Adyr watched Kharom's growing agitation, a trace of amusement flickering behind his cold gaze.
It was familiar—eerily so. A memory surfaced, sharp and vivid: a nearly identical confrontation at a dinner table, not too long ago, back on Earth. That time, it had been Cannibal sitting across from him.
Different worlds, different contexts—but the patterns were the same. Both men had once sat across from him, confident, reactive, emotionally brittle beneath a shell of power.
Cannibal had clawed his way up from nothing, surviving in a radiation-scarred wasteland where weakness meant death. He was someone who had never known structure, never been given a chance, always crushed by those above—until one day, power fell into his hands. He embraced it desperately, recklessly, trying to reshape his identity through domination. The result was power-drunk chaos, masked as strength.
