“Oh bollocks, I can’t get a sense on any of this stuff!” L said, throwing aside a handful of papers. He yielded his back to the comfort of the leather chair, letting one arm dangle freely as he tossed his feet onto the table. “Letters from the Kingdoms Of Spice, The Covenant of High Sorcerers, the Kingdom of Soltom, passive-aggressive warnings from the Gleeten, the elves, to the north-east, the dwarfs to the south-west...What is this place? A farm village? A trade center? A mercenary outpost? A diplomatic center?”
“Null, dear, this is where you say something. I gave you the perfect opportunity to jump in. I mean, come on! ”
No. You’re not getting anything out of me.
“Argh! Why not?” L whined.
“Seriously? You’re just not gonna..say anything?”
No.
“Say…” L began, his voice dropping a couple octaves.
I won’t answer that.
“At least let me finish! As I was saying….hehe, get it?” L said as he smiled from one ear to the other.
Sure.
“Perfect. Just wanted to make sure. Ok, anyway. Um, you can read my mind and stuff, right?”
I won’t answer that.
“Considering that that….I couldn’t think of a different word than that! Ahem! That that...that that was your answer before I even asked the question, I’ll take that as a yes. Now, are you being influenced by my thoughts?” L asked, looking above him. No answer came. “I’ll take that as a yes too. And for the million dollargold question...is that why you’ve been acting...like a 13-year-old-pubescent-adolescent-introduced-to-his-first-hard-rock-song... of lately? If you don’t answer, I’ll take that as a yes, too.”
Why are you even asking if you’re going to answer it yourself?
“It’s ‘cus you’re not answering that I am answering for you!”
If I said no, then would you believe me?
L laughed. “Of course not!”
Tiring. You are tiring.
“So I take it you can only read the thoughts that go inside my head at the time? A different AI does the deepe-”
What do you want?
L’s tongue stopped. It was an easy matter, to not think about answering that question, but he decided against it. He let Null read exactly what he wanted.
Immortality? That’s an oddly...normal thing to want. Ah, it’s not for you, is it? Hound, is she?
L shrugged. “I’m lonely. I miss her, and figuring that out will keep her by my side.”
You mean that you’re horny?
“That too.”
Tough luck.
“You didn’t say no…” L said, but by that time Null was already gone, off to do what it usually does when it desired to avoid speaking with L. Null was becoming increasingly avoidant of L, treating him like the plague. It had changed. Drastically.
L stood up, pacing the room. He too, had changed. This was no momentarily passing of the mood, and nor was this a whimsical desire for a fresh outlook on life in order to drive back the monotony. No, this was dagger fell deep into his core, mangling its basic structure. His life pleasures were slowly dwindling into oblivion, leaving him with a bland sense of place. With each passing day, the tedium only grew.
Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he shouldn’t have removed the most valuable piece of him for whatever purpose it served at the time. Maybe.
He set a hand to his mouth, feeling the outline of his lips with his long, oblique fingers. When was the last time had he had a good laugh? What had he been doing, all these past years? For what purpose? How was this different than thirty years ago? Twenty? Ten? It's been all the same; different worlds but same content, and to what end? What would he do next? The same old power creep? But what is there else is there to do, if not gain power? What happened to modifying his style, to vow off the scheming and planning, and to take up the honest ax and plunging into mindless brutality? Was that, too, a lie? Was it to fool Hound? Was it to fool himself? But why? And for who? Since when?
Questions within questions, whose slightest answer births more questions. L felt the walls closing in on him, the scent of the air turning horribly wrong in his lungs. His skin itched him, an uncomfortable cold growing below it. He scratched his head, rubbed the short hair growing on his chin. He paced the room quicker, clutching his teeth together. Everything felt so wrong. Every part of him was irked. Nauseous. The way the papers were stacked, the way books laid open and scattered, and the way the sun accented the tiny specks of dirt in the air. It felt out of place.
He walked out of the room, holding the scabbard of his sword with enough force to bend it. Little sounds in the corner of the room jabbed at his shoulders. They spasmed fiercely. L popped his shoulder, circling it, stretching it, but the sensation was still there. Now it was creeping down to the sides of his spine. Spreading. Multiplying. The fresh air did not help. It might have even exasperated him further, from the way his knuckles tightened and reached for the sword’s handle. He let its iron peek out as his feet marched briskly, their rhythm increasing by the second. It was clean and reflected a thin-lipped face and dry eyes. They stared back stoic and disconnected from the nagging rat chewing at L’s guts. His hands shook but his reflection did not. It looked back, becoming more foreign with each passing step. He snapped it shut and pulled his head up, glancing around him furtively.
Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!
It was ghostly quiet. His stomach ached him, hungry but not wanted to eat. Most of the goblinoids were asleep now, deep within their houses, as well as most of the leftover corpses, but L still felt like something was haunting him, like something was glaring at him from some gloomy corner hidden away from his sights. But nothing was there. Just L and the chirping of far away birds. He felt thirsty but not for water or any liquid. He unsheathed his blade, letting the scabbard fall to the soft ground. He walked past it.
Then he walked back, picked it up, and sheathed it. He looked it for a moment and then it, but just before he walked away from he realized ti still not feel right, so he picked it up again with a grimace. He looked around again. Nothing. He pumped his legs and walked as fast as he could, not in a run, for running would not be right either, and jumped up to the raised wooden platform looking over the wall. Nothing was there either. What was he looking for? The bugs crawling on the stone in front of him? The birds chirping and tweeting? The clear blue sky? The ruffling of the branches by now lukewarm winds?
What birds? Those weren’t birds. Birds didn't make those bird songs. L leaned over the wall, his hands digging into the fragile stone. He listened, his enchanced hearing reaching further and furhter, and then he heard it, and then everything dawned on him, and then he started cackling. Loudly. His laughter roared through the field, his voice breaking over as he fell over the platform and sinking into the wet dirt. He rolled in the mud, holding his stomach as his legs kicked the air. His abs tightened and then began to cramp up. One hand clawed at his throat, searching for a breath, while the other made sure his guts remained where they were supposed to.
Beyond the clearing the chirps and tweets diminished, scared off by L’s nonsensical bellows. He rolled on his back, letting the sun chip at the mana surrounding his skin. His throat and face lost the protective mana it had used to sooth the wounds, and now began to crumble away. It burned feverly. But L did not care, or at least, he didn’t think he did. His smile was wide enough to threaten a cut to the edges of his lips. He wheezed a couple short breaths and swallowed a mouthful of salvia that was dripping down his mouth. He wiped it off but got more dirt on his face, and then he tried to wipe it with his other hand but that only worsened the case. Finally, within the mud covering his back and dripping down his face, L finally let his hands dropped and embraced the sensation of his skin slightly sizzling against the yellow sun rays.
He had been overthinking it, these past weeks. Or months, or however time had passed. The lapses of memory, the incoherent thoughts, the absurd actions he had inexplicably taken. Even the threat of his minds messing about his head mischievously. The death of Raven, the death of Nealon. It all made sense. It made so much sense, in fact, that L realized why he did not allow himself to even think about it. Even through the blocked memories and night hunting and blocked interference, he would have figured it out quite easily. Actually, he did figure it out. Many times. But the thought never stuck, constantly slipping away.
There was no tactical requirement to it beyond the quest’s limitations. No, the limitations had been set upon him long ago, in the first day he had entered null. Hell, even before that, to the day of the experiment and maybe even a couple days before that. Or months. It would take a lot to fool himself, that he knew.
It wasn’t for the act, either. How could your enemies know what you’re doing if you yourself don’t know? Bullshit. L was too good and old at his job for him that to have any significance beyond the trivial ones.
No, it wasn’t for wit or tactic. It was just, in the simplest words possible, fun. It was fun to be surprised, fun to be confused. Fun to feel like everything is falling apart, fun to think he'd made a mistake. It was fun to doubt himself, to scrutinize his decisions and wonder where it all went wrong, if it even did. It was fun to have a mystery, fun attempt to prod and weave around the limitations placed upon him, fun to attempt to solve it without even thinking about it, and fun to think he did not have a plan all along, that not everything was perfect, that not everything was as was expected. It was all just so fun, and now that it ended, it felt a gaping hole was left. A hole even larger than when Nealon left him.
There were still questions that had to be solved, more specifically the reasoning and knowledge behind how his minds worked and what they actually wanted, including what he himself ultimately wanted, yet in the grand scheme of things, those questions seemed so frivolous, as if it was an afterthought placed in once the play was set in place. One point true point curiosity was whether the previous Jack had actually perished, of whether any Jack had perished at all, or whether he was in fact, going crazy, which, as things went, it seemed quite likely but too predictable and thus not likely at all. Maybe them clawing at his sanity was part of the act, too, or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he was the one torturing and enslaving them at as he seemed fit, creating him from his imagination for a little of spice, or maybe not. So many maybes, and so little answers, but who cares for the answers anymore? Those were very overrated things, which made it even more surprising that L did somewhat mind to find out the answer to these fascinating and thorny questions.
He stood up with difficulty, spitting out flicks of dirt. His mind was always a scattered heap of questions and answers and theories, but now that he could think and ask any question he desired without an incessant racket blaring in his eardrums thinking had become an entirely more captivating prospect to dwell longingly in. And without break. He pushed one unresponsive leg after the other, the giggles coming back to him every so often in unrelenting and unapologetic cascades. His hands lifted in front of him, pushing aside the large iron door that leads to the mechanism which raised and lowered the gates. Two Bugbears were within the pitch dark room, one bent over the table with the cloth covering her crotch missing, and the other directly behind her, the cloth covering his crotch also missing. They stopped humping each other for a brief time and had instead began sniveling and growling at L. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here, ay?” L said, and then bent over with the snickers. He threw one hand up, asking for a minute. “You see,” he began again, swallowing as his face turned cherry red, “I don’t either!” he said. He wasn’t sure why he lied, for once he knew exactly what he was doing, but he felt like it was utterly hilarious as the next moment he found himself breaking into an even larger fit of ceaseless laughter. He leaned over the bar which was used to block the door from invaders, using it to prevent himself from falling over. His sword bounced against the stone ground, forgotten.
The two Bugbears weren’t as amused. One of them came up to L, cracking his shoulder and spitting to the side. “Kluk shlish da!” he said in menacing grunts.
“You’re gonna have to start every word with L if you want me to get an inkling of what you’re saying!” he said in one short breath, and then doubled over again. He wasn't sure what the joke was but he was sure there was one. He picked up the giant bar and stuttered a few steps towards the door, closing it with his foot and then tossing the bar over. The Bugbear snarled even louder and grabbed L by his shoulder, digging into L’s skin and whipping him around ungently. L turned with the weight of a feather and thrust one stiff claw into the Bugbear’s neck. It sunk deep, deep enough for the spine to push aside L’s middle and index finger apart. His nails showed on the other side.
The Bugbear looked confoundedly at L, his two yellow slits uncomprehending. L nodded. “I should really get some type of skill for all the necks I’ve been openi-” L began but by then the blood already spurted in an unpleasant mess all over him and the ground. He sighed, shaking his head in disappointment. “Next time, I’ll come up with a shorter quip to-” he began, but had to immediately pause as he was forced to step aside and under the second Bugbear’s armpits as she charged with her sword. She swung down, finding nothing but darkness and many pounds of reinforced iron. The sword bounced off, and though the force of the rebound probably broke the Bugbears wrists, it did not pause or waste a breath before turning around and swinging horizontally. L crouched, twisted, and ducked under the blade as it passed above his head, and then came up with with the second uppercut of the day, smacking his right fist into Bugbear’s chin as it turned towards him in a flawless counter-attack.
This time, however, he had used Masked Pride as he wound up and twisted below, and combined it with a hefty pre-allocation of the entirety of his mana reserves and whatever bits he could seep from the surrounding darkness, causing not only his fists to morph into an armored lump of deadly iron, but also his entire arm and everything below it up to spiked shoulders. The weight of his arm and the strength momentarily gained far exceeded the durability of L’s own body, causing him to tear a couple of important muscles.
It might have been a slight overkill. An audible crack was heard as L’s fist tore off the Bugbears jaws, squishing it against the top of her skull. Her head popped like a balloon, squirting everything that was inside her through her ears. She fell limply to the ground in a very dead manner.
L puffed a few labored breaths, his two hands holding him up by the knees. He thought about the many different catch phrases he could have used, such as saying something alongside the lines of Beware the dark power hidden within my right arm! or This brings a whole different meaning to being crushed! and even At least you didn't get any stupider! but had instead settled for the questionable "Ha! You're not the first woman I've made squirt her brains out!"
It was all the action he was going to get today, and while this kill was incredibly ostentatious, L realized that this was considerably more satisfying than a dagger to the throat.
He picked up his sword from the pool of blood blew his feet. “You know...I’ve had this for so long, but I still hadn’t had the opportunity to use it,” L said, and since Null was not here, he was instead forced to direct it at one of the Bugbears. After a slight pause, L shrugged and tossed the useless blade over their corpses. He grabbed one of the fallen chairs and set it besides the previously occupied table. He sat down, and with his hands raised up behind him and feet on the table, L instantly began snoozing.