[DISCLAIMER: The following contains extremely graphic content. Viewer discretion has been advised. Read at your own risk.]
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
—The Judge, SS-Class Sentient Mana Beast
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There was a village on the northern border of Sapin that no longer appeared on any map.
It had appeared on maps once. Two generations ago it even had a name, a population of around four hundred, a road connecting it to the nearest trade route. Travelers stopped there. It had an inn, a mill, a well in the center square.
Ordinary things.
Then the Judge passed through.
The guild received a report twelve days after the fact, filed by a merchant who had come through on his usual route and made it to the nearest city before stopping. The report was four sentences.
The village was intact with buildings still standing, fires still burning in hearths, food still on tables. But no living person. No living animal. Something was written on the wall of the inn in a substance the merchant did not name.
The fourth sentence read, 'I did not go close enough to read it and I am not going back.'
The guild sent an investigator. Her report was longer but contained less. She confirmed the buildings standing, the fires still going after nearly two weeks with no one to tend them, the food on the tables already rotting. She also described a smell she didn't elaborate on, and the writing on the inn wall, which she did read, and which she transcribed in full.
That page had been removed from the file before anyone else could access it.
Who removed it was not recorded.
What did remain was a note in different ink, added after the fact,
'Do not send anyone else. There is nothing to recover and the looking itself is not safe.'
She retired four months later. She was twenty-nine years old and had been regarded as one of the most professional investigators the guild employed. She never explained her decision and did not respond to the guild's follow-up correspondence.
A colleague who visited her a year later reported that she was fine, physically, and that she had asked him not to talk about the village or the report or anything connected to it, and that her face when she said it was the face of someone describing a rule they had made for their own survival.
...…
He had arrived on a Tuesday evening, by the account of the three days that preceded everything else.
He walked in on the main road when the light was going orange and the farmers were coming in and the inn was filling up. He was noticed the moment he entered the village because he was always noticed. He was enormously tall and completely hairless and completely pale and dressed formally, which read as wrong in a farming village sitting in the middle of nowhere.
Nobody stopped him. Some tried but never quite got there.
He sat at a table in the inn and ordered a meal and ate slowly and listened to the room. He talked to the man beside him about the history of the local watershed in detail, which implied firsthand knowledge about events that had occurred well before either of them could plausibly have been alive. The man beside him found it fascinating and slightly disorienting and went home that night and told his wife about it and could not fully explain afterward why it had stayed with him the way it did.
The innkeeper's daughter was six years old. She came partway down the stairs to see the tall man, like how children were with strangers, and stopped at the fourth step and looked at him.
He looked back.
He smiled at her.
His smile was… completely normal. Warm, even. There was nothing wrong with it as a smile. She stayed on the fourth step and looked at that smile and did not come any further down. Eventually, she went back to her room and sat on her bed in the dark until her mother came to find her.
She couldn't say why. She was asked later, after, and she said his smile was fine and there was nothing wrong with his face and she just didn't want to go closer.
The Judge spent two more days in the village. He helped a farmer repair a fence. He sat with an elderly man on the mill steps for most of an afternoon talking about soil composition and crop rotation and the deep agricultural history of the northern territories, a conversation the old man apparently found among the most interesting of his life.
He answered every question anyone put to him.
He asked good questions in return.
On the third night something happened.
The fires in the hearths burned for twelve more days without anyone tending them.
No one remained to explain why.
...…
The Judge had a philosophy.
This was the part that appeared in the older records with the most consistency, reported by people who had spent significant time in his company and survived it.
The philosophy was not complicated. He did not express it in complex language. He stated it plainly, in various forms, across centuries of documented encounters, with patience like he had explained it many times and planned to explain it many, many more.
War, the Judge believed, was the only honest thing.
That it is the ultimate human sacrament.
War was not a means to an end, nor was it a necessarily evil or a failure of civilization — no.
It was the point, the Judge affirmed. And the highest expression of all living things.
Everything else, like law, commerce, art, love, religion, and governance, was mere scaffolding. Useful scaffolding, sometimes, scaffolding that made the setup more interesting. But scaffolding nonetheless, built on top of a foundation that never changed, which was this —
"Every living thing existed in permanent competition with every other living thing for the continued right to exist, and the competition had no referee and no rules and no final state except the ongoing one in which some things continued and others ended."
War was that competition made visible.
Made honest.
Stripped of the "scaffolding" and returned to what it actually was. A man who won a war had not merely defeated an enemy. He had asserted his primacy over the universe itself, about which of them deserved to continue, and the universe had answered. That answer was, in the Judge's view, the only answer that had ever meant anything.
The Judge did not consider himself violent in any pejorative sense.
He considered himself accurate and more than anything, honest.
The people who do cruel things while telling themselves they are doing something else — they are the ones living a lie.
The people who prosecuted wars while calling them regrettable necessities were lying — to others, or to themselves, or to both. The Judge had no lies. He saw the world as it was and he participated accordingly and he found the participation genuinely, boundlessly pleasurable and he made no effort to hide it.
...…
The Judge danced.
It was a detail that appeared in enough independent accounts across enough centuries that dismissing it as embellishment had become impossible. At battles, in the aftermath, sometimes in the middle — the Judge danced. Alone, in the dark, among the dead, with no music. Witnesses described it in terms that didn't cohere with each other on the specifics but agreed on the impression that it wasn't strange like how a madman's behavior was. And that it looked, instead, like an expression of genuine sentiment.
Like satisfaction made physical.
One account, from a soldier who survived a battle in the eastern territories two hundred years ago and wrote about it in a private journal found after his death, read —
"I saw him in the field after, moving among the bodies, and I understood as I watched him that he was not celebrating. He was worshipping. And the god he was worshipping was what had just happened. And I thought, standing there, that he was the only honest person I had ever seen, and that this was the worst thing I had ever realized about anything."
Then another account —
"His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the Judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."
...…
The guild file on the Judge was not available to anyone below S-rank.
It was not comfortably available to anyone at S-rank either, but they are permitted to request it.
The oldest entry was three hundred and forty-seven years old. The most recent was from eleven years before Special-Grade "Brightburn" Lymur registered as an adventurer. In the three-hundred-and-forty-seven years between those entries, across dozens of documented sightings and encounters and incidents, there was not a single notation of aging.
He had been killed twice in documented history.
The first time, a coalition of three S-rank adventurers verified the death personally, stayed with the body until they were certain, and encountered him again five weeks later in a city three thousand kilometers away. He greeted one of them by name and even asked how the journey had been.
The second time, the method was not recorded. The identity of the person who killed the Judge had been redacted from every copy of the report. What remained was the outcome, which was the same as the first time — he came back.
One of the three S-rank adventurers from the first incident wrote a letter afterward, addressed to no one in particular, that was found among her personal effects.
"The thing that I cannot conform to is not even that he's alive… The thing is that when I met him again and he said my name, he said it warmly. He was genuinely pleased to see me. And I knew in that moment that — "
She retired six months after writing the letter.
The sole entry in the file from an S-rank adventurer who had sought the Judge out intentionally rather than encountering him by accident — a man named only by his rank designation, his personal details removed at his own request — was the shortest entry in the file.
"Do not engage. Do not attempt to classify. Close the file."
He had refused every follow-up request from the guild. He had never spoken publicly about what he found. He died of old age twenty-three years later and left no account of the encounter among his effects. His family reported that he had never mentioned it.
...…
The Judge mostly moved on foot. He had no mount, no traveling party, no apparent destination that anyone tracking him had been able to confirm. He moved at his own pace through the land.
He had been observed, three weeks earlier, at the site of a minor military skirmish between two noble families west of the Kingdom of Sapin. He had sat on a hill and watched the whole thing from start to finish, and afterward had walked down among the dead. A scout from one of the families had seen him from a distance and had not approached.
The scout's account, filed with the guild through a third party, was not brief.
"I have been a soldier for sixteen years. I have held men while they died. I have done things in the name of my lord that I will answer for when I am judged and I have made my peace with that. I am not a man who frightens easily and I am not a man who frightens without reason and I need whoever reads this to understand that before they read what comes next because I need to be believed.
I saw him walking among them very slowly. He sat down next to several of them and I could not see clearly what he was doing from where I was but he stayed at each one for several minutes and there was something about the way he moved, like he was savoring — and when I realized, I told myself I could not see clearly.
He fucked the corpses!
And after fucking the corpses, he fucking bit them and ate a chunk!
On god, I can't get the sight of the color of blood dripping from his pale mouth out of my fucking head!
I am a soldier of sixteen years and I am writing this with hands that have not stopped shaking since that hill and I know how this reads and I know what you will think of me and I do not care because I need this written down somewhere outside of my own head because I cannot be the only one who knows this. When he stood up again, he looked… satisfied. That disturbing human look of a need met, and I watched him fucking smooth his clothes down and wipe his mouth and… and look out across the field like he was admiring a view.
I cannot sleep. I have not slept in four days. Every time I close my eyes I see him standing up and smoothing his clothes and I understand something that I did not understand before that hill and I do not have the words for it except to say that I think he has always been here. I think he was there at every battlefield I was ever on and I simply did not see him and I think he will be at every battlefield I will ever be on for the rest of my life and I think when I die on one of those fields he will sit down next to me too and fuck me and eat me and I cannot live my life further knowing the possibilty of that."
Please advise. I do not know what else to do with this. Please advise.
The scout committed suicide the next day after the letter was delivered.
...…
The Judge was headed east now.
There was no confirmed reason for this. There was no conflict in the east in particular, no war building, no notable political crisis that had reached a point of imminent violence. The guild analysts who tracked his movements, to the extent tracking was possible, had noted the eastward direction and had no explanation for it.
What was in the east was, among other things, Xyrus City.
And in Xyrus City, among other things, was a young man with deep blue hair and red eyes who had registered as an adventurer three years ago with no prior history and no documented origin and had proceeded to become the most anomalous entry in the guild's active roster in living memory.
The Judge was not moving quickly, but he was moving.