As he contemplated the difficulty in front of him, it was all Logan could do to maintain his calm through the festering worry eating away at his insides. Asthea had been his champion in this trial, welcoming him, playing referee and ensuring that everyone got along. She’d given him a communication crystal, shared information about her world… from the value of an S Grade item to intel about her System Integration. Without her being so helpful, Logan never would have received the Save Humanity Quest.
She’d demonstrated that she had family pressures and that this trial had been her way to prove to her mother that she’d be a good leader. It could be argued that he’d stolen what was intended to be hers. Without Logan, Asthea would have won the strength and agility trials, maybe even the endurance trial. And yet, even though he’d ruined her day, she’d still treated him with guarded respect and tried to ensure that things didn’t devolve into a fight.
Say what you would about her people’s horribleness at harvesting skill rings, if Logan had sat down and reflected on how that related to Asthea, he could argue that she was just ignorant. Like a culture that ate dog meat instead of treating dogs as pets. Just because her society had a horrible practice, didn’t make her a horrible person. Given the chance, he would have tried to change her mind. Teach her that sentient animals were more valuable as bonded companions, that they thought, had feelings, were like people….
If he’d changed her mind, as a future leader, she might have worked to change her people’s policies. Save a future Ernie.
And most importantly, Logan liked her.
She reminded him of Lara when she put her mind to things. Lara had struggled through her divorce, forced to be a single mom to two teenagers who were just starting to go through that teenage rebellion stage. In the face of pressure, career stress, and taunts from her ex-husband, Aaron, she’d come through while still finding time for Logan. Lara had a backbone of steel.
And so did Asthea.
So when he realized that backbone would be extinguished through Logan’s actions, a pit the size of a canyon opened in his stomach. Swallowing acid and breaking out in a cold sweat, Logan wanted to scream in frustration. Scream at the world.
Scream at the System.
Wait.
Was that…?
Asthea’s chest had moved.
“She’s alive!” His relief was so acute that he felt like he’d been hit by a truck, his breath quickening, adrenaline surging.
She took shallow, jagged breaths. As if a film covered her mouth, her lungs struggling to get air. Logan had been horrified to hear the guards reference the resurrection crystal, but they must have been preparing for the worst. Her constitution stat must be working for her—where someone without medical attention who had a severed arm and a severed brachial artery would be a goner, she had the System behind her.
“We’re aware of that, Idiot,” Arsen ground out, his hand flexing on his dagger. “Why? Are you wanting to finish the job?”
Shit. Logan took a step back, his gaze glued to the guards’ grips on their weapons.
If Asthea were unconscious, he couldn’t rely on her steadying, peacemaking presence. There would be no intervention here.
Logan had never liked Asthea’s guards. They reminded him of schoolyard bullies who would have loved tormenting a squirrely young, adolescent Logan during lunch hour. Ganging up on him, laughing at him while they pushed him around. He could respect Arsen for what he’d done for Asthea in the dexterity trial, but respect didn’t mean he wanted to be the man’s friend.
Even with all of that, Logan didn’t want to kill them. He never wanted to kill someone unless it was necessary. The men in the cabin, the undead minions at the resort. If a divine power from up on high came down and passed judgement on humanity, Logan was convinced he could justify those kills. Letting them live would have been the rabid squirrel situation all over again. The murderers at the cabin would have gone on to kill other innocent people, the undead minions would have infected anyone in their path.
Logan raised his hands palm side up, keeping his movements slow and as unthreatening as possible. “You don’t have to do this. I wasn’t directing the rope; it did it on its own. I would never intentionally hurt Asthea.”
His words only enraged them more. “But you did hurt her, Idiot,” said Arsen, followed by snarls from Thorin and Errol.
Logan swallowed, feeling like there was a lump in his throat.
He didn’t want to kill Asthea’s guards.
But there was no alternative.
To the guards, they were convinced of two facts.
That Logan was corrupted, influenced by the Cursed Rope. The second coming of this ‘Hallkelsdottir’ dude who they believed was the devil incarnate.
Secondly, that Logan’s weapon had attacked Asthea, their princess. Even though Logan hadn’t directed the rope, they didn’t know that. For all they knew, Logan had sprung it on her to steal the last True Grit Ring and complete his ring set.
Worse yet, if he were in their place and someone had attacked Lara, he wouldn’t have asked questions. Questions would have been the last thing on his mind as pure rage blasted everything away. There would be no bargaining with them, no talking them out of it.
They were going to kill him.
That meant he had an inflection point in front of him. Unless he made a difficult choice, a brutal choice, there was a risk that he’d not just lose his life, but everything he’d worked so hard for.
Without Logan, someone back on Earth might stumble over the Save Humanity Quest. If they got lucky. That was a big ‘if.’ What if the System gave out the quest once and once only? Humanity would blunder around, killing animals, killing each other for levels, when all along, there had been a way to save everyone.
Logan needed to survive this encounter. That meant no mercy.
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If he overpowered the guards, they wouldn’t stop.
Not after he’d tried to kill Asthea.
Pin them down, hell, tie them up, they’d come crawling back up, doing everything in their power to put him down like a dog.
Logan would have to make a choice.
A necessary choice.
He needed to kill them.
Fuck.
“I’m looking forward to this,” said Thorin with a wolf-like grin. “You needed to be taught a lesson from the start. With your trickster ways and doe-like eyes, manipulating Asthea and swaying her to your side. You stole what was rightfully hers!”
Doe-like eyes?
“Brothers,” said Arsen, his eyes narrowed. “Be wary. We were right to call him a trickster. He has a skill that lets him direct living things, something I haven’t seen in all my years. He might have other hidden tricks up his sleeve.”
Asshole. Way to pay Logan back for saving Asthea from torture, Arsen. Logan had made a calculated decision in that trial that revealing one of his skills was necessary to save the others from torture. He was regretting that decision now.
But even if they knew, Logan hadn’t figured out how to deploy [Life Cycle Master] in a one-on-one combat situation. He’d deployed raspberry vines in the serpent lair, winding the plants around the larvae and forming a tunnel to force a way out, but that was against larvae.
In the dexterity trial, he’d drilled into the insects’ brains and encouraged them to divert, but that was by using images they could recognize—piles of meat, Logan’s juicy bone marrow. Whenever he’d tried to get them to do something against their nature, he’d received a sharp rebound that had caused blood to drip out of his nose.
Encouraging insects to divert in a different direction was one thing, controlling the minds of a Silverdagger man was another. He could try, but he was betting the bounce back would be so severe that it might put him into a coma.
[Life Cycle Master] had unlimited potential. After all, he’d discovered that he could birth a star, but that wasn’t going to help him when he had seconds, literally seconds to figure out how he could make the skill offensive.
Errol spat a glob of saliva and sneered. “What would you expect when he has Hallkelsdottir’s weapon.”
Logan glanced down at the floor. Behind the guards, the Cursed Rope was in its inert form next to the dropped chicken egg which had cracked and split on the white stone.
The rope was motionless. Like a frayed old rope discarded in the corner of a workshop. Everyone had forgotten it while trying to save Asthea.
If the rope attacked the guards from behind, that might be a back up.
But Thorin had followed his gaze. “Oho! The trickster is planning a sneaky attack!”
Arsen didn’t even move. Still facing Logan, still looking him dead in the eye. “You know what to do,” he ground out.
Thorin panted with a toothy grin. “I always wanted to do this. Just think, I’ll become known in the Halls of Lore as the vanquisher of Hallkelsdottir’s weapon!” His long hair flew behind him as he leaped into the air, his massive sword glinting in the bright, white light of the room.
With a singing sound, that same high-quality twinge from Thorin’s tactician trial, he slashed the sword down with tremendous force.
Logan felt a surge of alarm, and then he realized it was coming from the rope. Like a snake trying to dart away from a dive-bombing eagle, it ballooned in size in a half-second, its rope fibres swelling as it desperately jumped to the side.
“Think you can hurt our princess?” bellowed Thorin as he adjusted his thrust, the man’s reaction time a match for the rope. His sword clanged onto the rope’s tail, severing it so forcefully that the end smashed into one of the white walls.
Pain! Kill kill kill, kill the smelly wolf-man! Against the wall, the severed end of the tail fell to the floor and then like a lizard, continued twitching, frayed rope fibres twitching like wiggling worms. The rest of the Cursed Rope jumped with a crackle of electricity, slamming into the top of the white ceiling and clinging to it like a monkey, its fibres dripping acid that plopped to the floor and sizzled smoke.
Kill kill kill. Kill the smelly wolf-man! Slithering across the ceiling, it positioned itself over the top of Thorin’s head and then let out a deluge of acid.
Logan had conflicted feelings about the rope. It had showed its duplicity when it disobeyed his commands, when it attacked Asthea, but he couldn’t deny that it had done it for a reason. It wanted Logan to get strong so it could get strong.
It had a dark history. If what the Silverdagger Clan had said was true, it had been the weapon of a pretty nasty dude.
But he didn’t know if he believed their bullshit tale about ‘corruption.’ Logan had gotten no hint of anything impacting him unduly when using the rope. Yes, he’d been pissed as hell when he’d learned what Asthea’s people did to sentient animals, but he’d been angry about that before he’d deployed the rope against the golden blob army.
As far as he was concerned, Hallkelsdottir might have just been that—a bad dude who happened to luck out with a badass weapon. If the rope continued evolving, it was valuable. Barring his spatial collar, it was more valuable than anything he owned.
It was like a misbehaving little terror.
Logan didn’t want to give up on the rope. If he could tame it, train it, the potential for its versatility was immense. All he’d have to do was walk into a monster swarm, unleash the rope and let it fly, killing monster after monster while levels flooded in like a tsunami. That many levels would allow him to upgrade his intelligence and wisdom attributes. More Karma, more resources for the Save Humanity Quest.
And yet, all of that was rushing through his mind while at the same time, he knew that wishes were horses. It would take all his power to survive the encounter with the guards, let alone save the rope from being torn apart.
As Thorin darted away from the acid and Errol lashed his whip at the ceiling, Arsen continued to stand motionless, staring at Logan with a face that might as well be carved out of stone.
Shit. He was fucked. Everything was happening in real time, but to Logan, it might as well be in slow motion. His heart raced as time slowed, crawling to a snail’s pace as his mind jumped from tactical possibility to possibility.
Thorin bellowed in anger as the rope managed to jump to another corner of the ceiling. Arsen turned his head, glancing at them. It was all the distraction Logan needed.
With a blink, Logan removed two buckets of sand from his spatial collar, his brow furrowing as he forced the sand to hover as he formed his armour with a snap, causing a sharp spike of pain to radiate behind his eyes. Life or death situations called for expediency, and Logan had become an expert at this through trial and error, getting it down to less than a minute.
He was even faster this time.
Straining, his vision blurring from the effort of expending so much Karma, he formed his armour layer after layer, from his legs to his chest, to his arms to his neck. He covered his face, creating a vacuum as if he’d just entered an airtight chamber in a spaceship.
That fast.
But this time, Logan had willed out an extra bucket. He wanted his armour to be thick, impenetrable. Shaping an added layer in front of his chest like a bulletproof vest, he then sculpted an extra layer around his neck—his most vulnerable places. [Regenerate] would allow him to come back from a severed hand and leg, but he doubted he could regrow a severed head.
Then he took a handful of diamond dust and reformed his ten-inch-long talons, the bright lights of the white room sparkling over the sharp ends like a prism.
By now, Arsen had turned back to him, but the man had barely ten seconds to comprehend what Logan was doing before the suit was assembled.
His eyes darkened as he gave Logan a glance-over. “That came from a spatial storage device, didn’t it, off-worlder. That wouldn’t fit inside an E Grade spatial storage device, let alone F Grade.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You truly are an abomination. A liar, corrupted, a world ender.”
Oh, come on! Just because Logan had felt the need to hide a high-quality spatial storage device? For the first time since this whole encounter started, Logan felt his pulse speeding up as a wave of anger surged.
“And you’re a hypocrite,” he ground out.
Thorin lowered his sword. He was in the middle of leaping at the ceiling and playing a game of whack-a-mole with the Cursed Rope. “Oho! What’s this now?”
Errol let his whip drop and turned to face Logan. “Idiot is all high and mighty, pretending to be the aggrieved party. What a world he must come from. A world of liars and devils. Why did Asthea bother giving him the secret to the loophole purge? No sense having a world like that in the Collective. Let them die where they stand.”
Bit by bit, Logan’s anger continued to build, like a dust storm that fed itself, funneling a vortex of rage deep in his chest.