2017-10-25: The Limit of Hatred
- Cutscene: The Limit of Hatred
- Cast:Kahm Yugh
- Where: Bledavik, Royal Palace
- Date: October 25, 2017
- Summary: After a interrogating Lily Keil with Loren, Kahm finds himself with some time alone and high-priority transmission. For some reason, his mind drifts towards his time in Jugend...
“I thought I told you to come at me with everything you have.”
Elricht Sophard had his one remaining eye trained on the boy where he laid. The trainee stirred, still blinking the stars out of his eyes as he found his feet beneath him again. Slowly, and without ever breaking Elricht’s gaze, the youth picked up the wooden training sword that had been smacked out of his still-smarting hands.
“That was just a taste.” Promised the boy.
It was a lie.
The air reverberated with nascent power as the child adopted a crude stance, and Elricht stifled a snort. Rapturous tendrils of lightning arced through the air he’d been standing in just a moment ago, and the Solarian swordmaster’s eye observed from the side every single thing wrong with the boy’s form as he charged forth with sword in hand, too furiously in the moment to even realize he'd lost his target.
Blind hatred. That’s all this whelp was throwing at him.
The first strike of Elricht’s cane reddened the youth’s knuckles. The wooden sword slipped out of his hands and clattered carelessly across the ground. The second blow struck as the instructor swung the cane back to his side, cracking across the back of boy’s head and sending him off-balance. A desperate attempt to right his before he fell merely saw the youth slide face-first into the floor before he even knew what happened.
Any and all excuses were silenced by the tip of the man’s cane as he gave it a single, authoritative rap on the floor.
“Again.” Elricht said.
Glowering, the boy stood again. “Do you give all your trainees these lessons?” He wondered. “Or just the nephs?”
His peers wasted no time. Elricht thought with a sigh, though it came out more like a grunt. “Hard to say sapling, most half-breeds don’t wear it on their sleeve. Now did you want to train, or did you want a mommy?”
“I’ll kill you!” The boy shouted, dashing over his fallen weapon and seeming to conjure a primitive replacement in his hands, roughly shaped with wild lightning and laughably unstable. But Elricht could give him credit in at least one thing: Those blue eyes did have murder in them.
......
Countless attempts later, the boy still lay on the floor. Sweat had drenched him, his body covered in dozens of still-rising welts.
“I thought you said you were going to kill me.” Elricht said no small degree of boredom, idly polishing his cane.
“I want to.” The boy admitted. “But I can’t move.”
Finally. The swordmaster thought. He stepped up to the trainee’s side, fitting him with a look like he hadn’t just given one of Jugend’s first years the beating of his life. “Then it seems you’re finally ready to learn.” He declared, and lowered the heel of his boot onto the boy’s stretched hand.
“Remember this feeling, Kahm.” Elricht bade, turning on his heel as he spoke, heedless of youth’s wincing, whispered curses. “Remember everything about this wretched state. Pain, futility, impotence..”
Kahm managed to crane his neck up long enough to see Elricht’s lone, golden-hued eye boring through him like the point of a spear.
“That’s it, boy.” He smirked, and withdrew his boot. “That’s the limit of hatred. Every year I teach a few flourishes to boys and girls who have nothing in their eyes but expectation. They know exactly what their lives are going to be, and what they’re going to get.”
At that, Elricht resisted the urge to spit on the floor and merely beat a path towards the training floor’s exit, leaving Kahm to return whenever his strength came back to him. “You, on the other hand, might make a decently half-assed soldier if you can get that anger under control. If you can't, this is all you have to look forward to.”
“How?”
Something about the pitch of Kahm’s voice, the half-choked desperation in it, gave Elricht pause. He half-turned back from the exit to see the boy had already managed to drag himself up to his knees. Faster than expected.
“How do I control it?”
Kahm's eyes, for the first time, glimmered with something other than rage.
Elricht shrugged. “Keep coming.” The man said.
He turned towards the door.
“And try not to die.”
......
The midnight air in Bledavik was typically muddy and inhospital, offering Kahm little comfort as he sought refuge on a palace balcony that overlooked the cityscape. The distant din of festivities and commerce were a vague reminder of the same doomed gaiety in Adlehyde as his eyes scanned over a thin, printed note of transmission they'd recently received from the field.
have made contact BREAK emergent event BREAK planned interference into bledavik zone re cecilia adelhyde BREAK persint bart asked for specifics of palace security BREAK cannot debrief or expand inquiry w/o compromise BREAK missile attack extremely likely BREAKBREAK
The corners of his lips twitched, and he rapped the commlink on his color. “This is Yugh. Have the prisoner moved at regular intervals, and double the guard on the Princess.”
He folded and stowed the note within his breast pocket and stepped back into the palace.
The unbidden memories he left behind him, where they belonged.