Samantha Cromwell was, until recently, a woman of two opposites.

On the work side of things, she was ruthless and merciless. She never stopped at anything in order to achieve her goals, no matter how deep down the path of evil the depravation of her acts brought her. She was willing to make any conceivable ethical compromise, down to becoming a literal monster, if the cause she was doing it for deserved it.

On the other side, the family side, she was a loving mother. She doted on her son, and pampered him perhaps a bit too much if anything. She was a single mother, forced to balance work and personal life while also raising a son on her own. And, as far as being a womanly woman was involved, she didn’t know much about what she should do and not do.

Everyone looked at her like she was an accomplished person who didn’t need anyone besides herself. She was. But not in the way most people thought. She strolled around the streets with sure steps, never bothering to look around and completely unfazed by the eyes she felt on her back. Of which there were many, of men and of women. Some with lust, others with the hatred that comes with intimidation, others with envy.

She never felt threatened by men, or overwhelmed by society as a whole. Only when her son was brought into the conversation, or when she needed to pretend to have a social life or friends or other interests that were not work related did she somewhat struggle.

But even in those cases, she was too well trained to falter even for a second, a fact confirmed by how most of Albert’s childhood friends and their families never thought much about her. They admired her, some even envied him for having such a great mother.

That was all fine and nice, a good balance.

Bound to be shattered.

When the two sides of the equation were forced to merge by events bigger than she had any right to question, but question she did nonetheless, there had been a brief period of time when she wanted to just take it out on something. Punch someone.

Then came all the struggle around balancing her whole existence as a single person and not as two parallel lives running alongside each other without ever meeting. Her father helped a lot in that regard, but there was still a long way ahead.

All this contributed to the strange mental state she had when she left the Lair and walked back into her house. Holding the magic ‘wand’, as she had come to call it after her son insisted, on which was a spell supposed to erase the memories of one of Albert’s best friends. Change his personality, putting safeguards around many potentially dangerous topics.

Not only that, but it was also something she herself had pushed Albert to do, even at the cost of the almost fatal backlash he suffered when he loaded the spell into the wand.

And even now, all things considered, she was still convinced she was right in doing this. She walked with confidence under the icy, pelting rain that had plagued her city for days without end, going towards the College dormitories.

The fact that she chose to walk, however, should serve as an indication that she was not all that okay with going through with the procedure. She knew she needed to do it, she knew it was for the best, but she didn’t feel good about it at all.

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She thought about how many times she did things way worse than this in the past, when she still was the head of the BSA. Which she wasn’t anymore, according to a text message the Overseer sent her. What a lack of respect, firing her via text. Not that she respected him back in any way, or the organization as a whole after she learned what was going on under the hood..

The thought that perhaps she was going soft crossed her mind. But, and a talk with her father just a couple of days ago had been illuminating in this regard, perhaps she had managed not to be soft in the past only because she was compartmentalizing to the extreme.

The whole system was bound to come down crashing sooner or later and she was glad it happened in one of the best ways it could. There had been conflict, but a very bad ending had been averted and now her relationship with her son was better than ever. A bit strange, and it would need a lot of getting used to, but it was good nonetheless.

She knocked on the door leading to Marc’s room. He opened it without even looking, and she studied him for a fraction of a second before almost forcing herself into the apartment.

It was a mess. Marc was a mess. Uncombed hair, unwashed clothes, a sink full of dishes. The apartment stank.

“You are alone?” She asked.

“Other guy moved out. You here to kill me?” Marc asked, voice monotone.

“No. Why do you think that?”

Marc shrugged. “Might as well be.”

Samantha decided to cut the talk short before she actually considered mercy killing the young man. Marc was totally justified in behaving like he was behaving, but it didn’t mean that she had to like it. She took out the wand from her black purse, and before Marc could ask what she was doing she just fired the beam of magical energy right at his head.

She caught him before he fell, and tucked him to bed.

Thinking about how she missed tucking her own son to bed.

***

Samantha Cromwell and her son were having breakfast together in the Open Office area of the Lair. Albert had told her about what he wanted to do with the Iperborea Seed to thwart the looming destruction of the valley and the conversation had moved on to other matters. She praised herself for not having lectured her son about being safe while he tinkered with elven artifacts, trusting that he was not stupid and could figure it out himself.

He seemed to appreciate it.

Then she briefly mentioned Marc, but Albert was clearly not ready for the talk. She mentally thanked her father for predicting this and telling her what clues to look for in her son’s face. She was a master manipulator, interrogator and a covert agent among the best the world had ever produced… but for the life of her the moment she had to apply the same rules to her son all her talent evaporated like it never was even there in the first place.

She moved the conversation away from the topic, talking about the system instead.

“So, you gain mana when you kill stuff?” She asked. “Only monsters, though, right?”

“Yeah, the fact that I didn’t receive any bonus mana even when I destroyed the last piece of PsyOps by melting his brain tells me that the system does not reward human kills. It might even be expanded to all sentients, but I sure as hell am not going to try and kill an elf just to see if doing it gives me mana.”

Albert made a hand gesture and the Lair, recognizing what Albert wanted, made more milk appear in his bowl of cereal by taking it directly from the fridge. An impressive feat, and even more impressive was how natural it came to her son to do it, how well he communicated with the Lair and how unfazed by the act he was. Perhaps the novelty had worn off already.

After breakfast was done, the two parted ways. She went to the newly upgraded Control Room, the place where she spent the better part of the day as of late, while her son went out to deal with the seed and fix the shield issue.

If nothing went wrong today, she thought, perhaps she would have time to dedicate to doing something she had been putting off for a while now. In fact—

“Lair, how much energy do you have?”

“Enough, for what you want to do.” It said.

“How do you know what I want?”

“I’m just—I’m joking. Sorry.”

Samantha cocked her heat half an inch before it returned to normal. A gesture her son had inherited from her.

“I want to make a training room.”

“Ah,” The Lair said. “We have a gym.”

“It’s not enough.”

“I can expand it. The far wall borders the mountain, we can just dig into it and expand the room as much as we want.” It said. “Just tell me what you need!”