“We’re here.”

Prota looked up at the sign hanging over the bar. It seemed a lot more menacing than the bar she used to live in, but maybe it was just circumstances that made it seem that way. Ignoring the uneasy feeling in her chest, she pushed the door open. Except for one lone table in the middle of the room, the place was empty. Even the bartender wasn’t there. The place might as well have been an empty building. In the dim lighting, she could see Fate and Kit sitting on one end of the table, Draco and his attendants on the other side. A singular candle sat in the centre, lighting the dim environment.

“Ah, I see the rest of the filth have arrived.”

“Aw, the wittle baby doesn’t have a cushy throne,” John sighed. “Can we get on with this? I’ve got better things to do with my time.”

Draco sneered and snapped his fingers. The swordsman shot forward and roughly grabbed John by the collar, lifting him off the ground.

“John!” Prota yelled, magic gathering in her hands, but she froze as she felt a gathering of mana from the woman behind Draco. Fate, too, shot up, hand on his sword, but his body was tense. He couldn’t unsheathe his weapon, not in these circumstances. Of everyone in the room, only two people weren’t nervous.

Draco, who had a shit eating smile on his face, and John, who was being held a foot off the ground, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

“Hey. Surely you’ve got better people to be working for than that trashbag,” John said, looking at his assailant.

“Do not speak of the lord like that,” the knight growled.

“You call him lord, but he’s a hell of a lot weaker than you, isn’t he? Just kill him and be done with it.”

“All the more reason to protect him.”

“Just because a garbage can looks all shiny doesn’t change what it is. If I took a shit in the royal palace, would you protect that?”

“You!”

The swordsman’s grip tightened, but he couldn’t wipe the bored look off John’s face.

Fate grit his teeth. “John! I told you not to-”

“Yeah, I listened. I didn’t hit him. We’re all good, right? The view’s pretty nice up here, by the way. Despite how this looks, it’s not all that uncomfortable.”

“Why are you aggravating him? What’s the point?”

“Well… it’s more fun than playing along.”

Everyone stared at him except for Prota, who, at this point, was half expecting this answer.

“Are you crazy?”

“Hey, calm your mutt down,” Draco sneered. “I didn’t think he’d come charging in like this, but if you can’t keep your dogs under a leash… I thought you came to deal, not to bark like animals.”

The swordsman tightened his grip a bit more, and John’s face twisted.

“I’ll keep him under wraps,” Fate muttered, his fists clenched. “So let him go.”

The swordsman dropped John and went back to standing behind Draco. The swordsman didn’t seem all that upset, but he did seem a little annoyed. John himself looked unaffected as he got up and dusted himself off.

“Why did you call us here?”

“I’m sure you’re aware of this, but the quests in this town belong to me now. I will be taking control of the guild.”

“That’s illegal.”

“Unfortunately, you are not the one who writes the law.”

“What, and you do?” John scoffed.

Fate shook his head. “John. This territory is part of the Wynton family’s territory. They do write the law.”

“Wynton… Wynton… doesn’t ring a bell.”

“They’re the nobles that rule over this area of the country. At least learn this much.”

“Ah. That’s some really great news.”

Draco pounded the table with his fist. “I did not call you here to have a silly little conversation! Fate. You need a quest from me, don’t you? For your little dog over there.”

“What? How did you-”

“I’ve been waiting for this,” Draco smirked. “Look at you. All helpless. Just like you should be. If you have a secret, you should keep it better hidden-”

“Hey. Time out,” John said. He had a nauseated look on his face. “I’m going to actually get sick. Please, talk like a normal person. I can’t stand this anymore.”

“You dare-”

“Listen to yourself. I might just kill myself before you even get a chance to do something to me. If that was your goal, you did a good job of reaching it. Look. How you found out about what we need, how you got the quest, I couldn’t care less.. We need the quest. You have it. Just tell us what you want, and let’s get over it.”

“Oh? So you can do more than bark.”

“Do you have a paper that looks really old? Kind of like the mage back there?”

The magician squeezed her staff so hard her knuckles turned white, but Draco raised a hand.

“How interesting. I was actually about to talk about that.”

“Yeah? So why don’t you stop fucking around and hand it over?”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I blow a hole right through your head,” John said, pulling out his gun.

Everyone was immediately alert.

There was no hesitation. He’d shown no intention of pulling a weapon out. It wasn’t like he’d been faster than them; he’d moved at a casual speed. It was the casualness that made it unexpected. There was no bloodlust. No way to tell if he had plans to go on the attack. It’d just happened.

“John, what did I say about hitting him?” Fate said carefully. Despite Draco’s assumptions, John was not Fate’s dog. Fate could push him over the edge just as easily as anyone else, and pushing him over the edge meant a dead noble.

“But I’m not hitting him,” John protested. His tone was the same as ever. “I’m just gonna kill him and take the quests back. I won’t ever come into contact with him, so I’m technically doing what I said I would.”

“Put that down, right now!” the swordsman roared. The mage had her staff raised, a magic spell ready on her lips.

“Or else what? I’m holding all the cards here,” John said. “I just have to pull the trigger. Do you think you can cast a spell faster than the speed of sound?”

“You’re bluffing. In the first place, if you wanted to threaten us, you should’ve used a weapon, not a toy. I don’t know what you think you’re doing with that piece of metal, but you should know that threatening a noble is a serious crime.”

“Oh? This is a toy, is it? Let’s test it. Come on, put your staff down. I’ll squeeze, just a little, and let’s see how harmless this is once your precious shitshow of a human is dead.”

“You’re just a child,” the mage warned. “You don’t know what it means to kill. You don’t have it in you.”

“Me? I don’t have it in me?”

John’s eyes lit up in amusement as a wide grin spead on his face. Without missing a beat, he pulled the trigger, and a bullet whizzed right by Draco’s face. He immediately pulled the hammer down, and a click rang through the air. At the same time, he let out a laugh, as if he found the whole situation rather humorous.

“I won’t miss next time.”

“John…” Fate growled.

“What, you want him to live?” John shrugged. “Come on, let’s kill him. Just a little. Even if it’s just to prove them wrong.”

“I don’t just take lives for no reason!”

“But there’s a reason to take a life right now. It’s called spite. It’ll be fun. Please?”

Prota also had a spell ready to be cast, but she didn’t understand. Why was John acting like this right now? Did she need to stop him? Or did he have something in mind? She looked at his face, but as usual, his eyes were lifeless. The way he was acting wasn’t a good indicator of what he was going to do. He could genuinely be having fun. Or he could be planning something else entirely. So what was she supposed to do?

“Hey,” Draco called out cautiously.

“Oh? Damn. You’re not scared?”

“You think your tricks could scare me?”

John’s smile vanished, replaced by a disgusted look. It was as if he’d just seen someone vomit on his favorite shirt. “Damn. Way to kill the mood. What do you want?”

“You want to deal with us, right?”

There was a collective sigh in the room as John put his weapon away. Prota looked at him nervously, trying to make sense of what was going on, but she froze as she saw his face. It was terrifying. He really would’ve pulled the trigger. He saw nothing wrong with killing Draco. He really would’ve found it amusing to do so, even if it were just out of spite, as he’d said. She reached up and tugged his sleeve. She had to snap him out of it.

“...?”

Prota shook her head ever so slightly. It wasn’t as if she cared about Draco, but even she knew that killing him would have consequences they weren’t ready to deal with.

“...fine.”

John looked back up.

“So. Let’s deal.”

“Fine,” Draco said, immediately regaining his sneer. “I’ll allow you to take a C-rank quest on one condition. You have to complete a quest I ask you to complete.”

“...you’re fucking kidding me,” John muttered to himself.

Draco nodded and snapped his fingers. A ring on the mage’s finger flashed, and an old worn down piece of parchment came out.

“Cleanse the old mansion… the B-rank quest. Isn’t this supposed to be a suicide mission?” Fate said.

“It’s up to you. This is the condition. You take it under your name, since you’re a B-rank adventurer. Oh, and by the way, I’m going to be the one to complete it.”

“Huh?”

“The rewards, the quest. It’ll all go to me. You’ll be doing this for me.”

“That’s bullshit! You want us to complete a quest and fork over the rewards to you?”

“You should be honored to do something like this!” Draco snapped. “You should be bowing at the very fact that I’m giving you this opportunity!”

“Like hell we’re going to-”

“I’ll take it,” John said. He took the paper off the table and folded it up. “Come on, Prota, let’s go.”

“Wait. That wasn’t all. You still owe me something.”

“Owe you?” Fate growled. “What the hell do we owe you?”

“Payment.”

John turned around, reaching into his hoodie.

“Payment? You’re trying to get us killed. I think this is payment enough, isn’t it? You get to live. I get to die. Thoughts?”

“I-”

“What, is that too hard to understand?”

Before anyone could react, John was holding Draco by the chin. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the physical capability to stop it. It was just that no one had expected him to move. Just like with the gun, there’d been no indication that he was going to move. Everyone had watched him walk over. He wasn’t fast or sneaky or anything.

He was just too unpredictable.

“Let me put it in a way your little monkey brain can understand. The payment is this: I don’t blow your brains out. How’s that for a deal? I’m this close to ripping your arms off and shoving them up your ass, and the only saving grace you have is that I’m not capable of something like that. So take your snobby, dogshit eating ass back to your rich little piggy of a father and tell him he can go fuck himself with his snub of a dick, alright? Remind him to zip up after he’s done sucking himself off.”

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Drace clenched his teeth, livid with rage, but was restrained as the man in armour held him back, whispering something in his ear.

“Fine. Go. But don’t think I’ll-” Draco started, but was cut off.

“I really will kill you this time.”

Prota had never seen John this mad before. She even thought she saw a hint of light coming from his red eye.

“Do not say what you were about to say. Under any circumstances. Are you suicidal or something? Do you really want to die that badly?”

He motioned for Prota to follow him and walked out without another look back.

“Hey. You get out of here too,” Draco said to Fate. The masked boy stood up and left without a word. “John!” he called out as he left the bar. Quickly catching up, he roughly grabbed John’s shoulders.

“What the hell was that?”

“What was what?”

Fate's grip grew stronger.

“Don’t mess with me. That look on your face. You really were gonna kill him, weren’t you?”

“Well, obviously.”

“...” Fate looked at Prota. The girl nodded her head.

Was he going to admit it? Just like that?

“What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you see that that’s not normal? Even your sister is afraid!”

“Well, yeah,” John shrugged. “But if I killed him, it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.”

“Not… a big deal?”

“What?”

“Hey. Get real with me right now.” Fate looked at John dead in the eyes. “You don’t act like a normal human. What are you? Some kinda god of death? What the fuck gives you the balls to act like that? Are you delusional? Sick in the head?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Then you should be in a mental ward!” Fate shoved John into a wall, golden eyes boring into black and red. “I can’t work with you if you’re going to be like this.”

“Then what? Gonna be Draco’s little bitch? Gonna suck his dick, eat up his leftovers, go at his beck and call and wag your tail like a good boy? Don’t get it twisted, Fate. I just can’t stand working under someone like that.”

John shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m not going to let myself get ordered around. I’d rather die on my feet and live on my knees. People like Draco are the kinds I can’t stand. The kind of person who decides that they can control others just because they feel like it. They’re the worst of all.”

Fate’s eyes glowed. John was… telling the truth?

“Then… what, you kill Draco. Then what?”

Prota shook her head at Fate. She seemed to be telling him not to push it any further. Fate looked at John again and was again disturbed by the lack of emotion he found there. He’d only noticed it a few times, and he’d never commented on it, but… it really was strange.

“I… well, we got the quest. Since nothing too serious happened, I’ll let it be. Why were you so quick to take that, by the way?”

“Huh? Oh, this is the quest we need to rank up. Lucky, right?”

“...you’re kidding.”

“Not this time.”

John stuck out his hand. “Well? Let’s get to it.”

Fate nodded, regaining his energy. “Well, obviously. Just don’t leave all the work to me.”

“...”

John just turned around and started to walk away.

“Hey, you were planning on making me do all the work, weren’t you?”

John just continued to walk away, but Fate ran up and grabbed his shoulder.

“You know, you can’t keep getting away with this.”

“...” A bead of sweat rolled down John’s face.

“Haah… I’ll let you go. Just this time. But if I catch you pulling something like this again…” He let John go. “I’ll see you tomorrow then?”

John nodded. “Yeah. At the guild.”

John motioned for Prota to follow him. She turned to Fate to wave goodbye, then ran after John.

Fate felt a shudder run down his spine as he watched John leave. Something about him was unnatural. He’d mentioned a mental ward as hyperbole, but it was quite possible that there was something actually wrong with John. That man wasn’t normal.

~~~

Once John and Prota were back at the inn, Prota wouldn’t stop bothering John until she got an explanation. She didn’t get it. What was with the hostility towards Draco? Why was he so calm with killing someone he’d just met? Sure, she’d seen him act rather casually about killing others, but they’d always come with an intent to kill him first.

So why Draco?

“He’s annoying.”

Prota cocked her head to the side. John was lying on his bed, doing nothing, but it seemed he’d had enough of Prota slapping his face.

“Draco. He’s really annoying.”

“...?”

“Do you know what Draco is? He’s the stereotypical noble. The person who bullies others because he can. Because it’s fun.”

“But… doesn’t John also…”

John sat up. “Yeah. Sure. I’m not a good person. But even I’ve got things I draw the line at.”

He pulled his arms up and stretched, then yawned deeply.

“Draco is one of those things. He doesn’t act the way he does because of his own efforts. He knows he has no consequences. His family name bails him out of whatever he wants, and he knows it. And he takes joy in abusing it. He takes joy in tripping on power, in abusing authority and fucking people in the ass because he can. Why? For what? No matter how hard I think about it, I cannot comprehend why people enjoy watching random people suffer.”

“But John-” Prota started again, but didn’t really want to finish the sentence.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s say there’s no big difference. We both fuck with people’s lives. He doesn’t kill while I do, right? Sure. Let’s say I’m worse.”

John opened and clenched his fist, staring at his hand for a while before looking up again.

“I kill. I can torture, but I’m not fond of it. But… there’s a little more to it than that. You, me, everyone, we’re not real, right? I’m fully aware of that fact. If someone needs to die to progress things or make things easier, then I’m all for it. And you know what? I can bring them back. If I make a mistake, I can just go back and fix it. I can make it so my actions never happened, Prota.”

No consequences.

So that was what John meant. His actions. They could always be reversed. Prota felt like John had explained this at some point, but she was starting to understand it now.

“Even if I killed him and started something bad because of it, I can always turn back the clock. I can just change my mind. That’s all it takes.”

Killing someone wasn’t a big deal to him. Since they weren’t real, it didn’t really matter whether they were alive or not to him, since they were never alive in the first place. And if he needed them back, he could just [Reset].

She shuddered.

“Do you understand the difference? Can he bring them back? Can he answer to what he does? No, he can’t. There’s no one to make him pay, and it’s not because he’s strong. He doesn’t deserve the power he has.”

John’s face was perfectly calm, but Prota could feel it.

He really was annoyed.

“Trust me, Prota. People like Draco, they’re not worth keeping around. They’re better off dead.”

Worlds like these? Forget about that for a second, John was talking about killing someone not because of something they’d already done but because of something they could do?

John looked at Prota and sighed. “Yeah, you wouldn’t get it right away. It takes a while to understand.”

“Takes… a while?”

“Maybe never. Don’t worry too much about it, ok?”

Prota nodded and went to her bed. Would she ever end up thinking like that? Did she want to?

She didn’t know.

~~~

Fate and Kit were having a very similar discussion in their own room.

John’s attitude. Now that Fate thought about it, this wasn’t the first time John had acted up in an irrational manner. When he’d met John when they’d been fighting the goblins, he’d almost allowed his sister to die.

On top of that, when Fate arrived after dealing with the assassins, John had seemed perfectly fine with killing his attacker. It wasn’t a matter of being calm; John’s attitude was like that of one who was taking out the trash. Bored, uncaring. When Prota had been wounded, John had reacted, but before that, he’d been fine, even while fighting to the death.

John’s abnormal knowledge of him came to mind again. Fate had said they would be companions, and he wanted to trust John, but just what was he? How much did he really know?

“What are you thinking about?” Kit said after a while.

“You already know.”

“Yes, but what about him specifically?”

Fate paused for a moment. There was a lot he had to think about, but if he could sum it up in one sentence…

“His attitude. Everything he does is an act. His nonchalance, his “guessing,” his fighting, none of it is him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“His eyes. Have you looked at them?”

Kit jumped off Fate’s bed and turned into her human form.

“I thought you were trying to avoid doing that,” Fate grumbled.

“I want to look at you properly while we’re talking about this,” Kit said. “Because even I don’t know what to do with that boy named John.”

Fate felt a shiver run down his spine. Ever since he’d come to this world, he’d met beings beyond his imagination, enemies and allies all unique in their own way, to the point where he thought he’d gotten used to it.

But Kit, who was over a hundred years old, was telling him that even she didn’t know what to do.

“You’re talking about his attitude. And while yes, it is suspicious, it’s possible he has a backer who has looked into you. It’s possible he’s been brainwashed into believing he’s over a thousand years old. Your abilities wouldn’t pick up on that, right?”

Fate nodded.

“What I’m worried about… is his power. And his sister.”

“Prota?”

“You don’t understand. There are a few factors to consider.”

Kit raised her hand and let lightning spark between her fingers.

“Time magic. You remember what I’ve been trying to teach you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a pretty powerful magic, but even still, it’s within the realms of mana. That’s because mana is the building blocks of the world. So how is it possible that a new energy is introduced? On top of that, Prota. She’s human and yet wields the power of dragons. On top of that, she can act on the same wavelength as John. I told you about this, but I theorized that the two shared an unknown energy, right?”

Fate nodded.

Kit sighed. “Fate. This is just based on a theory.”

Fate grimaced. “Let’s hear it anyways.”

“I’ve been thinking for a while. When you fought John in the Cave of Trials, you won, right? How was John?”

“I told you this already. He seemed to be a pretty good fighter, but, well, no mana core, right? He can only go so far.”

“And yet, his sister seemed surprised that he lost. Why is that?”

“He explained it to us. His strengths lie elsewhere.”

“...do you really believe that?”

Fate didn’t know what to say.

“Think. Think about Prota’s growth, her power, her capabilities. She’s strong. But she’s young. She’s not a good liar. And if someone of her strength were to be surprised that someone lost, would it not be natural to assume that they truly are stronger?”

“Maybe because she considered herself to be weak in the first place?”

“Yes, but consider their past. John is the only person she has to consistently compare herself to. No matter how bad of a psychological case this is, unless John completely brainwashed his sister, how could she hold him in such high regard?”

Fate was starting to let the pieces click in his head.

“Back to where I started. If Prota has abnormal capabilities, and John has an abnormal energy that Prota shares… then is it not possible that John is actually stronger than Prota? What if she thinks he’s strong… because he really is?”

Fate frowned. “But he has no core. And he loses all the time. He relies on a weapon, he uses his sister to fight, none of it makes sense. How would that work?”

“Fate… remember when you were asking John if he was ready for the consequences that follow? What if, well… he really is?”

Fate felt his spine go cold. He wore a mask to cover his face, but now that he was learning of the mask John wore…

Just how deep did it go?