After we wiped out the group of soldiers that had tracked us down, we didn’t run into anyone else for the rest of the day. Old Mo kept us moving at a decent pace, but didn’t talk much, and the rest of the group also seemed stunned by the bloodshed and revelations they had experienced earlier that day.
The parents seemed particularly surprised after seeing metal fragments zipping through the air and wiping out the soldiers. I didn’t blame them for being surprised. Abilities were so rare that most people had never seen them. For a group of children from the slums to have suddenly gained abilities was about as likely as a group of slum kids suddenly becoming wealthy merchants overnight.
At the same time, I was also left with my own thoughts.
The man who had come to attack us had seemed mostly interested in threatening Old Mo, and had mentioned that Old Mo used to be an assassin. I wasn’t completely sure why he wanted to catch Old Mo, but I had a couple guesses. Old Mo was a bit older now, so he probably wasn’t physically able to handle physically strenuous actions like assassinations anymore. Or at least, I had assumed so. I had never asked Old Mo what his age was, but he looked like someone who was in his early to mid fifties.
That being said, Old Mo had kept our entire group moving at a fast pace through the wilderness for hours on end, and even though Sallia’s parents seemed out of breath, Old Mo didn’t seem particularly fatigued. That obviously meant he was keeping up his physical abilities somehow. Did Old Mo have an ability of his own, that somehow enhanced his physical strength? Or perhaps he had replaced some of his limbs with metal prosthetics, allowing him to keep his physical abilities at the level of a reasonably athletic person in their early thirties?
But I still doubted the soldiers who had chased us had been looking for Old Mo to assassinate someone. The soldier in charge had mentioned Old Mo’s contacts, and how Old Mo kept a strong information network despite his age and retirement. I imagined there were several uses for a developed spy network that Verne’s military could make use of. Spy work, information for other assassins, and the like all seemed reasonable to me, although I had no idea what exactly Verne’s military wanted.
But the biggest thought that had been running through my mind was that Old Mo had been an assassin once. That was surprising to me. Old Mo had treated me very well during my time in this world - in a lot of respects he was more of a parent than my mother was. He kept me fed, looked after me, and worried about my circumstances when he saw me every day. He was a bigger part of my life than my mother, who was never mentally present.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about Old Mo being an assassin. In my mind, assassins were terrifying individuals who didn’t flinch at the thought of killing innocent people for money, and if I had met someone calling themselves an ‘assassin,’ I would have normally avoided them.
But considering how Old Mo had treated me this far, I found it hard to have a bad impression of him, regardless of his past. I had a hard time reconciling my two mental images together, so I spent a few hours thinking about it. Eventually, I came to a decision.
I didn’t know the circumstances surrounding Old Mo’s past, and I could only judge him based on what I had seen from him. At least when he interacted with me, he was a kind older gentleman who was willing to look out for a little girl, even when he had no need to. Perhaps in the past, he had assassinated people - and I had no way of knowing whether or not those people were bad people unless Old Mo told me about them. But despite the fact that I found assassins frightening, Old Mo had given me no reason to distrust him so far. I would put his past to the side, and perhaps someday he would tell me about it. If I saw Old Mo about to kill someone innocent, I would step in and stop him - but I wouldn’t enforce a value judgment on him unless I knew more about his circumstances.
Finally, near nighttime, we reached a considerably hillier area. I could see mountains close to us, although we hadn’t quite reached them yet. The terrain was also starting to get more difficult to traverse - which was a good thing. It meant that large groups of people would have a harder time traveling through the area, which should keep both armies off our backs.
When we set up camp for the night, the parents started awkwardly staring at us again - especially Sallia, who the parents seemed particularly wary of. Though, according to our story about what abilities each of us had, Sallia had done almost all of the fighting earlier, so it was understandable for them to be most shocked by Sallia. But they were also giving Felix, Anise, and me looks of interest, as if they weren’t quite sure which of us they should be interested in or afraid of.
Having all of our parents stare at us with a mixture of trepidation and curiosity… was honestly a little nerve wracking.
After a few minutes of awkward silence, Old Mo whispered to me.
“Were you all right with others knowing about your abilities?”
I nodded. “I have no real intention of hiding them anymore. I felt it was dangerous to expose them while we lived in Verne, but it should be much safer in other countries, where I won’t have an easily findable past as a street kid.”
Old Mo nodded, and let his voice grow a little bit louder. It still wouldn’t be easy for the parents to catch on to what he was saying, but it was no longer impossible. “Your past will be hard to dig up, yeah. And even if people realize that you were a street kid, if you stole from another country, they’re a lot less likely to make a fuss out of it. Especially since Verne isn’t particularly well liked by most of the continent right now. And if you do manage to successfully convince people you were a rich kid from the beginning, and fled from Verne…” Old Mo trailed off. “Actually, you might be better off pretending to be from a different country. I know that the town of Dalia, from the nation of Semurria, has suffered pretty heavily from Verne’s navy during the war. If you pretend to be from there, you could probably make a decent show of it. The nation still has nobility, unlike most modern nations, but they have no real power. And their language is very similar to Verne’s, since they were both part of the Zelyr empire during the Zelyrian golden age. You could pass yourself off as a fallen noble whose family tried to turn to mercantile purposes, and then lost your fortune in Dalia, before setting out for greener pastures…”
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I nodded to myself. I would need to learn more about Dalia, Semuria, and how to run a ‘failing merchant company’ from Old Mo, but it was a decent enough backstory to set myself up for a new life in the future.
A few moments later, with Old Mo having started to breach the topic of our unusual past and abilities, Sallia’s parents finally worked up the courage to broach the subject.
“Have you… how long have you had abilities?”
Unlike Old Mo, they didn’t try to disguise their voices at all. I could also see them glancing at Felix and I.
said Anise, with the telepathic equivalent of a sigh.
I said.
She nodded.
“The three of us managed to steal an ability potion from a corpse that we found while we were hanging out,” said Sallia. “The three of us were walking through the streets, when we saw a dead guy in a nearby alley. He looked wealthy - he had a suit on.”
Sallia launched into our somewhat plausible explanation of where we got our ability potions. There were a few weird parts to the story, such as the question of why whoever had killed the rich person hadn’t taken the ability potions we had found, but Felix ‘interjected’ to help clarify that the ability potions had been hidden under the man’s body, and it looked like the killer had fled in a hurry for some reason. By the end of it, our narrative was at least somewhat plausible, although it was unlikely.
“So you stole potions from a dead rich man?” said Sallia’s mother, frowning. Sallia’s father looked thoughtful. Meanwhile, my mother looked like she had fallen back into a daze - I was sure there was some sort of residual effect of her drugs running through her system right now, and she had stopped paying attention quite a while ago.
“You shouldn’t have been going out at all,” said Sallia’s mother, as her frown deepened. “We hired the old lady to make sure you didn’t go out and get hurt! Now I find out that you’ve been traipsing through back alleys when we were working.”
“It worked out though, didn’t it dear?” asked Sallia’s father. “She has an ability now.” I could see a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “Ability potions are so expensive that there’s no way we could ever afford them. The ability to manipulate metal… that could get Sallia an amazing job in the future. She could easily make items that are hard to construct for regular factories. It could get her a real future as something other than a factory worker. Something we never had a chance for.”
“But if she dies it would all be for nothing! I’m not… comfortable with my little girl risking her life like that!”
“But there’s also no changing the past,” said Sallia’s father, although his tone turned gentler. He turned back towards Sallia. “I don’t approve of you wandering around the streets without an adult, especially since it sounds like you did so a long time ago. I also don’t approve of you hiding it from us… but I guess it at least shows that you have the sense not to flaunt your ability when it could put you in danger. It worked out this time. Don’t take that as an endorsement of your actions - when we get to our new home, we’re going to have a nice, long talk about trust and safety. After that, we’ll figure out what to in the future.” He turned towards Old Mo. “And I imagine you can help all of us blend in to our destination? Since it sounds like you were an…” he didn’t manage to say the word ‘assassin’ out loud, but I could see what he was implying. With a spy network and an identity as a former assassin, Old Mo probably had ways to slip in and out of a city undetected and set up a new identity for all of us.
Old Mo nodded. “That was my intention. We’ll figure something more detailed out tomorrow night, when we’re a little less tired, but I’m thinking right now you could be childhood friends of Miria’s fallen noble family. Or perhaps investors in her father’s failed company or something. We’ll work out the exact details later, but I’m sure we can figure something out.”
Sallia’s father seemed to think about Old Mo’s words for a while, before he nodded. “All right, that makes sense to me, at least. We’ll figure out the finer details in the future.”
With the air finally cleared regarding our abilities, I felt lighter than ever when I went to sleep that night.