Chapter 22: Can you handle the consequences?

Chapter 22: Chapter 22: Can you handle the consequences?

...Popo circled Jaja slowly.

His axe was held loose at his side, eyes fixed with the patient, unhurried focus of a predator that already knew the outcome of the fight. He was simply enjoying the last few seconds before it claimed its kill.

Jaja leaned hard onto his injured side. His breath was ragged, blood dripping steady from his lips onto the dirt.

His whole frame trembled with the effort of staying upright. A privilege he could barely afford.

Their eyes met.

Jaja hated that look.

That calm, patient certainty in Popo’s gaze. It was not cruelty nor even triumph.

Just inevitability.

The look of a man who had already won and was only waiting for the rolling head in the dirt to prove his position.

Aside from removing the threat that was Jaja, this battle would also serve as an example to the remaining babarians with hiddden motives.

Two heads one battle axe kind of situation.

And then, without warning, the world fell away.

Umul.

Jaja remembered her laugh. It was always warm and full, echoing off the walls of their hut.

His head resting against the huge curve of her belly, swollen with the child they’d made together, and the small, insistent thump of a tiny foot against his ear.

He’d laughed then too. A real laugh, the kind of laugh he knew deep down that he would never find again.

"He’s going to be strong," she’d whispered, fingers combing through his hair. "Like his father."

Then the memory tore.

It changed into something darker.

Ummul’s belly, carved open. Empty. Her eyes were gone. Dug out, dark hollow sockets staring at a ceiling that had collapsed around her.

The child that would have kicked against his palm was gone before it ever drew breath, and the hut, the home they’d built together, was nothing but blackened wreckage around her ruined body.

Jaja’s breath caught like a blade twisting in his chest.

Reality hit him.

’For Umul. I do it for HER!’

Raw burining life surged back into his eyes, and he lunged forward with everything he had left, axe swinging in a wild, desperate arc.

But Popo had already read him.

He knew Jaja’s balance was gone, and with that, any battle advantage he previously had.

Popo pivoted into the opening and swung.

The axe caught Jaja clean across the belly, one side to the other, and blood sprayed in a wide arc as he collapsed.

The crowd gasped at this. They all knew what it meant.

Jaja hit the ground hard, rolling once, forcing his eyes open through the pain, just in time to see the blade already falling toward his neck.

CLANG.

The sound rang out sharp and sudden. Popo’s eyes went wide with shock.

A figure had appeared between them, battle axe raised, catching the killing blow a hair’s breadth from Jaja’s throat.

It was Victor.

The crowd froze. No one breathed.

Kiki was the first to move, stepping forward fast, voice cracking like a whip across the silence.

"How dare you interrupt a sacred duel before the ancestors."

Shit! Shit!! Shit!!! I actually did it. What the hell I’m I doing?

[Congratulations, player has unlocked Emotional Resonance]

Emotional Resonance? So it was that thing.

Babarians were an emotional people. It fueled their being, their battles, and of course their desires.

All the while, Victor had been thinking of what to do if Jaja lost.

Ever since last night that Jaja sacrificed himself for him. Something inside Victor stirred.

He did not want to see the stubborn babarian die.

But he knew. He had just committed a huge crime. One worthy of a foolish death.

Kiki’s broad sword was already moving, the point coming to rest a hair’s breadth from Victor’s throat.

"Wait..." he blurted, hands raised, voice cracking. "Just... wait. Hear me out first."

The blade, cold and unwavering paused just inches away.

What the hell am I even doing right now? he cursed himself internally, throat tight, heart slamming against his ribs. But he swallowed hard anyway, turning to face Popo instead of the sword at his neck.

"Brother Popo, do you really want to kill the man who saved the life of your little brother?"

The words landed well, and Popo’s grip on his axe loosened, just slightly.

Enough that Victor could see the pull of gratitude fighting against duty in his brother’s face.

But then Victor caught the eyes of the barbarians watching. Their expressions hadn’t softened the same way. If gratitude alone swayed the chief, that would raise its own questions later.

A chief who bent tradition for sentiment, not law?

That wouldn’t hold in a tribe.

Victor’s mind raced, flipping desperately through every trope he’d ever absorbed from a decade of manwha and manga binges

Come on. There’s always a way out of this in the stories. Think Victor. Think.

"This isn’t the time for killing one another," he said quickly, before the moment could slip. Then his eyes darted around

"I... uhh... I had a dream."

The crowd stilled.

In Babarian culture, dreams were... just dreams. But dreams from a Barbarian Shaman was something else entirely.

It was believed to be messages from the ancestors themselves.

Victor hadn’t been formally declared a shaman. But what he’d done for Jaja the night before healing him, had already planted little things in their minds.

A seed of belief, waiting for the right moment to be watered.

He saw it working. Their faces, their silence. He pressed forward.

"I dreamed that a calamity comes for the Southern Bloodline if we stay in this place."

Gasps rippled through the crowd.

Kiki’s eyes narrowed, stepping half a pace closer. "Is... this true?"

It is working. Keep going. Victor told himself.

Victor nodded, solemn as he could manage with his pulse hammering in his ears. "Not only that. The ancestors told me Jaja has a role to play in saving us. That’s why his life was spared last night. That’s why I was given the means to save him at all."

Whispers spread through the small crowd like wind through dry grass.

A few barbarians exchanged glances, nodding slowly, the fear and grief of the past two days making fertile ground for anything that sounded like hope, like purpose, like meaning behind the senseless deaths they’d survived.

For one breath, Victor actually believed it might work.

Then Kiki stepped forward, sword still steady, expression unmoved.

"That is that. And this is this." Her eyes didn’t waver. "You have interrupted a sacred battle. Can you handle the consequences?"