CHAPTER 146

Everlyn patted Tom’s leg. “I know you’re not great at that sort of thing. Do you have any thoughts about who you wanted to bring? What you’re planning on fighting? What skills do you need in your team?”

Tom hesitated, but then again, within a few weeks she’d find out, anyway. “Initially, single target sapients, though I expect group battles will be inevitable.”

This time it was Everlyn who drummed her fingers. “If I’m not mistaken all the surrounding kingdoms are a lot higher ranked than we are.”

“That’s why they need to be competent.”

She drifted off into a thoughtful silence. “And non-squeamish as well.”

“Yep.”

“You’re planning on murdering sapients. You know how evil that makes you sound?”

Tom said nothing, and she hugged into him.

“I’m not condemning you.”

“I know.” He frowned when he remembered the genesis of the strategy. “The first inkling of the concept was formed about twenty-five years in. It was when I was at my lowest. I’m sure I was clinically depressed and all sorts of stuff. I’d been alone for a long time, and it was before I got Pinkwing. My moral compass was more than a little compromised.”

Tom stopped talking, not wanting to continue, and Everlyn let him have his silence. “But once the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, the idea… I couldn’t forget it. It became real, and I invested more and more questions into it. Even when I ceased being quite so… cold… I couldn’t just discard an idea that might work. On earth, this would be one of those ideas that would make you a billion bucks… if it worked.”

“If it worked?” she said quietly.

“Same concept with the billion-dollar ideas. I imagine for the twenty that succeeded there were multiple millions that failed.”

“Even if it’s as bad as you’re implying, I’m still in.”

“Thank you.”

“But maybe we won’t tell all the others exactly what we’re planning, just that it has a chance to truly impact the competition rankings.”

“Yep.”

They watched the fire quietly.

“It will, won’t it?” Everlyn asked in a small voice. “If it works, it will alter the competition rankings.”

“I wish I could say yes, but all I can say is… I think it will.” With a sigh. Tom stood. “This is depressing. We really should get some sleep.”

The underground barracks that they had constructed had been changed steadily over the last few days. Instead of the entrance being sealed by a slab of stone that only Tom and probably Keikain could move, they’d replaced it with a solid wooden door. Then, in a combined effort between Tom, Harry and Sonya, they’d put in separation barriers in each bunk. They were a series of slats that could be dropped to seal the bunk. That had come at the cost of Sonya and two of her friends getting a spot in the bunker, but the powerful privacy screens that the lockable wooden barriers provided more than made up for the couple of hours Tom had invested to expand the space.

The screen had sound cancelling in them, which could be disrupted easily from the outside in an emergency.

Forty minutes after retiring. Everlyn cooed contentedly against his chest. “I needed that. Now sleep.”

Tom nodded, and it felt like she went to sleep immediately but Tom struggled to switch his brain off. He knew something was going to happen. His body could feel the new skill thrumming with power ready to bring him dreams, and he found himself reluctant to delve into the killer’s memories.

The connection with Mus was something he remembered vividly. He had empathised with the lookun before he had turned up and Tom did not want to feel sympathy for the murderer, and he was worried that sharing his mind however briefly would do that. There would be a dream Tom was sure of that. The skill was upgraded, but in all the critical ways it was the same only more powerful. If he had got a glimpse of the use of the Radunoc Mark with the old tier seven versions of True Dreaming and based on that, he doubted the killer’s wards could resist his tier nine enhanced method.

Maybe instead of finding the killer, he could do something else useful. Maybe there was a trial nearby that someone had seen but not consciously registered as existing. The benefit of a trial before the next wave would be immense. But his subconscious mind kept cycling back to a single question.

who?

Who?

WHO?

Tom felt himself slip into sleep and then almost immediately he was no longer dreaming and instead he recognised the touch of the skill, the change of reality that told him he was in another person’s mind.

For a moment, he absorbed all the senses he could. It was the killer and even though he could not see specifically; it was the same body he had shared earlier. Slighter taller than him, with a lot of time spent in the pursuit of fitness. A warrior’s body, lithe, agile with core strength. On Earth, this person had been fit.

Then Tom registered the energies flowing through the person. That a hand was held up and power was funnelling out through it.

The eyes of the person he was within darted around to check that all was as it should be. It was dark, but Jeffrey’s terrified face could be seen clearly. Highlighted by the light that the triggered ritual was releasing. Not that the mind was worried about anyone seeing. Once the process had started, everything was hidden perfectly; light, sound, magic fluctuations, fate, all of it was contained even divinations from the future would be prevented from unravelling their identities.

Tom recognised the scene. Not directly, but it was easy enough to place. This was the first murder. He was reliving its occurrence and Tom right at this moment was off bashing away at a hive completely unaware that this depravity was occurring.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The magical power that was being funnelled was mounting toward a crescendo. The air between the hand and Jeffrey’s face was almost solid with the energy.

It was a ritual, but.

Once more, Tom’s conscious mind used his own experience to examine what was happening versus the moment that he was living. The ritual was complex, of the level that it couldn’t have been taught. That meant it had been inherited as opposed to the type Harry did that had to be laboriously learnt. The intricate flows of power spinning around Jeffrey told Tom that it had been acquired from an heirloom, a trial reward or from contribution points. He knew, given the context, that the last suggestion was the true culprit.

As the energy gathered and strained different parts of the design thrummed. The mind he was in was just channelling the ritual and not interpreting anything else. Tom the passenger took a more active approach. There was a ritual cut into the earth. The soil was critical to the ritual. It was designed to moderate the sheer sharpness that was being produced. A moderating force that, while not doing anything directly allowed the rest of the forces at play to work as required.

Tom’s own guess after checking Mac’s body had been wrong. All that effort that he had put into mapping out the potential lines of the ritual from the remnants in the soil had been pointless. There had been no structure in them and all he had been capturing was the energy absorbed from random energy releases and would never have allowed himself to track the underlying formations.

The mind he was in maintained his focus and had moved to a problem and fix state. Spinning its thoughts to identify problems. The consciousness envisaged a mental checklist, and it went through it. Confirmed that energy was flowing clockwise between them, that the cuts were on the right spots of Jeffrey, that the torso was over ritual, that soil layer was thick enough and doing its job. It ticked off all the items on the list, confirming that each of them worked.

Almost bored the eyes studied Jeffrey, whose agony had not waned in the slightest. They held disappointment that the sapient had to be subjected to unfortunately required pain. The detailed ritual that covered the body created by the blood leaking out of the cuts perfectly placed. Unlike the soil, it was part of the ritual, and each line shone with even power, confirming that everything was working correctly. As opposed to the stone underneath that would need to be smoothed manually, the blood would evaporate away in the final stages of the ritual, meaning that no clues would be left behind.

Everything was functioning perfectly. The mind he was in relaxed and Tom realised it had been super stressed prior to the ritual getting this far. It was only now, after everything was coming together that some of the stress had vanished. Faced with the ritual functioning so perfectly, even the fact they had begun the sacrifice so close to the tent was no longer a concern. They could take their time to make sure the whole thing was completed correctly. The power would flow and then, while still shielded by the ritual they could clean-up the sacrifice area to scour away any clues.

Then the head Tom was watching out of straightened and looked beyond Jeffrey’s screaming body to a second figure. Their hand raised as well channelling magic.

Tom woke with a gasp and Everlyn was instantly rubbing his back in concern.

He sucked in deep breaths as he focused on remembering every bit of what he had just observed.

Two! There were two murderers, not just one of them.

At least two, he corrected, while for Jeffrey’s death there had only been a pair of them participating that was not hard evidence that there weren’t others.

Two, not one. The thought crashed around in Tom’s head and beyond that his dreams had shown him nothing to identify who it was. Male, he was confident that the primary mind he had been in both times was male, but that was all he knew. Even height was uncertain, but if he was taller than Tom that still gave him ten to fifteen people who were suspects.

Maybe he could resort to question.

Tom stopped that thought. Now that there were two killers questions would work even worse.

The second silhouette?

Tom couldn’t tell.

He had clearly seen the person also channelling magic but everything else about them. Nope, it was a mystery. Tom knew he should have been able to perceive more, but when he focused, it just created a headache. To be honest, based on the visuals, he was unable to determine if it was human, but he had been sharing another person’s mind. And that other person, the killer with the mark, had known that silhouette. Had recognised the person behind it. There had been the intimacy there associated with looking at another human that would have been absent if it was a construct, an alien, or a creation of the ritual. If the other partaking in the ritual had been any of those, there would have been surprise, terror or some comparable feeling… yet instead the mind had understood the other person had been human, like Tom recognised what his hand looked like.

The anti-divination wards of the ritual had mostly stopped Tom’s attempt to gather clues. Yet it could not fully deny a tier nine divination skill, which was partially tailored for breaching these types of restrictions. He had got a glimpse and learnt a lot, but at the same time he had gotten nothing specific he could pin on anyone person. That was not a coincidence.

Tom forced his mind to calm down. He had new information, which meant that he was closer to finding them. He would unravel the mystery soon enough.

There were multiple killers. It signified alibis could be meaningless.

The killer could be anyone.

Even Everlyn?

He didn’t think so. She had been with him for two of the murders and probably for the fourth, unless she had slipped out from next to him and returned without him noticing?

While it was unlikely to be her… It could be anyone.

“Tom?” she whispered in concern. “Tom!”

He looked at her worried and concerned eyes. Not her. He decided.

“System room?” She suggested.

Tom nodded, shut his eyes, and accepted the waiting invitation.

He appeared sitting on the couch, looking at their roaring fire.

Everlyn was next to him.

She did not press him for information and gave him the time to stare at the burning logs as he processed the implications of what he had seen and felt.

The purpose of the murders was hidden from him, but it was clear they were not the deranged work of a serial killer.

They had an objective of a kind.

Power?

It had to be the answer. The rituals were harnessing the soul of a sapient creature, that life force was being used to empower something. There was no other explanation for what he had sensed so far… Especially from deducing the mindset of the killer. To them their actions had been justified. But then again, most evil people in history in the sanctuary of their own mind probably believed similarly.

A lot of stuff suddenly made sense to him.

The targets had been those he would describe as disposable. Even the latest. Reilly had been a nice girl, but was hardly the type that time would have identified as likely to go out and earn a million rating points by herself.

Disposable was the right word to label them.

Harsh, merciless, depraved, mean there were lots of ways to condemn the choice, but it was understandable. Reilly had not been the type you would expect to change Existentia. Her loss to humanity was not significant.

He remembered the feeling after her death and the fact that she had been one of the imprisoned was the only reason that everything didn’t break down. There were likely better victims outside of the small group without alibis, but in the context of the greater good, he understood the selection of someone from that team.

Immoral bastards.

Yet another part of Tom was not even willing to condemn them. It was possible that they were evil. They might have gone too far. They might deserve death themselves, but whoever had done this had been doing it for the right purposes.

Tom, reviewed those memories that had experience touching on the emotions delving the different connections.

There had been no excitement, or glee or sadistic pleasure in killing Jeffery.

Not even a feeling of ‘you deserve this’ or ‘you brought this on yourself’. There had been none of that justification only a sad resignation about what they did was inevitable and couldn’t be avoided.

They had done it for duty and that duty had been…

The person whose body and mind he briefly inhabited had unfortunately not thought about why they were doing it and had instead focused on the there and now. “Bastards.”

“What did you see?”

Tom took a deep breath and glanced at Everlyn, knowing that he had to confess everything.