Episode 7

“Okay. Okay. Okay, please. I don't want any trouble.”

Now was the part where I put my body behind her and my gun against her head. Only I didn't have a gun, I had a sword, and I wasn't even tall enough to reach her head. Not without help, at least.

So what I did was sneak up behind her and put the tip of the sword against the small of her back.

It was, well, almost the same thing. Almost.

“On the move. Remember, I don't want to do this. I don't want to. If you cooperate, everything will be fine.”

It was important to remind them, too. Hammering it like a nail. Until it got into their heads. Until it stayed there firmly.

That's what we did, we got going. Plague tried to follow me.

We had gone over the plan before we went in, but apparently not enough. I clicked my tongue.

“No, don't follow me. I told you; you have to keep the hostages under control. Stop. Now.”

I had to insist, but at least she listened to me for a change.

How well she would do her job was another matter, but I had to trust the thing to a certain extent. It was a two-person team. Well, 'person'.

The girl took me in front of what I had to assume was the vault where they kept the money, since she didn't say anything. I didn't bother to ask to make sure.

The fact that she had stopped was proof enough for me.

She was too afraid to stop just like that, to resist in a futile way. If she had somehow raised the alarm without me noticing, that would be another story. She'd have something to pin her hopes on. But now she was at my mercy.

Besides, I didn't need to ask her anything for another reason.

It wasn't a steel door weighing tons, a virtually impenetrable chamber, but neither did it look like something I could break down with my body or my sword. I didn't need to. I was a ghost, after all.

I went through the wall as if it were no big deal.

Most of my body, at least.

Not the sword, along with the hand I was holding it with. That was a bit of a problem.

But my head had gone in far enough to see all the bags of money. I didn't actually see money but what else could it be? Anyway, I let go of the sword so I could move to the other side. Even if that woman took it from me immediately, what was she going to do with it? Stab Plague a few times? I'd already tried. Good luck with that.

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Now, of course, the problem was that the money bags wouldn't pass with me either. Maybe it was possible, but I hadn't learned how to do it yet. Maybe. But it did me no good to think about what I might be able to do in the future.

Only my present circumstances carried weight. My problems.

Plague was supposed to be dealing with the hostages, but I could ask her for help and she would surely be able to rip the door off. I wouldn't, though. I could manage on my own. Probably.

So I punched the door. It didn't give way like it was made of cardboard or like I had super strength, now. In fact, the progress was negative.

Some kind of blue energy appeared and sent me flying backwards into the wall.

And it hurt. Boy, did it hurt, all over my body. I had been tasered a few times before. With the voltage at a level, shall we say, not sanctioned by the regulations.

This? This was ten times worse.

If I had experienced it inside a human body, I suspected I would have died before I became aware of the pain. That fast.

Magical defenses, of course.

God, my head was going to explode.

I tried to stand up and my legs failed me. I didn't even have legs, technically. Well. No muscles, at least, and yet that shock had hit me so hard. Bad luck.

Nothing but bad luck. Some shit definitely wasn't changing a damn bit.

Crackling.

At first, I thought it was a thing of the defense system I had set off, that it was still going on and something even worse was going to come crashing down on me. Then the bottom of the door came off the hinges and the wall.

Plague's work, of course. I could see her legs through the hole, as well as her dirty dress.

No, that belonged to the princess, whatever her name was.

It was hard to... Eh, I couldn't think of the right word. Maybe I had never learned it. My education hadn't exactly been the best. I learned more behind bars than with my ass on a chair, to be honest.

In any case. I had a hard time... Differentiating? Differentiating, maybe, what I saw with what really was. A tangle of tentacles whose species humans called simply Plague.

It wasn't fair to the person who had been the princess, but it was hard to avoid.

“Thank you... Grab a few bags.” This time, I was able to stand up. But the pain wasn't gone. The electricity yes, the disability yes, but the pain was as if I was still being electrocuted. I was already dead, so I couldn't die, surely I couldn't lose consciousness either. I couldn't evade the pain in any way.

Plague nodded, didn't ask silly questions, didn't repeat herself to me. I no longer had any doubts about whether accepting her help had been a good decision.

I hoped that wouldn't change in the near future, at least.

Just because I could stand up didn't mean I was doing well by a long shot. I staggered out of the vault. Partly due to the weight of the bags of money, but only partly.

The bags of solid gold or whatever it was they used in this world, but I didn't think it was or could be that different. Everything was pretty much like in my world, only in the past.

Except for the magic, of course.

Magic and creatures like my new friend.

We left the bank, running through the terrified hostages. Not before retrieving the sword I had stolen from that soldier on the floor. Yes, I was wrong, no one had touched it. Seeing us pass by, more than one of them gathered the courage to flee. And screaming at the top of their lungs, as if we were coming after them with a blood-stained axe or something, like a horror movie villain.

They got somewhere, though not without tripping over their own feet and falling headfirst into the ground more than once, probably.

We didn't get very far.

I fell to the ground, me and my bags of sweet, sweet money. There was someone on top of me. A woman in armor. What, had she fallen out of the sky, on top of me? Really?

And of course, it couldn't have taken her a few minutes longer to come to the rescue.

Another proof of my incredible luck.

“You're some kind of ghost,” the woman on top of me said, sadly not in a fun way, “and you look like you're nine years old.”

She couldn't even imagine how much my life had changed from one moment to the next.

“Tell me about it. Whore,” I spat, as I tried to free myself. Get up.

“That mouth.” She shook her head. “Looks like I'll have to give you the education your parents didn't while you were alive.”

Oh boy.

Episode 7: FIN