'Oh, how wonderful the people of this world are,' Axiros thought, watching Stark laugh at something he'd said. 'They hand over control so willingly. Drunk on their own power, convinced they're untouchable, they leave every weakness sitting in plain sight and never once think to cover it.'
He smiled at something Stark said and laughed at exactly the right moment.
He had already decided how this would go. Not through force, that would be wasteful. Stark had a weak point, and it was a simple one. His wife. More specifically, her death.
This world had a real hell. Not a concept, not a metaphor, an actual place, presided over by the Archkeepers. Ancient beings who catalogued and held the souls of the dead with the indifferent precision of something that had been doing it for longer than most things had existed. No heaven on the other side. Just judgment, and then storage.
Which meant souls could be bargained for. If you knew how to frame the conversation.
Axiros already knew exactly how.
Stark was no small piece either. The man carried more power and more reach than his current surroundings suggested, the kind that didn't come from rank alone. The fact that Gary knew of him at all was a quiet mystery Axiros had filed away for later.
The hour passed without friction. Axiros wore the persona like a second skin, gentle, curious, the kind of rare young soul that made people feel chosen for having met him. Stark settled deeper into his chair as the conversation went on, laughing more freely, talking more than he'd probably planned to.
Kael sat off to the side and kept his mouth shut. His eyes moved between them with a look that hadn't quite decided if it was stunned or disturbed. The version of Axiros currently sitting across from Stark bore almost no resemblance to the one he'd shared a car with an hour ago. But he didn't say a word. He knew better.
---
"Uncle Stark." Axiros's voice was easy. Warm. The expression that went with it was the kind that made people instinctively lower their guard. "If I told you I had a way to let you see Maria again, your wife, would you believe me?"
The room shifted.
Stark's face changed before the rest of him did. The warmth drained out of it and something else took its place, something old and heavy and not particularly interested in being reasonable. The aura came down a second later, vast and crushing, pressing into the room like a change in atmospheric pressure.
"How." Quiet. Dangerous. "How do you know that name. I never told you." He rose slowly from his seat. "How dare you say her name."
Axiros let himself fold.
One knee hit the floor. He braced a hand against the ground, let his face do the work of someone straining under real weight. Then, with precise internal control, he crushed his own abdominal muscles just enough, a deliberate, calculated pressure, until blood climbed his throat and hit the floor in a thin red line.
A deranged thing to do.
He did it without a second thought.
'Good,' he thought, keeping his breathing laboured and his expression tight. 'He's reacting. And when someone reacts like that, it means somewhere under all that rage, they're hoping. That's all I needed. Emotions are the same in every world, every life, they're always the thing that finishes people off in the end.'
Kael wasn't performing.
He was on the floor, the aura sitting on top of him like something with weight and intention, his vision narrowing at the edges. He didn't have much left. What he had, he used.
"Please," he forced out, barely above a whisper. "Stop."
Stark heard it.
The aura pulled back. Not all at once, but fast enough. Stark was already moving toward Kael before it had fully lifted, crouching down, steadying him with both hands, words coming out in a rush-
"I'm sorry. I didn't, I lost myself, I wasn't thinking-" He helped him up carefully, the apology running on in that particular way that suggested this wasn't the first time his strength had gotten away from him and caught someone nearby in the process.
He disappeared into what looked like his bedroom and came back out almost immediately, a vial in each hand. He crossed the room quickly and held one out to each of them. "Take these. You'll be fine."
Axiros took his and drank.
The effect was immediate. The body's fragility, the malnutrition quietly threaded through every muscle, the hidden
in a vessel that had been starved and pushed well past its limits long before he'd arrived in it, all of it dissolved at once. He straightened up and took a slow breath.
'Finally,' he thought, rolling his shoulders slightly. 'Something workable. A portion of my techniques can be executed from this state now. The lowest tier of them, but still. It's a start.'
"Axiros." Stark's voice had returned to something close to normal, the storm of a few minutes ago mostly settled. "Who told you about her?"
"Kael did," Axiros said, his expression arranging itself into something soft and genuine. "On the way here. He told me your whole story. I found it fascinating — and genuinely sad." He let a beat pass. "I hope that wasn't overstepping."
He was laughing internally. 'Naive old fool.'
Stark turned toward Kael with a look that was somewhere between accusatory and searching, not quite angry, just waiting to see which way Kael would take it.
"Yeah," Kael said, without missing a beat. "He was bothering me the entire ride to tell him more about you." He glanced at Axiros and smirked. "This little bitch caused all of this."
He said it like he expected something back. A flinch, a flicker, anything.
Axiros gave him nothing.
'Intelligent pawn,' he thought mildly. 'But not quite intelligent enough.'
What was the point of reacting to an insult? Most people did it because they had quietly accepted that the speaker held some authority to define them. But that was never true. An insult borrowed whatever power it had entirely from the reaction it produced. Without one, it was just noise.
If a stranger called a king a beggar, nothing changed. The crown didn't vanish. The throne didn't shift an inch. The king simply looked at the man and saw someone small enough to believe that words could rearrange reality.
Reacting was a form of submission. It meant stepping into someone else's arena and handing them the first move. Those who truly knew themselves didn't do that. They watched the insult arrive, noted what it revealed about the person throwing it, and moved on.
An insult was never really about the target. It was always a confession. Anger pointed to insecurity. Mockery pointed to envy. Cruelty was just weakness looking for a moment to feel large.
Axiros had no interest in rewarding any of that.
He turned back to Stark.
"Uncle Stark," he said, his voice settling into something calm and certain. "I'll say it again. I have a way to do exactly what I said I could do."
"Really!? But how? How do you know? I tried for so long, but ..." Stark sat there his mouth hung open.
"Yes, I do," Axiros said, settling back slightly. "But I'll need certain materials. And a few other things." He began listing his demands with the calm of someone reading off a grocery list.
Stark leaned forward before he'd even finished. "Anything. Whatever you need. If there's even a chance I can see her again-" His voice caught somewhere in the middle of that sentence. He didn't finish it. "Kael. Is he telling the truth?"
Kael didn't hesitate. "Yes, uncle. He is. His physique allows for direct connection with souls. Albeit, requiring some materials." A clean lie, delivered without flinching. He turned his head slightly toward Axiros, eyes doing the rest of the talking. 'What are you doing.'
Axiros met his gaze. 'Don't worry. I have it handled.'
Stark sat back slowly, something shifting in his face, the suspicion still there, but cracking at the edges. "I don't know what to say," he said quietly. "If you actually do this… I don't even know how I'd begin to repay you."
"Uncle." Axiros's voice was warm. Gently dismissive, the way someone sounds when they're brushing off a compliment they clearly deserve. "You don't need to think about that."
He was lying through every word of it.
'Haa,' he thought, watching Stark's face. 'Men will walk straight into chains if you offer them the right thing first. Power. Ambition. Love. It doesn't matter which one, which the mechanism is identical.'
He handed over the list of materials.
None of them were needed for the soul retrieval. Not a single one. What he had written down bore a close enough resemblance in nature and energy signature to materials from his previous world, resources that, once gathered, would serve the ritual he actually intended to perform. One that had nothing to do with Maria and everything to do with laying the first real groundwork of his presence here.
Selfish, entirely. But then, what exactly was the alternative?
Selfishness was the most honest instinct anything living ever possessed. Strip away the costumes, kindness, loyalty, sacrifice, and underneath all of it, the calculation was always running. People helped when it eased their conscience. Loved when it filled something empty. Stayed faithful precisely as long as faithfulness cost them nothing. The moment the price climbed too high, principles had a funny way of becoming negotiable.
Most people weren't evil. They were just honest with themselves first, and everything else second.
Society dressed it up, called it ambition, called it drive, handed out awards for it. But it was the same thing at the root. Always had been.
Axiros had simply stopped pretending otherwise an incomprehensible amount of time ago.
---
He sat in his room that evening, the door closed, the space quiet around him.
'The first step is nearly complete,' he thought, exhaling slowly.
The room was large enough for what he needed. Bare, a little sparse, which suited him fine. Fewer things in a space meant fewer variables.
Over the following weeks, Stark moved with the specific urgency of a man who had been handed hope after a long time without it. He spent freely, pulled from whatever reserves and connections he had, tracking down everything on the list without complaint or question. Materials that had no use to Maria whatsoever, acquired at considerable personal cost, handed over without hesitation.
'What lengths a man goes to for love,' Axiros thought, watching a delivery arrive one afternoon. 'He doesn't even know if it will work. He has no guarantee. He is spending everything on the word of a child he met two weeks ago.' A quiet, internal laugh. 'How beautifully blind it is.'
He felt nothing about it. Stark's grief was a resource, the same as anything else in this world. Kindness, real kindness, the kind that gave without calculating, was a weight that slowed a person down. It had no place in a world built on destruction and hierarchy. Here, softness wasn't a virtue. It was just an opening.
His actual intention had never been Maria's soul.
It was Stark, plain and simple. The soul was a coin. Stark was the purchase.
'I'll need to implement that technique during my stay here,' he thought, turning his attention to the materials now stacked neatly along the far wall. 'The timing will matter. But the foundation needs to be laid first.'
He looked over what had been gathered and nodded to himself, satisfied.
---
A few weeks later-