“Here are my conditions. First, no more cutting up humans.”

Jerome tried to make his voice as authoritative as possible. If the king refused his demands then Jerome could just kill him. However, if that happened then Jerome would lose his chance at keeping the city from descending into even more chaos; he would be king of a nice stone city and a bunch of rebellious gnolls.

“How will we find their souls without science?”

“Humans don’t have crystals.”

“No souls?” The king looked horrified. “But your kind act as if you’re intelligent…”

“We have souls,” said Jerome, thinking back to the message he’d gotten when he’d tried to transform with a Portal Hand still going. Either humans had souls or the system was lying, and the system hadn’t lied before. “They’re just not like yours. They’re more… diffuse.”

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“Is that why you respawn randomly?”

“We don’t respawn. That’s new people coming in from earth.”

“Earth? I don’t understand.”

“Another world. We can’t go back. There are no respawns, just new people coming from Earth.”

“Why did you decide to come here from your other world?”

How to explain that most of the humans were criminals or enemies of the government? If he was completely honest then the king might distrust him even more. Maybe he could portray the World Government as evil; that would only slightly improve how the criminals were seen, but it would be a huge boost to the standing of the government’s enemies, like Krystyna.

“Well, it wasn’t a decision. It was—”

Katani’s eyes went wide, then the next second a spear was halfway through his head.