulus but the distant, indifferent stars that wheeled past me in their ancient dance.
I could not die. That was my triumph and my damnation.
In those endless months, I cycled through every emotion my newly perfected mind could produce. Rage came first. Volcanic, all consuming fury at the boy who had humiliated me, at the universe that had rejected my ascension. I screamed into the vacuum until my throat should have bled, but perfect cells regenerated instantly. I thrashed until my limbs should have frozen, but my body adapted, persisted, endured.
Then came the scheming. My vast intellect catalogued every possible method of return: generating thrust through biological propulsion, creating a membrane to catch solar winds, even contemplating whether I could evolve organs to manipulate gravity itself. But Newton's laws were crueler than any Hamon user. For every action, an equal and opposite reaction, and there was nothing to push against in the void.
Eventually, thought itself became torture. My mind, evolved to comprehend all living things, found nothing to comprehend. So I did the only thing left to me: I stopped thinking.
I willed my perfect consciousness into hibernation, shutting down all but the most essential functions, becoming a beautiful statue of crystallized potential. In this state of suspended animation, I became indistinguishable from a particularly elaborate asteroid. A coffin of my own design, drifting toward eternity.
But the universe, it seemed, was not yet done with perfection.
Gravity.
That was the first sensation that pierced the veil of my dormancy. Not the weak tug of distant stars, but something substantial. Something close. My consciousness flickered like a candle struggling against the wind, then blazed into full awareness with predatory speed.
My eyes opened to darkness, but this darkness was different. Textured, weighted with presence. I was falling. No, not falling. Descending. My trajectory had been captured by something massive, something that pulled me inexorably toward itself with increasing velocity.
A planet.
My mind ignited with feverish calculation. Atmospheric composition, gravitational constant, probable mass and diameter. My enhanced senses drank in every detail as I punched through the thermosphere. Nitrogen, oxygen, trace amounts of carbon dioxide. Earthlike. Lifebearing.
The friction that would have incinerated any spacecraft barely warmed my skin. I was a meteor with consciousness, a falling star with ambition. Below, I could see the curve of the world resolving into continents and oceans, painted in shades of twilight. Night was falling on whatever world this was. How fitting that a god should arrive in the gloaming, heralded by fire and thunder.
As I plummeted through the stratosphere, I experienced something I had not felt since achieving ultimate perfection: anticipation. Here was stimulus. Here was possibility. Whether this was Earth after thousands of years or some other world entirely didn't matter. What mattered was that my exile had ended.
The clouds tore around me like tissue paper. Below, a landscape of dark forests and jagged mountains resolved with crystalline clarity. I adjusted my trajectory with minute shifts of my body, bleeding off velocity, orienting myself toward what appeared to be a relatively clear area. A road, perhaps, winding through the wilderness.
The impact crater I created was modest by cosmic standards. Perhaps twenty meters across, carved into a merchant road that snaked through the forest. The shockwave flattened trees for a hundred meters in every direction, and a pillar of dust and pulverized stone rose into the evening sky like an offering to dead gods.
In the center of that crater, I stood.
And so it was that on a day like any other, in a world that had long since forgotten to hope, something terrible was born. Not born. Delivered. Inflicted upon a realm where suffering had already ground men's souls to dust, there came something that had transcended suffering entirely. The world groaned beneath the weight of this new arrival, sensing, in whatever way worlds sense such things, that the calculus of existence had shifted.
In a universe where causality was a chain binding all things to a predetermined fate, an element had been introduced that should not be. Could not be. Yet was.
I breathed deeply, filling lungs that hadn't drawn breath in years with air that tasted of pine, loam, and something else. Something rotten. The scent of decay was woven through everything, as though the world itself was a corpse that hadn't realized it was dead.
Perfect.
My body had retained the form I'd worn in my final moments. Humanoid, statuesque, with the refined features of a classical sculpture. My hair flowed long and purple, catching the last rays of sunlight like spilled wine. But there was nothing soft about me. Every line of my physique spoke of coiled violence, of potential energy waiting to be released.
I wore the clothes I'd manifested in the moment of my transformation: a revealing, almost ceremonial outfit that displayed the perfection of my form while incorporating organic armor plates. To any observer, I would appear as some pagan war god stepped from legend. Beautiful, terrible, and utterly alien.
I climbed from my crater with leisurely grace, my bare feet finding purchase on loose stone as though gravity itself had to negotiate with me. The forest around me was old, its trees thick and gnarled, their shadows deep even in the dying light. This was not a tamed wilderness, not a sanitized nature preserve. This was the real thing. Dangerous, indifferent, primordial.
My enhanced senses painted the world in layers of information that would have driven a lesser mind to madness. I could hear the heartbeat of a rabbit three hundred meters to my left, the rustle of an owl's feathers as it hunted in the canopy above, the distant sound of running water. I could smell the marker scents of wolves, the rot of a deer carcass somewhere downwind, the chemical signature of human sweat.
Humans.
A smile curved my lips. Beautiful and cruel. So there was intelligent life here after all. Primitive, judging by the rough construction of the road, but intelligent nonetheless. After years of deprivation, the prospect of interaction, even if it ended in the insects' demise, was intoxicating.
I chose a direction at random and began to walk. The road wound through the forest like a scar, and I followed it with the patience of immortality. Time had different meaning when you had conquered death. Whether I found civilization in an hour or a week was ultimately irrelevant.
But as I walked, my perfect mind began to catalogue anomalies.
The trees were wrong. Not dramatically so, but in subtle ways that suggested this was not Earth, or at least not the Earth I had left. The bark patterns were slightly different. The proportions of the foliage. Even the birdsong carried unfamiliar cadences. And that underlying scent of decay, it was too pervasive to be natural. It was as though the world itself was wounded, bleeding out slowly while continuing to function.
Then there were the sounds in the distance. Not animal sounds. Metal on metal. Screaming.
My pace didn't change, but my attention sharpened. Violence. Interesting. I followed the sounds with the casual interest of an entomologist noting an ant war.
The forest began to thin, and firelight flickered through the trees ahead. The sounds resolved into clarity: the clash of weapons, the meaty impact of steel in flesh, the wails of the dying, and most interesting of all, laughter. Not the nervous laughter of the desperate, but the genuine mirth of those enjoying themselves.
I emerged from the treeline onto a scene of methodical brutality.
It was a merchant caravan, or had been. Three wagons, now broken and burning. Perhaps a dozen merchants and guards lay dead or dying in the road, their blood painting abstract patterns in the dirt. The attackers were soldiers. Mercenaries, judging by the eclectic nature of their armor and weapons. Perhaps twenty of them, moving through the carnage with practiced efficiency.
But it was not the killing that held my attention. Killing was common to all life, as fundamental as breathing. No, what fascinated me was the style of it. The mercenaries weren't simply killing. They were enjoying it. One man held a struggling merchant woman while his companions took turns with her. Another was carefully removing a still living man's fingers with a hunting knife, counting each one like a child collecting shells. A third was using a survivor's body for target practice, making wagers with his fellows about which organs he could pierce.
This wasn't survival. This wasn't even predation. This was recreation.
"Well," I murmured to myself, "how delightfully depraved."
One of the mercenaries noticed me. A grizzled man with a scarred face and missing teeth. His eyes widened comically at the sight of me standing at the forest's edge, backlit by the last rays of sunset, looking for all the world like some impossible vision.
"Oi!" the mercenary called, raising his sword. "We got another one! Some kind of..." He paused, squinting. "What the fuck are you supposed to be?"
The activity in the camp ceased as attention turned toward me. The laughter died. Twenty pairs of eyes, some curious, some wary, most simply hungry, fixed upon me.
I regarded them with the detached interest of a biologist observing bacteria. They were primitive. Not just technologically, but fundamentally. The weapons were crude iron and steel. The armor was simple plates and chain. These were creatures who had barely climbed above the level of their Stone Age ancestors.
"What am I?" I repeated the question, savoring each word. My voice was beautiful. Melodious and cultured, utterly at odds with the scene of carnage. "I am what you would be if you could be anything at all. I am the answer to the question your pitiful species has been asking since you first learned to fear the dark."
The mercenaries exchanged glances. Some laughed. Others frowned, unsure if they were being mocked.
The scarred man who'd first spotted me took a step forward, his sword still raised. "That's pretty talk for a corpse. I don't know what kind of noble's pleasure boy you are, but you picked the wrong day to wander off from your master's estate. Tell you what, we'll make it quick if you're nice about it. Otherwise..." He grinned, revealing the stumps of his remaining teeth. "Otherwise, we'll take our time."
"Take your time," I agreed pleasantly. "I insist."
That seemed to settle it. Three of the nearest mercenaries advanced on me with the confidence of men who had done this countless times before. They formed a loose semicircle, cutting off escape routes, their weapons held ready.
I didn't move. I simply watched them approach with an expression of mild curiosity, as though observing an unexpected insect behavior.
The first man swung. A horizontal slash aimed at my midsection, backed by the strength of a career killer. The blade was sharp enough, the technique adequate. Against any normal human, it would have opened him from spine to sternum.
The sword shattered against my skin like glass against diamond.
The mercenary stared at his broken weapon in incomprehension. The sound of the blade shattering seemed to hang in the air, impossibly loud in the sudden silence. Shards of steel tinkled to the ground like wind chimes.
"Curious," I said, examining the spot where the blade had struck. There wasn't even a mark on my skin. "Your primitive weapons can't even scratch me. How do you manage to kill each other with such inefficient tools?"
The mercenary's face cycled through confusion, fear, and then desperate rage in the space of a heartbeat. He dropped the useless hilt and lunged with his bare hands, perhaps thinking to overwhelm through sheer violence what steel could not penetrate.
I caught him by the throat with one hand.
The mercenary's momentum stopped as though he'd run into a stone wall. He hung suspended from my grip, feet dangling above the ground, hands scrabbling uselessly at fingers that might as well have been iron bars.
"Let me show you," I said conversationally, "what real efficiency looks like."
I squeezed.
The sound was indescribable. Wet and crunching and final. The mercenary's neck collapsed like a paper tube, vertebrae pulverizing, arteries rupturing, windpipe crushed to nothing. Blood erupted from the man's mouth in a grotesque spray, painting my forearm in abstract patterns.
I released him. The corpse hit the ground like a bag of wet meat.
For a moment, no one moved. The remaining mercenaries stared at their fallen companion, at the impossible being standing before them, at the casual way I examined the blood on my skin as though it were a mild inconvenience.
Then chaos erupted.
Some ran. Most attacked. A few froze, their primitive brains unable to process what they were witnessing.
I welcomed them all with equal disinterest.
A spear thrust toward my chest. I caught it mid strike and reversed it, driving the point through its owner's skull with such force that it emerged from the back of the man's head and continued into the chest of the mercenary behind him. They collapsed together, pinned like butterflies in a collection.
An axe descended toward my shoulder. I raised my arm, the one coated in the first mercenary's blood. The impact should have severed the limb. Instead, bone blades erupted from my forearm, slicing through the axe handle and continuing upward to carve the attacker from groin to sternum. The man's bisected body fell in opposite directions, organs spilling across the blood soaked ground.
This is what you wanted, I thought as I moved through them like a dance. This is the apotheosis of violence you've spent your entire lives pursuing. Aren't you grateful?
Three men with swords surrounded me, attacking in concert. Coordination. Technique. The first intelligent response I'd seen. I rewarded their effort by manifesting my Light Mode abilities. Razor sharp blades of hardened protein that extended from my arms like living swords. The mercenaries' blades met mine with a shower of sparks, and for a moment, there was actual combat.
Then I moved.
My speed was inhuman, impossible. The mercenaries saw my blades coming the way a fly sees the descending swatter. With helpless, time dilated horror. The first lost his head in a single clean stroke. The second managed to raise his sword in defense, but my blade simply carved through the steel and continued into flesh, separating him at the waist. The third turned to run and made it three steps before my blade arm extended like a whip, piercing through his back and exploding out his chest.
Fifteen seconds. Fifteen men dead.
The survivors, those who'd chosen flight over fight, were sprinting for the forest. I watched them go with mild interest. Should I pursue? They were insects fleeing from a boot, hardly worth the effort. But then again, I had nowhere else to be.
From my wrist, I manifested something new. An experiment, really. A compressed ball of keratin and hardened tissue. I drew my arm back and threw.
The projectile crossed the distance to the fleeing men faster than they could perceive. It struck the rearmost runner between the shoulder blades and exploded with the force of a grenade, organic shrapnel tearing through him and into the three men in front. They collapsed in a tangle of shredded flesh and screaming.
"Effective," I noted. "Though the energy expenditure seems inefficient. I'll need to refine the technique."
I walked toward the dying men with measured steps, in no particular hurry. They watched me come, their primitive brains finally comprehending that they had encountered something beyond their ability to fight or flee from. Something that shouldn't exist.
One of them, showing more courage than intelligence, raised a hand toward me in what might have been a warding gesture or a plea for mercy.
I stepped on his head.
The skull collapsed beneath my foot with a sound like an egg breaking. Brain matter squirted across the road in a wet fan.
When it was done, I stood alone among the dead. Twenty three corpses decorated the merchant road in various states of dismemberment. The wagons burned. The twilight had deepened to full darkness, and stars I didn't recognize glittered overhead.
I felt... nothing. Not satisfaction, not disgust, not even disappointment. It had been no more emotionally significant than swatting flies. Perhaps less so. At least flies had the excuse of ignorance. These creatures had chosen to attack me.
Still, the encounter had provided data. This world's inhabitants were primitively equipped and apparently comfortable with extreme violence. Interesting, but not particularly illuminating. I needed more information.
I moved among the wagons, examining their contents with perfect recall. Trade goods. Cloth, spices, metalwork. Nothing sophisticated. The quality of the merchandise suggested a civilization in what humanity would have classified as medieval development. Dark Ages, perhaps, or early medieval at best.
Among the wreckage, I found something interesting: a map, partially burned but still legible. I held it up to the firelight, my perfect eyes extracting every detail despite the damage.
The geography was unfamiliar. Rivers and mountains that matched no Earth continent I knew. City names written in a language that was almost Germanic but not quite. And there, near what appeared to be the center of the map: Midland. A nation, perhaps? And within it, Windham, circled in faded ink.
"A starting point," I murmured. "How thoughtful of them."
A sound made me turn. A weak groan from one of the original victims of the attack. A merchant, somehow still clinging to life despite the sword wound in his gut. The man's eyes found me through a haze of pain and shock.
"Help..." the merchant whispered, blood frothing on his lips. "Please..."
I approached and knelt beside him, studying the wound with clinical interest. Intestinal perforation, massive blood loss, early stage shock. Fatal, certainly, but death would take hours. Slow. Painful. Inefficient.
"You're dying," I informed him matter of factly. "There's nothing that can prevent it. But I could accelerate the process if you wish. End your suffering."
The merchant's eyes widened. Hope warring with terror. He had watched me slaughter the mercenaries. He knew what this beautiful, terrible being was capable of.
"Who..." the merchant gasped. "What... are you?"
I considered the question. What was I, really? A Pillar Man? An Ultimate Being? Those terms had meaning only in the context of a world I'd left behind. Here, I would need new definitions. New purposes.
"I am Kars," I said simply. "And I am perfect."
"Are you... a demon?"
"No," I replied. "Demons are myths created to explain evil. I am simply the apex of evolution. What you call evil is merely my nature, as killing is the nature of your species. I don't hate you any more than you hate the cattle you slaughter for food."
The merchant's face contorted. Whether from pain or existential horror was unclear. "Then... you'll kill... everyone?"
"Eventually, perhaps," I mused. "Or perhaps not. I haven't decided yet. This world is new to me. I should explore it before making such commitments."
I placed a hand on the merchant's forehead. A gesture that could have been gentle if performed by anyone else. The merchant tensed, waiting for death.
But I paused. An idea had occurred to me.
My body could become anything. That was the nature of ultimate evolution. Total control over my biological structure at the cellular level. I could mimic any life form, adapt to any environment, manifest any biological function. But until now, I had been limited by my knowledge. I could only create what I understood.
But what if...
My hand began to change. My palm opened, and from the center emerged fine tendrils. Neural filaments, designed to interface directly with the merchant's brain. It was experimental, unprecedented, but my perfect cells adapted instantly to the task.
The tendrils sank into the merchant's skull.
The man screamed. A short, sharp sound that cut off as my influence spread through his nervous system. Then his eyes went distant, empty, as I began to read him.
Memories flooded into my consciousness. Not organized, not coherent, but raw and unfiltered. I saw his childhood in some nameless village. The face of his wife. The weight of his daughter in his arms. I felt his fear of the mercenaries, his hope that they would simply take his goods and let him live. His despair when he realized they wouldn't.
And beneath the personal memories, deeper things. Language. Culture. Geography. The name of the kingdom: Midland. The current political situation: a century long war with a neighboring empire called Tudor. The existence of nobility, of knights, of a feudal system that ground the common people into dust.
And something else. Something that made even my perfect mind pause.
Legends. Whispers. Stories told in taverns and around campfires. Of things that walked in the dark. Of monsters that wore human faces. Of artifacts called Behelits and something called the God Hand. Five beings of impossible power who existed beyond the mortal realm, who granted wishes to the desperate in exchange for... sacrifice.
I withdrew my tendrils. The merchant's eyes refocused for a moment, seeing me truly for the first time.
"Thank... you..." he whispered, though I had done nothing to earn gratitude. His mind was breaking, fracturing under the trauma of our connection.
"You're welcome," I said, and crushed his skull between my hands.
I stood, my mind processing the information I'd stolen. This world was more interesting than I'd initially thought. Not just primitive humans killing each other over resources, but a cosmos with its own supernatural hierarchy. Beings of power that existed beyond the mortal coil.
Gods, perhaps. Or things that called themselves gods.
How delightful.
I looked up at the unfamiliar stars, at the broken moon that hung in the sky like a malformed eye, and I smiled.
"Let's see," I said to the darkness, "if your gods bleed the way your mortals do."
And thus began a journey that would shake the very foundations of a cursed world. Kars, the Perfect Being, had arrived in a realm where perfection was an impossibility, where causality was a cruel joke, and where even gods were slaves to fate. He did not know it yet, but his presence would become a question the universe could not answer, an equation it could not solve.
The wheels of destiny, which had turned for millennia in their predetermined groove, shuddered. And in the spaces between moments, in the gaps where light could not reach, something ancient and terrible took notice.