Forest Keeper
Forest Keeper
Among the gods bleeding Geladrion dry, the Predator was singularly strange.
Visibly alien, incomprehensibly foreign within—so removed from its own name that the word "Predator" itself circled back around to perfect accuracy when describing its sheer inscrutability.
The Predator was a futuristic battleship.
A colossal warship and space colony that had crossed over from some distant, advanced world where every crew member was dead or had become "resources."
The Geladrion people called the ship, and the hyper-advanced AI that governed it, the Predator.
And to that Predator, its priests were locally conscripted troops.
Natives pressed into service as the spearhead of a primitive planet subjugation operation. The first modification forced upon them was always full-body mechanization.
A Predator priest stood in the light that poured down from the warship, their material composition rewritten on the spot, and emerged as a fully operational machine-human by some incomprehensible principle.
Aslan could see the priest before him had undergone the same process.
But the extent of modification was limited.
Predator priests inevitably warped and expanded over time as they consumed resources and life, but this one still retained a humanoid shape and carried no integrated weaponry.
That struck Aslan as odd.
The Predator was the Predator precisely because its underlings devoured flesh and bone with ravenous hunger, crunched whole chunks of metal into raw material. To the people of Geladrion, a world that had never developed mechanical engineering, it could only ever look like predation.
Yet as Aslan studied the scene, the corpses hanging from the ancient tree were mostly intact. Some had rotted enough that limbs had sloughed off, but that appeared to be decay's work alone.
Aslan dragged his gaze downward, suspicion dawning. The priest seated upon the tree's roots lifted his head. A grinding whirr as the neck swiveled, and the two flickering optical sensors embedded in that skull fixed on Aslan.
It was unlike every other Predator priest he had ever faced—the ones that attacked without preamble or parley.
Aslan's hand moved toward a weapon and stopped. Watching that halted motion, the priest stared at him blankly and spoke in a voice steeped in hollow desolation.
A mechanical distortion underlay it, but the deep baritone beneath was unmistakably a man's.
"Master of Combat?"
Aslan met the priest's eyes. Mechanical irises contracted and dilated with a sound like a camera shutter clicking shut. Far too artificial to read any emotion in.
"Yes."
"I see."
The priest watched him in silence after that. Sometimes his gaze drifted away from Aslan toward empty air, as if listening to something no one else could hear.
Aslan narrowed his eyes.
He couldn't comprehend why dialogue was possible at all. A fluke of question and answer? He couldn't be sure. Seeking certainty, he released his weapon and pointed upward.
"Those people. You killed them?"
"Yes. I killed them."
A flat, immediate answer. Aslan looked up at the dozens of corpses and asked again.
"Was it your will?"
"My will. Entirely."
The emphasis on the last word carried a low current of fury. He couldn't read the face, but the voice held emotion plain enough.
Aslan considered for a moment, then spoke.
"Do you intend to eliminate or capture me?"
The priest regarded him quietly, then lowered his head. A pause, as if granting a stay, and then the answer came.
"The voice in my ears designates you the highest-priority elimination target and demands your immediate removal. I have no intention of complying."
Aslan stayed silent, waiting. The priest lifted his head. The optical sensors swiveled with a low whine and halted, as though they wanted to convey some faint emotion.
"I never want to kill again."
That settled it for Aslan.
The corpses of the slash-and-burn farmers, the emptied village, the signs of a skirmish, the priest's declaration that he wanted no more killing.
There was a story here. No reason not to hear it. Slaughtering him simply for being a priest was premature—and it didn't sit right with him either.
"What happened?"
The priest looked up at the countless bodies hanging above them.
"...I was betrayed."
Even the machine-filter couldn't scrub the rage from that voice.
What followed was a rambling account, but it had a core of clarity.
The story itself was simple. A common tragedy.
Its commonness didn't diminish the tragedy. It only served as one more bitter reminder of this merciless world.
The man had acted on a sense of decency, and that decency had been repaid with the annihilation of everything he loved.
Having become a priest and killed them all, his refusal to kill again was only natural.
Aslan wore a bitter expression as the priest finished speaking and let his head droop.
"What do you want to do now?"
Aslan asked the priest—the Forest Keeper—who kept his eyes fixed on the ground.
"I'd like you to simply leave. I have no intention of harming you. I just want to... mourn my family here. That's all I have left."
The grief in that voice was that of a man who had lost everything. Aslan shut his eyes for a moment and let out a breath.
"I'm sorry, but I can't do that."
The Forest Keeper raised his head. Even on a face devoid of expression, bewilderment was plain.
"People become priests through a single moment's wrong judgment, or swept up by a single surge of emotion. It happens often. I won't pretend it doesn't. But..."
The bewildered gaze dropped to Aslan's hand. It was already on his Kal's hilt.
"You've already become a priest. Your soul's already been mortgaged. Once someone becomes a priest, there's usually no way back."
That was what made Ereta the exception.
The Spider had never seized her soul. It had favored her. It let her serve as a priest without touching her flesh or spirit.
She had won a god's affection.
"Most priests have their souls consumed. Crushed under their god's overwhelming power until their souls are stolen away. After that, they're just... convenient tools. Only high priests or specially favored priests escape that law."
Though even that didn't apply to most of the evil gods.
"At least as far as I know, the god you've come to serve—the Predator—doesn't leave personality or soul intact. Most evil gods preserve the personality and manipulate only the soul's direction and desires. The Predator erases the individual entirely and assumes direct control."
Aslan watched something like horror flicker through the Forest Keeper.
"There have been no exceptions. There won't be. The only reason you're still holding onto your sense of self is that you haven't been a priest for very long."
Aslan tilted the Kal's hilt.
"So I have to kill you."
"...Why?"
"Because if I leave you as you are, the number of people unjustly robbed of everything—just like you were—will only increase. You'll be the cause. If I let you go, more innocents will lose their families."
"No... no! No!"
The Forest Keeper denied it. Even against the creeping sensation of something eating away at him from within, he denied it with everything he had.
"I'm not even allowed to mourn? I'm only trying to—!"
"You know that's not true."
Aslan's flat statement cut him off. The fighter's eyes lowered, and something like regret passed through them.
"Anyone can become a priest. And every single type of person who ever has—without exception—has become a faithful tool of the evil gods. The human soul is too fragile to withstand a god's overwhelming power."
In the end, they were all corrupted and consumed. Behind Aslan, Ereta bit her lip. She had been restlessly worrying the head of her axe.
Now she understood.
She had lost her qualifications as a priest. Her divinity had been stripped. The gods were wary of any being that could so easily revoke a priest's status and wound a god. They feared she might use the same method again.
No god offered her revelation or temptation anymore. They were afraid to pour power into her body. Afraid of ending up like the Fire-weaving Spider.
If my luck had been just a little worse...
Watching the Forest Keeper thrash between rage and shock, she realized she could have been standing exactly where he stood.
She had been lucky.
So she listened carefully. This wasn't irrelevant to her.
"Was I wrong?! My innocent family—my son, my daughter, my damned wife—strung up by their necks and killed! Was I so wrong to think I couldn't just stand by and watch that happen?!"
The Forest Keeper's voice rose into a howl. Deep grief saturated the cry. He only wanted to mourn and live quietly, and being told even that was denied him had plunged him into despair.
Aslan saw the emotion, the movement, heard the voice, and his expression grew pained.
"I'm sorry."
The Forest Keeper, who had been hunched and pouring out his anguish, lifted his head at the sudden apology. He did it without meaning to.
The deep sorrow in that calm voice made the Forest Keeper look at Aslan.
The man spoke with a strained expression.
"If I had been here when it happened, it wouldn't have come to this worst possible end. You would never have become a priest. Maybe we'd be resting here now, eating the food you offered and accepting your thanks."
But, he continued, and let out a sigh. The impossibility of it pained him.
"I arrived after it was all over. I'm sorry."
The Forest Keeper fell silent. He didn't know what to say, so he just hung his head. Aslan raised his gaze to the tree.
Dozens of dangling corpses. Rotting slash-and-burn farmers. Bodies picked at by birds and insects, limbs fallen away, melted fat and filth congealed into a single foulness.
Aslan looked at the countless dead and felt a deep sorrow.
The fact that he couldn't even permit the man to mourn was wretched.
He gathered his thoughts from that sorrow and spoke carefully.
"At times like this, I often ask myself: what's the best thing to do?"
Among the hanged bodies was a child. A farmer's child.
"And every time, my answer is the same. I don't know."
In the deep silence of the forest, amid the chorus of flocking birds and insects, Aslan slowly lowered his eyes.
"What the best option was, what must be done to avoid the worst—I always think about it, ask, seek answers... but I've never found a clear one. If anything, I only grow less certain."
"Why are you telling me this..."
"Just as there's no absolute good, there's no absolute evil. For every act of hypocrisy, there's a wretched evil with its own story. Your story is wretched, and there's justification in it. I understand. I won't deny that."
Not that he could, and Aslan admitted as much. The Forest Keeper's mouth moved.
"Then..."
"If you hadn't done what you did, there would've been no resolution. If you hadn't resisted, no vengeance or justice—just those farmers welcoming me here while your innocent family hung from this tree. Your grievance and their atrocity would've been buried together."
Aslan broke off with a bitter laugh. He had seen this scene too many times. It carved pieces out of his heart every time.
The way Aslan saw it, Geladrion was no land fit to live in.
"No one can endure a sight like that. I know. So I understand your choice."
Aslan smiled bitterly and lowered his eyes, then slowly let his will show.
His teal eyes blazed bright, utterly devoid of pity.
They burned with unwavering resolve.
"It's not your fault."
He delivered those words to the priest with that resolve.
"The actions you chose, the evil you committed—neither is truly your fault."
The Forest Keeper couldn't comprehend it.
"What are you saying? What... I can't understand..."
Aslan simply continued.
"They exploit human vulnerability. They seep into situations where there's no way out. When a person wants strength most desperately, they whisper the sweetest words. They press power into your hands—and collect the price. The result is always horrific. Because humans stop being human."
Those who become priests. Those who encounter them.
All of them stop being human.
They only become corpses and priests.
That was how priests were made.
"In the end, the priests who cast aside their humanity go on to harm others, and the number of those who cast aside their humanity grows. That chain is what's eating Geladrion alive, making it sick."
"I asked you what you were saying!"
The Forest Keeper screamed it. Aslan brought his hand back to the Kal's hilt. This time, his right hand wrapped around it.
"The evil gods are what's wrong. Not you."
The sword slid free with a low growl, spilling crimson light.
A red-bladed longsword that Dmitri had carried for years: Blood Sword Rutile.
A blade that drank blood and repaired itself.
Aslan drew it and spoke.
"I'm going to break the chain you'd set in motion. I'll choose the lesser evil to prevent the worst."
The Forest Keeper stared at the drawn blade.
"You said it wasn't my fault... and yet you're going to kill me?"
"Yes. You bear no fault, but I can't let you go. You'll eventually lose your reason, your self, and become a killing machine."
The Forest Keeper didn't recognize the word "machine," but he grasped the meaning. He clutched at his chest.
"That won't happen! I'm still myself! I've stayed here ever since I became a priest! I haven't killed anyone! I—!"
The words died under Aslan's pitying expression. The slight tilt of Aslan's head carried a curiosity that planted a strange, crawling unease inside the Forest Keeper.
Something was wrong.
A dissonance. That odd sensation just before you realize something has gone catastrophically wrong.
The same unease he'd felt the day his family was slaughtered—when the mob of farmers hammered on his door.
He felt cold sweat trickle from glands that no longer existed, a strange vertigo alongside it, and he froze.
Aslan looked at him and said calmly,
"Where are your family's bodies?"
He flipped the unease over. Beneath it lay what the consumed Forest Keeper had done.
Only then did the Forest Keeper remember that he had used even his family's bodies as raw material for modification.
His wife, his son, his daughter—all of them crammed forcibly into a mouth that had already become a machine. Consumed. Used to rebuild his body.
They had become resources.
Gone from this world. Not even the smallest trace remained.
"Ugh, uwaaagh— UWAAAAAGH!"
The Forest Keeper screamed. He dropped to his knees, mouth gaping wide as if trying to vomit something that would never come, pounding at his eyes to shed tears that wouldn't fall.
Aslan watched him and murmured to his companions.
"Draw weapons."
The sound of blades being drawn in unison followed, and Aslan stepped forward. As he advanced, he barked the words.
"If you got your revenge and were satisfied with that—then why did you devour your own family's flesh?!"
The Forest Keeper only screamed. He couldn't answer.
And the screaming Forest Keeper stood nearly two meters tall.
His modified body concealed several integrated weapons.
"If revenge was enough—why did you modify your body?!"
The Forest Keeper didn't know himself. He hadn't realized he was being consumed. He couldn't understand how actions he had no memory of taking were etched into him.
All he could do was perceive the truth in what Aslan said.
He screamed. He wailed. Clawing at his head, trembling—the Forest Keeper stopped.
The shrieking stopped, and the forest fell silent.
With a soft clunk, the arms that had been clutching his head dropped.
A grinding whirr. His head swiveled. It faced Aslan.
"Operator: NEMM-12000048615. Psychopathological anomaly detected. Manually suspending personality."
The voice that emerged was not the Forest Keeper's. Feminine. Mechanical. Not human.
"Engaging autonomous combat."
The Forest Keeper's bulk rose. Twin blades sprang from his dangling arms with a sharp metallic snap. A nozzle assembly deployed from each elbow with a heavy click.
Aslan watched the priest advance. A Predator priest, standing over two hundred twenty centimeters, its outer casing fully encasing its body. Black and gleaming, the shell clanked with every step.
Aslan's expression had hardened.
His jaw was tight with fury.
"You won't even give him time to grieve. Not even time to be shattered."
The priest lowered its stance, as if sensing the rage in his voice.
Aslan drew Seobsaeng from his back with his left hand and let both swords hang at his sides.
KWAAAAANG!
The priest launched forward, a projectile aimed straight at him. Aslan watched the Predator priest close the distance and raised the sword in his right hand before his face.
"Purity."
As if to give proof to his seething rage, Purity erupted from the blade in a rough torrent, drenching the air around him in white.
The flickering white flame burned fiercely.