“What is the meaning of this?” JJ exploded. “This is a slave contract! A literal slave contract! You're not even allowed to think anything 'hostile' towards the Empire? Are you crazy!?”
“It's not tha bad” a guard said dismissively “As long as ye don't do nothing bad, the higher ups won't bother ya.”
Realizing that the students weren't convinced, the leader added with a placating smile “He's right ya know, the magical contract is just a formality. Tha great Eden Empire is known far and wide for its miraculous suppression barrier that covers the whole country. In order ta freely walk inside the Empire's lands ya gotta have a soul contract to be excluded from tha effects. Without it yer likely to die considerin how weak you lot are. Besides” he grinned “did you know that people with yer abilities are quite valuable in the Empire?”
“H-how did you know about our abilities?” Diana gasped.
“Of course we knew. That's why we went to tha trouble of collecting ya. In our society, those like yerself have a very high status. Money, wives, or husbands, parties, beautiful dresses, fancy houses, ye'll have it all!”
“W-what if... what if... our abilities... don't... work so well?” Michael stuttered, finally working up the courage to ask his own question.
“Then ye'll probably die” the leader bluntly responded. “Wait” he grunted as he saw the students recoil at his answer “I didn't mean it like that. We're not so cruel as ta kill someone for not havin an ability. But yer superiors promised my superiors that yer abilities were legit, and if they're not, then our laws are gonna hold you responsible for that.”
He shrugged “But as long as there ain't no funny business, everything will be fine, so dun worry about it.”
Rather than calming him down as intended, the previous statements only worried Michael more, to the point that his legs started shaking under him.
JJ glanced at the others and saw that Robert and Diana looked complete lost, while Josh simply stood off to the side and squinted at the guards. He felt himself calm down as he concluded that they were nothing more than lambs being lead to the slaughter. The carrot and the stick were obvious. This wasn't a conversation or a debate. His only choices were to submit or to defy them. The only question was what the consequences for defying would be.
Looking down at the contract in his hands, he decided “I'm not going. I can't bring myself to sign a contract like this”
Michael quickly held on to the only lifeboat he could find in this sea of terror, yelling “Me too! I can't sign it either! Let us go back!”
The guard leader slowly frowned before replying “Are ya sure? We're on a tight enough time table as it is. We can't escort ya back. Ye'll have to walk the entire way. Hours, at least, through a monster infested forest. All because you're a bit scared of a mostly symbolic oath? Think it over kid”
“I'm sure” JJ stated firmly, with a much less confident “Me too!” thrown in by Michael. JJ turned to the rest and asked “Are you sure you want to go along with this?”
Diana and Robert gaped as they tried to wrap their minds around everything that had happened in the past 5 minutes, before Josh stepped up and replied “It doesn't sound so bad to me.” He glanced between the three guards and then back to JJ and Michael before adding “I think you should join us, Junior. It probably won't be so bad. Who knows what the future will hold for us?”
“I know what the future will hold if I sign that contract” JJ responded. “I'm going back with or without you.”
“Nobody ever listens to me...” Josh muttered, turning away with a frown.
“Fine” sighed the guard leader “I guess I can't convince ya so I'll wish ya luck on your way.”
Although JJ knew that he had an incredibly rough and even dangerous hike ahead of him, he felt nothing but a huge sense of relief that he would be able to walk away without signing over his soul to a mysterious magical Empire. “Thank y-”
*BANG*
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“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
*BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*
JJ looked down in shock as he felt a burning, tearing pain in his chest and his gut. He heard screaming in the background as he saw red begin to cover his hands.
He felt himself fall backwards as he instinctively cast himself out of his physical body with his power. Hovering above, he saw his his own body lying next to Michael's as the life drained out of them.
The guard leader barked “Good work!” and JJ turned to look in his direction. One of his subordinates stood with a modern handgun aimed at where JJ previously stood, while Diana and Robert crouched in the background screaming. Josh stood silently behind them and glared briefly at the guards while they were looking away, before falling back into a calm facade.
“What a fun toy” the subordinate laughed while twirling the gun.
“Knock it off, Tom” the leader demanded “Hurry up and dump those bodies with tha slimes and bury that weapon. The last thing we need is an oracle following it to us.”
“Sure thing boss” Tom replied, walking directly towards JJ.
JJ couldn't feel the pain anymore. He couldn't feel the burning of the wound, or the light-headedness of his blood draining out. His astral form could only feel emotions, the most prominent being rage and betrayal at these men who took him away from his home, demanded his enslavement, and then stole his life.
Without any real plan, JJ charged towards the man in an attempt to do... anything. His astral form converged with the man's body and then foreign thoughts began to swirl in JJ's mind and a headache began forming.
“AHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Screams continued to sound through the forest, a deeper voice now joining Diana's and Robert's in the background.
The guard with the gun began to cradle his head while throwing his body around and screaming.
“A possession! WARDS UP!” the leader screamed with shock in his eyes. His remaining subordinate matched him in pulling out a thin circlet to place on their heads.
JJ began suppressing the foreign thoughts he felt, not destroying or silencing them, simply burying them beneath his own as he found that he could forcibly pilot the body he was currently co-inhabiting. As he raised the gun in his hand to point it at the two remaining guards, he felt his view begin to tilt. As his field of view turned upside down and dipped down to chest level, the foreign thoughts that were competing with his own began to disappear.
As JJ reverted to astral form, he noticed an irate guard leader standing in front of the now headless body of his former subordinate.
“TOM!” shouted the remaining guard “HE GOT TOM!”
“Shut up” growled the leader as he pulled his last subordinate's face closer to his own.
JJ felt his headache continue to grow and realized that the possession had stressed his powers and reduced the time he would be able to maintain his ability. Looking back at his body lying still on the ground, he doubted he'd ever wake up again once it ran out.
He tried to repeat his possession with the guard leader, but found himself bounced off an invisible wall and unable to draw close. Trying the last guard instead, the results were the same. 'That must be the wards he was talking about, damnit!'
The last guard continued muttering “Tom” and “He got him” until the leader finally slapped him in the face. “Listen to me Brett” the leader whispered “Nobody got possessed. One Astral who refused ta sign died. One fake died. Tom tried to protect them and died too. That's our story. No need to risk an inquisition over some asshole Astral just 'cause he was a bit stronger than we thought. Got it?”
Brett started to nod, calming down, before glancing back at the remaining students. “What about the others, boss?” he asked quietly.
“We'll watch 'em” the leader whispered back “Astrals ain't so easy to possess. One of them starts freaking out, we throw 'em to the monsters.”
JJ continued watching from his astral form as the two guards discussed the possible murder his former classmates. He considered these guards fair game after what they had done to him, but he felt repulsed at the very idea of stealing an innocent person's body. 'Even if I die here... I'm not going to resort to that.'
He followed behind as the guard leader collected all three lifeless bodies and sought out a nearby lake. The last guard remained behind to watch over the students.
The leader exhibited truly superhuman capabilities, running at what JJ suspected were highway speeds through a dense forest for over a minute while carrying three dead bodies. Even as his headache steadily increased, he managed to keep up with the frantic pace in his astral form.
To JJ's great displeasure, even as the guard leader tossed the corpses into a sparkling lake, he refused to remove the circlet that seemed to protect him from JJ's possession. No matter what angle he tried he could not get through, and the man showed no reaction to his attempts.
After disposing of the bodies and cursing JJ under his breath one last time, the guard leader turned to leave. JJ felt himself fading away and knew that he'd never make it back to the others.
With unwillingness in his heart, he looked back to his former body, now floating in the middle of the lake, with odd lumps of water converging on the area.
Floating closer in his astral form, he realized that this was why the lake was chosen as a dumping spot. There were dozens of bowling ball sized, translucent slimes with small dark blue cores beginning to glob onto and dissolve the corpses. He watched in fascinated horror as his own face began to distort and get sucked into the body of one of the slimes.
In one last desperate attempt to avoid his impending fate, he floated into one of the lone slimes on the outskirts of the feeding frenzy and tried to repeat his first successful possession.
To his surprise, he suddenly gained a 360 degree omniscient, spherical view of the area within 5 meters of this new slime body, while losing the normal linear view he was used to with both his old body and his astral form.
But what JJ appreciated the most at this moment was that his headache slightly lessened, and he felt none of the intrusive thoughts that came with his previous possession. He still felt exhausted, like that time he marathoned a 48 hour special of some 80s TV show with a talking car, but his existence felt tethered to the world once more.
Unnoticed by any sapient life, a single slime broke away from the mindless feeding frenzy currently taking place on the surface of the lake and lay flat against the lake bottom. It lay there for an indeterminable amount of time in apparent rest as its new occupant slowly recovered.