• • The Royal Bastards of Galagan
• March 29, 2026

The Royal Bastards of Galagan (Chapter 11)

The Royal Collusion

“It’s not impossible for an ant to receive empathy from the boot before it is crushed.”

Lady Zohra Sha

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Calcutta Sha

After Poppy spent the night cuddling up next to me like she was ten years old again, I had to figure out what to do. Poppy was safe, and Flavia couldn’t take me out on her best day. But Lemon? 

I warned him, but he didn’t seem fazed. I think the fact that his mother’s Diadect and Diadect Lexus were at war or going to be bothered him more. His mother would be in danger, surely.

Of all of us, he was the only one who looked upon one of our father’s concubines fondly. Hell, I’ll admit, she wasn’t a bitch to him, not like Poppy’s, but it’s not like she did anything but let him down. Where everyone else chose to disappoint us, she had little choice.

Regardless, this all left me with few options. I couldn’t just hunt Flavia down and snap her neck. We were guests on Drota, and while learning teleportation was pretty grand so far, we needed to learn the other powers. Or really…

Lemon and Poppy needed to learn these powers.

I was pretty set, happy with incinerating people in a way that didn’t leave a crater, and Koki was still going on and on about how my lack of empathy was the problem. I had empathy for Lemon and Poppy, so it should work on them if it came to it. That was fine with me, there was no one else like us in the world, and so no one else who needed my “empathy.”

Back to my original point, the big problem… Flavia.

If I killed her, we’d probably have to leave. If I didn’t, she was bound to poison Lemon or try to kidnap Poppy, or worse, lead others here if she hadn’t told anyone already. I needed someone with authority here to do something, even if it was just a promise to look the other way.

I teleported to him just outside our usual block, a place where a fire could be snuffed out in a second. He was in this sort of yoga pose, floating with his legs crossed, his hands together in some sort of zen hand sign. 

“Koki,” I called his name.

“Master Kok-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I need to talk to you about some illegal activity I heard along the grapevine.”

“Are grapevines known for carrying sound on your planet?” he asked me, quickly missing the point.

“What? No, just listen to me.” 

I gestured Koki into the short hallway before the training block, somewhere private where I knew for sure Flavia couldn’t hear.

No one else needs to be bored with the details again. I caught him up to speed on what Poppy told me. Flavia was here, she was trying to make a partnership of some kind with some angry colonists, and it put Drota on the map for the next Galagan civil war, one I may have pointed out, I would stop me and my siblings from taking the throne. I thought it might motivate him to push his fellow masters into pushing my siblings harder. If they didn’t have any stakes in us becoming the rulers of Galagan, they wouldn’t be training us.

When I finished, I shrugged and said, “So it sounds to me like she’s using Drota as a home base for illegal shit and whatnot.”

“Yes, this is… disappointing,” he said as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. I didn’t know when it happened, but I was kneeling down next to him as we were talking, making the conversation more eye-level. 

Even kneeling I was taller than him so it was as close as we were getting.

  “Galagans,” he muttered as if our species were a stain on the galaxy or at least a very big headache for him. “If I wasn’t aware of the good progress your siblings were making, I’d start to think that you Galagans are hopeless.”

So the teachers talked. That was nice to hear, maybe if they sped up we could get back to taking back Galagan and putting these rebellions to rest. A final pitstop at Zao was already on my mind.

But if I was going to be Khan, I would have to learn some diplomacy. Poppy was too reserved once she had to speak, and Lemon had more moral hangups than he liked to admit.

So I let Koki in on my plan that would clean up the problem quite nicely for the both of us. “Well, maybe I can make it up for you.”

He didn’t even look at me in response. In fact, he started walking away as he questioned, “And how would you plan to do that?

That’s when I wondered if he doubted how bad I was, and what I would do. It was always clear that he knew about or could infer my reputation, but it never seemed to faze him. This kind of approach bordered on foolishness, and I had him second-guessing when I suggest, “Why don’t we take care of it?” 

That’s when he stopped, and after a chance to hold his breath, I teleported behind him, showing how I mastered the technique and how I could unnerve him in one act. 

In a whisper to his ear, I said, “It’ll clean up a mess for the both of us.” 

There was a hollow silence to the room as he turned his head towards me. “Calcutta, I’ll have you know that while I deplore this breach of trust the Lexus Clan has conducted on Drota, I will not stoop to such violence.” 

I rolled my eyes and complained immediately, “Are you kidding-?” 

“Such things are so below me that they need not be spoken out loud… by you or me.” There was a weird emphasis there that caught me off guard. “I will not be joining you on any mission at the start of the new day or any day.”

Oh yeah, he was talking weird. 

“Do not seek to find out when this deal is going forth, the proper authorities will handle it.” I had honestly no idea what the proper authorities would even be on Drota if it wasn’t him and the other masters. “We will see each other again at the top of the tower on the said night as we would any other to continue your training.” 

Had I made a mistake in thinking we were safe to talk freely? Regardless, it seemed obvious to me. The plan was to figure out when Flavia’s meeting was, tell Koki covertly, and then we’d take care of it. Maybe there was something to like about this little man, but I played the part. 

“Alright, pipsqueak, I offered, but if you don’t want me to, I won’t waste my time. If they kill one of yours, that’s on you.” I thought that went pretty well, and that I avoided laying it on too thick.

Then I followed Koki into our usual training room.

Before I looked around, I would have said that Koki was giving up on me and trying to teach me healing.

But then I looked around.

There wasn’t a dummy in the middle of the room this time. This time, there was an actual man, with blood in the corner of his mouth and on his sleeve. At first, I wasn’t confused.

I knelt down and started looking for signs of an attacker, but Koki was quick to tell me, “I had him brought here.” My side-eye couldn’t have come quick enough. “I need to test you, to see if this training is even worth doing.”

“This is—”

I cut him off, having figured out what he wanted me to do. “I don’t want to know his name,” a comment that made the man’s eyes creep open. 

He was old, sickly, and a Terran with markings over his skin. Looked like a Cameloanian, if I had to guess. They and humans looked the most like Galagans. Cameloanians just had these line markings on their faces and from… personal experience, I knew that they had them all over their body.

Sometimes they have pointy ears, but not always. This one didn’t, and that’s all I needed to know.

“I would recommend knowing his name, it may help you,” Koki suggested to me. “Empathy is key to healing—”

“And I need to have empathy for who I want to heal.”

“Empathy allows you to learn the skill. If you don’t have it, you won’t learn anything, and you’ll burn your siblings alive.”

When I turned and looked him straight in the eye I looked for any sign that he was lying. This was too convenient and random that there was suddenly this caveat. I had to have empathy to learn? What the fuck was that? Sounded like bullshit.

“Sounds like I’ll kill him either way, you’re dooming him to death.”

Koki smirked in a way that I was growing all too familiar with. “To think you care, and you’re wrong. He’s doomed to die, either way, his lungs are infected, being eaten alive by alien parasites. The damage has been done and he’ll die in weeks, or you could use the bare minimum with the empathy you need to rid him of the parasites. He’ll live another year, get the chance to say his goodbyes.”

I looked away from the both of them when I asked, “And if I fail?” I couldn’t have told you why I did that.

“Then he will be put out of his misery,” Koki said with a nonchalant nod of his head. “It’s a win-win situation for him.”

I turned and looked down at him, the way he heaved. He looked old but that could have been his illness, it was impossible for me to tell.

“Do you deserve it?” I asked him, as I moved my hand over his body, sensing for his cakra. It was like searching for life in a corpse.

The man’s eyes fluttered, as if in confusion, and I added, “Do you deserve to be cured?” He hesitated before slowly nodding his head.

I forced the thought into my head, it wasn’t terribly genuine, but it also wasn’t incorrect. “We all think we deserve our health, don’t we?” 

I tried thinking of Poppy and Lemon, to try to emulate this feeling I keep being told I lacked. It helped me in my struggle to try and find his cakra, but it was so faint. 

I couldn’t remember any time Poppy and Lemon were ever sick like this. Lemon was bedridden after taking a city-destroying blast to the head, but being concussed wasn’t like this. I’ve never seen anyone dying, like, slowly before. No one I cared about any… 

Maybe, maybe there was one. 

There was one who I could say I didn’t dislike. 

I thought of Lady Takeda, in her bed, always sick, always wanting to hold her son and being too weak to do so. Her illness made strong men crumble in some way or another. The Diadects aren’t known for their sympathy, but even their little lords and ladies paid their respects for her pain.

Even Kita Khan took time to read his books with her rather than his study from time to time. You’d almost think she was his favorite concubine. 

On Galagan, especially in the royal walls, there was one person I knew who could say she was well-liked by most, and that’s who cancer decided to make its next meal.

I didn’t know if cancer and parasites worked the same, but with those thoughts, I found his cakra much quicker. Even though it was faint, it beat with his heart, and it vibrated at the same frequency as mine for a moment. 

Before I was letting my cakra wash over the doll. I was trying to surround it and heal from the outside in. Instead, I found my cakra slowly, little by little, creeping through the holes in his sense of self. It would slip into his nervous system as it were his bloodstream and make its way to the parasites.

I could see them with mind’s eye, where they had eaten their fill in his lungs, breathing the man’s air and threatening to make a meal of his organs. My cakra surrounded them, and then I just… concentrated…

“I’ve… I got him, what do I do now?” I asked Koki. This was precise, surgical even. There weren’t wounds to automatically heal, or parasites to kill, and my cakra was just holding them.

“They should burn,” Koki told me, and quickly fell in sync with the man’s cakra, immediately dealing out a, “Hmmm.”

“What? What?”

“No, let’s see how you do, do you see what you’re doing to the parasites?”

As I struggled to keep the focus on holding the parasites still, I focused my mind’s eyes, really focused on looking at just one of the parasites caught in my cakra. That’s how I saw how little progress I was making.

My cakra was feeding the parasites.

“Whatever you have inside your heart does not appear to be enough to save this poor man,” Koki said as if he sympathized, but it was a taunt. It could be nothing else but a taunt.

That’s when I did something I wasn’t proud of, and I panicked. 

Fear of failure shot through me, and I heard it through the man’s cry of pain. The parasites were getting bigger, and this man was getting hurt because of me. All I was trying to do was relieve him of fucking parasites and my lack of sympathy, empathy, or whatever the fuck good people are supposed to have, helped the parasites.

I found myself placing my second hand over the other, as having two hands connect to his cakra was going to make a difference.

It didn’t. 

The parasites began to eat again with greater vigor, quick enough that this guy surely felt it as it was happening. This wasn’t an improvement, this was totally fucked, and it was my fault.

I didn’t… I didn’t want this man to suffer, I had no reason to. 

In this moment of rage and failure, I made a risky decision to not hold back, to let my cakra run through him. If he died at my hand, he would die a quick death as most did.

My cakra didn’t wash over him like with the doll, my cakra took a quick path, following the trail I had already made. When my cakra reached the parasites, I hoped for the best and expected them to eat him faster for the sake of mercy. Instead…

Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

… they exploded. They were burned to a crisp, and burning so hot and so fast that they punched holes through his lungs, and out his chest, leaving smoking holes. 

His eyes opened wide with pain, and before he could scream my hand went to his neck to fix my mistake.

Crack.

There was nothing useful about the pain he was suffering. He couldn’t learn from it, he wasn’t going to come to fear or worship me, he was just feeling pain because sometimes that’s all you can do.

So I granted him a rare mercy after my failure.

I expected Koki to say something, to say I was a lost cause, I had heard it all before. Instead, he remained silent, stroking his chin, as he slowly walked behind me towards the door. 

“He’s in a better place,” he told me, “you tried and you failed, but truly, you tried.” 

If I didn’t know any better I’d say he was trying to comfort me. I didn’t need comforting.

“Yeah, well, it didn’t mean nothing, I just put him through more pain for no reason.”

“No reason?” he repeated to himself. “Well, no reason then, no reason at all.”

“And he didn’t go to a ‘better place,’ he didn’t go anywhere,” I started mouthing off. I was being a brat, not that what I said was wrong, but I was lashing at over my frustration with this training. “All that bullshit about there being some kind of heaven or paradise, it’s stupid to believe in that just to make yourself feel better.”

Koki stayed silent for a moment as if he was contemplating what he would say next to me. I realized after he spoke that he wasn’t thinking about what I was saying at all.

“I don’t believe in such things either. Be seeing you.”