Reminder:
-Spellwork is supposed to be like computer programming. This means that wards are literal firewalls and ‘picking’ those wards should be reminiscent of hacking… Though since I know very little about hacking, I will gladly review any suggestions that are given.
Announcement:
Since the arc is wrapping up I would like to announce something you may have figured out already: my schedule has gone to hell lately. To that end I am going to have to delay any chapters after the end of the arc for quite some time. I originally planned to release biweekly until I was either finished with the rewrite or December, whichever came first, but that has looking increasingly impossible.
Now it looks like BKR will need a hiatus after chapter 40. I can promise a chapter to celebrate a year since I first added a chapter, but the bonus chapter for 250 followers I kept promising will be on hold until then at least.
I apologies for this, but my mental timeline for the rewrite was not just impractical, but naïve and trying to add biweekly or (after year’s end) weekly releases would likely mean that I would still be writing it into say… June.
Once my schedule gets sorted I hope to rewrite a chapter every 3 or 4 days, meaning I can get a good solid start into it before I come back with new chapters, but that is still up in the air.
I can promise one thing though: neither BKR nor I are done yet.
In any case, thank you for your attention thus far and I hope you enjoy the chapter.
Chapter 38: Weight
“Gorith’s judgement they are a busy lot.” I quietly observed.
The guards were practically performing a grid search for me, kicking down doors and cordoning off areas as they went from house to house. Originally I planned to mix in with the crowds and just wait a few days, but my noon they had seemingly mobilized the entire city guard and even the nobles to look for me.
It was not an efficient method, considering how large the city was, they would be lucky to cordon off already searched areas. That said, once they got the message to everyone that they needed to get back to their homes, the streets emptied out and thing became much for difficult for me.
Fortunately, there were a few places that gave the guard trouble. Primarily the slums, but the nobility had something approaching a sewer system and the guard were obligated to search there too.
With a few unfortunate souls being sent in there, many unfortunate guards fighting criminal elements in the slums, and groups like the nobles and Sisterhood insisting that there was no need to search them, I actually pitied the guard a little.
The fact that the sewer actually led out of the city had made it tempting, but I had business to attend to still in the city. Specifically, I was standing near Jorgenson’s mansion observing one of a handful of patrols wandering around the otherwise empty streets.
The mansion was still protected by its powerful wards, but it had been placed in a stand-by mode instead of lockdown. The primary difference being permission, as when a ward was in lockdown, no one but the ward’s recognized master, or someone with a special device, could open it. Of course, since said device had to be created by the ward master anyway, the mansion was effectively sealed off from the outside.
How long I have inside before they thought to check it? Or more importantly, could I get inside?
I had a few talents, but picking wards was not one of them. Instead, I preferred slipping in and then dodging the ward’s magic and turning it against its masters instead. Since picking the wards apart and getting personal access required an exceptional level of mental ability, it was extremely specialized work.
I grimaced and made sure that no one was in the immediate area who would sense my magic. It took me a while to walk the around the area, but I was reasonably sure that there were no mages who were going to notice my little break in.
Only a single fool dared to bother me while I was walking the perimeter. Apparently he liked my new appearance a bit too much, so I helped him curb his desires.
Said new appearance was partly because of the guards chasing me and partly because, like any other mages, I bulked up when I expected to get involved a magical battle. Magic needed fuel, calories to be precise, so I started by buying a pig.
The single most useful idea that had ever entered Bella’s mind was mana roots and its utility really showed itself here as I killed and absorbed the pig. Stopping to cook the whole thing would have taken far too long and attracted attention, so mana roots played a key part in helping me eat as the guards emptied the streets.
Combined with some avotatoes and some rats I killed in an alley, I had enough to completely rebuild and refuel myself. As a result, I now looked like an actual young woman, with some rather discomforting curves as a result of my bodily manipulations. Though I was still fairly short as I did not want to go through a clumsy stage as I was trying to get away.
My previous trend of always looking younger than my actual age was reversed and I now looked… not ugly. I would not call myself a beauty, even if I modified myself into an absolute one, but I had a body that apparently attracted the idiot enough to make him attempt something stupid.
I left him stripped naked in a side street and made sure that he was not going to wake up for a bit. It was a bit of a risk, but he had a flask which provided enough alcohol to ensure that he at least smelled drunk. I would have castrated him as well, but that would have involved time, mana, and calories that I simply could not spare.
Especially as I was going to be taking fairly large risk simple by using a spell to make him stay unconscious for a while. If a mage found him and connected the residual spell to either me or the nearby mansion I would be in a bit of a fix. Regardless, I complete my walk and was reasonably certain that no mages would interrupt me, provided I finished reasonably quickly.
I knew I could be wrong of course, but I needed to get inside and unlike the prison wards, I could fight these off as long as I was mentally ready for it, so I decided to chance it.
I entered the outer layer of the wards the same way I did the evening I ran from the Sister’s temple, by walking in. The wards had the side entrances as public areas and therefore ignored me, but after that came the hard part, actually picking them apart.
Each layer of ward defense could be linked to another, connected like a house of cards. If any of the individual layer of defense were removed in the wrong way, the whole system would collapse and activate the defenses. It was actually not that difficult to parse out each layer of security, but then you had to remove or somehow bypass it.
Each layer of the ward’s defenses could be gently pushed aside if they were loosely founded, like a camp ward that I set up for personal protection. Lady Rapier’s friend had snuck up on me back near Entrials by pushing my wards just enough to slip by them without letting me notice. What that man did was more mana manipulation than ward picking, but it was still a very hard thing to do unnoticed.
The wards in front of me, but as I used my mana to lightly press through the outer defenses to try and map out as much as I could. Interlinked wards were more powerful and complex, but also more vulnerable to someone picking through them. Solid wards were more annoying to create and manipulate, but were harder to trap because they were simpler.
As anyone who tried to pick a ward could see every spell interlinked into the layer they were testing, it was always an annoyance to find solid builds. Thankfully, the problems caused by using solid builds meant that they were horribly impractical for things like doors.
This left me with a complex series of spells that made up the entrance wards. For right now I was just mapping out the security for the door, but then I would normally have to guess at the security behind it. Since I had been here before and watched the wards at work I had a slight advantage, but there were always traps in ward designs for security reasons.
Since the wards were so powerful and interlinked, I only had 3 options, get permission, systematically pick my way in, or use free-form method. Naturally, wards were designed with defenses to prevent such things as simple convincing it that you were allowed everywhere so, baring someone actually showing up and giving permission, there was some picking involved in each method.
The way I usually got in, whenever I had to pick or bypass any type of ward, was pretending I was someone else. It was something of a talent of mine and impersonating other people’s existence was something that I somehow understood. Sometimes it was just a blood magic derivative, but the wards had to recognize someone’s presence somehow and if they did not use a magical device, then I could try and copy a person’s presence instead.
Though in this particular case, I was already added to the ward’s internal list as a ‘guest’ from the last time I was here. Given that the ward master had died at that time, I doubted anyone had time to change my status and the wards were incapable of learning such things unless special spells were added to them. I just needed to try and activate the command to let me in as a guest once again.
That said, I still needed to make a big enough hole in the wards for me to access what the servants usually just pulled a rope for and that meant that I had to systematically map out and create my spell to pick the ward.
Each part of the ward I told my picking spell to avoid or attack would change the ward itself as it reacted to the spell. Of course, since normal spells were all constructed in advance of actually casting the spell, it meant that I had to predict all of the chain reactions that would result because of my spell and counter them in advance.
It was similar to the game baduk in my old world, where one had to ‘read’ the board and effectively the other player’s mind to predict their moves. If I do “X” then he will respond with “Y” and I will push him at “Q” and so on. The problem was that using regular spellwork, was doing that in increasingly complex situations.
A half dozen basic moves and countermoves could be easy enough to plan out, but once the wards got big enough it could become not dozens, but hundreds of moves to plan out in your head. By the time a ward was large enough that it surrounded a city, it was labeled as unpickable because of their enormous and powerful defenses.
“Got you.” I found the spell permission that would deactivate the wards and unlock the door and started to trace how I would get to it.
In my previous life I had been desperate enough to use free-form picking from time to time, but I would really, really, rather not do that right now. Free-form spellcasting could be useful, but it was always dangerous and I did not need to take that kind of risk at the current moment.
It was… different, now that I thought about it. I was used to fighting to survive and I was downright desensitized when it came to being chased, but I was not used to taking such risks on my own for luxuries…
Wait, was that what my sex was, a luxury? I did not need to be a male in order to keep living, so technically it was, but it was also a part of my identity. I was a male in my head and not being a male in actuality was wrong. Fundamentally wrong on a level that startled me.
I blinked as I lost track of the wards for a moment. Where did that line of thought come from? Stones, that felt like it was between 2 other people, neither of whom were me.
Shaking my head I decided that is was likely Bella, trying to mess with my head again. Though I was a bit surprised that she even bothered, considering the weight of over 5 decades of jaded existence versus her less than 16.
I dove into the interlocking spells of the ward and concentrated. I decided to use a rushing version of a pick spell, which counted on speed and surprise to deactivate the local ward security. It was a bad idea to try when the ward master was home, but it was useful when just dealing with wards.
It took some time to set it up, but I when I finally cast the picking spell, it activated the ward’s guest permission in moment and heard a click as the door into the mansion unlocked and swung in.
It was had been an annoyance, but it was worth it as I could now close up the small hole in the wards that my picking spell had created when it entered. With any luck, that alone would turn away investigators who thought to look at the mansion as a possible hiding place.
I would be the first to admit that this place was not the best place to stay, but how long I could stay here depended on how the guards decided to search. They had immediately sealed off the city and demanded an accounting at all of the inns while sending people back to their homes. This meant that I could only hid in areas where nobody would notice me, like the slums, or an abandoned building like this one.
If the guards tried to keep the lockdown going for too long people would start getting violent, unless they planned to cart water to everyone in the poorer parts of the city. Given what I knew about the guards, I had an idea that no one expected that and I could already imagine where the contents of chamber pots were being dumped while the guard barged from house to house.
If I could dodge the guards for a couple of days, I figured that the poorer areas of the city would be trying to stage a revolt while the nobility and outside traders would become restless. I was someone who murdered an extremely unpopular man and it would not take too long before they would grudgingly let people start moving through the city again.
By that time I also planned to be a male, and so settled into my new body that even spells designed to figure out what you looked like in the past would not be able to figure out who I was.
I walked into the mansion and mentally tested the wards to see how they were tied into the various ornaments. If I could steal some of them, it would help a fair bit with ensuring that I was well provided for without needed to steal from whoever I found wandering the streets.
Unfortunately most of the gold and silver decorations carried magic in them and were tied to the wards securely with solid connections. Not that all the gold and silver, even if I melted the ornaments down and recast them myself, would fail to attract their own kind of attention.
I took my time and went to the room that I had been waiting in previously. The guards would have already have trampled through the room and I was unlikely to active any traps, but I still hesitated before entering the room where Jorgenson died.
The moment only lasted long enough to check for possible traps with my senses before I entered the room.
It was suitably opulent, rather unlike the rest of the rather gaudy halls. A large hardwood desk to display Jorgenson’s wealth, and some opulent chairs that I knew from experience were remarkably uncomfortable. It was a well planned meeting room, if you did not notice the large bloodstain on the stone floor.
I shook my head and looked around. The room only had a single obvious entrance or exit, but Jorgenson had to get into the room somehow. If he was in the room before me, than the poison would have had to been extremely fast working. He had not killed the entire servant staff, which was not uncommon occurrence when a mage realized they were poisoned in their own wards.
From what I overheard the guard talking about that night, Jorgenson’s body had still been warm and there had been no sign of a food try of any type. The servant had said something about eating separately when Jorgenson had special guests, but that had been at the edge of my hearing.
It was obviously poison because there were he had died in his own wards and it was simply regarded as a practical impossibility to kill a mage literally in the center of their power. Stones, I was the only person I knew who ever figured out how to kill someone in their own wards without poison or overwhelming force.
Looking around and testing the wards it did not take me too long to find the hidden doorway, but getting through it was another matter entirely.
The wards on the hidden door made the ones protecting the actual house look simple. Technically it would take less mana to break through, but the design was so much more intricate and complicated that I was worried if I would be able to get through.
It took time, far too much time, to finally figure out how to beat the wards. In the end it was a combination of brute magical force and timing. Though that makes it sound simple, when I checked out a nearby glass panel, I realized that it took me far longer than intended.
I entered close to noon, but now most of the day was gone and I did not have too long until the sun started to set.
Then, as if to add insult to injury, I opened the door and found it ransacked already. There was even an unsealed stone box, sunk into the floor of the room, off to one side. Other than that, it looked remarkably similar to the office I just left. The only major give away that this room was special was the bed chamber that I saw connecting directly to it off on the side and the runes that wound around the room near the ceiling.
They were almost all scratched out or outright destroyed, but many of the runes seemed to be focused on power or control. There were no ‘obey’ runes, but some of the rune remains showed combinations that came close. There was a wooden desk with a small ledger looking book that I noticed, but I made sure to look around my feet at the scattered papers too.
All the various scattered papers had basic, if fairly valuable, information written in them. Things ranging from the prices of local goods to crop predictions and recent lawless activity. It was all interesting, but I did not see his research notes scattered around.
Looking back up at the ledger, I walked over and to the desk and tested for magic or more wards in the area, but found nothing. Just as I started to reach for the ledger though, a voice called out and I felt like I could have jumped out of my skin.
“Looking for something?”
I heard the wind whip as I turned around as fast as I could to face the relatively young woman who was standing at the doorway to the private office.
3 paces away, with no obvious weapons in her hands, she was a mage, more powerful than me, 12 or 13 circles. No iron that I could tell. Her stance seemed arrogant and at ease. Her body was not developed like a fighter would be, the way she stood was straight, but there was something else, that seemed off to me.
Then her breasts caught my eye. “Should you really be here while breast feeding a child? Though, that level of power suggest a noble, which brings up the question of how much you actively encourage lactation in the first place.” I then took a closer look at her and clinically dissected her with my eyes, trying to guess how much of her generous curves were just bone and muscle build.
The woman kept a completely-in-control face. “You must be the little escapee that everyone is looking for. This is hardly the first time someone dissected me with their eyes, but it is the first time they were so medical about it. Well, since my time in the Sisterhood anyway.”
I felt a shudder come up and I suppressed it. “What makes you think that I am the escapee? Or that, if I am, I will just stand here and talk to you while you call reinforcements?”
“The twitch was something of a giveaway, but I have no interest in calling the guard on you. You are a loose end like that.” Her face was… still a mask of indifference, but I got the feeling of sorrow behind it.
Loose end? “You make it sound like I did something to interrupt your plans.”
That was when she grimaced, “Partly. I do confess that I would rather you not have gotten dragged into this, but the servant got greedy.”
I felt my mana pulse at that statement. Had she just admitted to arranging the killing of Jorgenson? Why? Then I reassessed her and realized that I likely knew why. The woman was dressed in an expensive dress, had lots of mana, and was fairly attractive. “Oh? Greedy servants usually rank as major loose ends you know.” I asked casually, trying to get a better feel for her.
I also carefully stepped forward, I could likely deflect her first strike, but a drawn out battle was not in my favor. She saw me move and stepped forward herself, before I felt the wards move. They closed behind her, forming a solid barrier for a moment before reopening. Stone-me-in-a-boat, she had the wards under her control.
“Yes he was, which was why he was found dead after a mugging.” She said it coldly, as if detached, but if that were the case, why bother telling me? Was she bragging? “Just after he told me of the back-up ward control and the guard about how you were another victim of that thing that died in the other room.”
Abruptly I stopped moving and concentrated, there was only a handful of ways to survive while in someone else’s wards. Of course, most of those were impractical in the extreme, such as being mage powerful enough to take on both the mage and the wards at the same time. Other options included getting someone else to destroy the ward anchor, shielding yourself and running for your life, or poison.
Again, nerve gas or anything like that would be highly impractical because of my lack of experience or experimentation with it. It looked like she could ward the room again if I tried to run and I was not strong enough to fight both her and the wards. Thankfully I did have one way to beat her, but I really did not want to do that.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“So you came here all alone to what? Drag me back to The Tower?” I stalled. Using a trump card was a tricky thing and if I mistimed it or there was someone else here, my spell would be useless.
The woman shook her head lightly and tisked lightly. “Normally I would tell you to stop stalling, but the truth is that I do feel for your predicament. Besides,” she looked at me like she was trying to burrow into my head with just her eyes. “I already told the guard that this place was clear, that way there would not be any other loose ends to tie up.”
Assuming that she was telling the truth, I would have a fairly good chance of escaping. “You keep saying loose ends, you could have just asked me to kill Jorgensen after I got what I needed from him instead of causing this much trouble, for both of us. Why did you even want him dead anyway?”
The woman went very still at that. “He was a disgusting perversion of the human species, something that I am sure both Conbra and Prometheus cursed in equal measure. Why do you assume that I even needed a reason to kill him beyond that?”
“Because, between your bearing and the way magic power flows out of you, it is obvious that you are a noble. For someone like you to actually go to such lengths like this is unlike nobility. Your kind always hates directly attacking others, it means too much personal work.”
A small smile ghosted across her face for a moment. “True… Tell me young lady, what would you do for your honor? For your pride? I did what was necessary to protect my house, but that piece of filth pushed FAR beyond where he should have. FAR beyond where he had any RIGHT to.”
There was so much emotion behind that statement that it took me some time to parse it out. In the meantime, I just prompted her to continue with a curious look. The spell I needed to have ready also needed a bit more time to finish.
“Oh do not give me that look child, you know what type of disgusting creature that thing was. Originally I just wanted his slime of a servant, his enabler, to kill him and then die conveniently, after all, he was not just about to stop. No, he already had his hooks in you too, I am sure.
My spell was unique, but I was familiar enough with it that it was already prepared in the back of my mind by the time I responded. “You are assuming a lot there miss, how would you know if something like that happened? Jorgenson and I were professionals about most of it.”
“Professional? Most of it?” She looked disgusted, no, revolted, at my statement. “That thing was a sack of disgusting pus on this world only because someone forgot to pop that zit of a creature at birth. What part of it deserved to live? What part of it could you possibly have seen as anything worth its existence!?”
“All I had to do was give him a disease that caused impotence and hold the cure over him” I replied blandly. “Besides, I understood him and that made him far safer to work with than many others. He tried to get me to give in to his advances of course, but I refused him every time.”
That shut her up for a moment. Clearly she had at least partly expected to find a fellow victim of Jorgenson’s. “Were you actually going to cure him afterwards?” She asked quietly.
“Does it really matter? Why did you bother talking to me in the first place if you planned to kill me?” I asked because even after putting my brain to the task of trying to figure out why I was still alive, I could not figure it out. If it was me, I would have even opened my mouth and simply blasted her from behind. Although she seemed to have an explanation already prepared.
“I felt you deserved an explanation.” She took a deep breath. “You got involved in this despite having nothing to do with it. In fact, if it were not for the servant insisting that you were the one who killed that bag of soulless refuse, it would have gone off with no victims.”
Something clicked in my head and I realized why we were still talking instead of fighting. “If I may enquire to the name of the random woman who plans to use me as her patsy?”
“Baroness Unda.” Her voice seemed… an odd mix of pride and shame at the same time.
“Baroness,” I said simply, “Before we go further I would like to establish that is you attempt to kill me, than you will die instead.” That ghost of a smile was back. “It will be your own fault and no one else’s as you will kill yourself simply by trying to kill me.”
“I am curious how you think that will work young lady, but please do go on.”
“As you wish. Baroness, it seems to me that you are not actually hesitating-” she rolled her eyes. “-because you give even the slightest care for my life, but because you want vindication.”
“Vindication? For what, killing that filth?”
I nodded, rapidly understanding just who this woman was and why I was still alive. “You want me to tell you that he was the evil one, that he deserved to die and you deserved to be the one to kill him. Furthermore, I would say that you actually want permission to kill me.”
Her body language changed and I noticed how her jaw tightened up. “Pardon?”
“I cannot speak for everyone, but I find that normal people tend to have trouble taking a life.” I said simply. “You are used to manipulating people, you are used to using others to get what you want, and you might even be used to killing people at a distance. However, that all changes when you think of me as someone worthy of empathy. As someone like you.
“You want me to tell you that you were not alone and that everything will be okay, but Baroness, I cannot and will not pretend that I can justify your actions for you.” I stepped forward once and made sure she understood what I meant. “You are the only one who can determine such things, no one else. You will still be a murderer and no matter how much you try to dehumanize Jorgenson, which will never change.
“Let me give some advice for your next life Baroness.” I wanted to be cold, to shock her back to reality, but my word came out much more sincere than I intended. “You see, everyone has an impact on those around them of some sort. Even loaners or hermits impact someone or something’s life and will have their deaths mean the end of their influence on the world around them.” I stared Unda dead in the eyes. “Everyone has a name and a life that they are entitled to live as they choose, but thinking about that too much when you kill will only lead to madness.”
She scoffed, looking slightly uncomfortable with my sudden change in attitude. “What are you talking about little girl? Entitled to live? Really now, I think you have it backwards, every person is only entitled to die and everything else is what we make for both ourselves and our children.”
I shook my head, “Some people forfeit their lives with stupidity, but that does not mean that they do not have that same right to live regardless. I have long since learned that what matters too many is simple the right to exercise the choice to how they want to live that life. It was why I had no moral problems with Jorgenson, despite the fact that he disgusted me personally.
“That man wanted you to give in so badly that he literally could not being himself to force you. For him everything revolved around that submission to his power and I could tell fairly soon after I met him that he was a slave in many ways. Physically raping a woman would be the antithesis of his satisfaction, so tell me Unda. What did he trade you that made you hate him so much?”
The wards rippled and I prepared for Unda’ suicide. “You think that it was a trade? That I would ever willingly climb into that- that thing’s bed if I had ANY choice!? For any price like some common whore?” She was losing control.
I suddenly found myself regretting that my old prayers would have no worth here, but I said one of the older ones I knew anyway. “A non-reasonable choice is still a choice. If you have a knife to your throat, you can still chose death and before you ask I have seen many, many, men and women do just that. You can still chose to turn around and walk away from this place too. You could choose to live and stay alive in peace with your family, ignoring my existence for the rest of your days.
“The problem Unda, is that you will not chose that, will you? You will chose to kill yourself by attacking me and after you realize what has happened, as a shade awaiting what comes after, everything will make a certain horrible sense.”
“You vile little-”
“-I was born from death Unda and I was both blessed and cursed by the god of death. I know what I am saying and what you are doing far better than you will ever comprehend until after your death.
“EVERYONE is sacred in one way or another Unda and I want you to walk away now, to choose not to kill yourself, but I have no faith in you right now. The look on your face says that you do not believe me and I cannot make you do anything you do not chose to. Though not choosing is a choice too.”
“You are insane.” Her voice was shaking, but for a moment I thought I saw doubt in her face, like she was not sure if it was still from anger, or if something else was creeping in.
I held my spell ready and could not bring myself to anything other than look at her sadly. “I am still sane Unda, despite the feeling that sometimes life itself is trying its best to prove me wrong. I am Morte and I am no more or less of a person than you are.”
“I- I do not have a choice!”
“Yes, you do.”
“To simply trust you and let you go? How is that a choice?!” There was a bitter laugh as she shook her head, seeming to regain control of herself as she prepared to kill me. I took a slow step forward and double checked my preparations. “No, you are just another loose end to be tied up and I should have done that from the start without saying anything.”
“Choosing to talk instead of killing me could still be the right idea depending on what you do right now Baroness Unda. I would not trust me, but I am a bit paranoid and you still have the ability to walk away. Please do not choose death, please walk away.” The spell was ready and waiting to come out in a flash.
“I choose to live,” the Baroness’ face was a mask of cold rage and she raised her hand, “by killing you,” and she send commands into the wards to do just that, at the same time I unleashed my spell.
Gorith’s shroud erupted from me and claimed all of the mana in the area as my own, wrapping us both in my black miasma. The wards than shot at me with what was clearly I fireball spell with enough power that I had no hope of stopping it. So instead, I redirected it.
The Baroness barely had time to register surprise on her face before the spell slammed into her and I instinctively closed my eyes to shield them from the resulting fireball. She had tried to raise mana shields before it hit, but the spell simply ignited when it touched her shields. The Baroness effectively exploded and melted at nearly the same time.
Wards had to determine who their master was somehow and if they were ordered to attack a specific target, who suddenly seemed to change places with the person commanding the wards, well… wards were too stupid to question how I could possibly switch places with anyone else so suddenly.
Gorith’s shroud controlled the area, to the point where even a secret implant in a royal mage’s body would not escape. If I used that feature to control the air around us, I could manipulate what the wards saw or ‘felt’ in an area, then I could mask who the master really was. Naturally it was extremely easy to counter, especially if someone was actively controlling the wards, but that was like using free-form spells to the controllers. It would also, like most techniques that involved Gorith’s shroud, only really work when there was only one opponent, who was not expecting it.
Regardless, the end result was the same, just like I told her repeatedly, the Baroness had died by her own choices and I would not feel the Guilt for her suicide.
You stoning graveborn.
I shook my head sadly. I could feel hatred overflowing from the Nalk divide in my mind, but I ignored it and went to grab the ledger. The ledger had several interesting notes inside it, but there were several parts which seemed to be written in symbols I did not recognize.
It was likely a code of some sort, or at least a language I did not know, but as I was skimming I found the section about the spell and sighed in relief. It was written in the kingdom’s common language, the eastern tongue.
I turned back to the smoking ground where the Baroness had died. Both the remains and the heat had been fairly well contained by whatever spell she had used. I gently retracted Gorith’s shroud and dispelled it, watching the wards to make sure that they did not do anything about their now dead master…
Who I do not think told me how she had controlled the wards in the first place. Maybe the servant? Oh well, it was one less noble in the world. I felt a brief flash of emotion from Bella before she went silent again.
Children could not understand. I knew how to humanize or dehumanize someone to the extent that I would feel nothing except a cold numbness when I needed to butcher my foes. Feeling any amount of non-Guilt imposed sadness for Baroness Unda was my way of paying my respects, but in the end I told her what would happen.
I literally told her exactly what she was choosing and told her about her other choices. I always did that for such individuals, simply to give them one last chance to change their mind and to make a better choice. If they chose to die, than I would not prevent them from doing so and if they chose to live, than that was their choice too.
Dying was easy, but living was hard and it frequently had a cost.
That knowledge… it was the weight that I had borne on my soul, along with the Guilt, for every moment that I had existed. Even if I were to erase my own existence and give that burden to Bella, it would not go away. No matter how much she denied it or hated me for passing it on, that was a truth that would turn anyone into someone else.
In a way, the baroness was correct, we were all entitled to death and sometimes there were no choices given. I certainly had not been given any the moment after I walked into the room where Jorgenson’s body. However, I firmly believed that not even the Nalks could completely control someone, everyone and everything still had a choice in what they did.
Anton did tell me some things that made me wonder about how much choice we truly had. I could now cast a stoning orgasm spell for instance. In theory, I could even design and predispose someone to violence if I used magic on them in as they were still developing. Still, it would come down to their choice in the end and no matter how much the Nalks or I influenced their responses, I still believed that the choice was theirs and theirs alone.
With the literally divinely sent Guilt, I could not imagine it any other way.
I skimmed through the notes and walked out of the private room before a flickering on one of the glass panels caught my attention. There was a fire that was blazing as the sun closed in on the horizon.
I escaped the Prison Tower, but according to the Guilt[ I was not responsible for any deaths in that fire. Even though that fire was likely the result of the search for me. “Do you think I should feel guilty about that Bella?” My voice was quiet, but it still seemed to echo in the empty mansion. “Some would argue that it is my fault and they will likely blame me or the guards or even the people who live in that area for the fire. I decided a very long time ago not to carry around such burdens if I did not have to.”
I turned away from the window and started to move. I originally planned to change my sex before having to deal with her, but I had another 5 days for that, so I adjusted my plan accordingly. I would find a relatively safe place to get some sleep before dawn came and would then settle things with the voice in the back of my head.
[AN: Next chapter will be Bella Vs DeMorte, but the “winner” might not be clear until afterwards. At that point I plan to have Leo show up and talk a bit before wrapping everything up for the arc. Thank you for reading.]
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In a nearby mansion:
That is quite some fire Captain Solad observed out the window. I wonder if that odd one started it.
“If there was anyone who deserved the sea it is you brother.” A deep, if not quite as manly voice commented from behind him. “Even now you cannot tear yourself away from a window.”
“You do know me well.” Solad smiled to himself, not turning away. “I miss the freedom brother.”
A snort answered him, “Then do not go chasing after young bounty hunters with mouths between their legs. I swear, I am partly surprised that I do not get bitten more often.”
That did make him turn around. “Now why would you want to put such an awful idea in my head?” Solad shivered. “You would have made a scary pirate yourself Wesley.”
“I thank you, but who would be afraid of the dashing captain Wesley?”
Anyone with a half a working brain, brother. Turning back to the window and the fire beyond, he changed the subject. “I do not suppose you brought any rum?”
“And how exactly would I do that? You friend is out there causing havoc by the looks of it.”
There is never enough rum. “That is not who he is. Also, he is not my friend, just someone I met recently.”
“Him? I thought that your ‘not friend’ was a young girl.”
“Ah, yes, a her… she is not causing that trouble, it is not her style.”
“Oh? How would you know after just a single night? I know what she looks like and I doubt that you bedded her. If you did, you 2 might have escaped together, instead of leaving me to pay some very hefty bribes.”
“I will pay you back brother, you are the only one from our family who ever treated me as if I was acknowledged, so do not worry too much. Besides, I do not think I could have helped her escape. She was just fast enough on her own and we did not really know each other.”
He heard his brother pouring a drink and slowly walking towards him. They were nearly the same height, curtesy of their father, so Wesley had no trouble looking out the window, despite Solad’s formidable height.
“You speak as if you know her quite well.”
“I know that look in her eyes. She had power, but lost it. The problem is that she did not lose the conviction that helped grant her that power. I have seen former captains like that, men who expected to be obeyed simply because they once were someone important. A ruler of dust.”
“Did I just hear you reference the ‘Exiled King’ brother? For a random girl you just met? I am starting to wonder if she was your type after all – not that it matters to me, but you might want to know that my spies say the guard will be executing her accomplish soon. A swordsman named Drasiedi.”
“…If that is the case brother, I worry about the future of this city. If that young man is executed, than I can only guess what will happen next. She escaped without his help and did everything possible to hide her connections to him while being questioned. If she cares about him even in the slightest and he is killed… I get the feeling blood will follow.”
His brother did not answer and merely stood behind him, both watching the growing blaze as large amounts of water began to materialize in an attempt to fight the fires. The thatched roof homes and mud houses of the slums would not burn for too long, if it could be contained.
With mages moving in to fight it, the fire would be out by morning at the latest, but that raised the question of what would happen when dawn broke.
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One of the things I don’t like about BKR (besides the fact that I made the MC a bit of an a$$hole) was the 3 types of spellwork/spellcasting – suggestions and input on the subject of names has never come up, but since the rewrite is coming up, I’m making a list of things that might get renamed.
That way I can make a post with the whole list of name changes before I start posting the second arc…
Oh and concerning the plot of the second arc:
Spoiler :
(English needs more gender neutral pronouns)
MC will be expanding their powerbase and starting to do a lot more work as a magic based mender as Game Start looms ever closer. MC will also gain the first major follower of their new life and finally determine how they will proceed in this new world.
The tricky part will be if the Nalks will do about the MC and if they can surprise them, or will just end up dancing in the palm of the Nalks’ ethereal hands?
Anyway, thank you for reading, apologies for the late post,
Bob_Sagit.