As soon as he got confirmation that the password worked, they both moved at once. Whether she was a foxwoman or tigress, the woman that had been Miku realized the threat at once and moved immediately to shut him up by ripping out his throat. She was too late, though.
“Freeze!” Benjamin shouted. “Do not move, do not think, do not breathe, and certainly do not activate or cancel any abilities.”
He waited cautiously for her to show any signs of life for a few seconds, but nothing moved. So, he moved her hands away from his throat and then pushed her off of him as he stood to look around.
Not even the ugly green flames that sprouted in all directions in this little pocket hell flickered anymore. He was a little surprised at that, but then he had been very specific in his wording, and he knew full well how powerful a Summoner Lord’s prohibition could be thanks to Raja’s suffering.
Well, that’s not all I have to thank him for, Benjamin thought to himself.
It was only because his friend had kept chipping away at the combinations while Benjamin was being nursed back to health by Dahlia that he even had Lord Jarris’s seal. He was just glad the man hadn’t changed it, but then, why would he?
Even if they’d found the phylactery of the version that Benjamin had managed to kill, there were no memories to suggest that he had any idea how to crack a code like that. As far as he and the rest of the Summoner Lords were concerned, he was just an asshole with a few tricks. It was that arrogance that was one of his biggest allies.
He smiled at that and studied his captor. She was still lying there with a look of fury on her face, like she was about to claw his eyes out. She wasn’t even able to express the look of shock that was almost certainly racing through her mind.
“Don’t end this spell, or ability or whatever it is,” he said finally, trying to be careful with his words. “But make it a bit cozier so we can have a nice long chat. Make me a comfortable chair while you’re at it.”
As Benjamin spoke, the flames dwindled, and the uncomfortable-looking monstrosity lumbering toward them faded from view as walls solidified around them. The previous version of hell was replaced with a small room that he immediately recognized as the one he’d lived in until he’d gone off to college, complete with a cluttered desk and his computer.
Benjamin wondered for a moment if this simulation was real enough that he could play video games on it. Miku probably didn’t know enough about his PC to do that, but with all the other data she remembered from her time on his phone, she could probably do a convincing job of letting him play a mobile game or two. He resisted the urge to check, though. As tempting as it was to explore those broken partial memories, he had more important things to do.
Even though it seemed like the most dangerous thing in here was the overwhelming sense of nostalgia, he remained skeptical. If someone was going to try to lull him into a false sense of security, this would be the place to do it, after all.
So, he looked around his room, trying to determine how she was going to try to kill him. He didn’t see anything wrong, but he was certain that there was. He had a literal tiger by the tail, and he didn’t expect her to let go without a fight.
“Deactivate whatever traps you made and tell me about them,” he said finally. “But, you know, politely. You may not speak unless you are spoken to.”
“The chair…” she said, struggling and failing to resist him. “There’s a spike under the cushion, and the computer will explode… if… if you turn it on.”
Benjamin lifted up the cushion and saw the blade there, concealed in the step of his swivel chair. He pressed on the armrests experimentally and saw the seat lower even as the blade moved up.
That would have been an ugly way to go, he thought grimly as he sized her up again. He was going to have to be very careful about giving her free rein in any capacity.
Instead of sitting in the chair, Benjamin tossed the tattered red cushion on the floor and sat down on it instead. Once he was comfortable, he asked. “There’s traps out there in the real world, too, aren’t there?”
“There are,” she agreed with a grimace.
“What about my parents and the Emma clones? Are they real?” he prodded, already pretty sure of what the answer was.
“They are real,” she stated simply, but he could feel that it wasn’t quite true. It was a subtle lie hiding within a true statement.
“But not the actual people you are pretending they are,” he continued. “Just like the rest of the house.” He’d given her just enough room to tell him a falsehood, and predictably, she’d jumped at it.
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“They are not,” she agreed. “They are only random slaves disguised to fool you.”
Random slaves probably meant specialized assassins with every scrap of knowledge that they had on how to kill Benjamin and his friends, but he dropped that topic for a moment and basked in the truth. This wasn’t his house, they weren’t even his family, and Ethan wasn’t even Ethan anymore. They could raze the place to the ground without a shred of guilt. That was what really mattered.
He wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but it wouldn’t do to let down his guard. Not in here. Not with her glaring daggers at him. Instead, he did his best Matt imitation and wore a supremely confident smile as Benjamin stared back at his prisoner and his jailer before asking. “So, if you could do this all along… if you could freeze time and torture me into submission, then why the elaborate set-up? Why not just walk into our camp pretending to be someone else and murder me.”
“If you’d been somewhere accessible, that would have been the preferred option. That’s the reason Summoners of sufficient skill prize the Rakshasa over blunter instruments of destruction.” she agreed. Miku’s words were mild, but she could not entirely hide the tone of raw, violent hatred, “but since you weren’t, it was decided we should try to exploit your weaknesses to avoid dealing with you directly, if at all possible.”
“Because I’m dangerous?” Benjamin asked, leaning forward as his smile widened a little more at the accidental compliment.
“No, because you’re weak,” Miku pronounced with glee. This time, it was her turn to smile as Benjamin’s own smile faded. “My master knew you wouldn’t be able to smite me as long as I held the right hostages. He knew that I would be able to get close to you. I’d plan to wait on this part of the plan until after you’d been separated from your friends, but as you can see, they could never have stopped me.”
Benjamin said nothing, but he did not like how close to the mark Lord Jarris was on that little detail. All this time on Aavernia had made him harder, but apparently not hard enough.
“Pity Lord Jarris didn’t plan on this, then,” Benjamin said, gloating slightly just to see what Miku would say. She said nothing, though, because he hadn’t asked a question, so instead, he eventually added. “They didn’t see this outcome, did they? Why do you think that is?”
“Because what happened is impossible!” she said, suddenly showing real anger for the first time since time had stopped for the two of them. “I tried and failed to pick the lock on my own cage for decades. I tried thousands upon thousands of auspicious combinations, and yet they did nothing. Meanwhile, you pluck a single one out of the air, and it simply works! Such a thing should not be possible. Not with the sheer number of possibilities involved!”
For a moment, Benjamin thought about bragging and explaining how it was he had worked this miracle, but he suppressed that urge, hard. It was far better for him if she thought he was simply a complete genius instead of granting her even the smallest glimpse into all the hard work it had taken to pull off this coup.
After all, even though he planned to end her here and now, she might yet get free, or she might have some other way to relay this information to… Benjamin’s train of thought came to a complete halt as he realized she’d probably notified someone, somehow, as soon as she’d dragged him into this little bubble of whatever this was.
If I can still see my party interface, then she can probably still communicate with people outside this, too, right? He thought to himself.
“You already gave them the signal to attack, didn’t you?” he asked.
“That’s right,” she agreed with a wicked smile. “As soon as this moment is done, and we are back in the world, everything will happen very quickly. Your friends will be sliced to ribbons, and you alone will be preserved for further study.”
“Everything, huh?” he cracked his knuckles, “Tell me more about everything. Who’s going to attack us. How many Summoners? Will Lord Jarris be one of them?”
He spent the next few minutes dragging all of the details he could think of out of Miku. She fought and struggled at first, but they both knew that was fruitless. Her Resolve couldn’t last forever. Eventually, she moved away from resisting and switched to offering answers that were as uncomfortably shallow as possible.
Ordering her to be as helpful as possible helped some, but even then, the Rakshasa resisted him. That made sense since this was her forte, and he was a rank amateur, but no matter how much she dragged her feet, he eventually got all the information he was after. In addition to the few people he’d seen, there were other faces from Benjamin’s past that were waiting in the wings to be trotted out, and every one of them was a killer.
She didn’t have a chance to contact the Summoner Lords, who were waiting a day’s ride away to tell them to open rifts yet, but that would happen as soon as time started again. She already had someone standing by a mirror just waiting to send word, so once things started to move, they would move fast.
Fortunately, the demoness didn’t seem to be lying about the weird time thing. Benjamin cast status, in its incredibly basic, zero mana configuration, several times and was pleased to see that time at least didn’t seem to be moving forward. They really were paused on the same second in here somehow.
He didn’t try to understand that any further once it was clear his jailer and his prisoner couldn’t explain it any deeper. The best she could explain it was that they were between the worlds and would stay that way as long as she wanted, though further questioning admitted that the longest she’d ever really stayed out here was a few weeks.
Miku was powerful, but the range of her knowledge seemed to be focused very narrowly into summoning and subterfuge. So far, he’d only asked her about the latter, but there was no reason not to spend as long as it took asking her about the former, too.
For too long, the whole summoning part of the Summoner Lords was a mystery to him, but he was going to get a crash course in the subject now, whether she liked it or not.