Two crashed through the floors, wood cutting into his shoulders and his skull as he propelled himself forward with a singular aim. To kill whoever it was that had been manipulating him. The floors passed by as he emerged into a darkened room.

If that was what the room actually looked like. With a Mind mage involved, it was likely that what he saw wasn't what was there. A single woman stood there, her back facing them. The Elf. Was she the one responsible? Mind magic was the Fae's specialty, but he wouldn't put it past the Elves to have a few of those among them too. The humans had managed to do it.

The Elf turned around as he jumped towards her, his compatriots following after him as they lunged at the woman together. There would be only one chance at this. The injuries they had sustained till now were far more significant than they should be. Two could feel wood stabbing into itself with every movement, courtesy of his attempt at jumping through floors.

But his daggers would land true.

A volley of daggers preceded a cloud of dust, hiding a club within. Ten had died just crossing the floors. Two hadn't even noticed it. But it was done. The attack was made. The Elf would die.

Or they would.

The daggers approached the Elf's face as she turned around, her hair touching the daggers…and shoving them away. Two's heart skipped a beat as he saw his entire attack countered by someone simply turning their head. But it wasn't over yet. Two watched, his heart beating at a hundred kilometers a minute, as the cloud of dust covered the Elf.

A loud bang resonated throughout the room, reminiscent of metal clanging against each other. And Two's heart ceased beating as he fell to the ground, his knees finally giving away.

In the end, they had been too late, too slow to detect what was happening. That must be why they had targeted One and Five. A fog lifted off his head as the Elf stepped towards him. The situation had been constructed.

The Mind mage had boosted his arrogance, his belief that he was the one that should lead. And thus forced him to make foolish decisions. Even as he died, the questions would not leave him. Would One really have detected it? The man had been killed by an arche- closing his eyes, he felt the realization dawn on him.

A possibility he should have considered from the get go.

The archer had been One. There weren't eleven archers, just One fighting the rest of them. The Mind mage had changed their perception, forcing them to kill each other. Playing them against each other like toys.

The Elf's hand brushed against his chin, lifting his head up as he felt stared into a pair of icy blue eyes with a tinge of red. A pair of eyes he would recognize anywhere.

The eyes of the Line of Blood. The eyes of the Mad King. The eyes that had killed him.

sc

Nathan

Nathan sat in the office staring through his mind magic. There was little point in keeping up his magic now that the assassins were already dead. But they couldn't' just abandon it. The blood he had spilled, the pain and desperation he had felt in their minds, remained in his memory. And he could not deny his part in it.

The palace had boosted his defenses, and the Princess had made them more susceptible to it with her power. But he was the one that had tricked them. Had them kill each other, lure them into traps that led them to their death.

Just hours after he had refused to do that.

At the end of the day, he couldn't just not defend the palace. The Countess had left him with a responsibility. But it still pained him to do it.

There were few that understood what it felt like to go into someone's mind, to see their desires, their reason to live, and then twist it into something that aided you. This group was easy. There was too much that they hid from each other, too many suppressed emotions. Not to mention, they weren't particularly moral.

That helped. That was why he could go through with this. Why his conscience did not balk when he had their leader try to kill his own comrades, boosting his paranoia.

As the Princess had predicted, the leader had figured out that it was an illusion within seconds of falling into one. And started fighting back. Of course, she also knew how to fix that.

The leader had been afraid of his comrades betraying him, especially the one called Two. And once she attacked him using Two's element that Pulsie detected, it was just a matter of making things unfold. If they had better mental defenses, then perhaps they would not have fallen into a trap.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Or maybe they would have fallen anyway. The Princess' power was powerful, editing their very DNA to make their natural defenses vanish. Nathan hadn't even known you could do that.

"Are you gonna stop moping about?" Pulsie asked. "What are you even thinking anyway? I can't read your mind these days."

That was because he didn't want the plant sneaking around his mind. The Countess didn't mind, but he found it…uncomfortable.

"Just wondering what kind of person I am." he said.

"That's nice. If you're lucky, you'll figure it out and become an Adept quickly." Pulsie replied.

Nathan scoffed. "As if."

"Don't put yourself down, you were just a couple of weeks behind the Countess. If she hadn't broken through, you would have been the youngest Master of the millennium." Pulsie said.

Nathan wasn't sure why he was even going into this. "I am also a few months older than her, so she has a lead of a few months. Not weeks."

"Oh, fine. But look at Vanessa and Isa, both of them are still in the Journeyman stage. And they had the special island. Imagine how much your cultivation would be if you'd had that island."

Nathan narrowed his eyes. "Why exactly are you buttering me up, you plant? What do you want?"

There was a pause where the plant did not reply. Nathan just waited. Even if he didn't like to admit it, he was a Mind fae. Figuring people out was literally in his blood, a part of his very existence.

Reading minds was more natural to him than breathing. In a very literal way. After all, he could stop breathing, but he couldn't stop reading minds.

"…what is your opinion on reading plant minds?" Pulsie asked.

"Why?" Nathan asked. "And how sapient are these plants?"

"Not at all!" the Countess' familiar yelled back. "I just want you to try to manipulate the Silverbirch trees around Deadre."

Nathan narrowed his eyes. Reading non-sapient minds wasn't that problematic for him. At least they couldn't feel much if he did something accidentally.

Extending his senses outwards, he felt minds around him. The mind of every bird, every plant, every insect appeared before him. And, of course, every human. Then there were the trees. Just beyond the city, farther than he had extended before, he felt them. A massive, gigantic presence that wasn't visible at all until he looked for it.

Are the trees telepathic?' he thought, extending his mental tendrils to the orchard's edge.

There was no reaction. Even if the trees were telepathic, they did not seem to possess any sapience. There wasn't even any emotion from them. Piercing their mental defenses, he found them exactly as he had expected. A hive mind of emotionless, thoughtless husks that couldn't even be called sentient.

The feeling of giddiness radiated from Pulsie as he opened his eyes, unable to stop himself from reading the plant's mental outbursts.

"What did you figure out?" he asked, looking around him. As was normal with these sessions, there was a huge crowd of animals around him. For some reason, they loved his mana, flocking to him as soon as they sensed it. That disturbed him more.

Of course, he had been careful not to actually manipulate them, but what if there was something happening to them that was not within his control? Even if he tried lying to himself, he still couldn't say that he knew everything about his power. The power he inherited from his grandfather, the butcher of continents.

The birds flocked to him, chirping as they sat on his shoulders. Nathan couldn't even shoo them away, their mental defenses were so low that he would feel guilty just doing that. Not to mention how happy they were just being around him.

What about Mind and Poison was attractive, exactly?

"Are you done thinking about how bad it is that birds love you?" Pulsie asked, his joy being replaced by sarcasm.

"What, feeling jealous?" Nathan quipped back.

"Yes, here I am making a major breakthrough, and you are worrying about birds."

Nathan ignored his complaints, going straight to the point. "What major breakthrough?"

"Well, I was thinking about how influential the Druids were. And how it didn't make sense that they didn't have their own method of communication. I even asked the Empress to send me records of-"

"Pulsie, could you please get to the point?" Nathan answered as a bird tried to pluck his hair from his head. Thankfully, he was a master and far too powerful for that to work, but it was still annoying. At least, the animal frenzy should calm down in half an hour or so.

Looking down at the mouse that had somehow managed to not only sneak inside, but was also rubbing itself against his shoes, he couldn't wait to tell the maids that it was time for pest cleaning.

"No. I spent a lot of time figuring this out. The least you could do is listen to it!"

Nathan rolled his eyes, but relented himself to listen to Pulsie talk for the next few minutes.

"So, I was going through history, and I couldn't find anything that the Druids could have used as their communication. The only thing that they spread around was the Silverbirch trees, and they were mostly ceremonial." Pulsie said.

"And you just figured out they weren't?" he asked.

"Yes!" the plant replied, his excitement returning. "After looking at you changing whatever the assassins sensed using your magic, I wondered if the Silverbirch trees could do the same."

"And they can." Nathan replied. "Does that mean you can announce things using the orchard now?"

"Yes, that should be possible. Not just that, I can announce things across the county, wherever the Silverbirch is. The trees are just empty shells to you, but I can actually use those!"

What? That-someone couldn't just use someone else's mind. Nathan hadn't heard of anyone doing anything even remotely close.

"Yes, it's a Silverbirch thing, I suppose. I can use the other trees to increase my telepathic abilities."

Nathan thought about the consequences of this, what ramifications Pulsie’s new abilities would have.

"So, you are saying that you are able to use every single Silverbirch tree as some sort of listening station?" he asked. That wasn't that big a power. There were a few Silverbirch trees scattered around that would be useful for spying, but other than that, it was pretty much useless.

"Oh, spying is a stupid thing to do with it! But I can use this to process so much more information.”