At these words, the angel froze, clearly lost in the realization of the greatness of the forces of Chaos. However, after a couple of minutes he 'unfreeze' and gave us an almost adequate look.
"Well, I've already told you what I wanted to say. Catch a brief instruction on the basics of magic of the Air Element and go to perform the task. I'll give you six months. Those who fail will go to the depths of Hell, where go only the most notorious sinners. Also, here is a list of all rules and restrictions related to the impact on the material world.” - To each of us rushed another image containing a data package. - "Again, just for you.” - Sariel stared at me. - "You can't kill people other than those on the list. And most importantly, no nuclear explosions! I know you very well.”
"Sir. Yes, sir! Let me do it, sir " - I jumped up from my throne and saluted.
“Start immediately. Dismissed.” - The angel waved his hand.
I did not wait for him to decide to foil his irritation on me, and immediately rushed towards the material plan of existence, carefully avoiding the illusions and force fields that hung around me. For the other four game figures, I probably just disappeared into thin air. After all, my perception of multi-dimensional space had been trained in the Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch, so I felt like a fish in water in the world of the ascended.
When I reached the world of the living, I began to search for victims from the list, simultaneously thinking about the principles of influence with the magic of Probabilities. Based on the contents of the book, Probability magic was a small subsection of Air Element magic, which was a pale reflection of Chaos Magic. On this moment I understood the scale of this system that I realized that my skills in Chaos magic was similar to the convulsions of a paraplegic. There was no question of consciously applying its capabilities.
In general, the task was not so difficult. After I learned to influence 'random' events and was able to 'see the future', the rest was just a matter of technique. In study of Probability magic memory of a Rat from the game before last helped very much. He too could see hundreds of possible futures, though he was not limited by the force of the impact.
However, not everything was so rosy. The problem was that although I could choose the line of probabilities I needed, I couldn't control it. In other words, along with the event I needed, there were other events that could be called 'side effects'. In the end, when the power of Chaos was manifested in the material world, all sorts of devilry began to happen there. In addition, events became connected to each other in a way that theoretically should only exist at the level of ideas.
For example. A man is walking down the street, heading home. I adjust the probabilities so that a frog jumps out of the grass in front of him and he steps on it. Nothing special, I guess. As they say, shit happens. But then a truck with a picture of a frog passes next to the man on the crosswalk. When he buys a newspaper, he sees the title of the article 'Frogs in our pond' on the front page. When he comes home and turns on the TV, he comes across the program 'in the world of animals', dedicated to frogs. And in the end, as 'divine retribution', when he begins to take a shower, the ceiling in the bathroom breaks and a two-hundred-kilogram neighbor falls on top of him, dressed in a frog costume, which breaks his neck.
In general, the more I tried to influence reality with Probability magic, the more delusional the subsequent events turned out to be. And most importantly, all this nonsense was in no hurry to meet my wishes.
After I found and killed five of the people on the list, I started thinking about how to improve my performance. The point was that the less likely the event I needed was, the 'further' in the future I needed to influence reality. Roughly speaking, the future five minutes from the present was much less plastic than two weeks later. This had a simple consequence: I had to start planning of each death in advance, preferably a couple of months in advance. Given the length of the list and the time allocated to me, the 'personal' approach threatened to fail.
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However, the solution was found quite quickly. Most of the victims were residents of the New York city. Moreover, there were fifty students of the same school among them. So, with a little bit of trickery, I was able to find a way to finish them all with one blow. In just a couple of months, I set up things in such a way that all the people on my list were on board a plane flying from New York to Paris. After that, all I had to do was make sure that the plane would explode almost immediately after takeoff, and I could relax and watch the chain of events.
Everything was going just fine until all the passengers were on board of the airplane. But then the probability lines suddenly changed dramatically, and I had to urgently intervene in the situation to return it to the planned path.
One of the passengers, a schoolboy on a ten-day trip to Paris, suddenly jumped up from his seat and started shouting that the plane would soon explode and everyone would die. Another pupil at the same school began to attack the 'prophet', they started to fight, and other passengers tried to stop them and as a result, seven people were removed from the flight for disturbing public order.
Fortunately, I was able to 'convince' the airplane's captain and airport security to continue the flight. After all, it was a year 2000, and senility and paranoia had not yet reached the level of the twenties of the twenty-first century. Twenty minutes later, I was able to admire the colorful 'explosion' of the burning airplane, and then focused my attention on the lucky survivors.
The clairvoyant who almost foiled my brilliant plan was Alex Browning. The main bully of the school, Carter Horton, got into an altercation with him, along with his girlfriend, Terri Chaney, who survived. Alex's friend Tod Waggner and his classmate Clear Rivers got off the plane on their own initiative. The first decided to help to his best friend, and the second, it seems, was also all on the nerves and decided not to fly anywhere. The last schoolboy in the company was Billy Hitchcock, who banally got on the plane the very last just when the fight started, so he was 'swept up' only for standing in the aisle. Well, in addition to this minor company on earth, there was a teacher and the leader of their group, Valerie Lewton. Three of the students were seventeen and three were eighteen, so these two groups studied in different courses.
For the next two weeks, I watched my ‘clients' and planned my 'revenge'. I was most concerned about Alex's ability to foresee the future, so I decided not to start with him, but with his best friend, to study carefully the limits of the clairvoyant's powers.
Tod Waggner lived with his family in an 'American Dream' house. His older brother had died on the plane, so the family was now in mourning, and the survivor's father generally blamed Alex for his son's death, showing a purely human tendency to blame in the misfortunes not those who called them, but those who could foresee them. Another factor that led me to choose my first victim was the fact that I had already worked out a plan to eliminate Tod and his brother, so some preparations had already been completed.
The house where the Waggner family lived stood on the site where another house had been. As it happens with smart Americans, the constructors decided to save money, and therefore built a new house on the foundation of the old one. Moreover, 'eco-friendly' materials were used, which have been rotten for sixteen years.
I chose the bathroom as Tod's resting place. It was a combined bathroom, with a washing, a toilet, and a couple of storage rooms that the builders had slapped in so that the supporting walls of the house would be located above the foundation walls. Because of the constant dampness, the boards that played the role of the floor had rotted during this time and were ready to fall apart at any moment. But the residents didn't know about it, because the bathroom floor was tiled with ceramic tiles, hiding the condition of the wood from the eyes of people.
But that wasn't the main thing. The fact is that right under this room was a deep basement, littered with construction debris. The builders simply hid its existence from the new owners, not wanting to spend money on repairing of the foundation.
All these circumstances determined my plan to eliminate Tod. About two months ago, his mother bought toilet cleaner from a store that had too high a concentration of alkali because of a factory defect. During the next cleaning, the woman did not notice how the plastic 'bottle' standing on the floor in the pantry overturned and the caustic liquid began to spill on the floor, flowing under the lagging tiles. During the night, the floorboards finally turned into mush, and in the morning, Tod visited the bathroom.
The guy went to the toilet and intended to 'go big'. But he noticed that there was almost no toilet paper left, so he decided to get a new roll. When Tod opened the pantry where all the household chemicals were stored, he found that a wad of toilet paper was on the top shelf, which he couldn't reach. Then he walked across the crisp floor to the second storeroom, opened it, and took out a stepladder that was used for such purposes.