Meanwhile, where the plinth originally stood was now replaced by a ten-foot crater in the ground. The church-lady was a good deal more injured, but appeared to have survived thanks to a magic shield she had put up. It had cut the damage enough to let her live, if not without scratches and bumps.

“What was that? Why would you do that?” She screamed, standing up from the grass and brushing herself off. “Are you insane?”

Matt had zero time for her. He looked around frantically for Lucy. Luckily, he didn’t have far to look. She was standing by him, hugging her own chest and shivering.

“Matt, awesome work,” she said, her voice quavering. “But we need to get out of here. Now.”

Matt agreed. “Derek, come on. We are going.”

Derek, who had been on a boredom-to-mind-shattering-surprise emotional journey over the last few moments, followed meekly. It took him half a minute to find his bearings, at which point he freaked out.

“Matt, what the fuck?” he yelled, as they walked down the road. “Why in the hell? You attacked that plinth. Hell, you even hurt that church lady. She’s boring, but she’s nice. Why?”

Matt sighed. “Okay, listen. You know how I occasionally talk to someone who isn’t here, and you think I’m crazy?”

“I wouldn’t say crazy…”

“It’s fine. Just listen. That’s a real person. I’m a reincarnated hero. Reincarnated heroes get guardians. From what I understand, that’s true in almost every world. The system goes to the guardians, convinces them to help, and they help. They are full, actual people. Free will and everything. Following so far?”

“I guess.” Derek shifted uncomfortably.

“I get you don’t believe me because you’ve never heard of it before. You have these plinths. They do a lot of the same things. But just now, I walked by one they said they had built for me, even though I never asked for one. And it tried to eat my guardian. Absorb it. Whatever.”

“So you blew it up?”

“Would you let a pillar eat Brennan or Artemis?”

“Point taken. But, listen, accidents happen. Why are you still freaked out?”

“First, because that wasn’t an accident. No chance. Nobody tells me about this thing until I get in striking range of it? That’s a trap. That’s them trying to take a hostage. Second, think about it. They say those things run of, what, holy magic? Holy power?”

“Yeah, that. They charge them.”

“So why does it need to eat my guardian? Why would it even try?”

Derek went quiet for a minute.

“I could have had a fairy sidekick?”

“Something like that. Mine is just a little girl who cusses a lot.”

“Holy shit,” Derek said. “I feel so robbed.”

—

It wasn’t hard to set plans in motion when the plan wasn’t very complex, very long, or even very good. Matt gave Derek a few instructions. Derek, in turn, promised to execute them, giving Matt only two things in return. The first, and arguably the most important, was trust. Matt didn’t expect that. Derek believed him, understood that something was wrong, and even though he wasn’t ready to topple society with him, was willing to try to figure things out.

The second thing he gave him was direction to the pope’s house.

—

“This is bullshit.” Lucy said.

“Yeah, I agree. I was really, really hoping it wouldn’t come to this.”

“No, I mean, that, yeah. But look over there.” She pointed to a manhole cover as they passed it at incredible speeds. “This is the same direction we went in the sewers the other day. Exactly a straight shot. We could have just come in there, and spent a half-hour less looking at turds and fighting rot-rats.”

Matt was moving so fast that the couriers didn’t catch up with him until he was actually climbing the stairs to the leader’s residence. Matt was beginning to believe that the courier was a specific speed build because even moving with his boot-enhanced speed, the courier was able to get in front of him and cut him off.

“Reincarnator Matt! Your presence is requested and required at…”

“The leader’s residence? Where I already am?”

For once, the courier stopped yelling, looking slightly defeated. “Well, yes, but…”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Matt swept the courier gently out of the way with his arm. “You still have to say it or they get mad. I get it. Jobs.”

“Yeah. Jobs.”

A few short minutes later, Matt found himself in front of a man announced as High Counselor Alder, Leader of the Ra’Zorian Church and Chief Authority of the Human Territories. If that was all a bit much, so was the man. Rather than the short pudgy man in ill-fitting robes and a huge hat Matt had imagined, this was a wall of steel in finely tailored robes in a giant hat, one that he wore with such confidence that it almost worked.

Seated at a large stone table elevated several feet above the floor on which Matt stood, he bore down.

“Reincarnator Matt, I welcome you. You look troubled.” Matt was nowhere near the podium from which Alder was speaking, but the sound was like someone screaming in his ear. In the large, all-stone room, his voice boomed out and echoed like thunder. Matt didn’t think it was a magical effect, either. He was just loud, projecting in the way well-trained singers did during performances.

“What a fucker. He knows, Matt. You can tell he knows.” Lucy was fully over being shaken up by her experience with the plinth and had moved on to being fully pissed off.

“You could say that. I trust you heard about my experience at the church?” Matt said, affecting the same calm, measured tone the man was using. If he was going to be bullshitted at, he felt justified returning a bit of bullshit as well.

“Yes, I did, at that. It’s very unfortunate, and I sincerely apologize. I never expected that something I intended as a pleasant surprise, a gift of thankfulness for what you’d done, to end up like this.”

“Oh, I’m sure. It being activated based on proximity to me is quite a coincidence. And that in a world without guardians, it would somehow be capable of attacking mine, in a way I could only counter because of a very, very specific skill.” Matt didn’t feel the need to be honest about just what had allowed him to counter the attack. “Quite the coincidence indeed.”

Alder regarded him coolly, for a moment, before seeming to come to a decision he found distasteful.

“You may not know this, but we keep records, here.” Alder spoke in a different tone now, one that was missing the smarmy calm-them-down-without-helping-them customer service tone from before. “And all our records of the earliest reincarnators are records of chaos and disorder. They would come, obtain absurdly high levels of power in a frighteningly short amount of time, and use it as they saw fit. Some of them helped. Some of them were a wash, causing damage as they did their work, but doing at least nearly as much good as was needed to balance it. Others were disasters.”

“And so you decided to enslave guardians? Living things, packed into shoeboxes and forced to do your bidding?” Matt was pissed now. He could already see where this was going, and he hated it.

“It was necessary.” The counselor sneered down at Matt, clearly unused to people willing to disagree with him openly. “It would have been bad enough if they kept their own counsel, but they had support in what they did. Company, even when we threatened to deny them ours. Knowledge, even when we attempted to hide it. We had to bring them to heel, and then the system offered us a way to do just that.”

“That’s horrific. You have to know it’s horrific. You have to know it’s wrong.” Matt motioned to a line of guards who had stood by a wall silently, ever since he had entered. “They won’t tell you, and some of them might not even know. But you know. You didn’t get this far by being stupid. You know what you’re doing.”

“I do, you fool! And why should I think it wrong?” Alder boomed again, louder than he had been before. “The reincarnators were sent for us. For protection. For our use. This made them useful. It brought them under control. Our control, where they belonged. It brought balance.”

That word meant something. Matt had heard it before.

“Balance? Not victory? I noticed this war has been going on for a while.”

“Balance is survival. It’s stability. It’s guaranteed to us. So long as we play by certain rules.”

“And there it is,” Lucy said. “He really is an evil pope. Brennan and Derek called it.”

“Yup. A real asshole. I didn’t think they really existed like this.”

High Counselor Alder apparently did not like being cut out of the conversation, and didn’t react well. His surprisingly huge fist came down on the table in front of him, splintering a large section of it into shards of stone and dust.

“Do you really fear me that little, Matt? The ruler of a half a world? Do you really think I have no recourse with which to address slights?” He stood, walking around the table, and pointed at Matt with some kind of short scepter.

“I’m willing to give you a choice, Matt. A peaceful one. You will give us your guardian, and we will hold it in trust for you. If you decide to do exactly what we say, no more and no less, for exactly as long as we say, then we will consider sending her back with you wherever you came from. Whenever we, and the system, deem it proper.”

Like all assholes, he took silence as an invitation to keep speaking. “And you will do it while holding back no secrets. Your skills? You will explain them to us, in detail. Your weapon? You will explain to us how you obtained it, and how to counter its unique properties. We will know everything you know now, and everything you learn as you learn it, or you will forfeit any claim on what we’ve promised.”

“Don’t do it, Matt.” Lucy said, defiant. “He’s just like the system. Everyone does just fine, so long as he gets what he wants.”

“Yeah, I think we’ll pass. Don’t worry, Lucy. I never even considered it.” Matt hefted his shovel on his shoulder lightly, not feeling a single ounce of the weight the old man had strapped to it. “I can think of at least one counteroffer we could make, anyway.”

Matt sprang towards the Counselor. If he was proposing hostage taking with Lucy, Matt was pretty sure he could counter and do an awful lot with a captive as high value as the entire leader of a country. He was halfway there before any of the guards’ reflexes kicked in, but by then it was far too late for anyone to catch him. The only thing that could keep him from getting to the ass-pope was if there was a literal force field between them. It was unfortunate that it turned out there was just that.

Matt bounced off the invisible wall hard, then watched as it rippled blue, just as the fields around the hearts had.

“It’s funny, really.” Alder said, smirking. “Reincarnators are, naturally, a source of chaos. Of disorder. The system prefers this, despite the work it goes to establish balance. We’ve long since noticed the pattern. So the demon lord got his siege weapons because as the holder of the sword, weapons of attack are what he cares about.”

He leveled the scepter at Matt. “I wasn’t to get anything besides you, until you became an annoyance to the system. And now I hold the shield.” Suddenly, force ripped out of the scepter, slamming into Matt. He swung his shovel into it, which did cut the force but did nothing to protect him. The energy simply swept around his shovel, bashing into Matt and sending him sailing through the air. He landed on his shoulder blades dozens of feet back, barely keeping the air from getting knocked out of his lungs.

“And from the looks of it, the system has been thinking about how to counter that weapon of yours.”