He’d barely spared the men a glance before he’d left.

One way or the other, there would be consequences for them trying to hunt him down. And if he was being entirely honest he didn’t want to add on to them. They weren’t at fault for this, he was. If he’d killed both of the men at the start instead of freezing - instead of pussying out as most people would say, he would have been safe. Him and the girls would have been safe.

Now he had the Ginte tribe sending out hunting parties made up of the enslaved tribes they ruled over. He hadn’t only fucked himself over, he’d most likely caused the deaths of dozens of people and ruined the small amount of peace the girls had. He may have only known them for a few days, but he rather liked Chloe, and Juli was at the very least a good hunting partner.

I hope they are fine, I really don’t want to think about what those crazy fuckers would do to them.

By the time he’d realized he was almost halfway home he had sped up to the point where he was nearly shattering stone beneath his feet as he ran. Each step shook the earth beneath him, and caused the trees to shake as he ran past them. The fact he could be easily tracked didn’t matter, the fact he was very likely being followed didn’t matter, all that mattered was getting the girls somewhere safe so he could deal with yet another problem he’d caused.

But through it all the forest was quiet, deathly quiet. He hadn’t run into anyone else as he ran, barreling through obstacles like a rabid bear as he made a flattened path of destroyed foliage and trampled earth towards the ravine. He hadn’t noticed anything off until he began to feel his heart speed up even faster, sweat beginning to form on his back. It wasn’t fear, not like he’d felt when Juli had snuck on him, it was…

Panic.

He’d begun to feel it a few seconds before, but after leaping through a bush instead of over it he felt it clearly. It felt like a panic attack, or at the very least the beginning of a nasty one. His hands balled into fists as he gritted his teeth in an attempt to force it away. He’d made it another few steps before his panic was explained in a way even an idiot like him could understand.

Light. Brilliant, eye blinding light surrounded him on all sides.

What?

He recognized pain before the voices, he felt rage before he understood why.

He felt fear. True fear. Fear and rage mixing together until all he was left with was the feeling any cornered animal felt. Helplessness.

He was being attacked. He was being hunted.

He’d never lost his pursuers, they were bait, meant to draw him out. Meant to make him lower his guard towards actual threats. He’d assumed that everyone tracking him were baselines, mortals, but the Ginte had sent Warriors.

They’d sent powerful Warriors.

He was surrounded, covered in a dome of pure light. He could feel as the light burned him, scorching away his hair and the first few layers of skin of his entire body. It felt like he was on fire, like he had stepped into a raging inferno. He couldn’t see anything other than his charring arms and the light surrounding him, so he did the only thing he could do; he jumped.

Launching himself with all the strength and will of a cornered animal he broke out of the barrier with the sound of shattering glass following him. He’d barely gotten out long enough for the spell to begin dissipating before he was hit with something from behind, sending him careening into the dirt below.

He heard laughter, he heard voices in a language he didn’t understand.

But all he could feel now was rage. He’d been hunted, ambushed, and nearly killed, and they were laughing at him… like it was just another pit fight.

“BASTARDS!”

With a roar he was on his feet, and with reflexes the Warriors hadn’t realized he had, twisted around in time to shatter a spear that had been launched at him - eerily similar to the one that Juli had thrown at him before. This one was moving slower, not much slower, but enough for him to make it out. For a moment he was worried he’d been betrayed, but the force behind the attack was far weaker than the one Juli had thrown, so he instantly discarded it.

If Juli had thrown that spear he wasn’t sure he would have been able to react in time.

For roughly half a second there was silence. The two Warriors who had ambushed him were out in the open now, one barrel chested man with several weapons ranging from throwing spears to hatchets either on his back or in his hands, and the other a slim woman with glowing white hands. It was obvious to him now who had thrown the spear, and who had casted the magic.

It didn’t require much planning or forethought on what to do next, there was a rule that had been cemented everywhere from video games to real life battles between Altered forces - always target the mages and healers first. Even halfway outside of his own mind he locked onto the mage first in an attempt to take her out of the fight early, and she knew it.

He dashed towards the mage first, readying an Ignis spell of his own as he nearly shattered the sound barrier while rushing towards the now panicking mage. Backpedaling as fast as she could without stopping her own cast, she began to yell out towards her partner.“Raki! Ill nes pah mor!”

I didn’t want to do this. Abrehi

He had to give her credit, she was far more nimble than he’d expect of someone in the process of casting magic, let alone while trying to run away from someone chasing her down. She had nearly gotten an entire ten meters away before he was in front of her, bringing a black carapace covered fist down upon her skull.

I didn’t want to do this! Ignis

He was only an inch away from shattering her skull into fragments when he sensed more than noticed the man having rushed him in an attempt to save his partner. With a bellowing rage he attempted to bring a hatchet made of mana-bark down onto Mark’s skull.

You could have just left us alone! Foca

Mark barely spared the hatchet wielding psychopath a thought as he spun his free hand around, firing the Ignis spell directly into the man’s open mouth. For just a moment before the half-spell detonated he thought he’d miscast it, and for just a moment he was almost relieved that the man would survive.

Then the detonation occurred, with fiery flame and the blast waves of a military grade bomb the man’s head was incinerated to ash, sending small skull fragments flying, and tearing the rest of his body to bloody cinders.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

You should have just left me alone!

He heard the woman scream in horror just as she finished casting her spell, almost the exact same time his carapace-covered fist shattered her skull into a pulpy, fragmented mess, sending gore everywhere around and over him. Her body took another step, almost like she hadn’t realized she’d already died, before falling backwards onto the ground.

Why didn’t you just leave us alone?

The forest was quiet now, real quiet. Other than the sound of his labored breathing and the sound of bubbling flesh he couldn’t hear anything around him save for the breeze shaking the tree tops.

I killed them.

He hadn’t been expecting the ambush, he hadn’t been expecting anything or anyone because he hadn’t expected any Warriors to be traveling so closely behind the trackers. He’d thought that the people being sent to track them down were just pawns, scapegoats, he’d never expected the Ginte to travel behind them in an attempt to catch him off guard after dealing with them.

Holy fuck they’re all dead.

He couldn’t stop staring at the corpses as his mind ran a mile a minute.

What if they already found the girls then killed them and decided to finish off the one out hunting? They were strong enough to nearly wipe me out when they ambushed me, Juli would never be able to fight and protect her sister at the same time.

His stomach began to churn as bile filled his throat.

What if they didn’t kill them and took them as slaves?

He could feel a burning pain emanating from his stomach.

Did these two have families? Were they even Ginte, or more people enslaved into doing their work?

The nausea grew to be too much and he began to vomit onto the ground. The choking, acidic taste of bile, puke and everything he’d eaten today came up at the thought of all the possibilities, at the thought of the girls being dead.

He kept going until he was empty, and long after he was done he stood there as he dry heaved into the dirt. The pain never stopped though, and he figured out why after the nausea refused to go away even after his stomach was emptied.

Is that… blood?

His vomit was full of his blood, and the pain from before wasn’t fading.

The spell.

Looking down to his stomach he could see a large circular hole the size of his fist gushing blood, having covered most of his abdomen and knees with gore.

“Oh fuck.”

He tried his best to cover the wound with his hands, to slow the bleeding long enough for his natural regenerative abilities to seal it themselves, but it wasn’t working. He couldn’t feel the burning sensation that came with the regeneration, he couldn’t feel anything.

“What the fuck? Why am I not healing?!”

His body was being flooded with sensations from the Symbiote. Hot, then cold, vibrations so strong he was worried they’d shake one of his teeth out, but through it he also felt something new; fear.

It was afraid, it was panicking just as he was.

The weakness came then, smashing into him like a hammer. He fell to his knees, holding the wound closed with all the strength he could muster. The blood loss was taking him, and quickly. He didn’t know any healing magic, he’d never expected to need a healing spell so soon, hell he didn’t even think he’d need the Ignis spell, he just thought fire magic was cool. He hadn’t expected anyone other than the best of the best of his world to be capable of hurting him, let alone some fucking cannibal in the middle of the woods.

He felt regret, regret at not having learned more spells, regret at not learning how to control his new form better before he was sent here, regret at being weak enough for some weak shit-heel from some tribal village was able to kill him, and that they were most likely going to try and kill the sisters… maybe even succeed.

They’d die, thinking he’d abandoned them, sold them out, or had already been murdered by the Ginte scumbags.

He wouldn’t die here, he refused.

“Not… Like this!”

He shoved the Symbiote into the wound like a gauze, and although it began to slow the bleeding, but it didn’t stop.

I know you can change shape buddy, just try to… try to block the hole, do something - please!

The creature buzzed with understanding, before he was hit with one of the worst pains he had ever felt. The Symbiote began to morph, and shift, breaking away at the debris and removing broken bones entirely. He felt- no, he knew what he was going through was the equivalent of open surgery without anesthesia.

Make the pain stop, someone please make the pain stop!

When the pain became too much, when he began to lose his sight and neared the edge of unconsciousness, the pain disappeared. It was like a switch had been flipped as he went from suffering horribly to being almost entirely numb throughout his body.

He hadn’t realized he was screaming until he was coherent enough to hear it.

Oh Goddess, thank you.

The sound of his ragged gasping echoed around him, reverberating throughout the forest. He tried to move, but with the blood loss he was barely even able to move his head. But he knew he couldn’t stay here, he couldn’t. The sisters were still in danger.

I gotta go- gotta… get-

Within the span of seconds he was incoherent, and within a blink he was gone.

----------------------------

I forgot how much I detest meaningless paperwork….

While Mark had been fighting for his life, living off of scraps, and destroying cannibals, Lilliha had been doing something she viewed as far more terrifying.

Taxes.

After realizing that the taxation system was a tad more thorough than simply “I made five thousand gold this year, as stated in our agreement here is one thousand of it.” She was ‘forced’ into the laborious process of researching, learning, and doing her students' taxes for the year, and his taxes for several years previous where he had forgotten to do them.

To say that she was beyond furious that what she assumed was going to be an hour of time wasted turned into two days wasted was an understatement.

“Income tax, sales tax, solaking medical treatment tax, if I didn’t know any better I would assume some minor deity of taxation invented this system!” As she spoke to herself, not for the first or fifteenth time this day, she glanced back towards the textbooks, guidebooks, research papers, and tax papers that belonged to her charge that she had collected over the days gone by. She couldn’t understand why the system was so complicated, it was bloody TAXES!

Let alone the fact that they required proof of income simply to accept those taxes, which she understood and admired the fact that they made their citizens prove their funds weren’t criminally gained, she simply couldn’t understand why there were so many hoops to jump through simply to pay his government.

It’s like they get off on torturing people with this, I should send Vakta here to learn some of their tricks!

She had thankfully managed to… finagle her way through several years of income. She had falsely proven half of his current funds were legally gained after several hours of persuasion of the local workshops to provide her with fake employment information, had done several more hours of paperwork to ensure it was all correct, submitted it, then gone back to somehow trying to get the last two years done properly.

The boy had been relatively ‘lucrative’ with his gains in the last few months, so she had tried to find a workplace that would hire someone of his birth and knowledge for the amount he’d earned in an attempt to falsify the reports, which had failed. After giving up and deciding to simply use mind magic on someone so they’d do the paperwork for her she had nearly been caught when half a dozen men had burst into the overweight man's office she’d charmed in an attempt to arrest him for embezzling.

The fact he’d done it and gotten caught wasn’t shocking, she had gotten carried away in her annoyed state after all, but the fact he hadn’t even finished printing the paperwork off before they’d gotten to him was.

“How the hell am I going to clean thirty grand if they react so harshly to a measly twenty?!”

She had barely managed to clean around a fourth of the funds before running out of ‘years’ he’d been working. The boy had luckily been working ‘under the table’ for most of his adult life, which made things easier, but she hadn’t expected such a hostile reaction or she would have split the yearly earnings far more evenly.

I wished to clear all of this before I dragged him back as a reward for getting through his test, but I don’t even know if I am going to manage to clear half of it.

There were certainly easier ways for her to gather money if she simply wanted to give him some spending funds. She could sell information on how to make certain low-tier spells or artifacts and make herself, and him of course, the richest pair in the world overnight… but she didn’t need nor exactly want such an easy course of power. If she wanted to be at the top she could take it by force in less than a fortnight, but the point was simply to give the boy an easier way to spend his rightly earned money.

She almost regretted choosing this over giving him some form of artifact or weapon, it would have been easier by far and certainly more enjoyable an experience to see him sob all over some toy she bought to sate her curiosity.

Why in all of the Abyssal Planes are these damnable ‘pits’ not considered legal workplaces anyways? If foolish mortals want to beat themselves bloody over pennies, let them! It entertains everyone else anyways, seems foolish to ban it and lose out on a lucrative method to gather taxes.

Of course, she’d already gone through this argument in her mind a thousand times over the last few days.

Most of the worlds beyond didn’t bother banning most things unless they were simply too dangerous to leave unchecked, especially if they were beneficial to the Rulers themselves. Nothing from brothels, combat games - lethal or otherwise - intoxication parlors, whatever. As long as it generated taxes it was generally allowed so long as they didn’t go over the general limit, harm innocent members of society, or harm the ones at the top of the hierarchy.

I understand banning dangerous magic, that’s a given, I will never understand banning brothels. How else are your soldiers and champions going to relieve stress after a campaign? Assign them ‘stress relievers’? At that point you’re just hiring harlots under a different name.

Her gripes with the odd laws of the country aside, she had thought about other ways of getting the funds cleared legally.

‘Cleaners’.

She had heard talk of them around the city, criminals who would ‘clean’ the cash for legal use.

She had still wanted to do it all legally, but she was running out of options and time. She hadn’t planned on the boy being out for so long in the first place, but she needed time to get these damnable taxes done, and the funds he’d earned cleaned properly.

To the Abyss with it, I’ll just track down one of these ‘cleaners’ and force them to do it for me for free. It’s not like they’ll refuse.