The trip to Harban was dull. To his intense horror, he had run out of books. He had been right there in a small city, and didn’t even think of stopping by a local bookstore and picking up some schlocky romances. Second hand books must be cheap as Hell right now. And yet, somehow, he whiffed. Shameful. Just disgraceful.

It was a boring few hours. He tried to spend the time thinking about what he wanted his revolutionary organization to look like, but kept going around in circles. Eventually he gave up, and tried to fall asleep. Usually he was good at that. Not today. Today he got to listen to the endless drumming of the monsoon rains and the not-quite-quiet-enough noises of the other passengers on the bus. Somehow it all managed to keep him from sleeping. No reason for it. Just couldn’t quite pass the gray threshold into oblivion.

I… really don’t want to apologize to Niles. Which is pretty messed up, since I very literally kidnapped him and brainwashed him into my adoring servant.

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Yeah. Yeah I did. And worst of all, even if I knew how to set him free, I’m not going to. At the very least, not before the apocalypse. He’s just too useful where he is, doing what he is. Which makes me a complete piece of trash.

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Very in character. Very on brand. A Prince, not a King.

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A prince that can inspire fear, but not love. Not without using extreme methods.

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Right. Any servant powerful enough to be useful is powerful enough to be dangerous. Broadly defined.

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Because they are only accountable to the King. And it’s in his interests to keep them happy. So as long as it doesn’t threaten his interests too much, he can split off a portion for them. But how do you keep the masses in line?

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I’m certain it’s more complicated than that.

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Even boredom couldn’t be eternal. Unfortunately. They were roughly a third of the way to Harban when the sky suddenly flashed a bright pink. Truth wasn’t the only one who knew what that meant. The bus driver immediately pulled over onto the verge and yanked viciously on the emergency break. Truth watched him shove the door open, then dove out onto the grass. He wasn’t alone- everyone was scrambling to escape the bus. The windows were smashed open, people stampeded for the door. They didn’t try to run very far. It was just that none of them wanted to be in the bus when something awful happened.

They must know something I don’t. Well. Out the window we go.

It had been barely four seconds since the pink flash. Truth got well away from the bus and into a storm culvert by second five. The monsoon rains had water running ten centimeters deep already. Easy to drown. He didn’t worry about it. There was the most incredible sound of thunder, and then a terrible pause.

The vacuum hit hard. Every scrap of him was being tugged on, every millimeter of skin, every twist and wrinkle of intestine, his corneas and the little swirling canal inside his eardrums that made balance possible. Not that it succeeded in pulling anything away. He was sealed tight. The tension ramped up and became a stinging pain. The vacuum was far more intense than it had ever been before.

There were shouts, screams, babbled prayers. Crying. Begging for mercy from a merciless Heaven. Truth wanted to tell them that it was pointless, hopeless, that God despised them, and so did the planet they lived on. They were not wanted. Their suffering was a byproduct of a necessary process and was never worth considering.

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There was a series of muffled thuds, and the sound of tearing metal. Seconds later, there were horrific crashing noises, incredibly loud as carriages traveling in excess of one hundred and fifty kilometers an hour smashed into each other, long since running out of control. No demon turning the wheel, sheer inertia and Fate’s spite carrying them into one another.

It quickly became quiet again. All over but for the screaming. And there were fewer screams now. Then there was another impossible crack of thunder that shuddered the marrow in his bones, and the pulling had become a hard press. All that energy that would have been yanked out was now hammering in again. Fast, too fast. And far too hard.

There was another round of screams. Then some meaty pops. Some broken sobs. Truth had a sick feeling that some people just exploded, while others had their apertures destroyed. As for him?

Truth absorbed the extra cosmic rays. It didn’t carry him very far towards Level Six, but it was a noticeable improvement. At his level, that was significant. The brutal cataclysm humanity was suffering was just a happy accident for Truth. He could just fill every scrap of his body with the excess energy. Becoming more real, with all that entailed.

Was this what life was supposed to be? One person elevated as billions suffer? One rat picked at random out of the boiling vermin swarm and elevated above the rest? Was there really something better than this?

Only one ass sat on the Throne. Everyone else, no matter how high, had to look up from their knees.

Metaphorically, anyway. The mucky water frothed around him, racing through the corrugated metal pipe. Seraphim famously never touch the ground, and their whole job is floating around saying how great God is. Still, I feel like the point stands. Is that the point of ‘evil?’ Put something in the universe so God will always be above? I mean, that is a God-Tier level of pettiness, so it would probably be wrong to rule it out.

He sighed. The pressure was easing off now. When you got right down to it, he didn’t really believe evil was intentionally added to the universe purely to make humanity suffer. More like… incompetence or some necessary byproduct of a function he didn’t understand. Like an axle generating heat as it spun.

Truth crawled out of the culvert. The bus was trashed. Whatever happened was worse than what he had seen before. He had seen the demon powering a carriage obliterated. He had never seen one of those energy voids crush an intercity bus like a beer can. He tried to figure out what might have happened. Best he could come up with was reinforcing enchantments keeping the bus light and strong suddenly collapsing.

It seems this wasn’t the first time it happened. Everyone piled out in a panic. It wasn’t that odd- why use a load of expensive metals for rigidity when you could use lighter materials and some enchantments. It all made complete sense… until the magic vanished. Then everything contracted in on itself. You could imagine what would happen if people had stayed in the bus.

The grassy verge of the road had mushrooms rising out of the ground, swelling then exploding as their tiny physiques were overloaded by the energy hammering down into them. Truth started counting. There had been forty five people on the bus. Thirty two were still alive. How many more would live out the hour, he couldn’t say. How many still had intact apertures… well. He might be the only one.

He looked up the road. The sign for Harban was pain as could be. Just keep running. Leave them here and put those feet in gear. They would die soon anyway. Today or in a few months, what difference could it make? Hell, nothing was saying you couldn’t have two voids back to back. It was getting increasingly likely, in fact.

Yeah he could do that. But the happiest he had been recently was when he played Dr. Bone Bro. And Bone Bro would never leave them like that. He’d bitch and moan about the complete absence of bones, and about how morally wrong it was not being able to fix everything by casting ANCEF. But he would do his goddamn best regardless. The Prince was an asshole, disdaining all others. The fool didn’t have that kind of arrogance. His arrogance was of a completely different kind.

Who needed help most urgently? He reached out with his spells, trying to nudge Cup and Knife and Incisive to work together. An older man. He had a heart problem that had been fixed with a magical tattoo. Now his apertures were shattered and he was having a heart attack. Truth reached him with a single step. No problem using the Earth Folding Step at the moment.

“Alright, Senior. It’s going to be alright.” He cast Cup and Knife, riding the ebbing tide of the magical overpressure. He could feel the spell making minute changes to some of the nerves around the heart. Calming them. Slowing their pace. The heart resumed a steady rhythm. Such a tiny thing, but it was killing a man. Well, it was fixed now.

The apertures, along with all the tiny channels that ran magic through most people’s bodies, was destroyed. Utterly. The one open aperture was shattered, the channels were shattered- it was plainly fatal. Plainly irreparable. He had seen young masters torturing people by destroying their apertures. None of them had ever managed anything so categorical.

This was no longer a human capable of using cosmic energy. No longer a mage, but something else. A clay doll, permanently severed from the infinite heavens above it. It could barely see the shadows on the rock, but it could never turn around and see the truth that cast the shadows. Wisdom would never reach it. Absent a miracle.

“This isn’t how people should be. Whatever a human is, it should be able to look up and strive. We aren’t clay dolls. Even if it feels like someone is just playing with us.” Truth poured Cup and knife into the Senior’s body. The spell wove through the man, gathering all the spiritual scraps and rebuilding them. Knitting them together in a way that wholly exceeded everything Truth thought he knew about medicine.

This injury was irreparable, unless you understood what you were looking at. Manda wasn’t trying to repair a body. He didn’t give a damn about some meat sack. Manda wanted to repair souls. To bring them more in line with God. Because God was how things ought to be. At least according to Manda.

The pieces pulled together. The body, the shattered bits of soul, and those strange structures that bridged the gap between both, all came together. Meshed into a complete human being. The old man curled up on himself. Not quite sobbing, but hanging on to himself as hard as he could. He was safe now, but the whole thing had hurt.

“Now. Just need to do that thirty-one more times.” The rain was still pouring down. Living water, pouring from the heavens. Nourishing and bringing life to the dead earth below. Truth stepped to the next person, and got back to work.