He didn't wait for Deacon to speak, as he was recalling the thousands upon thousands of scenes that etched themselves into the back of his eyes, and centered himself.
"Between the years 01 and 034," Bjorn went on, "everything was war. And not the kind you saw in that Linked Quest you experienced; that was simple and straightforward. The war I refer to is one where people tore apart their own families if they thought it might give them even the smallest chance of making it to the next day. Where every morning you woke up thinking it couldn't get worse, and by the end of the day you'd be proven wrong."
"From the moment the System gave people the ability to grow stronger, morality and reason ceased to exist," Bjorn said. After which he reached toward one of the glasses sitting on the edge of the holo-table, intending to drink, but stopped halfway when he realized it was empty. His fingers curled in a small, irritated motion before he let his hand fall back to his side and continued to speak.
"Everyone wanted power, Deke. And in a world where the System rewarded the strong and discarded the weak like scraps, people learned real fucking fast that morals were just suggestions that could easily be ignored."
Deacon remained silent, listening with rapt attention, watching as his uncle's hands went to his back and reached into his Spatial Storage and pulled out a crystalline vial that looked like it was filled with blueish-red, frozen lightning.
Item Name: Memory Vial
Type: Consumable – Memory
Rarity: Unique
Description:
A crystalline vial containing blue-red, lightning-like memory essence suspended in a frozen state. The crackling essence inside is the combined memories of Mattias Hayes and Bjorn Sten, covering their first two and a half years inside the Tower.
Deacon watched as Bjorn got off his stool and leaned forward enough to slide the vial into a port on the side of the holo-table's projector.
After they both heard an audible click, the projection shuddered like the surface of water disturbed by wind, and the image of the trial room blinked out. What replaced it were scenes that were taken from the eyes of both his father and his uncle, Bjorn.
The first scene was of men tied to a support beam, with the ropes around them cutting so deeply into their wrists and ankles that the bone beneath showed white in the places where flesh had been worn away by thrashing.
The scene then shifted, closing in on one man in particular, who looked to be in his fifties. His ribs had been forced open unevenly, and the lungs inside still tried to expand, shuddering like soaked cloth struggling to catch air. In front of him knelt two women who looked to be in their forties, their hands bound behind their backs. One of them tried to speak, but her throat was too raw to form sound anymore. Her mouth opened and strained anyway, her face twisted into the unmistakable shape of someone trying to scream. The person whose eyes Deacon was seeing through looked up and to the side, where a tall, thin girl with long black hair was sobbing and clutching onto their arm.
"The person in the middle was my and your father's father, your grandfather," Bjorn said emotionlessly. "And the kneeling woman on the right was your grandmother, while the one on the left was my own mother… This happened a bit over a month after we were all teleported from our homes in Salem, Oregon, to the Tower. Father was sixty-seven, Mother was sixty-eight, Second Mother was sixty-three, Mattias and I were fourteen, half-brothers, and our sister was fifteen at the time."
The scene shifted to cages that were stacked three high in long rows, each crammed with children no older than ten, packed so tightly they couldn't straighten their legs. Their skin pressed against the metal bars, bones jutting under paper-thin flesh.
All of them were trembling from cold and hunger with empty gazes, not even able to croak out any cries.
One little girl looked directly toward the vantage point, one eye swollen shut, and her lower lip split all the way to the gum. She mouthed something toward whoever was watching, whether that had been his uncle or his father, Deacon couldn't tell, but what he did know was that no sound escaped her mouth, and that the reason why was clear: her tongue was gone.
"Not long after Gen One cleared Floor Two, our parents were killed trying to buy us time to escape after a group of degenerate thugs tried to kidnap our sister and kill us for the XP flesh bags we were," Bjorn said, his eyes fixed on the image of the girl, recalling the very memory in front of him. "Floor Two was cleared, and the Beastkin races synced with the System. They tried to push down into Floor One and expand territory, of which, soon after your father and I were captured by one of their tribe's hunters, a Jaguar Beastkin."
"They hunted us after catching the smell of our blood and detected that we were humans that had descended from witches by the smell of mana within it," Bjorn nodded slowly as he looked down at his palms. "They locked your father and me in cages, to be taken out to be used for entertainment in the pits, while they took our sister to their breeding farms to bear beastkin hybrids that could wield magic."
The scene shifted to that of his father and uncle watching from a crack in the hide-covered barbed fence to see a woman being pinned to the ground by two men while a third forced himself into her, her face so swollen and broken that it barely resembled anything human anymore.
There were bruises layered over bruises, discoloration turning her skin into a map of everything done to her. Blood pooled beneath her hips and down her legs, and she looked — not at the men, not at the ground — but at the family tied behind her, forced to watch, all of them gagged so tightly the skin around their mouths was already split. Their bodies strained forward so hard that their muscles shook, but they couldn't move an inch as various beastkins held them down with their massive bodies.
Deacon's body reacted before his mind caught up as waves upon waves of screaming and shouting resounded from the holo table. His stomach twisted and his throat tightened, and he lurched forward, bile forcing its way up and out as he vomited across the floor and the corner of the holo-table.
When the wave of nausea passed, another came right behind it, but there was nothing left to bring up, just harsh, empty retches that made his ribs ache under the bandages and sent a hot pressure behind his eyes.
Bjorn didn't move to try and comfort Deacon. He just remained in his seat, letting Deacon see and hear all of it – the true nature of people that wasn't written down in history.
The holo-table finally stilled, the last scream dissolving into a silence that felt too thick to breathe through. The frozen still-frame of the projection showed the Tiger Beastkin mid-snarl, his jaw unhinged around a severed arm like it was nothing more than a haunch of roasted meat, while his father was braced forward, twin short swords raised, the camera of memory locked in on the bastard's throat while he could see out of the corner of his father's sight a younger version of his uncle in the air and plunging a massive greatsword into the head of a Jaguar Beastkin.
Deacon's hand, which had been clamped over his mouth to hold back whatever was left in his stomach, trembled once before he lowered it and stared at the scene of his father and uncle fighting. He didn't try wiping the bile from his lips or speak to fill the quiet, instead keeping his eyes fixed on the projection of the holo table.
"That," Bjorn began, keeping his voice low as he raised his gaze to grab hold of Deacon's, "is what the people turned into once the System gave a way for them to get stronger. And people stopped being people and became walking bags of XP that, if killed, would grant you power. Man, woman, child, beast — none of it mattered anymore."
"How did you manage to fight back?" Deacon asked.
Bjorn kept his gaze leveled with Deacon's before looking down and pulling back his sleeves to reveal a thin bracelet made out of long, black hair.
"Mattias and I managed to amuse the Tiger Chieftain with our skills, and he granted us Class Crystals and allowed us to gain our Tier 1 Class when we reached sixteen years of age. And on that very night, we went to find our sister after being given the right to be a part of the tribe's warriors." His tone had shifted into one of unbridled anger as a rising wave of killing intent began to exude from his body and began to oppressively weigh down everything within the room.
Bjorn didn't wait for a response from Deacon and continued.
"Do you remember the breeding farms they told you about at the Academy?"
Deacon nodded slowly, as he struggled to hold his ground at being held under his uncle's oppressive killing intent. "It's what people did back then after learning that there were those who had the ability to manipulate mana from birth, instead of waiting until they reached Tier 2. It pitted every race against the other as they wanted their children to be able to harness the ability to control mana due to the limitless potential it granted."
"Our older sister, your aunt, had been seventeen at the time and had been in a farm for two years before we found where she was being held," Bjorn said as he recalled the appearance of his brutalized sister that begged for her death, unwilling to live any longer with herself.
"We could barely recognize her when we found her," Bjorn said. "She was hooked up to IV Bags that were filled with Health Potions just to keep her alive and injected with drugs that destroyed her insides."
"And when she begged us to kill her," Bjorn said, leaning his head slightly to kiss the hair bracelet. "Any lingering remains of humanity that Mattias and I had died that very moment, we ended her life and set fire to the farm."
Deacon opened his mouth to speak, but whatever words he reached for slipped away before they formed.
"Mattias and I let ourselves go. We became the very monsters we had to be in order to kill every last son of a bitch in that Beastkin tribe that kidnapped us," Bjorn said. As he spoke, his killing intent intensified, pressing down on the room until Deacon was forced to grit his teeth just to withstand the crushing weight of it and the overwhelming feeling of being held under an ocean of blood.
"After that, we wiped out hundreds of settlements like the ones we had been held in. We didn't stop until every camp that kept people in cages or breeding pits we came across was razed to the ground. Whether they were run by humans, elves, hags, witches, it didn't matter to us, and we didn't stop until every last one of them on Floor Zero was razed to the ground, and the only survivors that were left were the both of us and those that were oppressed." Bjorn took a moment to take a pause and rein back in his oppressive killing intent as he caught sight of Deacon struggling beneath it.
Letting out a shudder of relief from being under his uncle's killing intent, Deacon quickly gathered his bearings and continued to listen to his uncle.
"After that," Bjorn continued, "we started climbing the Tower, clearing Floor after Floor, and Quest after Quest – never letting anyone get close to us again… After seeing the true faces of others, we couldn't trust anyone who wasn't us."
Bjorn said before coming to a short pause and continuing in a soft, yet blissful tone. "Until we reached Floor Twenty-Four."
He didn't expand immediately, instead preferring to let the silence fill the air as he recalled his time on Floor Twenty-Four.
After his uncle had gone silent and began staring off into the distance, Deacon reached into his sling bag and pulled out two of what he knew was the strongest beer he had on him.
Handing one to his uncle, who was pulled out of his musings by the chilled drink touching his palm. Bjorn softly smiled at Deacon and muttered a quick apology to him before both he and Deacon cracked open their beers.
When Bjorn finally spoke again, his tone no longer retained the edge it previously had and had become softer.
"Floor Twenty-Four," he repeated. "That's where we met the Jötnar — where Mattias and I abandoned the lingering remains of our humanity that the System claimed we had and became Jötnar ourselves."