The last of the slaves were sent through the gates and now Harlan was just rampaging.

He knew that as soon as he left he would need to shed this extra mass as it was too weak and would thus give him vulnerabilities while also pointlessly ballooning his size. So he figured he’d raze the market to the ground while he could.

“WE NEED TO LEAVE.”

“THEN GO, I’LL CATCH UP.”

Harlan pushed Dawn through a gate and then went back to crushing the buildings and the soldiers that tried to stop him. D’if and his men willingly went into the one he opened near them.

Harlan put the lid on his rage, but now the steam made it rattle.

Over the walls a banner flew, it was black with three concentric red circles, in the last circle was a left hand in white, with a gold pinkie.

Once Sholl saw the bricks fly over the wall, he got excited about the prospect of stopping some monster from destroying a city and winning back favor with the emperor.

“I’m going ahead.”

“Sir ple-”

He traced a circle in the air with his pinkie and opened a gate-like spell.

Sholl dropped into the city, but didn’t understand what he was looking at.

It was a six legged elephant bear whale drake something, big enough to tear down a house with a kick while the tentacles were slicing men in two before barbs dragged the halves back into its many mouths.

“By the emperor.”

He traced sigils with his pinkie and a blade of gold energy appeared, it was triangular, and the gold after images contrasted his dark blue mythril body.

Harlan saw this with his many eyes, but none of them could process exactly what had happened.

He had never seen anyone draw sigils like that and he tried to match the movements with a finger of his own, but the result was just a formless black cloud unlike the pristine blade the Cast had summoned.

Sholl grew fearful that what seemed to be a beast had instantly tried to mimic the sigil shown to him by Seraphallen, Right Hand of the Emperor, but more so because something actually happened when it did.

He went to the mayor's home in the middle of the city and spoke to the commander on site.

“What is that thing?”

“We have no idea, it appeared suddenly through a gate, survivors say it started as a man and spoke Godgiven with a few others. They started stealing the slaves and when we fought back he turned into a bear and he’s been growing into that abomination since.”

“Evacuate the city, if that thing gets into the residential sectors, I fear what it might become.”

“Unlikely. It has just been destroying the slave market and most of our information is coming from civilians who it seemingly refused to kill, even saving some of them from falling rubble.”

Sholl bowed in prayer.

“Emperor, grant safety to those who would protect our innocent from this horror, and grant strength as I join in defense of our people.”

A wave of golden particles flowed from the gold veined white metal of his finger and across the city.

The soldiers who were in Harlan’s path of wrath vanished, ending up in the room with the Finger.

“Evacuate the city, I will attempt to wear it down. Have your fastest man take this key to the communion room, call for another finger, Helik should still be in the area, if not Arkhen may be.”

While he wished for some glory, he put the benefit of the nation above himself, if the city was lost, it would be a great loss.

A few hundred miles away in a clearing, Dawn, D’if, and his men were all sitting.

“That fucking bastard.”

“Kid’s just blowing off steam. Besides, what is the worst that can happen? He’s an absolute behemoth.”

“He’s not invulnerable and he’s a fucking idiot. We barely know what the worst possible thing could be, and knowing him that is exactly what’s going to happen because he’s a fucking misfortune magnet.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“He went for a walk in the forest once to look at foxes and ended up attacked by a mechanical wolf assassin. He went to a camp and ended up almost killing himself fighting a lich. He happened to replace a team member for a mission and assassins attacked and almost killed him. Everything he touches turns from simple into a nightmare.”

“Shit. Can’t be that bad if he’s still alive.”

“One of these days his luck is going to fail and he’s actually going to die.”

“And then he has a half dozen more bodies. The kid explained that he’s hard to keep down.”

“Just help me rally the new citizens.”

D’if just shrugged and got to work.

“I WILL NOT LET A MONSTER LIKE YOU HARM THE PEOPLE OF THIS EMPIRE.”

Sholl dived toward Harlan, skimming across him, the gold blade cut through Harlan’s blubber with ease and his tentacles weren’t sharp enough to do more than scratch the surface of actual mythril.

Harlan wasn’t in pain, this temporary flesh has no nerves inside of it to feel pain, yet he let out a loud bellow which shook the ground and burst the eardrums of the Cast; yet so few pieces of the Cast actually mattered to their functions.

Sholl felt minor discomfort but didn’t stop his relentless attack that was really having no effect on Harlan due to the shortness of the blade and his rapidly sealing wounds.

Realizing that the tentacles were useless now that the soldiers were gone, Harlan stopped making new ones, and instead large arms came from his back and tried to pull at the Cast.

Yet as they got closer to him, Sholl stopped, breathing in the aura of golden light around him.

When he opened his eyes again he moved beyond what any of Harlan’s eyes could see and the arms had been reduced to mincemeat. But what Harlan’s eyes could see was that his aura had slightly changed, some of its shimmer had lessened, and the wisps did not reach as high before dissipating.

Harlan formed dozens of hands and tried to replicate the blade sigil again

Each of them was slightly different, some were more or less solid, the shapes were different as well, some of them didn’t look like weapons at all.

Sholl meanwhile traced a new sigil, and Harlan began growing more arms, replicating the sigil as it was written.

For Harlan the idea of spending over a minute doing hand movements for a single spell was ridiculous, even warmagic was 10, 15 seconds of movements and words before the rest of the time was waiting for the mana to gather for a minute or more.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Yet the results spoke for themselves.

Harlan’s paled in comparison to the beam only three feet in diameter which severed three of his legs before causing delayed explosions wherever it hit.

Had he not tried to counter with his own beams, it would’ve hit him at its full power, and this body would’ve been lost entirely.

Harlan downsized himself, a flash of steam blew over the area as he healed himself.

The process of transforming mass into energy was not perfect, something was always lost, and in such a rapid use, that lost energy took the form of heat.

Sholl believed Harlan dead, not realizing that he had slipped through a gate.

Harlan was dripping blood, he only needed one arm to cast gate.

Dawn ran up to him and grabbed his face.

“D’if I fucking told you. Harlan, what was that?”

“Food, need food. Or meat.”

Dawn returned shortly with deer slung over each shoulder.

Harlan touched them, and the sigils carved into his bones lit up, though normally they went unseen, due to the partly grown left arm he had, a malevolent blood red came from the newly growing limb.

Harlan slept for half an hour before he recovered.

“Honey, what happened?”

“Finger, left hand, pinkie.”

“Sholl, you got lucky, bastard’s only had it for about half a decade.”

“I’ve never seen sigils used like that, I’ve taken apart the ones that I know, but mine are for building up and breaking down, not fighting.”

“You can use God Touched Magic?”

Harlan traced sigils with his hand, and a black beam hit a tree, though there was no explosion like what had happened when Sholl used it.

From the outside, it appeared to be little different from the void. Material would be teleported into the mana stream, broken down, and the energy would then be returned to the planet for whatever purpose it was needed. Harlan could feel that whatever was hit by the beam was instantly converted into mana.

“You really can.”

D’if went quiet, Dawn spoke again.

“Are you ok? Can you use gate?”

“Yes, let’s get these people settled.”

When they finally got back, the first person he met with was Mercedes.

“I rescued another 3,000 slaves from a city.”

“Must’ve been a slow day at the markets for the numbers to be so low.”

“Food first, then comfort, work last. I think most of them are in good physical and mental health, so it shouldn’t be terribly hard to-”

“Do you think that I just whip up a thousand new jobs with the snap of my fingers? That I can just open a gate and grab blankets or put in an order at a restaurant and get cauldrons of soup started? Those people need to be processed, interviewed, and then we can think about what work they could do and where to put them. Not that we have enough empty homes anyway.”

She pulled a stack of papers from a box which was sitting on the floor, ready to be put away.

“We also haven’t even gotten through the items you raided last night yet, and that needs to be checked for tracking spells, anything that is rotten and might spoil the rest of it faster, it needs to be sorted so we can store the freezables in the freezing room and the grains in the dry room. You know what, no, just shut up and let me do my job.”

“Whoa, don’t bite my head off. What happened?”

“Darrath has been coming here every 10 minutes, asking me where you are, and I keep telling him you will be back when you are back, and he keeps coming and disrupting my work, wanting to play.

And I’m sorting through inventory papers and requests to know what random bullshit you brought back should go where because we don’t have rooms for a hundred boxes of instruments.”

“Do you need me to hire more people?”

“I need you to not vanish into the night, come back for a quick stop, and then run out again without explaining anything other than we have more shit we need to look through. And I won’t hire anyone to sort things without trusting them, and I have everyone I trust already working under me.”

“Would you like some more golems? You can trust them.”

“Fine, if it makes you feel like you’ve actually helped, then give me the reserve golems.”

“Done.”

“Ruling a kingdom isn’t just fighting, it’s all of the mundane crap you push onto me and I push onto everyone that I can.”

“Why don’t I stay then, you can show me what you do, and I can help.”

“I’d rather have Darrath, you can’t stay still for more than 5 minutes before you need to train or research or-”

“I’m very sorry to have disrupted your work.”

Harlan did feel a little bad, she was right, he hated paperwork and he was only able to rule as he had because most of these people had nowhere to go and he had the strength to do whatever he wanted.

Harlan tracked down Darrath.

“Please don’t bother Mercedes when she’s working.”

“I wasn’t. I just asked when you were back.”

“If you keep asking again and again, that is bothering her. Did she ask you to stop?”

“I did stop.”

“And then you went back again?”

As if some grand revelation had crossed him, Darrath put his hand on his chin and thought, it was something that he saw Harlan do, so he figured that is how people were supposed to think.

“Yeah, was I not supposed to?”

Yet it was a facade, Darrath had learned nothing.

“When she asks you to stop, you need to stop and not do it again.”

“But I was bored.”

“Why not go out and play.”

“Joan was busy and I couldn’t find grandma.”

“Grandma was with me. Why not go out to play with other children.”

“Joan said I shouldn’t leave without someone watching me.”

Harlan knew there was a rather simple solution, one which he had done once before.

“Do you want a pet?”

“What’s that?”

“An animal that is a friend.”

“An animal I don’t eat?”

“Exactly. And you can take it out as a guard, so long as you don’t leave the town, you can go anywhere with it.”

“Oh, ok, I want one then.”

“I’ll make you one really soon then, but I’ve got a few things I need to do. In the meanwhile, you can go out to play with the other kids in the Dague Quarter.”

“Ok.”

Harlan wanted to go to the interviews, process people, but he also knew that it would be a waste of his talents.

Marigold paid a visit while he was building a temporary home, it would be several stories tall and made up of many small rooms. He had never been in one, but he heard that it wasn’t abnormal for the large cities to have these apartments.

“Been a while.”

“You learned more sigils.”

“How’d you know?”

Her eyes lit up with a golden glow, and tattoos he never saw before reflected that golden light.

“I came here to give you a little warning. Sigils never quite act the same, everyone who learns them gets something different. They aren’t entirely unique, but what you can do and what I can do is different.”

She used the same beam sigil that Sholl used, but when it skimmed the ground all of the plants grew.

Dandelions the size of dogs bloomed, releasing their seeds and then turned to large yellow flowers in a cycle three or more times before they settled on just being flowers.

“I lived my early life lusting after the plants that didn’t grow in the desert. If they let me back in, I could set up oases, make travel easier, and get my people to be part of the world. But they reject that idea, because they are fools who think they can do everything themselves. But I didn’t come here for that. ”

She let out a long suffering sigh.

“I just wanted to warn you that once you start to pull apart that sigil, and the other, you aren’t going to be throwing around beams or making weapons out of it. Don’t be discouraged by how different the same spell might seem, I’m sure you’ll find out how to use them in a way that is only for you.”

“How is everyone back home?”

“Oh, you know, fine.”

She could hear his heart rate spike and his breathing quick.

“Seriously, they are fine, I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d worry so much over a simple statement.

Yggdra is dead, Rosewell took over, Harlan spent a night killing nobles who refused to accept her rule and now they the ones who rebelled are hiding out in various fortresses across the country.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“The thing you aren’t telling me because you know I’m going to be upset.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because you didn’t say anything about my family.”

“Everyone but Ava forgave you. He is with Amber now, Dawn is getting a body, you got expelled from the academy. And…”

“And?”

“Adina and him are married now, just legally, they didn’t do the party.”

Harlan sat on the ground and pulled his knees to his chest.

When she heard him start crying she sat alongside him and held him.