The silence that followed Kami's declaration lasted exactly seven seconds. Kami counted them—not consciously, but because his mind had defaulted to measuring time through auditory cues in the absence of visual information. Seven seconds where the only sound was distant shuffling from other parts of the quarters, the creak of old wood settling, and the shallow breathing of two people occupying the same cold space.
Then the voice spoke again, and the casual friendliness had evaporated entirely.
"You don't understand what you're saying." Each word was deliberate, stripped of the rural ease that had colored the earlier conversation. "This isn't about pride or honor or whatever you think names mean. This is about survival. You keep that name, you're dead within a week. Maybe less."
Kami's fingers curled against the rough fabric of his sleeping mat. The body he inhabited was weak—malnourished, underdeveloped, carrying the accumulated damage of neglect and regular beatings. But the consciousness driving it had spent six centuries learning how to survive conditions that should have killed him. A week sounded optimistic compared to drowning for five hundred years.
"I understand perfectly." Kami's voice remained level despite the physical weakness affecting his vocal control. "The name carries weight. Attracts attention. Creates complications." He paused, feeling his way through the political geography of his new situation. "But I was given that name. It's mine."
"Yours?" The voice rose slightly, frustration breaking through. "It's not yours—it's his. The devil's. The god-killer's. You're just some blind kid whose parents hated him enough to curse him with it before selling him off." Fabric rustled as the speaker shifted position, closer now. "You want to die for a name that isn't even really yours? That's just stupid."
The logic was sound from a certain perspective. This body's parents had assigned the name as cruelty, not inheritance. Kami Van Hellsin the god-challenger had no biological connection to this blind child. The name was coincidence, malicious circumstance, nothing more.
Except it wasn't coincidence. Kami didn't believe in coincidence—not when it came to matters of identity and power. His consciousness had found this body specifically, had occupied it at the moment of death. That his name was already attached to it felt less like accident and more like something else. Recognition, perhaps. Or inevitability.
"The name is mine," Kami repeated, "because I'm the one carrying it now."
Another pause. Then: "You're serious."
"Yes."
"You're going to get yourself killed."
"Possibly."
The voice made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan—the exhalation of someone realizing they were arguing with immovable stubbornness. "Fine. Fine. Die for your name if that's what matters to you. But don't expect me to speak it. Don't expect anyone here to speak it. The overseers hear someone calling you Van Hellsin, they won't just beat you—they'll beat everyone in the room for letting devil-worship happen under their watch."
Kami hadn't considered that angle. His presence, his name, would create collateral consequences for others in proximity. The tactical landscape was more complex than simple personal survival—he'd have to account for how his choices affected those around him, whether he cared about their welfare or not. Operating in a slave environment meant existing within forced community, and forced community meant individual actions had group repercussions.
"Then give me a different name," Kami said. "One that doesn't carry weight. Something unremarkable."
"Now you're thinking." Relief colored the voice, suggesting the speaker had been genuinely worried about the blind child's chances. "Alright. Let me think..." A pause filled with consideration. "Most common name around here is probably... Thomas. Or maybe Peter. John's pretty common too—three Johns just in the south quarters alone."
John. The name was aggressively ordinary, carrying no historical weight or cultural significance. Perfect camouflage for someone who needed to operate without attracting attention while rebuilding from absolute zero.
Kami's jaw tightened. Every instinct he possessed—six centuries of cultivated pride and carefully constructed identity—rebelled against accepting it. The name John suggested nothing. Promised nothing. It was the verbal equivalent of becoming invisible, of admitting that Kami Van Hellsin no longer mattered enough to exist in the world.
But tactical necessity overrode pride. He needed time. Needed to understand this world, this body, the systems that had developed during five hundred years of his absence. Needed to learn how to navigate without sight, how to build strength in a frame this damaged, how to identify opportunities for advancement when starting from the absolute bottom of social hierarchy.
He needed to survive first. Everything else came after.
"John." The name tasted wrong in his mouth, syllables that belonged to someone else, someone who'd never challenged gods or walked through blood to reach divine thrones. But he forced himself to say it anyway. "Fine. John."
"John." The voice repeated it, testing how it sounded in reference to the blind boy. "Yeah, that works. Simple. Unmemorable. The overseers won't care, the other slaves won't question it." A pause. "What about family name? Or are you just going to be John the blind slave?"
Kami hadn't thought about surnames. The body's original family name was irrelevant—those parents had sold their broken son for twenty silver and wouldn't be relevant to anything going forward. But operating without any surname at all marked him as either orphaned or abandoned, which while technically accurate also suggested complete lack of social connections or potential value.
"No family name," Kami said. "Just John."
"Alright then. John it is." The speaker's tone had shifted back toward something approximating friendliness, the tension from earlier argument dissolving now that the immediate survival issue had been resolved. "I'm Marcus, by the way. Marcus Webb. Been here about a month—got sold after my father couldn't pay harvest tax. Figure I'll be here another two years working off the debt, then maybe buy my freedom if I'm lucky."
The casual mention of timeframe suggested Marcus still believed in the fiction of temporary servitude, of debt-servitude being distinct from permanent slavery. Kami had seen enough of human power structures to know how rarely that distinction mattered in practice—debt had a way of growing, of accumulating interest and penalties, of ensuring that "temporary" became permanent through procedural mechanisms that looked legal on paper.
But Marcus's optimism was useful information. It meant he hadn't been completely broken yet, still maintained enough hope to cooperate with authority, which made him simultaneously more stable as a social connection and less useful as potential ally in anything requiring rebellion against the system.
"Two years," Kami echoed, letting Marcus interpret his tone however he wanted.
"If I'm lucky," Marcus repeated. "Unlucky, it might stretch to three or four. But at least there's an end point, you know? Not like the permanent slaves down in the mining operations or the agricultural compounds. Those people are just... stuck. Forever."
The class hierarchy within slavery was apparently more complex than Kami had initially assessed. Temporary debt-servants like Marcus occupied a higher status than permanent slaves, which created internal stratification and probably reduced the likelihood of unified resistance since different groups had different incentives.
Classic control mechanism. Divide the powerless into tiers, give some hope while denying it to others, and they'd spend more energy managing internal boundaries than challenging the system itself.
"And me?" Kami asked. "What tier am I in?"
Marcus was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, the careful diplomacy was back. "You were sold for twenty silver. No debt attached, no timeframe mentioned. That usually means permanent sale, especially for..." He trailed off.
"For blind children who can't contribute meaningful labor," Kami finished for him.
"Yeah." Marcus sounded apologetic. "Sorry. But that's probably your situation. Brennick bought you as permanent property. Probably figures he'll get at least twenty silver worth of work out of you before you die of something, so it's a net neutral investment."
Before you die of something. The phrasing was telling—not "if" but "before," death treated as inevitable event rather than potential outcome. Life expectancy for slaves in Kami's category was apparently short enough that Marcus could reference it as common knowledge without seeming cruel.
Kami processed that information and filed it under tactical constraints. This body was operating on borrowed time in multiple senses. It had already died once from cold exposure. It was malnourished and damaged. And the system it existed within apparently expected it to die relatively soon anyway.
Which meant Kami needed to either change his status within the hierarchy or escape it entirely. Operating within a system designed to kill him slowly wasn't sustainable even for someone with his endurance.
"The overseers," Kami said, changing subject to gather more immediately relevant information. "How many? What type of Uncos users?"
Marcus made a sound that might have been surprise. "You know about Uncos?"
"Everyone knows about Uncos." Kami kept his tone neutral, not revealing how extensively he understood power systems that these people probably considered divine gifts rather than trainable skills.
"Right, yeah. Okay." Marcus shifted again—nervous energy, probably from discussing people who held life-and-death authority over him. "There's five overseers for the north quarters. Head overseer is a man named Garrett—he's got strength Uncos, not extreme but enough that he can break bones if he hits you right. Other four are regular humans, no powers, but they've got clubs and they know how to use them."
Five overseers for how many slaves? Kami hadn't heard enough ambient noise to calculate the size of the quarters accurately, but based on Marcus mentioning multiple "rooms" and referencing other slaves in plural, probably at least fifty people. Maybe more.
Fifty to one ratio meant the overseers needed force multipliers—weapons, Uncos powers, and most importantly the internalized compliance of the enslaved population. People who believed resistance was futile wouldn't resist even when outnumbered ten to one.
"And Brennick himself?" Kami asked.
"The master?" Marcus's voice dropped instinctively, the way people lowered their voices when discussing those with absolute power over them. "He's got fire Uncos. Strong fire—not god-level or anything, but enough that he can burn down buildings if he's angry. Nobody crosses him. Ever."
Fire Uncos strong enough to destroy structures. That put Brennick somewhere in the mid-tier of power users—not weak enough to be vulnerable to conventional attack, but not strong enough to be considered a serious threat to organized resistance. If Kami had his original body, his original power, Brennick would be an obstacle that could be removed in approximately thirty seconds.
But Kami didn't have his original body. He had this broken child's frame that couldn't see and could barely sit up without shaking from exertion.
The gap between his current state and what he'd need to become was vast enough to be almost funny. Almost.
"John." Marcus's voice pulled him back from tactical calculations. "You still awake?"
"Yes."
"You should rest. Work detail starts at dawn—overseers will come through banging on doors, and if you're not up and ready they'll drag you out by force. First day's usually light duty since you're still adjusting, but they'll expect you moving."
Light duty. For a blind child who'd frozen to death the previous night. Kami wondered what "light duty" meant in this context—probably something that would push this body to its limits while being considered merciful by the standards of an institution built on systematic cruelty.
"Understood." Kami lay back down on the straw mat, feeling cold immediately seep back into his body despite the slight warmth he'd accumulated while sitting up. The fabric covering him was thin, inadequate for the temperature, probably intentionally so. Keeping slaves slightly too cold, slightly too hungry, slightly too uncomfortable was another control mechanism—exhausted people didn't rebel.
"John?"
"Yes?"
"Your real name." Marcus spoke quietly enough that the words barely carried across the two meters between them. "The one you're not supposed to say. You really born with it, or did you just choose it for some reason?"
Kami considered the question. Considered what answer would be strategically optimal. Considered whether Marcus's opinion mattered at all in the larger scope of what needed to happen.
Then he answered with truth because lies cost energy he didn't have to spare: "I was born with it. Before everything else. Before this."
"That's rough." Marcus sounded genuinely sympathetic. "Parents who'd do that to a kid... that's worse than just selling you. That's marking you for suffering from the start."
"Yes." Kami's fingers curled against the mat again, nails digging into rough fabric. "They marked me."
But not how Marcus thought. Not as curse or cruelty. The name Kami Van Hellsin had been self-applied, self-constructed, built letter by letter through centuries of deliberate action. And now, five hundred years later, in a body that had been marked with it as punishment, Kami was being forced to abandon it.
Temporarily.
Just temporarily.
He was John now. John the blind slave. John who nobody would remember or fear or think twice about.
But underneath that forgettable name, Kami Van Hellsin was counting days. Cataloguing information. Planning the first steps of a climb that would make his original ascension look modest by comparison.
The Supreme Gods had five hundred years to grow comfortable. To grow complacent. To forget what it felt like when someone looked at their thrones and saw not divinity but simply obstacles.
Let them forget.
Let them think the devil was dead and sealed and no longer relevant.
Kami would show them how wrong they were.
But first, he needed to survive dawn.