"I don't think you will impress the board by throwing the champion under the bus, Marcus," Noah accused.
It all made sense to Robert. Marcus needed to cover his ass and pin the blame for this massive invasion on someone. And in the cult attack, he couldn't even guarantee his own safety. Not only did he fail again but got derailed by Noah.
He didn't want to know what would happen if he hadn't summoned his teacher.
They left the administration building.
"Caroline wanted your help," Noah said. She is having trouble with her troll."
*
*
As the winner of the combat teacher's ranking in the tournament, Noah had more resources allocated to his class. He was also under a lot of pressure to accept more students.
That pressure was threefold. These students wanted the bragging rights of being taught by the best, they wanted a share of these resources, and they wanted to get closer to either Robert or Amanda. Or both.
The first was a consequence of the young master syndrome. These faction scions couldn't admit they weren't served by the best.
But it also meant that those who openly opposed Noah were banished to the shadows. They lost a lot of reputation and clout.
Noah was in high spirits, walking with his back a little straighter. But he was also overworked. He authored a lot of research papers about the expedition and the insights they gained from it, especially the destruction of the Gravity Slime Caves.
He explained a few details to Robert on the way to their private gym. It was one of the benefits of having trained the first and second place. The gym they were supposed to return back to the Academy after the tournament ended was now theirs at least until the next year.
"I need to explain how we escaped the shockwave," Noah said. "It will be impossible without disclosing at least some details about your talent."
"What do they say about it? How much about it is public knowledge?" Robert asked. "You can say that my talent is long-range teleportation. Does this work?"
"Yes, I think it can work. Thanks, Robert. I needed confirmation, you know, because of the oath."
"Sure."
They entered the gym, with no assassins in sight.
Caroline was sitting on her deviant minotaur's lap, eyes closed, meditating.
As they approached, she opened her eyes.
"Hey… Robert! You came!"
"Sure. I had a morning exercise and a visit to the administration. Nothing serious."
"Wha–"
Noah chuckled. "Caroline, why don't you tell Robert what's your problem?"
"Yes, sure! So, the troll is really rowdy. It doesn't want to obey me at all."
"Did it attack you?" Robert asked.
"Yes but we were bonded, so he felt my pain. And I had his talent of regeneration. Nothing serious."
"Okay. How may I help you?"
"You have all these creatures, and your minotaurs are learning music, and–"
"You know I basically brainwash my monsters, right? And your approach to taming is radically different. You will get over this and bond deeper with your troll. But I have fried the brains of many monsters to do what I do now. Are you sure you want me to mess with the troll's mind? It might break."
The creature was a rare specimen. A very rare and hard-to-capture creature, because they were nigh-suicidal. If this one died, Caroline wouldn't see another before it was too late.
Robert continued, "And I am afraid that you might have some issues due to your symbiotic bond. I might find it impossible to make changes to his mind without affecting you."
"What if you use your spell on both of us?" She asked.
Robert winced. "Caroline, that's… I don't want to use it on people I don't intend to kill. It's a huge violation of their privacy."
It was the ultimate violation of privacy. Because Robert could make the person become someone else entirely. He could even turn people into obedient copies of himself. Without the evil clone shenanigans.
"Sorry to intervene," Noah said. "But Robert's ethics aside, I cannot allow him to use that spell on other students."
"Can you just peek into his mind?" Caroline asked. "Without making any changes?"
"I can."
Caroline used her artifact to change the active poke… monster.
She kept focusing.
*
*
Amanda waited in a sitting room, waiting to see a groom candidate. Yes, she was having an oriental-style marriage meeting. Antiquated as fuck. She couldn't believe her Granny would put her through this. Was she testing her resolve? Or just milking the competition for what they were worth?
It was such a cliché. The flower sitting alone on the mountaintop may be beautiful, sublime, and desired by many. But it was also lonely, bored to death, and wishing to see the world up close.
"Would you abandon Samson and go away with me?" Robert had asked her.
She knew what he meant. He viewed her ties with the megacorporation as a burden, not a boon. He had this wanderlust, this desire to go where nobody had ever gone before. To him, that was his reality. The man who spent 99% of his time where nobody could go. It chilled her heart. How lonely did he feel, trapped in there? A king with no subjects, a master of a place where no living things could go without dying. The few times she was forced to spend several days in the liminal void, she felt like dying would be better than doing that. Yet, he had already spent around fifty years in there since ascending from mortal to one star.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
She was nineteen. Robert was four times older than her. Yet he had the energy of a child with the wisdom of an old man. That was one of the reasons she admired him. The stoicism felt so manly.
So why was she forced to go through these marriage meetings? She had no intention to marry any of these suitors. Everybody knew that. Yet, they went through the farce.
The ritual was simple, yet had many steps. It started with a faction showing interest in marrying one of their scions with her. Then they presented their case, on how this marriage would benefit both factions. Next, Titania gave her verdict, on whether the proposed groom was acceptable, by her standards.
If approved, the groom then requested a meeting and offered a gift to the bride-to-be's family. Given the level of the factions presented, the gift was often something nobody could pin a monetary value on. Once the gift was accepted, the meeting was scheduled. Should the meeting not occur, the gift should be returned.
The door opened. Two powerful Fire Archs, father and son, entered along with Titania and Jeremiah. They took their spots in silence. Then, Titania started the conversation. Amanda tuned them out, staring at an empty spot above and to the left of the groom, letting her eyes move slowly from there to another spot on the wall to the right, without ever going over the guy's eyes. She nodded, she made a blank smile when necessary, and she replied to questions with empty and noncommittal platitudes.
They displayed the gift to her, and she showed a little bit of interest. It was a rote ritual, a mechanical dance she performed for the sake of her family. Amanda couldn't help but show a little disdain for the gift.
Robert gave her a world with more than seventy passages.
Did this Fire brat have anything to compare to that? No. Get the fuck away. But she couldn't say that. It would defy the very purpose of this meeting. Why was Titania doing this? To get these gifts, yes. But also to forge connections and gauge interest. When she inevitably rejected the groom candidate, Samson would offer generous partnerships and advantages to the dejected faction. Doing so bound them as allies, and spread the influence.
It was all a convoluted way to make trade agreements. These faction leaders were playing the long game. Yes, Amanda was refusing to marry into them but what's to say that the situation wouldn't change in ten or twenty years?
Hells, in twenty years, Amanda could have a daughter who would be suffering in her exact place. And these faction scions were basically immortal.
Another angle was that they stepped on a lot of toes during the tournament. If not for the Empress taking the reins and guiding the aftermath, they could be at war instead of doing boring marriage meetings.
The time came and she politely rejected the guy, giving him a longing glance that kept a candle of hope alight. If he believed in it, it was on him.
*
*
The troll tried to attack Robert the moment it came out of the poke..t habitat. He evaded with grace, placing a slow spell on the monster and using haste on himself.
“Any detrimental effects from the slow?” He asked Caroline.
“No, I'm good,” she replied.
“Mind Blackout!” He shouted. The troll's mind was so one-track he felt like trying to shoot an arrow at a cardboard target… but the target was sideways.
He managed, through brute force. Once inside, he had the creature sit down on the floor.
“Caroline?”
“All good!” She gave him a double thumbs up.
Robert's experiments with the Minotaurs paid good dividends. He knew more about mental patterns and how to move them around. But the troll's mind was all hatred and destruction.
Adding the imprint of Poochline’s love for people, for example, was like trying to balance a crystal wine flute on the edge of a sword. Not much room to work with.
He made a copy of the troll's mental patterns, once again using the VHS tape metaphor to represent it in his intellect fortress.
With a backup in case things went awry, he tried to find the part that recognized Caroline. Once he found it, he had to translate the troll's feelings into something people could understand. This step took longer than just doing a bulk download of the entire mind.
What he found shocked him. The troll was behaving hostilely to Caroline because it wanted to make her submit. And it wanted her to submit because… it wanted to claim her as his female.
Yeah. This pipsqueak bundle of violence wanted to mate with Caroline. Robert squinted and frowned.
“Is anything the matter?” She asked.
He looked at the girl with brows creased. “Do you know that your troll wants to…”
She looked away. “I do.”
Robert had a moment of insight. “Oh! So, that's why you were in such a hurry to get me to make the change.”
She didn't make eye contact. “I would do a lot for my friends but…”
“Is this a bit too much?”
“Yeah. I drew a line in the sand right before that. I'm not a freak!”
“Nobody in this gym will ever make that claim.”
Caroline nodded slowly. “Thanks. But if you can't fix him, I don't know if I want to keep it.”
That alleviated some of Robert's worries.
“You said he was making you feel some of its aggression. Is the same true for the other instincts?”
Caroline froze, which was all the confirmation Robert needed.
“I know what I have to do now.”
He couldn't mess with the troll's mental patterns at his current skill level, backup or not. But he could use another affinity to solve the issue.
Since he was controlling the troll's mind, it was trivial to allow his own Life essence to change him into her.
Or remove the creature’s genitals altogether.
Robert made a copy of the troll's body structure before continuing. Then, once he had it, he removed the organs, leaving the troll with a smooth finish.
Then, the troll's talent kicked in and restored his body.
Robert frowned and cursed.
It was a passive talent that granted the user its namesake. Regeneration. Robert had to either make the changes all at once or not at all. Worse, the troll's regeneration was at best of supernatural quality. The more he messed with the monster, the greater the risk of some nasty deformity.
Robert paused to think.
A talent granting Supreme-quality healing would be ludicrous.
Someone like that would be immortal from day one.
Yeah. No way such a thing existed.
*
*
The gorel didn't even see the human leg that pulverized his head. The guy grabbed the corpse and went back to his cave. “Honey, dinner is served.”
The woman in the cave stopped her meditation.
“Har, har, you think you're so funny. Hey, why are your ears so red, Freddy?”
“What? Are they now?” Freddy Stern, the employee of the month, rubbed his ears.
“Maybe someone is bad-mouthing you,” the woman said with a snicker.
“Happens all the time,” Freddy sighed.
*
*
Robert explained the conundrum to Caroline. The troll still wanted to mate, but neither his mind nor his body was easily changed.
“Just do what you can. I won't blame you if the troll dies or becomes a vegetable,” Caroline said. “I want to become his friend, not his bride. Eww.”
“I think I'll try something. Wait here,” Robert said and engaged his primary talent.
In the liminal void, he dove into his mind palace and created a replica of the troll with a copy of its mental patterns. He dominated it and started making the changes he thought would work.
The issue here was that he was imagining everything, including the results. If Robert thought he'd succeed, he would, and if he believed he had to fail, then bye-bye troll.
He had no way to tell whether the changes would stick. He needed more brain matter to accommodate higher concepts the simpleton troll couldn't grasp. All the gray matter it had was taken by basic instincts and a few learned behaviors.
Said behaviors were so basic and ingrained into his skills that he couldn't mess with that either.
After spending a couple of months in the mind palace researching a solution, he decided what he had to do.
*
*
“Okay. I think I got it.” Robert said.
“W-What?” Caroline stammered. “So soon?”
“Yeah. Bring the troll back.”
She took it out of the pó... rtable habitat. Robert dominated the troll's mind again.
Using Life essence, he started to increase the size of the troll's head. He had to do minute amounts of change because the Regeneration power would erase any unfinished deviations from the template.
Little by little, he enlarged the monster's cranium and related structures, giving it a prominent forehead. Robert had to frequently stop, make Caroline take control again, dive into the deep void to refill his essence, and then come back to keep working.
It was late afternoon when he found enough room to add a bigger prefrontal cortex. He stimulated the troll's stem cells to multiply and migrate to the empty space, differentiating themselves into neurons.
He basically gave the troll cancer. Controlled, brain-making cancer.
These new neurons had few synapses. He then downloaded Poochline's friendly pattern, weaving it with Caroline's image. He added the concept of people and made sure it would recognize the rest of team Actus as well.
It was late in the night when he finished. The pygmy troll now looked like one of those cartoons that depicted smart people with big heads and prominent foreheads.
He nudged Caroline awake.
“What? Is it time to take over again?”
“Yes but not for me to recharge. Try and see if he will stop sexually harassing you.”
She sneered at him for the joke. Caroline used her talent on the troll.
“Woof! (It's me!)” The troll barked.
At least it was friendlier now. Robert thought that this was a minor and acceptable side effect of shoving more dog into a troll's brain than the thing had of the troll itself.
That is until the troll started to dry-hump his leg.