The Warrior of the Kappemansha

In the deep wetlands of Belevil Kadu, all kinds of anisapiens lived and thrived. Every creature had a clan, a name, and a place in the order of things, and all of them existed inside a web of customs and quiet rivalries that had been there longer than anyone could remember. It wasn't a peaceful place exactly. But it had a kind of balance.

Junta was a warrior of the Kappemansha clan, and for a long time that meant something. He was big for a frog, loud in a way that filled a room, and genuinely fearless in a fight. When there was prey to chase or a threat to meet head-on, he was always the first one moving. The clan respected that. They fed their children on stories of warriors like him.

His closest friend wasn't a frog at all. Nakleel was a praying mantis from the Ontihula clan, and the two of them had been inseparable since they were young, since the days when Junta was still a tadpole and Nakleel was barely a nymph, and the worst thing either of them had to worry about was who could catch the bigger dragonfly near Mungaru Pond. They were different in almost every way. Junta hunted with speed and noise, throwing himself at prey and trusting his strength to finish what his recklessness started. Nakleel barely moved at all. He'd sit still for so long among the leaves that you'd forget he was there, and then with one clean strike, it was over. They used to argue about it constantly, in the way that only good friends argue, where neither one actually wants to win.

"Quantity is not the same as skill," Nakleel would say, looking over Junta's pile of beetles and flies with that calm, infuriating patience of his.

"And patience is not the same as victory," Junta would reply, grinning.

They'd laugh and go home, and the next day they'd do it all over again.

But things shifted, the way things do when the world quietly stops cooperating. The wetlands grew harsher, food got harder to come by. The insects that once practically wandered into Junta's path started disappearing before he could reach them, too cautious, too fast, or just gone. His method of hunting, which had never required much subtlety, started failing him in ways he couldn't easily fix. Nakleel adapted to this but Junta couldn't. And slowly, quietly, the gap between them started to show.

The whispers started at clan gatherings. He heard them when people thought he was out of earshot, and sometimes when they didn't care whether he was or not. Too loud. Wastes energy. A warrior who comes home empty handed is no warrior at all. He could stomach the criticism from the elders, mostly. What he couldn't stomach was Jagalganti, whom he'd thought about marrying for years, and who'd stopped meeting his eyes somewhere along the way without ever saying why. He noticed the exact moment it changed and spent weeks trying to convince himself he hadn't.

He tried copying Nakleel's style once. Crouched in the tall grass near a dung beetle, held himself completely still, waited longer than he'd ever waited for anything. It almost worked. He leaped at the right moment, he really did, but his bright red skin caught the light and the beetle saw him coming and drove a horn into his side before escaping into the brush. He limped back to the pond that evening with nothing. Nakleel was already there with a fat beetle hung neatly from a twig. "You'll get them next time," Nakleel said, and Junta said he'd let it go out of pity, and neither of them believed it.

It kept getting worse. An elder looked at him during one gathering, looked right at him in front of everyone, and said strength without results is only noise. The laughter that followed was the kind that stays with you. That night Junta went to Nakleel and told him everything, all of it, the shame and the fear and the thing he hadn't admitted to himself yet, which was that he was terrified of being cast out. Nakleel listened without interrupting. Then he offered a solution so simple that Junta almost laughed: they would hunt together. Junta's strength to hold the prey, Nakleel's precision to end it cleanly. Two hunters doing what neither could manage alone.

It worked perfectly. Their first shared kill was a dung beetle that never had a chance. They were both smiling when it was over. The problems started on the way home, when Junta told his clan the story and quietly moved himself to the center of it. He said the kill was his, said he'd shared part of it with Nakleel out of generosity. Meanwhile Nakleel told his own clan the truth. The Ontihula elders praised him for it. Unfortunately the version of events that spread through the forest was one where Nakleel hunted under Junta's protection, dependent on the warrior's mercy.

When Nakleel found out, he confronted Junta and said, tell your clan the truth. Junta said he couldn't, that it would destroy him. Nakleel said that an honor built on lies was already destroyed. They went back and forth like that, and somewhere in the middle of it Junta said something he couldn't take back, that Nakleel's pride was worth less than his clan's hunger, and Nakleel walked away and never hunted with Junta again.

Junta hunted alone the next day and tried to prove something. He found a massive beetle, stalked it the way Nakleel would have, actually got the approach right. But he'd forgotten that Nakleel had sharp pincers to finish a kill cleanly, and he didn't. The beetle twisted under him and drove a horn through his hind leg. By the time it was over, his hind limb was severed on the forest floor while Nakleel, who had heard the scream from somewhere nearby and come running anyway despite everything that had happened, kept the beetle distracted long enough for Junta to climb a tree and survive.

Nakleel rushed back and informed Junta's clan, and they carried him home. Sympathy lasted about a week before the truth about his lies caught up with him and the elders made their judgment. He wasn't exiled outright, but nobody called him a warrior anymore. Jagalganti married someone else before the dry season ended. He started surviving on scraps, the leftovers that other hunters didn't bother to take. And somewhere in there, the sadness hardened into something uglier. He watched Nakleel start a family, watched the Ontihula clan treat his old friend the way the Kappemansha used to treat him, and the bitterness settled into his bones so deep he stopped noticing it was there.

---

A shaman lived at the edge of the swamp, alone, in a hut that most animals walked past quickly and without looking directly at. He was old and strange and rumored to practice things that the clan elders didn't have a name for. Junta had walked past that hut a hundred times. He started stopping in front of it sometime after Jagalganti's wedding. Then one evening he went inside.

He didn't decide all at once. That's the thing about choices like his, they don't usually arrive as single moments. They accumulate over time, driven by desperation. The shaman talked about power in a way that sounded almost reasonable at first, like philosophy. Strength can be taken, he said. Life can be stolen. Junta pushed back and kept pushing back for weeks, through a dozen visits he told himself were just curiosity. Then one night the shaman named the price. "A blood sacrifice......the younger the better." Junta left without answering and went home and lay awake until morning.

He thought about his leg. He thought about the laughter at the gathering. He thought about the way Nakleel's children ran toward their father every evening like he was the whole world. The anger that had been sitting in his chest for so long it felt like a part of him just... swallowed the last thing in him that was still saying no.

One gloomy evening during the solo feast, a young tadpole approached him near the food pile, small and timid, asking if he might share a little of his portion. Junta smiled and said of course, come with me. The child followed happily as kappe children were very gullible. During the walk, while the child held onto his hand, he thought on and on, should he or shouldn't he. After reaching his hut, while the child was eating, Junta raised his walking stick and stood there for a long moment with his arm in the air. Then he brought it down.

He carried the unconscious child to the shaman's hut that night. The ritual circle was already drawn. The shaman pulled the cloth back from the child's face to inspect her, and that's when Junta saw the pendant around her neck. Jagalganti's family crest. Small, silver, worn smooth at the edges. His stomach dropped. But the knife had already moved, and it was already over by the time he registered what he was looking at. The shaman handed him a bowl of dark liquid and said nothing. Junta received it with trembling hands, realized it was too late to turn back, and drank. The bowl dropped. Something came over him, his eyes turned red, and then he picked up the knife and opened the shaman's throat and stood there in the hut with two bodies for a long time, not really thinking about anything.

---

That night Junta's sleep was filled with nightmares. He woke before sunrise and lay still for a moment, trying to understand the feeling in his body. Then he sat up and looked down and his leg was there. Whole, strong, like it had never been touched. He flexed it slowly, waiting for pain that didn't come. The memories of the night before came back in pieces and he clenched his jaw and pushed them away. Power always has a price, he said out loud, to no one. It sounded hollow even to him. But he picked up his walking stick and stepped outside.

Something had changed about the world, or about the way he moved through it. Every sound was sharper. He could hear beetles under leaves, could feel vibrations in the ground he'd never noticed before. He hunted early, found a large beetle, leapt and came down on it so hard the shell cracked on impact. He stared at that for a second. That shouldn't have been possible. He hit it again and the shell came apart completely. He laughed, surprised, and started eating.

He was still crouching over the second kill when a familiar green shape dropped from the branches and landed beside it. Nakleel. They looked at each other without speaking. Junta watched his old friend's eyes move slowly down to the restored leg, then to the shattered shell, then back up.

"You're walking," Nakleel said.

"Told you I'd recover."

"That leg was torn off, Jun!"

Nakleel didn't say anything else right away. He crouched and looked at the beetle shell for a long moment, touching the edges of the crack with one pincer. When he spoke again his voice was quiet in a way that wasn't gentle at all. "There was a sacrifice last night. A tadpole from your clan, overheard from the search crew." Junta kept chewing. "The elders searched all night." Nothing. "The shaman is missing."

Junta swallowed.

"You went to him."

It wasn't a question. Junta put down the beetle and looked at his friend and didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer. The forest felt very still. Nakleel's voice dropped lower. "It was a child, Jun." And then, after a pause that lasted too long: "It was Jagalganti's daughter."

Something moved across Junta's face then, a flicker, brief and quickly buried. He wiped his mouth. "A life is a life," he said. "We kill insects every day. This isn't so different."

Nakleel stared at him. "You've lost your mind."

"No," Junta said, and he almost sounded like himself for a second, like the frog who used to race Nakleel to the pond and argue about hunting methods and mean none of it. "I've finally gained something." He gestured at his body, the leg, the hands, all of it. Stronger. Faster. Whole. "You could have this too, Naki."

Nakleel went still.

"You have two children," Junta said quietly. "You can always have more."

What happened after that happened fast. Nakleel lunged and drove one of his pincers into Junta's eye, which should have ended it, which would have ended it for anyone else. Junta stumbled backward but didn't fall. He reached up and took hold of Nakleel's arms, very slowly, almost calmly, blood running freely down his face. He was smiling. "You should have aimed for the heart," he said.

Nakleel tried to pull free. He couldn't.

Junta drove the blade into his abdomen. Once. Then again.

When Nakleel went limp, Junta held him closer. "My friend has truly died," Nakleel whispered. Junta looked at him for a moment. Maybe he was searching for something in himself that he thought might still be there, some last piece of the frog who had played at Mungaru Pond, who had argued about beetles and laughed about it and meant none of the arguing. If he found anything, he didn't show it. He tore the mantis in half. And bit his head off.

The wetlands of Belevil Kadu were quiet that morning. But not the way they usually were.