------------------------------Hervalle Empire -----------------------
Avior sat in his morning class where a deranged older mage of the fourth with only wisps of white hair remaining on his scalp presented information as clearly as an unsolved riddle. Ignoring the terrible lecture Avior’s eyes drifted to the open window where he watched the storm occurring outside.
“I wonder how my organization is coming along.” Avior thought. He had entrusted the mission to Bastian, a man who seemed hopelessly incompetent so Avior’s expectations weren’t very high. The servants he made in the following years were focused on either creating their own independent organizations like Luxia or bringing more conflict into the world like Fluma and Arden. Either way, none of them would be able to pick up the mantle Avior believed Bastian had left in the dust.
“I guess I’ll just have to do it myself.” Avior thought in exasperation as he stopped his constant mana drain allowing his reservoir to begin building back up. Thinking about what kind of servant he would make later that day Avior continued ignoring the lecture and watched, lost in thought, as the raindrops splattered across the ground outside.
After classes, Avior left the school grounds with the intention of going on a walk to help him sort out his thoughts. With a brief greeting to Jenkins, the guard he had met back on his first day at the Academy, he set off on his stroll. Wandering into town Avior bought a snack or two and tried sorting his different ideas for a new servant when he suddenly heard the sound of a screaming woman.
Breaking his train of thought Avior looked around spotting the sun setting only to realize he had unknowingly walked pretty deep into the city slums. “Well, maybe a good deed will help me figure out what I should do.” Avior thought as he used darkness magic to cover his body in a black veil. Then threading magic through specific muscle groups he summoned a burst of strength allowing him to leap onto the roof of a nearby building. With his new vantage point, Avior sent out a small scan with his mana encompassing the nearby alleyways. Immediately Avior discovered a young woman, who was unfortunately now a fresh corpse, being dragged by two men into an unusual building. Avior realized he was unable to sense inside the building with his scan, something he found odd considering his current abilities.
Annoyed his desire for a frolic in heroism had ended before it had even begun Avior launched himself at the door one of the two men had just disappeared behind.
His heavily reinforced body tore through the metal door like paper before continuing through and reducing the two men behind the door as well as the woman's corpse to pieces upon impact. His black veil absorbing the red mist Avior found stairs that led below the city. Taking the stairs Avior found an empty area resembling a local bar. Here Avior did a quick scan before finding the area his magic senses couldn’t penetrate. Wasting no time Avior threw his hand forward, slamming into one of the room’s floor with his palm. The stone floor beneath his palm broke apart revealing yet another downwards set of stairs. Following it down Avior discovered two men in aprons wearing face coverings and wielding odd-looking scalpels emitting mana. They stood over a table where a young girl covered in grotesque purple growths watched the men with dulling eyes as they cut into her body.
Interested, Avior sent two white flashes into both tormentors' brains. Melting their mind as Avior copied whatever information they knew in brutal fashion. In a flash, two bloody-aproned corpses collapsed on the stone floor while Avior received a rush of new information.
“Hm, so he was a member of the shadow organization Tyrant.” Their mission in my previous lives was to take over the world. This seems to be one of their more flashy experiments where they subject humans to a massive amount of uncontrolled mana: leading to the subject immediately dying or surviving, but producing much denser mana than before. These “lucky” individuals would be horribly mutilated as their mana circuits, not built to handle such dense mana, would break apart under the strain leaking mana to run wild inside their bodies. In most cases, the subjects bodies would then be overloaded with mana and explode, but in rare cases, the subject manages to hold their body somewhat intact. Their uncontained mana would build-up clogging their veins creating large growths the size of human heads all around their bodies while the remaining wild mana would reach their brain causing havoc and cursing them with madness. In all previous cases these “mana mutants” would enter a frenzy immediately after waking from their procedure. As such their fates never expanded beyond becoming berserk, destroying whatever lay in their vicinity, and being put down mercilessly by Tyrant soldiers. Tyrant’s goal with the whole project was to find a way to control the surviving monsters and use them to form an army of mana-dense mutants to help their goal of taking over the world.
“In my previous life, they never progressed to being surgical in how they applied the mana. It seems someone powerful decided to support them this time around.” Avior moved to the girl whose eyes showed no sign of acknowledgment at the sudden death of her tormentors. Avior placed his hands on the young girl made ugly by magic rot. Slowly Avior channeled some mana he had been storing for the creation of his servant. Soon Avior became lost in his work. Inspired by how Tyrant’s henchmen were applying magic to the girl’s body Avior overhauled the procedure sending a rapidly increasing stream of mana throughout her body slowly reinforcing and widening her mana circuits so they could process the excess mana without breaking or leaking mana. Hours passed until suddenly Avior broke off his channeling in a daze. Avior had become too engrossed in the experiment and had channeled all of his mana without realizing it. Once his body began converting his own flesh and blood into mana he had been jolted out of his work craze. Quickly wiping the blood that had come out of his nose and ears as a result of his overexertion he turned his attention to his completed project. The girl was now staring back at him with wide eyes akin to that of a frightened fawn. The girl’s body was no longer scarred. Her ugly boils and rotten flesh were no where to be seen. A young girl was revealed to be underneath similar in age to Avior himself. And this young girl appeared awestruck at the twelve-year-old boy in a student uniform before her.
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“What’s your name.” Avior broke the silence asking the young girl a question.
“I…I…I don’t know my name.” The girl said in response.
“Ok, then I’ll call you Prim for now. What’s your age?” Avior assigned the girl a name to avoid the inconvenience of trying to talk to someone without one.
“I don’t know that either.” The young girl looked to be on the brink of tears due to her frustration.
“Well you look twelve like me. So we’ll say you're twelve for now.” Avior assigned the girl an age.
“Can you use magic?” He asked continuing his line of questioning.
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried before.” The young girl responded afraid of being abandoned for being found unuseful.
“Fine, I guess I’ll have to teach you then.” Avior believed she must have an excellent affinity for mana considering she’d already absorbed all the mana he had on hand and seemed able to absorb even more. Besides, he could teach her without expending his own mana so it wouldn’t cost the progress of his own training at all. Avior began looking forward to molding Prim into a soldier for humanity. His thoughts of creating another servant from scratch forgotten.
“Teacher?” The girl asked in a confused tone. Not knowing what she had just been dragged into.
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A few months passed with Avior sleeping through classes before seeking out Prim to teach her about mana control. Avior even threw in some lessons on physical workouts to help with melee combat and stealth. After the third month of training, Prim was already showing a mana capacity equal to higher mages and at the rate she grew her body's strength was not weak either. Avior decided to begin testing her with “missions.”
Prim knelt in the darkness inside Avior’s college room. Across from her was her mysterious teacher who saved her life and bestowed an endless stream of gifts upon her. Prim believed that although the boy was a clear genius with unique backing he seemed unusually weak as she could never sense even a sliver of mana coming from him ever since he'd seemingly overexerted himself to save her. The young boy now spoke with a new tone veiled in seriousness, “Prim the people who tortured you are known as Tyrant.”
Prim felt anger rising in her stomach as she worked to feverishly ingrain the name Tyrant onto her mind as her teacher continued.
“Tyrant's a group who seek to rule the world. They have many different plots they pursue while hidden deep within society's dark underbelly. Their actions have recently become more and more brazen. Your first mission is to track and eliminate any who have ties to Tyrant here in the capital. While you should bring all their important research material back with you, you don't have to bother with letting any of their lackeys live.”
Prim, excited to finally get to use her skills to help her teacher, acknowledged the command with fervor. “Yes, Teacher!” With those words, Prim vanished from Avior’s room bent on fulfilling her Teacher's first request.
-------------------------------------------------Western Isles-------------------------------------------------
Bastian looked on at the shriveling mess before him. The so called Pirate Princess Diana looked nothing more than a terrified animal, eyes held wide open, pupils shaking, while her body itself was cowering in a corner of the room.
“Are you truly unwilling to help me find the sea dragon Diana?” Bastian spoke with a friendly voice tinged with sadness.
Diana only meekly shook her head in response unable to muster the courage to speak in front of the man who had butchered everyone on the ship escorting her. Her mind that hadn't recovered from meeting Fluma had been kicked further down into a pit of madness after encountering yet another monster.
Bastian let out a remorseful sigh. “Ah a true pity then.” Bastian began walking towards Diana prompting her to only shiver more in fear. As Bastian reached her he extended his arm and put it on the docile but terrified Diana. “Allow me to help find your courage.” The warm words coming from Bastian’s mouth were made to be out of place as the shrill screams of torture began echoing in the ears of Captain Roarke’s crew for the rest of the night.
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Shortly after Bastian wearing his traditional cold look emerged. Roarke’s remaining crew all immediately knelt, treating Bastian as they would a king, not daring to even let a muscle twitch in the madman's presence.
“Captain Roarke,” Bastian spoke with a stately aura, “Set sail for the Red Crescent Cove.”
The crew not even waiting for Roarke to say the orders sprung to action hoping to stay on the good side of the monster they were carrying. They were so focused on immersing themselves in their work they didn’t manage to see the feminine figure who had emerged to stand behind Bastian posturing much like a servant while dressed in a black hooded robe hiding their face.