Jaune watched, sat on his cot as Blake made herself comfortable on the floor, leaning on the wall opposite of him. Him being elevated and her being on the floor was what he had been banking on when he'd sat on the cot.

He had left space open for her, but sitting in a bed with a stranger was beyond what most people would be willing to do. They would willingly sit themselves on the floor to avoid it. Willingly put themselves in a position of someone lesser... The effect would of course be stronger if Blake didn't know what he was doing and how he was doing it.

Jaune doubted she suspected anything. She seemed more street-smart than anything else. The type of manipulation he'd just put into action was on a slightly more refined level than what she was probably used to.

"The reason why I helped you is… I'm bound to my own view of the world, I guess," Jaune started. "I could say that I helped you because you attempted to help me, when you seemingly had no reason too."

She made to speak but he raised a hand to halt her.

"You might say that anyone would have done what you did, warning a stranger of a potential ambush where he might lose more than just his material goods. But..." He locked eyes with her yellow ones, sparking a small amount of arcane in his. "Look inside your heart, no matter how cliché it sounds. Do you really believe many others would have done the same as you?"

Stopping someone as they were about to speak, and forcing them to say something else than what they originally wanted...

Blake broke eye-contact. Looked down. "No, not many," She admitted.

"Could you please raise your head?" Jaune asked. "You have done nothing to warrant shame, and should not act in any way that suggests it." He chuckled. "Unless you think having a subconscious belief in the good of humanity is something to be ashamed of."

Blake raised her head and he was able to lock eyes with her again. They were quite pretty, now that they had lost their hostility.

Suggest something that the target was going to do anyway, make it seem like it was your idea, and therewith implying that they were foolish enough to need your guidance in something as simple as that. Dependence.

Then, ask for a favour that the target would have no reason of refusing. People don't do favours for anybody, therefore if they did one for you, you must be their friend. Why would they go out of their way otherwise? The construction of a positive bond.

The simple act of a compliment, paired with the commandment, thou shalt not feel ashamed. I am your absolver, your judge, your executioner.

"It's not something to be ashamed of, but it is quite naïve, I admit. It does lead well into my reasoning behind helping you." Jaune continued waffling as Blake listened.

Belittlement, you are something lesser than me. Immediately followed by something else to grasp their attention. Making the act of putting them below you seep into their psyche without any chance to analyse the words actively.

"I do not believe in the inherent good of humanity, quite the opposite really, I believe in its limitless malice." He raised a hand to interrupt her again. "That does not mean that I want it to be that way. I rather like the idea of inherent goodness actually. That means for me, rewarding such acts when I can. After all, if you experience positive consequences from your acts of good you are more likely to continue committing them aren't you?"

Always ask questions, rhetorical ones if you can. If they are busy answering questions they can't actively steer the conversation and rhetorical questions leave very little open in the way of variation.

Blake snorted. And the anger returned to her, the colour changed alongside her emotions, interesting. They were more amber than yellow now. "And how does you wanting to do good compute with how you killed those men? With how strong you are you could have simply incapacitated them."

It won't always work of course, that's why you should phrase your words in such a way that when your target breaks away from your script, they are more likely to do so in a very specific way. A specific way that you have already planned for.

"It works quite well, really." Jaune raised his hands and lowered them in a calming gesture as Blake bristled. "Just as acts of good are to be rewarded to incentivise them, acts of evil must be punished with a brutal severity to deter others from walking down that path."

The words must have pushed a very deep-seated button in the girl, as she slammed a fist onto the floor and shouted at him. "You can't just divide the world into good and evil!" She continued, suddenly more quietly. "They could have been redeemed."

Interesting. Her stance implied that she herself was someone who did not want to be judged in black and white, which of course implied that if she were to be judged she would be painted black. Also someone who had likely been redeemed, or was in the process of doing so.

She could also be a moralist.

Jaune seemingly ignored her. "Of course if nobody is there to spread the word of how the act of evil was punished, it won't deter a great many people. Therefore I let one live. Thankfully I am strong enough to choose which, and I chose the one who seemed the most at odds with what they were doing."

The anger receded from Blake's eyes and she slumped into herself. Seemingly exhausted.

If someone is foolish enough, to bare to a stranger one of their core beliefs, of how they view the world, then they are truly an idiot, for they have just handed you the key to their heart. Now, you simply have to turn it and open the door.

Jaune of course had not chosen to spare Bob because of any supposed chance at redemption, Bob had simply been the only one to survive his initial attack and it was preferable for someone to survive and spread the word, so to say.

He stood up. "Now if you'll excuse me, the ship is about to depart. I must speak with the captain. You can use the time to think on how to continue the conversation if you wish to do so." And he promptly left.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Suggest people what to do with their time. Once you have a grip on that, you own them. They are more likely to do what has been suggested, even if they don't realize it. And less likely to do the opposite. Jaune had said 'how to continue the conversation,' which made it less likely for her to dwell on how the conversation had gone up to that point.

Do not contemplate the past, always look towards the future. Do not doubt, do not falter, do not question. A slave mentality.

Conversation was just as much of a battle as everything else in life. It was just that most people didn't even know they were fighting in the first place.

Jaune pulled his hood back up as he exited the cabin. No need to show the sailors how young he really was. They thought he was in his twenties, if a bit short, and that was perfectly fine. His presence seemed to reassure the men greatly as he walked through them, arriving by the captain's side.

"We lost five." Ercanbald told him before he could ask. Jaune clasped the man's shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. "My first mate amongst them."

"A good man deeply regrets his failures, a great man, turns them into lessons." Was all Jaune could offer to that. He wasn't particularly attached to any of the sailors, but he could feel how affected the captain was by their deaths. The man's eyes were tearing up.

It was all quite sudden, Jaune thought to himself. Not even knowing that something was happening and then dying due to the power-hungry machinations of another.

"Thanks," the captain choked out. This was quickly approaching territory that Jaune wanted nothing to do with.

So he changed the topic. "Is the ship sailable with the men we have now?"

He received a nod. "Yes, but barely."

Jaune grimaced. That was something that he had rather been hoping to avoid. "I can offer the simple assistance of two hands on board if it becomes necessary." He wanted off the sea as soon as possible. If he had to help the crew a bit for them to not be slowed down, then so be it.

It would of course be quite drab if he was called when not truly needed… Jaune departed towards the port side with some last words. "Do not attempt to misuse the privilege."

Maybe the captain had picked up on his ability to sense things out of sight, because he nodded, despite there being no chance at Jaune seeing it.

-/-

Jaune smiled at his handheld mirror. Had it really been this easy the entire time? The skill of turning the descriptors above his head on and off was something he'd mastered a year ago, but he'd never wondered if there was anything more to it.

Until Blake had come along, somehow not showing her last name.

The knowledge that the descriptors were, to a point... malleable, had shattered his understanding of the entire bloody thing. Maybe it was an assassin skill! Moving onto a target with the name Mary Jane revealed, garnering no suspicion because the most famous assassin in town was called Jane Mary.

But no...

He had simply needed to think it and the Arc had disappeared from Jaune Arc. Was it really that simple? Nobody had bothered trying, therefore nobody knew it was possible? Jaune could see why this information had never been written down. It was only useful as long as others didn't know about it.

Blake showing only her first name would make people assume she was some kind of orphan, or from a family that refused to use their last name to ever refer to their daughter. The orphan and no-last-name ideas had only come to him after he'd already made up his mind about the descriptors being malleable.

It was obviously a well kept secret if even the Arc family, which had many encounters with assassins, didn't know about it. It better remain a secret.

After all, this was potentially his salvation. His freedom.

Jaune looked into the mirror and grinned. If you could leave out your last name, wouldn't it make sense that you could leave out your class as well?

Jaune Arc

Lightbreaker

Classes and titles didn't have anything that could help discern between the two of them. And being ogled for a rare class (first of its kind actually!) was much better than being hunted for being a dimensional mage.

Teleport was simply his passive, the class "Lightbreaker" seemed to be a mix of offensive magic like arcane bolt/rend, and skills capable of looking through illusions, like dimensional comprehension.

Though he would never reveal its true name. "Gaze of the Beholder" seemed quite catchy for something that could simply glance through illusions.

Jaune was ashamed of his rare, but rather useless class, and therefore hid it. The entire thing centred around being a counter to illusionists, which wasn't overly useful, since illusionists were a rare class as well. The reason why his skills were so unfitting for an illusion breaker was the fact that he'd taken the divergent skills offered every time.

After all, shatter illusion was only good against a certain group of people. Arcane bolt, however, did damage to everything, with a small chance of disrupting light-based illusions.

Jaune deliberately stopped thinking about how he could display Lightbreaker as a class. He was getting ahead of himself. While happy he had chanced upon something so utterly versatile, especially for someone in his position, he shouldn't rush in creating the story of how his supposed class worked. Hell, he could maybe gain another title and use that.

Warrior of the Seas sounded like something you could get if you fought enough naval battles… It was better to start his planning when he had come down from his happiness high. So that's what he did.

Stopped thinking about it. Helped the sailors. Starting the ship up always took more effort than keeping it sailing, and with his amateurish help they had probably set off five minutes earlier.

Jaune stretched out his senses to their maximum, expecting an ambush or something as they sailed out of Kuo Kuana's dock. The town hadn't really made a good impression on him so he was a bit more paranoid than usual. He relaxed when they sailed out of sight of it, and walked back towards his cabin, intentionally scuffing his feet against the wood beneath him and walking heavily so as to not startle the assassin in his room.

It was his room; he refused to knock. If she wasn't listening intently enough and he came upon her in an embarrassing situation then it was her own fault.

He found her sleeping, in the same position he'd left her. Back to the wall, knees drawn to the body with the head resting on them, hands resting on her daggers. Well, she was pretending to sleep, anyways. Probably just didn't feel like interacting with him.

Now that Jaune looked at her, face clear of all the negative emotions marring it before, he noted she was quite the beauty. The probable baggage kind of ruined any attraction he might have felt though. From his interactions with her, he was able to discern that she had been redeemed, or was seeking redemption. Redeemed for what he did not know, but she was too much of an assassin to have been raised as anything but. ...And maybe, being a mage, his prejudices against the class were showing.

But if even an assassin felt that a crime needed redeeming, then it must have been a hefty one indeed. Was that why she'd warned him about his would be robbers? An attempt at doing good to mask the evil of her past. She has most likely turned over a new leaf only recently. She was too emotional about the subject for it to be an old wound. In general, too emotional for an assassin. Whatever had made her attempt a change must have happened recently.

And the outfall was big enough that she was fleeing to another continent, to attend a hero school of all things. After all, what other destination would a sixteen, seventeen-year-old assassin seeking redemption going to the city of Vale have? Missions you could receive from Beacon were all centred around helping or saving people, after all.

Redemption, absolution. It was a pursuit of freedom. Freedom from one's own conscience.

Jaune tilted his head as he observed her still form.

What have you done, Blake?

-/-

The anguish of the fallen absolves our eyes

'Til beauty shines in all that we can see.

Murder is our scourge; yet it has made us wise,

And fighting for our freedom, we are free.