The palace was in turmoil. For a brief, terrifying moment, all forms of magic had ceased to function. When their connection to mana had come back, the slaves had somehow been freed of their compulsion; given back their free will. The nobles were currently hiding in the grand hall, while the guards were fighting off those they had once ordered around.
Felix, for his part, simply tugged the table cloth a little bit more to the right so the guards in the room would not notice him eating the food he had taken from the table. What a good day, he thought, biting into the pastry. Maybe I could take some of that cutlery?
It was golden and very shiny; all things Felix knew were good signs that they were worth a lot, and he liked money. Gotta wait till they're done cleaning up, though. Freshly escaped slaves were high on the list of things to kill or recapture at the moment, and so for now he had to wait for things to calm down a little.
His next bite of the sinfully delicious food was accompanied by the sound of shattering glass and even more screams. He heard one of the guards yell something and draw his sword, only for the voice to cease mid-word. A moment later, a head rolled under Felix's claimed table.
If he had been anyone else, he would have likely screamed. But Felix had seen more than his fair share of bodiless heads, and this one did not even bleed everywhere as the cut had somehow sealed everything off. He simply chose to… liberate the gold-accented helmet. One more for Felix!
"You," a woman's voice echoed through the room. Felix could not move when she spoke, an invisible force holding him in place and taking control of his limbs just like the collar had done in the past. "You have a choice to make, mortal."
If circumstances were different, Felix would have wondered about the choice of words. Instead, he was trying to get himself moving. He had been a slave for a few years already and that was more than enough, and besides, a golden opportunity — in the form of a helmet — had literally fallen into his lap. Whatever it was that was happening, he couldn't stick around to find out.
Before his mind could fully comprehend what was happening, Felix could feel something warm slowly wrap around himself. A moment later, he was no longer hidden safely beneath the table but standing next to his fellow ex-slaves behind two women.
He could not tell much about them, only that one was an Elf — a tall one at that — as her ears poked through her hair. She also held a weapon that he had not seen before; a staff tipped with a black, feather-like blade whose blue edges always escaped the focus of his eyes. It matched the wings that sprouted from her back, which shared the same colour as the weapon down to the blue edges. Her dress was adorned by armour, though Felix could only see glimpses of metal pauldrons whenever her wings moved.
"You can either abandon your vile ways," the winged woman said as she stepped towards the emperor and the nobles that had gathered around him, "or you can watch me kill every one who keeps by them. I am willing to overlook much, but not slavery."
The other woman seemed much more normal in comparison, aside from the red hair and the fact that she had come into an apparent battle in a dress and without a weapon. I know her? He felt like he did, was sure he had seen the emblem she had embroidered on the hem of her dress before. But where?
A side effect of the collar, he had soon learned, was the fact that his memory was not quite as good as it used to be. Why would a slave need to remember anything but the commands they had been given?
"Silence is not an answer."
The first to move after the freed slaves had been magically shifted behind the two intruders was another guard. One of the emperor's personal ones, if Felix's eyes did not deceive him.
Neither of the women reacted to his approach. The only thing that happened as the guard's blade began to swing was that the winged Elf's hand lifted up to catch it. Felix did not quite believe his eyes when the obvious outcome did not occur, but instead the woman's hand closed around the blade and squeezed, breaking it without any apparent effort. She let go and the clatter of the weapon's broken pieces on the floor seemed to echo, then her hand — empty, and free from any signs of damage — embedded itself in the guard's chest so fast that the freed slave could not follow it.
What he did see was the aftermath. The dead guard slid limply off the woman's arm as she held his heart in her hand. She looked at it dispassionately for a moment, then threw it at the feet of the emperor. Somewhere in that movement, the blood that clung to her arm and hand simply vanished as if it had never been. "Your answer. Now."
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Aperio narrowed her eyes further at the most gaudy of the mortals present. Prior to her crashing through the roof they had been sitting on the throne, ringed by guards as they slaughtered any of the freed slaves that tried to get close. While she did not particularly agree with them throwing their lives away like that, she did not blame them either. They didn't know I was coming, after all.
She found herself not truly caring for their deaths, as the idea of them being enslaved was worse than them awaiting their next life in the Void. Perhaps it was a bad sign, but she was too caught up in the moment to examine her mental state any further. She gripped her swordstaff a little tighter and took another step towards the presumed emperor, causing the polished floor to crack beneath her feet.
Silence was not an answer Aperio was willing to accept. She did not care how scared the mortal might be of her, nor did she care what people would think of her. All she wanted was for them to stop enslaving one another. Something she didn't think was too much to ask; shouldn't be too much to ask.
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She could sense a miniscule shake of Ferio's head, her daughter once again not content with what she was doing. Aperio no longer cared that bringing her along was a mistake. She barely knew Ferio, and the attitude with which she approached life was so far removed from her own view that it was beginning to be unfathomable that she was actually her daughter. But, she knew what her old self would have done — was currently doing exactly what her old self would have done.
Aperio shook her head and waved her free hand, causing the emperor to be lifted into the air and dart into her grip. She held him by the neck and pulled him closer so he would be forced to look into her eyes. "Your. Answer.
"This is not a hard choice," she added, ignoring the man clawing at her arm as he tried to escape her grasp. "Your guards seem to have made one of their own already." She dropped him. "You have a day to decide while I clean up the mess that is your empire."
Her first course of action in cleaning up Geshwen was to take all the slaves she had already freed and place them in an abandoned city she had found. Forcefully teleporting them all might go against some of her own beliefs, but at the moment she could not bring herself to care. Freeing the mortals only to have them get murdered kind of defeated the purpose of freeing them in the first place — even if she did not truly care about their deaths.
While she was not sure how she could make the System give them a message, she could use her own mana to fake a System message, one that told the freed slaves what had happened and instructing them to wait a day for her to finish cleansing the continent. Whether they followed it was another matter entirely, but she could take care of anyone that tried to take advantage.
"So," Ferio said after the All-Mother had teleported the two out of the palace. "How exactly are you planning on 'cleaning' this empire?"
Aperio looked at her daughter for a moment, not sure if she was actually curious or simply wanted to make conversation. "I am bringing all the slaves here," she said, gesturing to the city below them. "And then I shall take care of anyone who opposes the banning of slavery. After that, I will figure out a way to make the System handle this." Or at least have it stop any form of magical enslavement or mental tampering.
Messing with Souls was outlawed by a directive but that did not make it impossible, only illegal in the eyes of the [Court of Heaven]. After she had at least removed the mortals that had no ability to imagine a world without their 'beloved' slaves, Aperio intended for the System to actively forbid the use of the System’s magic to force someone's will onto another. Some vague ideas on how she might do that were already gathering in her mind, but she would have to spend some time digging through the mess her past self had made to figure out if any of that would work.
"Razing the continent is probably the easier solution," Ferio commented. She raised her hand to preempt her mother's inevitable reply. "No, I don't mean the slaves. Though, considering what some of them have been through, death might be a mercy for them."
Aperio tilted her head at the words. As cruel as it might sound to someone else, her daughter was correct. Some of the mortals had likely spent their lives being forced to do all kinds of things that they would never be able to forget. They did not have the luxury of being the All-Mother in disguise. Aperio herself had not questioned her lack of reaction to most things that had happened as they happened but, looking back, her experience was rather unique. Definitely not representative of what the average mortal would have.
"I will give them the option," she eventually said, altering the fake notifications the freed slaves could see. It would require her to listen for their prayers, but that was a small price to pay. The whole situation was also her fault to a degree. She had left, and had never before been against slavery. Because I didn't know.
Aperio let out a sigh as she let more information from her aura fill her mind. Just as she had thought, the various armies that the empire had spread throughout their lands were starting to mobilize. "Why are they so stupid?" Aperio asked, turning to face her daughter. How do they think this will work? "You can see it too, right?"
"Oh, I can," her daughter replied. "But you didn't really think they would just accept your decision, did you?"
"No… I did not." I hoped they would.
"Well," Ferio said, a sword appearing in her hand, "are you going to let them defy you or not?"
Aperio gripped her own weapon a little tighter, the metal somehow withstanding the force she used. She would be lying if she said that she did not like the idea of a fight, but she was also fully aware that many of the mortals in the forces she was about to battle were likely not of the same mind as their commanders. The solution to this problem, at least in Aperio's mind, was simple. She simply produced even more of her fake System notifications and presented them with a simple choice. They could lay down their arms, or die.
"I will not be defied," the All-Mother replied, drawing a bit more heavily on her well. Just this once she would give in to the voice at the back of her mind that told her to punish those insolent mortals that dared to go against her will. "I presented them with the choice in a way that could not be ignored. Those that remain have chosen to die." She looked at her daughter as she spread her wings slightly. "This has gone on for long enough."
Ferio's lips tucked upwards into a small smile at her mother's words and she grabbed her weapon of choice a little more firmly. "Are you ready?"
"Yes," Aperio replied, letting her mana sweep over the continent of Geshwen to to bring all those that had heeded her warning to the city as well. A small flex of her mental muscles caused a barrier made of her mana to come into existence around the deserters of the Eternal Empire of Zeltar. "I am more than ready to end this farce."
With a beat of her wings, and a touch of her magic, Aperio and Ferio vanished. They reappeared directly over the nearest fort that still had mortals preparing to fight them. The All-Mother would not grant them the mercy of simply being erased. They would feel her anger, delivered by her own hands.
Just as she had done once before, Aperio ceased beating her wings and let go of any magic keeping herself and her daughter aloft.