Klesha
Near the volcano, corpses were piled into literal mountains of the dead.
"……"
Looking upon them, the Sage was seized by a strange unease.
Even at a glance, the remains blanketing the surroundings were staggering in number. Add the drowned bodies along the riverbank, and the total looked close to a hundred thousand.
No. That can't be.
The Sage denied it inwardly, and for all his disquiet he did not immediately turn his Eye upon the scene to confirm. Yet he could not simply stand there forever, and at last he used the Eye to see what had happened in this place.
To put the conclusion first: it was a disaster.
A Kosala host a hundred thousand strong, celebrating their victory on the march home, had made camp near the volcano. Still flushed with the frenzy of plunder and slaughter, they were careless beyond measure. Not one of them foresaw that the mountain would erupt in the dead of night, or that the ash-gray storm it birthed would swallow them whole.
Already a great portion of the army had been swept up by the storm and killed. Those nearest the volcano had fared better, in a way — they would have died before they could feel the pain. The scorching ash and smoke inflicted agony beyond reckoning on the rest, and even the fortunate few who survived were burned so thoroughly they could no longer move. Some, by pure instinct, flung themselves into the nearby river. In a catastrophe that set the forest ablaze and heated the very air to a searing pitch, the living were vanishingly few.
But the disaster did not end there.
Not long after the ash-gray storm had passed, rain began to fall from the sky — a torrential downpour that lasted a full two weeks. Those immobilized by the agony of their burns, and those who had luckily thrown themselves into the river and lived, were soon caught by the flood and drowned to the last. As if by some grotesque miracle, the entire host had been annihilated.
"No. That's not right."
It could not end this absurdly. There had to be survivors. No matter how sudden and unforeseen the calamity that overtook them, a force of that size could not simply all die. It made no sense.
"They don't get to die this easily."
The Sage scoured the past with a concentration greater than any he had ever brought to bear. He meant somehow to find a survivor and visit the same suffering upon him. And at last he found one — a single man who had lived through the disaster. Moreover, he was the architect of every atrocity: Virudhaka.
"Found you."
A smile of pure madness spread across the Sage's face. Without pause he tracked Virudhaka's trail through the Eye.
"Damn… it…"
Virudhaka had thrown himself into the river faster than anyone. Even as the rains swelled the waters into a flood, he somehow swam free and survived.
"What happened? …How could something like this happen?"
Staring at the mountain of his own soldiers' corpses, Virudhaka sank to the ground in a daze. It was a natural reaction — his entire force had vanished for a reason so ridiculous it defied belief. He had marched out with the whole of the nation's military; conquest was out of the question now, and the Kosala Kingdom no longer even possessed the troops to defend itself.
But Virudhaka would not need to worry about the distant future.
"…For the first time, I found myself thinking that something called fate might actually exist."
At the voice from behind him, Virudhaka tried to whirl around. The stranger's movements were far faster.
Slice.
The left arm that held his sword was severed clean through. Grasping the situation too late, Virudhaka flung himself backward — only for his right leg to be cut away as well.
"AAAAAARGH—!"
"To scream at this much pain after slaughtering so many people so cruelly. You're nothing but a worm."
"Y-you…?"
The man who had ambushed Virudhaka was someone the Sage knew as well. None other than Virudhaka's own cousin.
"Just so we're clear — don't imagine you'll die comfortably. No. I'll make you wish you were dead."
"D-don't make me laugh! As if the likes of you could—"
The cousin had no further interest in listening. Disgust plain upon his face, he seized Virudhaka by the hair and dragged him away. Virudhaka thrashed with everything he had left; it made no difference. Blood spraying from the stumps of his severed limbs was washed away by the rain.
The cousin took him, deliberately, to a cave people rarely visited. Then, with a saw from who knew where, he slowly cut off the remaining leg.
"AAAAAARGH!!"
"Hold still. It'll hurt more if you move."
"Y-you dare lay hands on the great King of Kosala and expect to walk free? M-my son will never forgive you."
"I'll think about that when the time comes."
Virudhaka, possessed of a formidable vitality, did not lose consciousness. The cousin kept talking, ensuring he stayed awake.
"P-please! I was wrong! I've committed a terrible sin! Just forgive me once— AAAAAAAAARGH!!"
When the cousin at last set about severing every remaining limb, Virudhaka began to beg for his life. The cousin had no intention of stopping.
"P-please spare me! I don't want to die like this—"
"You little shit. Even reduced to this, you still want to live?"
The cousin tore out the vocal cords of the man weeping tears and snot. With crude, half-remembered knowledge he cauterized the stumps with fire so Virudhaka would not bleed out — and even accounting for that, the life force of the Kosala king, who had partially inherited the power of his ancestors, was astonishing.
"You're the best, you know that?"
"Ghk— ghk!!"
The cousin had no intention of stopping at mere dismemberment. Solely to deepen Virudhaka's torment, he went hunting, killed a wild boar, and flayed it.
"Uuuh— uuhk!!"
Virudhaka thrashed in a frenzy. Paying him no mind, the cousin sewed the boar's hide onto his body, fashioning a counterfeit beast that at a glance could not be told from the real thing. That quiet, meticulous malice was enough to freeze the blood.
"There's a hunter living nearby."
"Guhh— guuuuhh!!"
With his vocal cords ruined, Virudhaka could form no human speech. The cousin dragged him near the hunter's dwelling, released him, and watched.
Before long the hungry hunter spotted the idiot boar crawling along on its belly and loosed an arrow.
"Squeeeeal!! Eeeeeee!!"
Virudhaka wanted desperately to convey that he was not a boar — but to the hunter it was nothing more than the sound of a pig being slaughtered.
"Lucky. One that can't even run away properly."
The hunter kept shooting. Each time a cold arrowhead punched through the hide and dug into flesh, Virudhaka felt a searing heat of pain. Even a hardy demigod, mind and body so thoroughly broken, could not endure a continuous rain of arrows. When shafts at last struck his eye and his heart, he was completely incapacitated.
"Hmm. Something's off…"
The hunter frowned down at the collapsed creature. Even so, to finish the wheezing boar, he drove a dagger into the nape of its neck. One smooth draw downward, and blood poured out like a waterfall.
"Now… I can die…"
When death finally arrived, Virudhaka felt a strange relief. Then the hunter realized what he had killed was not a boar at all, but a limbless man wearing a boar's hide — and he retched, vomiting up everything in his stomach. To the Sage watching through the Eye, that detail scarcely mattered.
"……"
The Sage found Virudhaka's corpse. Decayed beyond recognition together with the boar hide, the body would have been unidentifiable to anyone without the Sage's particular eyes.
"…This is how it ends?"
Was this the hollow curtain call of his revenge? Virudhaka had died horribly, cruelly — and still the rage and hatred in the Sage's heart refused to die. Even a death this wretched fell far short of honoring the spirits of the tens of thousands of a kingdom's people sacrificed to one man's inferiority complex.
"Don't make me laugh!!"
The Sage stomped Virudhaka's remains into the earth. He trampled them thoroughly, then burned them until not a trace remained.
"I said don't make me laugh!!"
When the Sage roared, the ground shuddered as if struck by an earthquake. He returned to the place near the volcano where the Kosala soldiers' remains and corpses lay, and began taking out his fury on them one by one.
Still the fire in his chest would not go out. How could it? What remained there were nothing more than unmoving husks — what meaning was there in burning and tearing at unresponsive scraps?
"…Right. There's still something left."
There would still be people remaining in the Kosala Kingdom. The mere fact that they belonged to the same nation was reason enough for them to die. Collective punishment was hardly unusual in those days.
The Sage set out at once to destroy the Kosala Kingdom.