CHAPTER 80 THOUGHTFUL
I opened my eyes to the rocky roof of my room. I didn’t remember falling asleep, or even trying to for that matter. Brief flashes of memory came to the forefront of my memory. The soup. I smiled.
I didn’t feel that crushing despair and sadness anymore. The soup had been something my mother had made and damn was it not good soup. How had Jolene made that though? Was it just pure happenstance that she made something I would recognize? Had to be.
Interesting situation, but I was glad that it happened. Now that I had slept a bit and cried a good amount I felt a lot less stressed. I still didn’t feel great, but I felt like I had a slightly better grasp on my situation now.
I rolled out of my bed and let one of my mental processes handle remaking my prosthetic arm.
I stepped out of my room and made my way down the hallway. With my observation skill I could already see that there were tons of people milling about in the commons area. It didn’t take long to make it out there, I started making my way over to the set of tables and chairs closest to the kitchen and sat down there.
Normally I would have preferred to just stay in my room, maybe work on leveling my skills. But for some reason I just felt like being around other people right now. Not sure why.
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. I managed to pick out a couple of people in the crowd that I recognized by using my [One With Nature] skill. Kayla was one of those people, the others being David, Fists sister that wasn’t with David currently. There were some other people I didn’t recognize by name as well, like those guys I had fought a while back.
Kayla was talking with a guy that looked around her age, he was a little bit taller than her and had shaggy blonde hair and blue eyes. Despite being a slave the man had somehow managed to keep a groomed appearance. A skill perhaps?
He had relatively handsome features as well, and I would’ve said he kept himself in good shape if I didn’t think that skills more than likely had something to do with it. I mean, it wasn’t hard to get ripped when you could just choose classes that boosted your strength and made you ripped.
Kayla seemed to notice that I was here and pointed me out to her friend and started leading him over here. It didn’t take them long to cross the room and reach the table I was sitting at.
“Hey, Alex!” Kayla said excitedly.
I opened my eyes and responded in kind.
“Hi, Kayla. Glad to see you’re doing well.”
“Yeah, as well as I can anyways. Kind of hard to be ‘well’ when you’re a slave in a salt mine, but not much I can do about that.” She said with a slight shrug.
“Fair enough,” I agreed with a light chuckle.
“Anyways, I wanted to introduce you to my friend. This is Max.” She said with a slight gesture to him.
“Hi, good to meet ya.” He said with a smile and stuck his hand out.
I returned his smile, “Likewise.” And I shook his hand.
“I actually knew Max from before this place, he went missing from our town a few years back and I wasn’t sure what had happened but he ended up here I guess.” She frowned slightly at the end of that.
“How did you end up here, Max?” She asked, giving him a curious look.
[Level 253]
‘Ping’ [Identify] Has leveled 10 > 11
Max let out a sigh, “It’s a bit of a story.”
“We’ve got a bit of time before they send us out.” Kayla said while pulling out a chair and sitting down.
“I guess we do.” Max pulled out his own chair and sat down as well.
“So you remember how I ended up joining the imperial reserve guard?”
“Yeah, I remember.” Kayla said with a nod.
“Well, we ended up marching north to Lake Omnikiah, on the side of the dukedom. They’ve been getting pretty aggressive recently due to rising tensions between them and the Theocracy. So we marched up north and we hired ourselves out as mercenaries to the dukedom. For whatever reason the Empire wants to see them come out on top.”
“What? Why? Wouldn’t the Theocracy be a much better choice? Sure they push their religion down everyone's throats, but they never go beyond actually just being pushy about it. Even their law is centered around religious freedom. The dukedom actively culls non-human populations in their countryside though.”
Max just shrugged, “I think they’re both evil in their own ways. There’s been a bunch of shady shit both sides have been accused of. But that’s not really the point. Getting back to the story, we fought for the dukedom for maybe a year or two. We got some good levels out of it at the very least.”
Kayla just made a non-committal noise in response.
“Anyways, after our engagements against the Theocracy we ended up retreating back through Dukedom territories. Do you know where the Elitol Forest is?” He asked, looking between the two of us.
We both shook our heads.
“It’s a pretty big forest just to the east of the border between the Dukedom and Alixia. It kind of follows the shoreline of the lake on the Dukedom side. Anyway, the forest is pretty big and lots of monsters infest it. It’s pretty dangerous, most of the monsters are tier four or higher. They tend not to ever leave the forest though so it hasn’t really become a problem for the Dukedom though.”
Interesting, that might be a place to keep in mind for the future.
Max kept pressed onwards with his story, “Well, we ended up getting chased by an archangel that was summoned by a squad of paladins. We obviously didn’t stand a chance, so we ran. Some of us ended up running through the forest to get away. I went with that group.”
Kayla let out an exclamatory noise, “Why would you do that? You just said that it was extremely dangerous!”
Max sighed, “I also just said that we were being chased by an archangel. Those things are tier seven minimum. Highest one ever recorded was a tier nine and it decimated an entire country single handedly in less than 24 hours.”
Well, shit. That gave some perspective to things. I’d seen what tier sevens were capable of when I’d seen the Queen fight the Harbinger. Hell, I’d seen a tier six that had the capability of destroying an entire city by herself.
Kayla opened and closed her mouth several times, it made her look like a fish trying to breathe. It was kind of cute. She eventually sat back in her seat crossing her arms and pouted a little.
“Oh, don’t pout.” Max said with a bit of teasing exasperation, “It makes you look like a kid getting caught sneaking treats before dinner.”
Kayla just turned her nose up at him, before peaking an eye at him and giggling slightly. “So what happened after that? You obviously made it through fine.”
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Max nodded in agreement, “I did. The rest, not so much. A lot of them died in the forest. I just… ran. For the most part. Everything was too strong to fight for us. Anyone that tried just died and didn’t do a whole lot of damage. So while we were running we ended up coming across these ancient ruins. And I mean ancient. The place looked like it was tens of thousands of years old.”
He leaned off to the side and coughed a bit, clearing his throat before continuing his story.
“So we ran in there and took shelter. The monsters didn’t end up chasing us inside so we used it to take a moment to relax. Thankfully the archangel didn’t chase after us. It was a tier seven one, but it could have easily killed anything in that forest and us if it had bothered to chase us.”
“After taking a few hours to determine a course of action we agreed that we couldn’t stay here for very long. Simply because we didn’t have any food or water and no real way to get any either. So our plan was to follow the shore of the lake back to the border as that would be the most effective way to find our way back. It took a bit of effort to find where the lake was but we managed to do it. And from there we ran back.”
“Huh, so you made it back pretty easy then?” Kayla asked.
Max just shook his head. “When we left the ruins there were probably fifty of us out of the 250 man reserve group we were in. When we made it back to the border only ten of us survived.”
“Oh.” Kayla said quietly. She looked slightly embarrassed.
“I got lucky. My… friend pushed me out of the way right before some monster from the lake would’ve grabbed me. It grabbed him instead.” Max bowed his head slightly looking into the table.
A pang of sympathy welled up in my heart for him. I was having one of those moments where you realize that other people have shit lives as well, not that you’d forgotten. But hearing about it made it all the more real to you and impacted you in a different way than just reading a history book about injustices or something. Receiving first-hand accounts tended to have more impact on the listeners.
Max took a deep breath and looked back up and pressed onwards, “So. We made it back to the border and were able to cross back over. We were the only ones that made it though. We went back to where we were supposed to report after ‘completing’ our mission. Well, the commander of the reserve guard wasn’t happy to hear that we were the only ones to survive. And charged us with deserting in the middle of an armed conflict and leaving a superior officer to die.”
“What?!” Kayla yelled, “That’s a load of crap and they know it!”
Max just laughed, “I agree, it was a pretty shitty thing for them to do. So that’s how I ended up here. They charged me with a fake crime and sent me to jail, nothing much more to say. That was two years ago.
I frowned. Was it just a coincidence? I had no doubts that some people here more than likely deserved to be in the prison system. Did I just happen to find the one person in the cell-block with a similar story to mine?
“Huh… Now that you mention it, something similar happened to me.” Kayla said, causing my head to snap to her.
“Explain.” I said to her.
She looked at me with a slightly confused look before nodding.
“Well, um. I worked at the bar. A roaming guard force went through our town a few months ago. Several of the officers ended up coming in, normally we like it when the officers come. Well they can get a bit handsy, but they usually tip well so most of us deal with it.”
I nodded slowly, gesturing for her to continue her story.
“Well, one of them started taking it too far so I told him to knock it off, he ended up getting angry at me and it devolved into this whole fight and everything. They ended up coming in and arresting a lot of the staff. They held us for a few weeks and then later they came in and told me I was being charged with assaulting an officer. Before I knew it I was here.”
My frown deepened. A quote came to mind, ‘one is a tragedy, two sounds like carelessness.’
Normally I’d say it as a joke to something a bit more lighthearted. It wasn’t really that funny at that moment. Especially when I was the third to round out our trifecta of abuse at the hands of what was seeming more and more like a police state with a penchant for taking advantage of its citizens.
Or foreigners in my case.
I ran three different minds to try and start piecing together what little bits of information I had. See if I could make heads or tails of any of it.
“You look like you’re thinking something.” Max said, he made it sound less like a question and more like an observation.
I nodded slowly, “In your case, Max, I would say it was an abuse of authority. But it wouldn’t have been the worst thing I’ve ever heard of a government doing to its employees. The fact that Kayla had something similar happen to her? Surely not a coincidence. The situation lines up too perfectly to be the case. My story is… marginally similar enough to be enough to firmly root out any possibilities of it just being negligence. People are being purposefully funneled here. I just don’t know why. Maybe there’s not a reason why, maybe your government is just corrupt and wants slaves to work its infrastructure for free so it creates a problem where there isn’t one to arrest people.” I shrugged slightly at the end.
It wouldn’t have been the craziest conspiracy I’d ever heard that ended up being true.
“I don’t know about that. Seems a bit ridiculous, I mean, what would they even get out of that?” Max asked.
“That’s what they want it to seem like. Let me pose a few questions to you that I’ve learned over my many years of life.” I phrased that last bit mostly as a joke. As a twenty-something year old I hadn’t had ‘long years’ yet. But I remembered that I was an elf, so it took on a completely different meaning to them.
They both leaned forward and listened intently. I felt a little guilty about this now, but I wasn’t going to correct their misunderstanding.
“First question, in your country who holds more wealth? The top 10% richest people in your country, or the other 90%?”
“The other 90%” They answered instantly in unison, looked at each other and laughed slightly.
Their energy was a bit infectious, causing me to smile as well.
“Wrong.” I answered. I smiled a little more when I saw them look back at me in shock.
I had learned a lot of things when I was with Karif. Including things about money flow through countries. He knew a lot about Seltas and Alixia due to his family business. I had asked him a few questions myself, simply because I was curious as to how similar this world was to my old one. Unfortunately the upper class still just dominated society. Not that I was particularly surprised at the revelation.
“Let me run you through it. If you have a population of ten million, that means the wealthiest ten percent is one million people. Which leaves nine million as the other ninety percent. The average person working their entire life for fifty years will amount 100 gold coins over the course of their entire life. Granted they won’t have all of that at any one point given they need to spend it and such. But that’s their accumulated worth broken down into coins. With me so far?”
They both nodded, so I continued. “That means that nine million people would amount to the worth, essentially, of 900 million gold. That’s quite a lot of money.” They both nodded, Max letting out an appreciative whistle.
“Looking at the ten percent, however, we get a quite different number. The average wealthy person in the ten percent on average accumulates roughly ten thousand gold.”
Both their eyes bugged out at that number. I honestly thought it was probably at the low end for estimates. But I doubt there was anyone going about auditing rich people in this world and then releasing the information publicly.
“That means that one million people hold 10 billion gold. That means they hold 91% of the wealth of the country. So ten percent, the ruling class usually, holds 91% of the country's total wealth over the other 90%.”
They both looked like they were struggling to wrap their minds around the thought. I wasn’t done bursting their little bubbles though.
“So with that much money, how hard do you think it would be to bribe the government into getting them to do what they collectively want? All of these people are usually friends through association. I, personally, don’t think it would be that difficult for them to make the government do illicit things and cover it up. Like, falsely accusing citizens of crimes to propagate a slave labor camp to help run their infrastructure in various places of the country so that they don’t have to pay more to hire workers to do the same thing.”
Kayla’s eyes were wide as she tried to process everything. Max just leaned back in his chair making a thoughtful noise. I was about to continue when I heard David yell that it was time for us to go to work.
“Well, just think about it. You’ll have twelve hours to internalize everything. Come find me later and tell me what you think.” I said to them.
“Maybe we’ll get paired together! We could maybe talk then?” Kayla said a little excitedly.
I just gave her a sad smile.
“Not likely, given I’m more than likely not going with you.” I said to her.
“What? Why?”
“Lurks makes me fight in the cage matches, that’s probably where I’m going again tonight.”
“You fight in those?” Max asked with a bit of surprise, “What level are you? Most of those guys are well into the third tier.”
I frowned, “What do you mean? I’m…” I then realized that the passive hiding my class tier was on for some reason. Huh… when did that happen? Actually, this was probably a good thing. I should leave it up going forward. It could work out well for me. It could also go horribly wrong. We’d see.
“That’s something I think I’m going to keep to myself going forward.” I said with a slight smirk.
Max just chuckled, “Alright then, keep your secrets.”
I just laughed.