[FIC] Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan (129/?)
Disclaimer: This story features characters and concepts based on Dragon Ball, which is a trademark of Bird Studio/Shueisha and Toei Animation. This is an unauthorized work, and no profit is being made on this work by me. This story is copyright of me. Download if you like, but please don’t archive it without my permission. Don’t be shy.
Continuity Note: About 1000 years before the events of Dragon Ball Z.
[18 August, 233 Before Age. Nagaoka.]
"Treekul! I need your help."
Guwar found her in one of the common rooms of the cult's underground complex. He hadn't seen her since they first arrived together on Nagaoka. At first, he had been too occupied with his indoctrination and the rituals that followed. Later, when he rose through the ranks to become one of the cult's Executants, he had greater privileges, but he was too busy with various missions to wonder what had happened to her. But now, when she was the only one on the planet who could help him, he discovered that she was much easier to track down than he expected.
The alien woman looked up from the yellowed parchment she was reading and her eyes lit up at the sight of him. "Guwar!" she cried out. "I was starting to think I'd never see you again."
She met him in the middle of the room and embraced him somewhat awkwardly. They had never exactly been friends to begin with, and their current positions in the cult didn't call for much fraternization. Fortunately, the others in the room were of lower rank, and dared not to question the behavior of a Priestess and an Executant.
"Listen," she said as she pulled him close so no one else could hear. "I need to talk to you. Alone."
"As you command, Priestess," Guwar said immediately, making sure everyone could hear. "Right this way."
He hadn't been expecting her to need anything from him, but it made things simpler that way. When they first came to Nagaoka, Guwar had assumed that Treekul would be executed immediately. She wasn't a Saiyan like the rest of them, after all. Surprisingly, she was allowed to live among them, even receiving the rank of priestess. But instead of robes, she was fitted with a strange dress of red strips of fabric, and he had never known her to provide any counseling. Guwar didn't know what to make of it, but he was more concerned with his own problems instead of figuring out her status.
"If you needed to speak with me so badly, why didn't you just summon me?" Guwar asked in a low voice when they were in an empty hallway.
"I didn't know I could," Treekul said. "You mean it was that easy?"
"You're a priestess," he said. "We're bound to follow your orders."
"Yeah, but I don't want the boss to know what I'm up to," she said.
"The boss?"
"Trismegistus," Treekul said. "I just started calling him that at some point and... Oh, it doesn't matter."
"Well, if anyone asks, you can tell them you're helping me," Guwar said. He led her to his quarters and swung open the door. "I need to understand something and you're the only one who can decipher--"
"We need to get out of this place," she said the moment the door was closed. "Right now."
"You're forbidden to leave, Treekul, everyone knows that. Trismegistus made it very clear."
"Did he tell you why?" Treekul asked.
"You're an alien," he said. "You could betray our secrets."
"Then why did he make me a priestess?" Treekul asked. "Why is he training me in alchemy? Why didn't he just kill me from the start?"
"He has some use for you," Guwar said. "And if you would have preferred execution so badly, I'm sure you could have found a way by now. You still live because you must see the truth in this place. Don't deny it."
"He's insane," Treekul said. "All he cares about is controlling people, and some bizarre plan for the Saiyan species. He's only keeping me around for his own amusement!"
"That's his right!" Guwar said. "You should be honored he's letting you learn from him at all. The Jindan power won't work on you because you're not a Saiyan. If he can impart some of his wisdom to you, then you could become a great help to us--"
"Sure, that'd be great," Treekul said. "The only trouble is that he isn't teaching me anything at all. He's just putting me through pointless exercises to keep me busy, or to test my compliance."
"He's testing your resolve," Guwar said. "You can't learn the deeper secrets unless you've proven your dedication to his teachings. Don't you get it? He could make you so much more than you already are, if you'd just let him."
"All I want," Treekul said, "is to get as far away from this planet as I can."
"Then cooperate," Guwar said. "The Executants and other priests are allowed to come and go as we please, because Trismegistus trusts us to carry out his will." He grabbed a stack of papers from his writing desk and shoved them into Treekul's arms. "You can start by checking my work."
"What is all of this?" Treekul asked.
"Trismegistus ordered me to calculate a mathematical model of the war effort," he explained. "The tactics don't make much sense from a conventional standpoint, but he told me that it was all based on geomantic adjustments."
"He's tampering with galactic ley lines?" Treekul asked. "That's crazy."
"It's brilliant," Guwar said. "Luffa can kill all of our warriors, but it won't do her any good in the long run. Eventually the galactic ley lines running through Federation space will be permanently shifted to ensure our ultimate victory. Trismegistus wants me to refine the calculations to improve the process."
"You can't just move cosmic ley lines," Treekul said. "It would take more power than... No. He could do it, couldn't he?"
"The trouble I'm having is that I keep running into a brick wall on the math," Guwar said. "His methods are based on an algorithm by another alchemist, the first Trismegistus, he said, but that work was for a smaller scale. I'm sure I could adapt it, except the algorithm itself doesn't make any sense. It doesn't look like it would work at all, which means any model I build will also fail. I've gone over it a hundred times, and I think I'm missing something on the geomancy side of things. That's where you come in."
"Me?" Treekul asked. "What good can I do?"
"It's no different from when we collaborated on the search to find this planet," Guwar said. "You used a geomantic compass to triangulate the locations of alchemical artifacts. This is just the same thing on a bigger scale."
"I don't..." she trailed off as she looked at the papers he had given her. For a moment, it was like it was before they found Nagaoka. He was a Saiyan mathematician, and she was an archaeologist specializing in alchemical artifacts. Guwar had come to despise those times, before the Jindan potion increased his strength, and made him a somebody for the first time in his life. And he was certain that she had grown as well. Whatever Trismegistus had taught her, he was sure that it had made her more powerful. She still opposed the cult in her heart, but she couldn't help but improve in this kind of environment. And working together, they could do almost anything...
After a few moments, she shook her head and shut her eyes tightly. "Guwar this is nothing like what we did before. Using the ley lines to find a planet, that's one thing, but what Rehval is proposing is just..."
"All I need is for you to verify the core principles of geomancy," Guwar said. "The algorithm has to work, Treekul, or he wouldn't be using it, but the computer can't make heads or tails of it, so--"
"What computer?" Treekul asked.
"On the ship I'm using. Rehval has one set aside for me to use for my work."
"Then you can take me off the planet," Treekul said. "You Executants can come and go as you like, right? I'll help you with this, but you have to smuggle me out of here, drop me off on some other world. That's my price."
"I can't do that," Guwar insisted. "I have a lot of pull here, but not enough to take you away from the master. He'd remove my Jindan power for sure."
"Would that really be so bad?" Treekul asked.
"Are you kidding?" Guwar said. "I'd be even weaker than I was when you first met me."
"That never mattered to me before," Treekul said. "I... well, I respected you as a scholar. That, and the whole space pirate thing you had going for you. That was pretty cool."
"Well that wasn't enough," Guwar said. "Not for me. I wanted more from you than respect, woman. But I could tell you weren't interested, not the way I was before."
"I didn't think you'd be interested in me," she said. "Besides, Endive was crazy about you, and I didn't want to try to get in the way of that."
"Endive?" he asked. "That's ridiculous. She wants nothing to do with me. Even now, when I've become as powerful as I am."
He wanted to believe her, of course. The truth was, Guwar was interested in them both, but with Endive, it was more of a matter of lust and pride. The idea of such a magnificent specimen at his side was very captivating, but Treekul had Endive beat on personality. He could have conversation with Treekul, and her strange hair and lavender skin had grown on him over the time they had spent together. For a moment, he allowed himself to indulge in the fantasy that strength didn't matter, and that both women were infatuated with him at the same time, and they had just been too intimidated by his brilliance to make a move.
"Rehval has her so brainwashed that she only wants what he tells her to want," Treekul said. "Just like he has you running in circles trying to solve his equations."
And that was the proof Guwar needed, the proof that Treekul was lying to him. For he knew that the cult hadn't brainwashed any of them. It had simply reinforced truths they had all known from the beginning. The supreme value of strength, the importance of ruthlessness. Endive outranked him, so if she was truly in love with Guwar, she could have ordered him to her bed whenever she wanted. But she never did, because she was waiting for him to prove his worth, one way or another. And he would. Rehval Trismegistus had promised Guwar great rewards for completing this model, and Endive would be one of them.
"I don't buy it," Guwar said. "You're a priestess, aren't you? If you wanted me so badly, what's stopping you? I'll do anything you ask, short of taking you off the planet."
"Yeah, well that's not how I like to socialize," Treekul said. "I didn't ask for any of this, and I'm not going to exploit my 'power' over the rest of you like that. And even if I was willing to stoop that low, I wouldn't waste time on you now. I liked the Guwar from before. This guy I'm talking to now.... I... I don't know who you are anymore."
They stood there silently for a minute or two, and then Guwar shook his head and pointed at the door.
"Enough of this," he said. "Work on the equations or don't. I'll give you whatever I can in return, but I still can't take you off the planet. There's no use discussing that."
"Oh, I'll help you, Guwar," Treekul said. "It's not like I have anything better to do with my time, and it seems to be the only way I can get through to you."
Guwar thanked her for her cooperation as she left, but he doubted that she would take the problem seriously. At the very least, he could be certain that she wouldn't tell Rehval that he was having trouble with his assignment. She was so suspicious and paranoid towards the Master that he doubted that she would tell him much of anything. And even if Guwar had no intention of giving her a lift in his ship, he could still use that as a bargaining chip to keep her quiet. He sighed and returned to his notes. He would work in his quarters for a while, then return to the ship to check his figures against the computer. Treekul had helped in one sense, at least. Even if she didn't check his work, she still gave him the motivation to solve this problem, if only to prove to her that Trismegistus truly was the great man he claimed to be. Treekul was a reasonable woman, and once he laid out the calculations for her, she would have no choice but to accept the truth. Even if it took weeks to sort things out, Guwar was certain he could find the answer. The numbers wouldn't lie.
*******
[15 September, 233 Before Age. Nagaoka.]
The numbers just wouldn't add up.
It was all supposed to tie together. The algorithm was supposed to work, and all he would have to do was refine the calculations and build a more robust mathematical model for Rehval's plans. Each battle was supposed to tug on the cosmic ley lines that supposedly governed the currents of fate in the galaxy. It was all supposed to work.
Only it didn't. He had gone over the figures for over a week now, and they simply didn't fit. Guwar had checked and double-checked the numbers, and the results just didn't match up with Rehval's plans. Rehval had boldly predicted victory within months. Guwar couldn't even extrapolate a duration of time that was a real number.
So he checked population growth models and tried to determine if the Jindan cult's population was sustainable. It would be, provided a stable birth rate, and with the cult's emphasis on breeding, that seemed to be a safe assumption. But that only meant the war with the Federation would go on indefinitely. Rehval could keep sending cultists to invade the Federation, and Luffa would continue to kill them, and he would have more to make good the losses.
What did that leave? Luffa wasn't immortal. Eventually she would die of old age, and the stalemate would be broken. But that would eventually happen anyway. If Trismegistus's grand scheme was to wait out the clock, he could do it without squandering his resources. Instead, Rehval had insisted that victory was imminent, and the lives he had sacrificed at the front would not be in vain.
And Guwar believed him. He had believed him before, and he still did now. Rehval was Trismegistus, the Holy Inventor of Jindan, the King of the Saiyans, the One Who Would Transform the Universe. He had transformed Guwar, changing him from a nobody into a great man. It was all true. It had to be true.
Because if it wasn't true, then Trismegistus was a fraud.
If it wasn't true, then Guwar wasn't a great man. Being an Executant was meaningless. He was nothing more than a patsy, no matter how strong the Jindan potion had made him.
He didn't want it to be a lie. And so he checked his figures again. And again. And again. He searched for proofs that would save him from the dilemma. He racked his brain for theorems that could help him escape. In the end, all of his mathematical skill could only offer him a more beautiful expression of the same problem. Rehval's geomantics plans would make perfect sense. The war would end in Jindan victory precisely when he said it would. Beginning with that premise and working backwards, Guwar could solve the equations and find the conditions necessary to support that truth. In the end it boiled down to a simple falsehood:
Two equals three.
This non-answer stared him in the face as he feverishly re-checked his work. It had been staring him in the face the entire time. He had already established that Rehval's strategy was impossible. "Two equals three" was just another way of saying it. Two, of course, did not equal three, and never could.
The contradiction was too awful for him to put into words. It was like being diagnosed with a terminal disease, only Guwar considered this much, much worse. At least a doctor could be wrong, or a patient's body might prove more resilient than anyone imagined. Even the hardest sciences allowed for a slim chance of things turning out differently. The law of gravity was only "true" until someone found a way to prove it false. That was incredibly unlikely, but never impossible.
Two, however, was incapable of being Three. There was no bargaining with this, no semantic argument to be made. A layman or a freshman philosophy student might blithely wonder if numbers really had any meaning after all. But Guwar was a mathematician, and his training forbade him from dismissing this, no matter how badly he wished otherwise.
The numbers didn't lie. They couldn't lie. Worst of all, it had been Trismegistus who told him to consult the numbers in the first place. Trismegistus, the Thrice Blessed, had made a mistake. There could be no new model, because the algorithm is was to be based upon simply couldn't work.
And as his mind raced for a solution to his dilemma, he considered checking with Treekul, to see if she had come up with something he could use to make sense of all of this. It mathematics couldn't save his faith in Rehval, then maybe alchemy would. But first, he remembered what she had said to him in his quarters.
"He's just putting me through pointless exercises to keep me busy, or to test my compliance."
He hadn't taken her words seriously at the time, but now he began to wonder. Was this just another pointless exercise? If Rehval would waste Treekul's time, why wouldn't he do the same to Guwar? Was all of this just a test to see what Guwar would do? Was he supposed to admit that the task was impossible to prove his honesty? Or did Rehval expect him to falsify his results to demonstrate his blind obedience? Or had Rehval gone mad, and he truly had no idea how flawed his plans truly were?
No matter how Guwar looked at it, he had spent the last six weeks in a spacecraft for no good reason.
He would have to come out sometime, and what was he going to do when he finally did?
*******
[16 September, 233 Before Age. Nagaoka.]
He found Treekul in her quarters. It was a violation of protocol to barge in on a priestess without being summoned, but he was past caring about such things. She didn't move from her desk.
"You were right," he said. "You were right about everything. We have to get out of here."
"Who's 'we', Guwar?" Treekul asked. She didn't bother looking up from her work. "I'm getting out of here, on my own terms. Are you asking me to invite you along?"
"Rehval's lying to us," Guwar said. "He asked me to verify his claims... no, he told me to, but I can't. The numbers just don't line up. He doesn't care about winning the war, he just wants me to tell him what he wants to hear."
"Who are you trying to convince here, Guwar?" Treekul asked. "Me or yourself?"
"I'm trying to tell you that I'm on your side now!" he hissed. "I want out. I'll do whatever it takes to get out. If we work together, we'll have a much better chance of--"
She looked up from the grimoire she was reading and smiled distantly at him. "You really think it's that simple?" she asked. "I've had time to think it over, and it just won't work. Twenty minutes after he notices you're gone, he'll withdraw the Jindan power from you. You'll lose all the power you've gained in this place, and then some."
"You... you said you didn't care about that," Guwar asked.
"On a personal level, I don't," Treekul said. She finally rose to her feet and looked him in the eye. "The point is that you'll be no match for whoever they send after us. And they will send someone. Endive, probably. She knows where I live. Hell, Rehval probably extracted all sorts of information from me with his potions, and I don't even know about it. I'll probably never see my home planet again."
"They didn't send anyone after Salziff when he left the cult," Guwar countered. He was a little surprised by the desperation he heard in his voice. Salziff had been their last lead in their search for Nagaoka. It was strange now, to think back to a time when Guwar so badly wanted to find this planet, and now he wanted to leave. He tried not to think about how weak and sick Salziff had been, or how Salziff had warned them to stay away from the cult. All he wanted to remember now was that Salziff had quit the cult and lived to tell about it.
"Salziff didn't quit, he was kicked out," Treekul said. "And losing the Jindan power turned him into an invalid. Is that how you'd want to end up? Don't you get it? They let him go because he was no threat to them. If anything, they used him as free advertising. If he kept his mouth shut, fine, but if he told anyone what he knew, it would only attract other Saiyans curious about how to get stronger. It's how we ended up here in the first place."
She picked up her stylus and poked Guwar's vest with it. "Salziff was a rule-breaker. They made an example out of him. You, on the other hand, Executant Guwar, have an outstanding service record. You're in too deep. You know too much about the cult and how it works. Rehval shared his war plans with you, for pity's sake. He can't let you go."
A chill ran down Guwar's spine, and he felt like something inside his head was collapsing in on itself. "I... I hadn't thought of that," he said.
"Of course not. Why would you? You thought you were on the winning side, right up until you checked his math. That's how he breaks people, Guwar. He gives them everything they thought they wanted, and then, when it's too late to back out, he betrays them somehow. He doesn't want us to trust him. He wants us to serve him even though we don't trust him."
A glimmer of hope suddenly dawned on him. "Then... maybe the plans he asked me to check were a phony," he said. "He was just testing me to see if I'd defy him."
"No," Treekul said, snuffing his idea before he could even consider it. "If the plans were fake, there'd be no test. He wants you to know what he's up to, and that it won't work the way he tells everyone. That way, if you continue to serve him, he'll know he rules you completely, in spite of your better judgment. If you cut and run, then it only proves you weren't worth having in the first place."
"I don't believe this," Guwar said, planting his hands over his face. He turned away from Treekul and lowered his head, as if trying to hide from the truths she was speaking.
"You had the right idea from the start, Guwar," Treekul said. "I can't escape, not the way I am. The only chance I have is to learn from Rehval, until I have enough power to escape him without being hunted down."
"That doesn't make any sense!" Guwar said. "He's not going to teach you how to leave this place!"
"Not directly," Treekul said. "It'll take a while. I'm an alchemical historian, not an alchemist like him. I'll never reach his level, but there's things I can find that he won't know to look for. Take a look at this."
He turned and saw her smiling as she pointed at a page from the grimoire she had been studying. Among the lines of tiny, alien characters and symbols, there was a woodcut image depicting a crude diagram of the galaxy, with various lines criss-crossing it like a spider's web. Surrounding this were various alchemical notations, along with an inscrutable face in the galactic center, which implied that the galaxy itself was a living thing.
"Rehval claims he can manipulate cosmic ley lines," Treekul explained. "I thought that was impossible, and maybe it is, on the scale he's talking about--"
"It is impossible," Guwar insisted. "I wouldn't be talking to you right now if it wasn't!"
"Maybe so," Treekul continued. "But these texts suggest that you can nudge them a little. A primeval Makyan used a spell to camouflage his planet from geomantic triangulation. I'm betting Rehval used something similar to hide this world. If I can learn how to do it myself, I can create a refuge where he'll never find me."
Guwar couldn't believe what he was hearing. "'If'?" he asked. "You don't even know if he can do it. How long will it take you to learn?"
"Like I said," Treekul replied. "It's a long game, but it's the best chance I have. In the meantime, I'll have to figure out how to counterfeit enough precious metals to pay the bills while I'm in hiding."
"We don't have time for that!" Guwar said. "If he learns what we're planning, he'll--"
"He already knows I don't want to be here," Treekul said. "He's toying with me, so the only choice I have is to play along and wait for an opening. Now, if you'll excuse me, I really need to get back to this..."
She turned to resume her reading, but Guwar grabbed her by the shoulders and lifted her out of her chair. "You little fool!" he growled. "You said yourself that this is exactly what he does to control people! All you'll end up doing is entangling yourself even further!"
"What's your point?" Treekul said. "I'm already trapped here. Worst case scenario, I get so drawn into this world of his that I end up enjoying it. You and Endive don't seem to mind."
Guwar's eyes went wide with horror. Treekul was his only ally in this nightmare, and she had practically resigned herself to her fate. He had never felt so alone. Even when he had literally been alone, he had always felt enough confidence in his ability to overcome any obstacles. Now, there was only himself and his power, and these belonged Trismegistus, who surrounded him on all sides.
He lowered Treekul back to her seat, and she returned to her work. There was the chance, however slight, that her plan might be his only salvation, but he doubted it. The look he had seen in her eyes was all too familiar. He had seen it in the faces of all the other Saiyans who had sold their souls to Trismegistus, only to swallow their regret later on. Like them, Treekul would tell herself she was biding her time, and Rehval would just manipulate her into doing his bidding.
The same thing would happen to him, sooner or later. The longer he remained here, the tighter Rehval's grip would become.
And so, Rehval turned and ran. If Treekul realized that they would never see each other again, she didn't bother to react. Guwar himself felt strangely empty about it. It was as though he knew he ought to care, but couldn't bring himself to do so. He supposed that if he made it to safety, he would have plenty of time later to regret leaving her behind.
*******
Leaving Rehval's base of operations was exceedingly simple. As an Executant, Guwar knew where all the ships were kept, and he had license to requisition one at any time, no questions asked. He briefly considered taking steps to cover his tracks, like entering false data into the flight log to throw off any pursuers. He also considered sabotaging the rest of the fleet to slow down the inevitable manhunt. But he dismissed these ideas almost immediately. The longer he delayed his departure, the greater the risk that he would be caught before he could even get off the planet. Like so many of his past adventures in space piracy, his best chance lay in outer space, where the playing field would be somewhat more level. There, he could pit the technology of his own stolen ship against those that followed him. Rehval could remove the Jindan power from him at any moment, but it wouldn't diminish his own skills as a pilot.
And so, he simply returned to the science vessel he had been using for his work, and launched it into orbit. He charted a course towards Mundokuul, then set the ship to proceed along in the opposite direction. There were no inhabited planets along that path, but he planned to alter course several hours later. With any luck, he could throw his pursuers off-balance by heading for nowhere in particular. Eventually, he would find a spaceport, steal another ship, and repeat the process until he was far enough away to breathe a little easier.
But he knew that wouldn't solve anything in the long term. He knew that Rehval had the means to track him down, however long it might take. Treekul's talk of "nudging" cosmic ley lines to create a hiding place seemed far-fetched to him. Still, the very fact that she was seriously considering it meant that Rehval would be very difficult to avoid. He believed that it was best to act immediately and risk the consequences of his haste, but now that he had taken that step, he began to appreciate just how weak his position really was.
As the hours passed, he also found time to second-guess his decision to leave. All he had left was his Executant uniform, which was meaningless in the outside universe. The privileges that came with it-- the food, the women, the authority-- were all behind him now. He was back to being plain old Guwar again. Less than Guwar, really, once the Jindan power was finally removed from his body. If Treekul had come along, it might have made things easier for him. Now, all he had left was abstract solace of mathematics. For however long it lasted, he was free once again to admit that two was not equal to three.
Perhaps mathematics was all that remained for him in life. He had plundered planets to sate his Saiyan craving for battle, but the galaxy had clearly become too intense a place for a small fry like him. The future would be dominated by monsters like Rehval and Luffa, and those who served them. All that remained for men like Guwar was to struggle to stay out of their way.
"At least I've had some practice staying one step ahead of the monsters," Guwar mumbled aloud to himself. "I managed to keep away from Luffa, so how bad can Rehval be...?"
Then it suddenly hit him. Luffa. The only reason the Super Saiyan had ever persecuted him was because she was hunting Rehval. And now, here he was, running away from Rehval because he knew too much about his organization. He had been so worried about Rehval punishing him for treason that he never stopped to consider why it would be so important to Rehval in the first place.
As he consulted the star charts for the distance to Federation space, he considered the risks. Luffa might destroy him on sight, thinking him to be an enemy. The Jindan Saiyans currently attacking the Federation might turn against him as well, assuming Rehval informed them of his betrayal. On the other hand, Guwar knew Rehval's war plans, including when and where he planned to deploy his forces. Surely that intelligence would be enough to get him into Federation territory without being attacked.
And then, even as he began to feel some semblance of confidence in his survival, he felt a strange tingle in his body. It began in his abdomen, and radiated outward. Guwar had never experienced the Withdrawal before, and though he had expected it, he had no idea how it would feel when it finally happened. Acting more on instinct than anything else, he got up from the pilot's seat of his ship, and retreated to the rear cabin, where he sought the relative comfort of the cot mounted to the inner hull. Instead, he was assailed with an intense pain, and he collapsed onto the deck.
As he lay in a fetal position on the floor, he clutched at his stomach with fingers that were so numb that he felt like they belonged to someone else. He saw a purple aura surrounding his body, and it seemed to grow brighter as the pain increased. Guwar was tempted to beg for mercy, but he bit his lower lip instead. There was no one to hear his pleas, even if he made them. At least if he endured this agony in silence, he could preserve some small remnant of his Saiyan pride.
And then, just when it seemed that it would never stop, and he would be unable to endure any more, the pain vanished, leaving him only with the traumatic memory of the suffering it had caused him. Gingerly, Guwar rose to his knees, and as he pulled himself onto the bunk, he sensed his own ki, now purged of the Jindan power, and diminished.
He was surprised by how empty it felt. By his estimate, Guwar figured he was now about as strong as he had been at ten years old. Strangely, he was grateful for this, as he had feared he would lose much more than that. But the true dread he felt was at the absence of Jindan in his body. He felt like an empty vessel, bereft of purpose. In a way, it hurt worse than the physical pain that was still fresh in his mind. Now, at last, he realized why Rehval was so eager to use the Withdrawal to punish his unruly followers. The loss of Jindan, however temporary, was far more terrible than the ecstasy of receiving it.
Guwar lay on the bunk for several hours after that, with only his despair to keep him company while he waited for his ship to reach the next stop on his journey. When the computer finally called out to him to request a new heading, it took him forty-three minutes to pull himself together and return to the controls. He would go to the Federation and find Luffa, no matter the risk, if only for the slim chance of repaying Trismegistus for what Guwar had just endured.
*******
"You could have gone with him," Rehval said. He had just received the report of the stolen starship, and he had completed the mystic ritual he used to withdraw his alchemical power from Guwar. With that task completed, he reclined in the chaise lounge in the middle of his study. "Some would consider it a rather romantic adventure. The two of you together, roaming the galaxy in exile."
"You'd find him eventually," Treekul said. She was sitting on the floor, studying parchments she had arranged in a semicircle around herself. "And you would have him killed, I assume."
"Oh, I don't know about that," Rehval said. "Guwar has served me with distinction up until now. Perhaps he needs some time away to remind him of where his home truly is. He might still be redeemed."
"And if I had gone with him?" Treekul asked.
"Then I would have had you brought back here, alive and unharmed," Rehval said. "So it would be a pointless journey, but I suppose you could have enjoyed it as something of a vacation."
"I'd rather focus on your lessons," she said. "It's a much better use of my time, isn't it?"
"I'm gratified to hear you say that," he said. "With Guwar absent, I'll need everyone to work that much harder to pick up the slack. Now, I believe you asked me to teach you about ley lines."
"The texts you provided me are incomplete," she said. "I've run across this sort of thing before. The ancient masters would encode their greatest secrets using an energy imbalance. Too much sulfurous essence, or not enough, and you can't see the text well enough to read it."
Rehval smiled. "The key is to balance the sulfurous essence with the mercurial," he explained. "An influx of masculine energies to counter the feminine, for example. Any man would suffice, but only I have the expertise to do it properly. Assuming you're interested, of course."
She rose from the floor and approached him. "Well, why not?" she asked. "I've come this far, after all."
He embraced her when she was close enough, and they shared a kiss to begin the process.
NEXT: Luffa's Test.