Truth slammed into motion. No use trying to play invisible with a couple dozen cops in the hall running every detection spell they could. He was The Big Bro. The last villain they would ever see. Unstoppable.

The ones coming through the front were a little closer. He went for them first. A few bolts of paralytic lightning were loosed, slapped aside by the Tongue. He was on them in less than a second. Wrenched aside a riot shield, put his blade through the cop’s neck, then fung him, shield and all, straight down the hallway. He crouched, got low, started hacking away at legs while the cops lost him in the crush of bodies and shields.

Cop went down- got finished on the ground, then launched up and away down the hall. Their bodies and shields blocking the incoming fire, blocking the vision of the other team. Got a big problem? Make it into little problems, then deal with them. One at a time. Chop chop. You can’t be slow.

A bright crackle of pain caught one shoulder, there was a second’s numbness, then the feeling was gone. One cop had gotten lucky with his zapper and achieved nothing. Truth grinned like a skull. Spell resistance. What a lovely thing. He stood with a rising slash, removing one arm and, with a twist, one head. This side of the hall was done.

He turned and burst towards the other side, those coming in from the back. They were still tangled up in all the corpses and shields he had launched their way. Some trying to pull back the “wounded,” thinking they could be saved. No chance of that. The bane in the Tongue worked as well on humans as it did on demons.

It had been just a few seconds since the doors were breached. Just a few seconds, and a squad of heavy-armor mages were dead. The Tongue whirled and danced with him, hacking limbs, hacking necks, punching through gaps in armor. Always moving, moving, moving. Solving the violence puzzle with speed and precision. Someone dropped a potion, filling the hall with choking gas. Good idea. Not enough. Their head flew away too.

Truth was suddenly the only living thing in the hallway. The slaughter had lasted less than a minute. He prayed Vig was long gone, but just in case he wasn’t, he’d make sure the cops had plenty to distract them. He quickly grabbed every potion and grenade he could lay hands on and piled them up in a helmet. He took a moment to carve “THE ROARING TIGER CANNOT BE SILENCED! NO SLAVES IN JEON!” in the wall, then ran for the front door.

Before he crossed the threshold, he pulled the pin on a couple grenades, armed them, and tossed the whole helmet out into the street. There was an exactly three second pause, then chaos.

Truth, for all his experience, for all his instinctive capability with weaponry, was not alchemically savvy. Nor was “grenade maintenance” a thing. You just removed the physical safety, tapped the arming gem, and threw it towards the problem to be solved.

The helmet arced out over the street, then exploded. Then exploded again, but for longer. Truth wasn’t entirely sure what he was hearing, but when the glare lowered enough for him to crack his eyes open, there was a cloud of dripping fire four meters wide in the middle of the street. It wasn’t doing much additional damage, but the black smoke pouring off of it smelled like death. Cabbages left to rot next to the fish cannery that went on strike in the middle of production.

There were scattered cops and golems lying around the street, more rushing in to try and control the floating mass of whatever the hell it was. Truth struggled for a moment to shed the identity of a villain. It was particularly sticky. Wrapped once more in unnoticibility, all eyes on the cloud, he slipped away.

He stank. He knew he stank. He stank so badly, he could feel Incisive and the Blessing of the Silent Forest working hard to keep people from noticing the A-Tier pong. He looked around for somewhere to scrub. He saw an awful lot of what he didn’t need until he got reasonably close to the hotel. Hide a leaf in the forest, hide a smelly person amongst the whiffy. He hit the gym.

It was a classy gym. This was the City Below in Conjin, so it was called a “Health and Wellness Rejuvenation Center,” where every workout was a one-on-one appointment with a strikingly good looking personal trainer. Truth bypassed all that and made for the showers. Wood paneling, the illusion of a storm at sea, followed by gentle rains over still waters in the shower. He let the storm fall on him, scrubbing away all he could.

He commanded the water to be hotter. As hot as it would go. The gentle rains turned into an equatorial shower. He could barely feel it. He wasn’t letting himself feel it. Everything was locked down. Tight, tight, crushingly, can’t-breathe-tight. He lashed out, rage driven fist only stopping a hair from the wall. It strained his muscles slightly to stop so sharply. He did it again and again. Lashed out hundreds of times, until his back and arms ached.

Truth silently screamed. He was so close to Vig. He could have walked right up to him. He could have hugged him. His family, his blood! The one thing in his life that definitely, for sure, was a good thing- the sibs. And he wasn’t allowed it any more. Not if he wanted to keep them safe. Keep being the good big brother. He wasn’t allowed the warmth of their presence. The comfort of knowing he was seen and appreciated.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Such things were privileges. A safe comfortable family was the prerogative of the strong. And despite his blessings, and his magic, and his capacity for personal violence, he wasn’t that strong. His rule was exactly as long as a heavy needle could fly, enchanted by Graeme’s Arrow. If it was further than that, or a problem that couldn’t be resolved under threat of death, he was helpless. Useless.

He started to laugh angrily. This was why there were those insanely rich people who were only Level Three or Four. The whole system of the country was set up to secure their property and their safety. The reach of their fist was irrelevant. The State of Jeon would catch you anywhere if you touched them. In theory, at least. Organizational strength. And if there was one thing Truth knew he was lousy at, it was that.

He could command a small squad reasonably well, a fire team very well, and that was it. Anything more than that? He had never been put in a position to find out what it would be like trying to lead a platoon, but he was quite sure he would hate every minute. He didn’t want to be responsible for other people. He had his hands full looking after himself and the sibs. One of his favorite things about Etenesh was that she could look after herself.

Truth laughed harder and harder, clutching his sides as he gasped for breath. He was breaking a system. The same system that others relied on for safety, to protect their sibs. He was breaking it. Breaking the illusion of it, with absolutely no intention of fixing it later. No grand plan for what came next. He rejected any responsibility for the aftermath. His happy world was never going to be created with mortal laws. How could it? He didn’t trust anyone enough. He could see how the system was a lie, how it protected selectively and inconsistently. How could he trust the sibs to a fraud?

Etenesh was right. She was so damn right. He would have to keep climbing. Break every illusion. Figure out how to stand up, to be more than a rat. How to become a God. And perhaps, one day, The God. Someone who could simply command and be obeyed without any further reason than it was him who did the commanding. And, of course, a person in training for future absolute power was… a prince.

He laughed himself sick. Truth lay on the heated floor of the shower, just letting the rain fall on him.

Some time later- “Change conditions to an arctic storm, the frozen spray of the sea.”

Truth stepped out of the shower invigorated and focused. The water displacement talisman kept the water in the stall, washing down the drain with everything else. His clothes stank. He shoved them in a trash bag. No need to have someone discover them and start asking questions. They would be quite happy in a dumpster outside. There wasn’t anything in the lockers his size. He was larger than most.

He sighed, momentum ebbing quickly, and raided the considerably less nice staff lockers. One of the more buff trainers had shorts that fit, another had a tee shirt that fit. Good enough. He would shoplift an outfit on the way back to the hotel. Maybe he would find a Robins Egg Blue shirt.

He did not. Apparently the color was terribly out of fashion. He made due with a reddish-purple silk shirt and black trousers. It suited him surprisingly well.

The Banana Fish yellow of No. 23 Milk Street was marred, just above the ground, with a spray of bioluminescent blue paint. There was a little red mixed in there as well. Kids playing around, perhaps. Though he hadn’t seen a single child since he came to Conjin, that he could recall. Nor a school.

Message received, then. Communication needed urgently, use Plan C. It seems he will be speaking with Merkovah over lunch tomorrow.

Can’t imagine what could possibly be so urgent. He grinned despite himself, then returned to the Hotel. The Prince was once more in residence. He had missed lunch. Easily mended with a single command.

It was delicious, but he was too distracted to enjoy it properly. It occurred to him that he had nothing to offer people as a Prince, other than his personal protection. He was trading on the illusion of power. You needed more than that, though, to be Prince. This was only sustainable until it was tested, either by a disaster or by a better offer coming along.

Truth considered himself a loyal person, but the instant Starbrite wanted his life, conditioning be damned, he revolted. He tried to escape, to fight back every way he could. He joined, and stayed, because of the benefits. The second the benefits were outweighed by the harms of employment, he was gone. If Truth, deemed shockingly loyal by his supervisors, wouldn’t stay bought in the face of certain death, he felt that no one would. He might be wrong on that, but it would do as an assumption for now.

So, he needed to be able to offer benefits to attract servants, but benefits wouldn’t keep them. Nor would indoctrination, without going full Starbrite. The Jeon army was not a place of high morale. What then? Fear? Do it or else? It worked, but the second your back was turned, your servant would be gone, or actively trying to betray you.

A balance of things, then. Benefits, indoctrination, and fear, all wrapped around a single person. Really, the idea of that person. You could judge a prince by their glory- no, that wasn’t quite right. By their… he searched around for the word and landed on one from a historical romance. You could judge a prince by their dignity. And with that dignity must come good fortune, for the prince and his subjects. He set out today to conquer fortune. Half joking, true, but also half not. Had he done so? Or made any progress at all on those lines?

No. He was fortune's fool today. That wouldn’t do. It was an offense to his dignity. But how do you pin down fate? He smiled as he sliced apart his medallions of beef, dipping them in an intense, rich sauce. Pinning down fate might be a touch ambitious. He would instead make preparations for fate to screw with him. Step one would be reinforcing his dignity. Which meant walking around money. But in a couple of days, there would be no more use for wen. Time to make another trip to the bank.