For a while I didn’t speak much. I just…I couldn’t really respond to that. Who the hell backs up the guy who lost? They should have lost faith in my abilities right? Where was the mockery, the shit talk? When you lose, it’s supposed to feel bad, that way you want to get better and win in the future. That’s the law of the jungle, that’s the way I know. So why….why were they so….irrational? And why didn’t I care that it’s irrational? I normally hate how something as baseless as someone else’s mood can determine their entire course of action, so why not this? Is it just because it ‘feels nice’, and ‘I like it’? Am I experiencing irrational thought patterns as a result of emotion? Then why am I not angry with myself? Why am I not warning myself not to trust it? Why is my mind just…..letting it be?
I don’t remember where I heard it from, but in my old world, I once heard someone ask a question. “If you only ever do the rational thing, then are you truly alive? Or are you just a speck of dust in the wider universe, no different from the common asteroid?” There was an old philosopher and mathematician by the name of Laplace. He believed that if you had a demon who knew the exact position of every single atom, and could read the complete memories of every single human, from birth to date, and fully understand the way they think, and if that demon had enough processing power, then he would be able to predict the future with 100% accuracy. Every decision made, every single raindrop. Is that all life is? Something completely predictable? Not predetermined, but pre-expected?
On the other hand, running counter to the thought experiment of Laplace’s Demon, we have chaos theory. Chaos theory can basically be broken down into two pieces. The first is the Butterfly Effect. The concept that a tiny change in initial conditions, somewhere way down the line, can create massive shifts in the world. Like a bad time travel movie, where someone goes back in time, kicks a rock, and somehow a few years later, someone stumbles on that rock, resulting in an accidental death, which causes one of their relatives to become angry and unstable, leading them to get into a bar fight where they kill the father of the guy who invented the internet, making it so that the internet was never created in the first place, creating a huge shift in the future of the world, just from one rock being in a slightly different place. But the truly interesting part of chaos theory is the second part. The part that gives it its name.
You see, everything I just described, while radically different from the original timeline, still follows a very logical process, a chain of events. The second part of chaos theory is that sometimes, things will just….happen. For no observable reason. That rock you kicked when you went back in time? Well, one day, it just randomly split into two, half of which someone else kicked into a random spot, so that in the future, not only was the internet never invented, but also JFK was never shot. Or maybe that rock would just randomly teleport somewhere completely different in the world one day and start off a whole new chain of events, so that now the internet is safe, and also we have a colony on mars by 2030.
Now, there is a whole lot of math behind chaos theory, and I’m definitely oversimplifying, not to mention exaggerating the extent of the chaotic ‘spark’ that affects change. Most of these theoretical moments of chaos would happen at the subatomic or maybe atomic level, which would maybe only change weather patterns, but that still could absolutely influence someone’s mood in a certain way on a certain day. Like a grown man whose wife was caught in bed with his best friend, but somehow still got custody of the kids, and the man stands on the balcony of his apartment, on the fence on whether he has the will to keep living. Something as miniscule as how cloudy the sky is that day could absolutely be the tipping point in what that man does from that point on.
But the truly fascinating question is: Are these sparks of chaos only found at the subatomic and atomic level, or can human decisions be considered equivalent to those sparks? Inspiration, art, human ingenuity, are those predictable, even by Laplace’s demon? Are we beings of chaos, of Existence, determining our own path as we walk it? Or are our actions a result of our genetics, the external experiences that we are subjected to, all of which mold our bodies and specifically our brains, so that if Laplace’s demon was to scan us, they could know exactly what chemicals our brains would release, and in the exact quantities down to the last atom, and from there be able to perfectly calculate the decision we make. Do we actually have free will, do we actually make any decisions? Or are we just specters, along for the ride, observers to the predicted life of this puppet that we believe ourselves to be?
Laplace’s Demon vs. chaos theory. Free will vs predetermination. Fate vs choice. This question has been asked in different ways all throughout the history of mankind, but no one truly knows the answer. In my opinion though, emotion has always seemed like pure chaos to me. Something that takes an understandable world, and shifts it, so that somehow you’re expected to see and respond to things that aren’t there, and ever changing. It’s like somehow every single other human has access to a fourth dimension that I just have no way to possibly perceive. And so I had to use logic, and reason. I had to learn everything I could about a person, understand them, their past, the way they think. I had to try and know beforehand what they would feel in certain situations, and how I should respond to those feelings. I had to study psychology, neurology, anthropology, everything I could to make sense of these incomprehensible creatures I was surrounded by. In a way, I guess…I was trying to become Laplace’s demon.
I know that I can experience emotion. I can observe the physiological responses, and the change in my thought processes. Usually, I can rationalize what I’m feeling and why, but sometimes…sometimes I get it wrong still. There’s no real reason for me to be scared of insects, or heights, which is why I didn’t realize I was until I was in my 20s. There was no reason for me to not love the woman I married, so I thought I did. But…..because of these failures. Because I never know what I’m actually feeling, what information my emotions are trying to convey to me….I never act on them. Every random experiment I do, I do because I need to understand the baseline of this new world. Choosing not to let Sophia help me understand my Aspect, so that she doesn’t one day end up feeling like I’m just sponging off of her, and choose to cut me off. My whole relationships with both Sophia and Ash….as terrible as it is, I know that it has very little to do with how I feel about them, and far more to do with the fact that I don’t want to be alone, and they are willing to be with me.
That’s not to say that I don’t have positive emotions about the both of them, I absolutely do. Sophia has a…calming effect on my thoughts, and makes it easier to unscramble the wild jumble of information constantly raging through my mind. She also has a relaxing effect on my body, making it extraordinarily comfortable to spend time with her. I also find her incredibly sexually attractive. And Ash on the other hand, has almost the exact opposite effect on me, yet somehow still in a good way? She provides a source of stress on my mind, making me question where she is, what she’s doing. Looking out for and after her. Spending time with Ash is…uncomfortable, but fun. Like babysitting a cute kid who keeps doing stupid stuff so you constantly have to be on your toes to make sure they don’t accidentally kill themselves, or letting your buddies talk you into taking you skydiving. Stressful, but good. And while Ash is certainly objectively sexually attractive, I’d never consider being with her. Being in a romantic relationship is already hard enough for me, doing anything like that would just end up ruining my relationships with both of them. Sure it might be fun to fantasize about having a harem from time to time, but logistically, and rationally? It’s just not feasible. Not to mention, Sophia would probably just kill both of us if anything happened.
I think the reason my brain is just allowing this irrationality to be, has to do with one key word. Positive. Looking back on my old life, there were maybe three people I had ever possessed any sort of real positive emotions towards. Everyone else? I was either completely ambivalent, or downright disliked. Could this be my mind’s reaction to positive emotional attachment? To not freak out over the inherent irrationality of it, and just….enjoy the moment? I made sure to make a mental note of it, so that I could cross reference it with any odd memories I had or events I would experience in my future, to help me map out and understand my own thoughts and feelings about the world. But for now, is it okay if I let myself do something irrational? Is it okay if I just…be, in this moment? Is it…Is it okay if I just…Live?
The next night, when I woke up, Ash was still asleep in the carriage beside me. I don’t really remember too much about the rest of our watch, or how I got in, but I put yesterday out of my mind. I was getting paid to do a job after all, so I should stay fully conscious and aware, and do it. I waited until we stopped, then awoke Ash.
The two of us sat with X and Duke, the new people we’d made yesterday. X was sitting with Ash, and they seemed to be having fun. I couldn’t really tell what they were talking about though, as I was primarily focused on teaching Duke about making circuits with interconnected enchantments, and learning from him about how he made his enchantments do exactly what he wanted to do.
My entire enchanting career, I had avoided using words to form my enchantments due to double meanings and colloquial usages, causing words to be highly unpredictable. This is what led me to the desire to create my own sort of programming language using symbols that have defined meanings to me. Duke on the other hand, went probably as opposite a route as you could possibly go. He had decided to spend his life traveling to different towns, living in them all for a couple years, until he was able to speak their local language fluently. He believed that with enough languages mastered, he’d be able to build up a vocabulary of enchantments that had the perfect word in any possible situation. I asked him how he handled words like Second, which have multiple meanings, as well as words that are the same in two different languages but have different subtle contexts to them.
“Well that’s where styling comes into play. For each new language, I develop my own sort of artistic way to form the words or letters, so there’s really no overlap between the two. However, if I were to take your system methodology and apply it to my style, then I would probably do so in the way of sentence structure. That way, I could turn the stylization of the languages themselves into kind of a background enchantment that forces everything to blend together, even if I happen to be using words from completely different languages all in the same sentence.”
“Couldn’t you do that with syntax instead? Like, say for example you want to make an enchantment that automatically draws mana from you and shoots out a fireball whenever it reaches a target. A basic sentence structure is broken down into subject, action, object, or S, A, and O. Now, because this is a two step process, you would need 5 words, turning it into S1, A1, O1, S2, A2, and O2. This is 5 words because O1 = S2. S1 would be the word for you, A1 would be a word about mana draining, O1/S2 would be some sort of mana storage, A2 would be fireball, and O2 would be enemy. That way the syntax would turn your 5 enchantments into the sentence, ‘Take mana from me, and put it into a storage container, then take mana from that container and use it to cast fireball whenever there’s an enemy detected.’.”
“Why would I have a separate mana storage? Why not just have it cast a fireball directly from my mana pool?”
“Well having a mana storage enchantment lets you put in safeguards so that it doesn’t risk draining you when you need it, look.” I reached my hand into my shed in the subspace, and pulled out my spare blindfold, then showed him the intricate circuits between the mana batteries, the windows allowing me to segment my vision or monitor my knives, the hearing aid, and the switches allowing me to cut off mana flow from the batteries to all my various other enchantments. He tried it on and fiddled around with the enchantments for a bit, seeing how they all worked in conjunction with each other, as well as,
“Wait, so these eye and ear enchantments, are you actually blind and deaf? Or are you just using a blindfold so that you can get this full field of vision and these wild ass colors, which, to be honest, is both awesome, and fucking with my head hardcore.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
I took the blindfold back from him and replied, “Yeah, it took me a while to force my brain to adjust to take in information all around me at the same time. Shit was absolutely miserable too. And yes, I am actually both blind and deaf. My wife is so beautiful that just seeing her naked for the first time straight up burned my eyes out, and Ash is so dumb that my ears couldn’t take it anymore and just completely shut down, so I wouldn’t have to hear her anymore.”
“HEY!! I HEARD THAT LEO!!”
I laughed and waved at her in response. Both her and X came over to join us, Ash still with a rather cute pouting expression, but X? X kept glancing around, eyebrows slightly knit together. His sword was clenched tightly in his hand, like he was getting ready to draw it at any moment. “What’s up?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Something just…seems off.” There was nothing in my immediate field of vision, and I had three of my drone knives flying around in a 200 yard radius, none of which picked up anything. “I’m not seeing anything, what makes you think something’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, just a gut feeling.” Duke seemed to take that as all but a confirmation, as he immediately stood up awkwardly and started fumbling around, checking his gear.
I asked Duke, “This gut feeling of his that reliable?”
He nodded aggressively, his helm almost flying off, and he slapped his gauntleted hand on top of it to keep it steady. “In the couple of years I’ve known him, bad gut feeling usually means bandits within the next three nights. Considering that if we push it, we’ll reach the Capital by end of day tomorrow, the process of elimination means that bandits are probably coming tonight.”
Intrigued, I clarified, “Specifically bandits? Not monsters or anything?”
Duke replied as he attached different staves to different parts of his suit of armor, so that he’d have access to whatever enchantment he needed, “Monsters aren’t really that big of an issue in the Kingdom. Because of all of the towns being so close together, and people regularly traveling between them, most really dangerous monsters are found and exterminated fairly quickly. The biggest problem is bandits. I’m not really sure how X’s gut feeling works, but my theory is that somewhere way back in his family line, there was a beastkin, and somehow he managed to awaken that dormant innate magic, something like a sixth sense for danger.”
I remained silent. I suppose that could explain it, though that does also pose a rather interesting question about the connection between magic and genetics. Could an innate magic be a recessive gene? What was innate magic in the first place? Questions for later. For now, I’ll just operate under the assumption that these two are correct, and bandits will attack tonight. I had my knives fly higher into the air, checking for heat signatures, and…I saw them. About half a mile out, halfway through dismounting…
Wait….are those?
Pure, unadulterated wrath began to fill my body.
Kill
Are you fucking kidding me right now?
Kill them all
For days now, I’ve been getting lugged around by horrifying monstrosities, evil incarnate, but you mean to say…
KILL EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE DAMN BASTARDS
That this world has normal fucking horses?? And bandits get them???? What the actual fuck is this?
“Ash, please stay here. I’ve got some…things…I need to work out.”
Ash’s POV
“I’d do as he says Ash, you know better than anyone that Leo doesn’t say the word please. The only time I ever heard him say it, he started ripping people’s throats out with his teeth. It was a fucking massacre, and utterly horrifying. He’s asking because he’s about to do something he thinks will scare you off, so if you want to keep looking at Leo the same way you always have, I recommend staying there.”
If he’s really about to lose it again, isn’t that when he needs us the most? I have to go.
After Leo had asked me to stay behind, he’d shot into the air with his flight spell. I watched the direction he flew off to, and sprinted after him, not quite as fast but still managing to keep him in sight. I heard X behind me shouting at the other adventurers to wake the others, that we were going to take care of it, but keep an eye out for stragglers. I heard the awkward clanking of metal, and then silence, as Duke took to the air as well, just over the treetops, heading the same direction as we were, and X silently caught up to me, keeping pace as we followed the half naked flying blind man. And then, he vanished. “His damn invisibility spell”, I groaned. It was practically impossible to find him when he was using that while also flying.
“There,” Duke announced, “A shitload of mana is getting infused into the sky, that’s gotta be him.” We made our way forwards, silently this time, as the bandits were near. As we crept near, I saw at least a hundred of them, with the majority banding together in one group, and around the sides, random outliers. An army with detached ranged fighters. We couldn’t afford to lose the element of sur-
“What’s up you damn bastards, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
This dumbass!!!! Why the hell would he just announce his location like that!? Furthermore, why the hell wasn’t he flying anymore?!
“A solitary traveler? No, a blind man, are you one of the traders up ahead? You’re pretty far from your group. Poor bastard.”
Good, they’re still underestimating-
“Careful boss, this smells like a trap. Look at how white his pants are, no way he’s been traveling through these woods without ruining them. Not to mention, he appeared out of nowhere. I think this guy’s an advance scout.”
Shit.
Leo let out a sarcastic laugh. “Nah buddy, I’m the whole force. They don't need anyone else to deal with you. Now, I could ask you how you know our precise location, but honestly, I have at least 3 different ways that I could do that in your shoes, so I won’t bother. Instead, I’ll get down to the most important business.” His voice turned cold, emotionless, but somehow filled with an icy fury. Not a wildfire that wanted to burn the whole world to the ground, but a frozen tundra, sucking the warmth, the life, right out of you. “How the hell did you motherfuckers get horses?”
Are….Are you freaking kidding me right now?? THAT’S what this is about??? THAT’S what made you literally fly off the handle??? The fact that we have GIRAFFES????
How could he possibly be so goddamn stupid as to risk his life going against an actual ARMY of bandits ALONE, and all for what?!? The fact that he had an irrational fear of the animals pulling our carriages?!?? X looked over at me in confusion, as though asking if this was secretly some kind of intel gathering technique or code word, but I couldn’t respond. I just shook my head and put my hand over my face.
“The hell are you-” in one second, Leo was standing there, looking like an absolute moron, the next, he’d already slit the throat of one of the detached ranged fighters. Due to shock, none of the bandits moved, giving Leo time to teleport again and take out another one. This time the rest of the bandits were able to respond, firing arrows and magic at the collapsing body, but he’d already teleported out of the way again, taking out another archer. The main body of the army seemed to wake up, and haphazardly charge towards where he was standing, where their allied bowman still lay, fallen, and Leo sent what was probably the rest of his mana pool flooding into the ground.
“He’s draining his mana pool! The idiot, he-” I cut Duke off as I responded, “He has a plan. That dude is a monster, I’ve watched him completely empty his mana pool 10 times in a row with no problems. It’s best if we sit back and watch for now, or we might get caught up in-”
CCCRAAACKKK!!!!!
As though proving my words correct, Lightning descended. It seemed as though the entire sky had opened up, and a god had brought down heavenly judgment upon the mortals there. I couldn’t tell if it was dozens of bolts, all striking one after the other, or if it was somehow all one continuous bolt, constantly shifting, devastating the entire area. One of the bandits who’d been standing closest to Leo when the lightning fell, picked his spear back up and charged him, reasoning that if he killed the mage, the spell would end. 250 pounds of pure adrenaline barreled straight at him, all channeled through the tiny point of a spear, but Leo simply…stopped it. He placed his hand in front of him, allowing the speartip to sink into his palm, but it didn’t even come out the back of his hand. I had to remind myself that with his Markings, it was extremely difficult to actually damage Leo’s body.
Leo pulled his penetrated hand off the spear, spinning down the length of the shaft, and simultaneously flipping the foot long bone dagger into a reverse grip, then stabbed it into the throat of the spearman. The blade sank all the way to Leo’s hand on the back end, then he firmly pulled it out, spun his knife back into a normal grip, and whipped his arm and wrist downwards, flicking the man’s blood off of his blade. He then walked towards a small group who’d made it out of the area where lightning still struck, though less rapidly now, and one of them hit Leo in the shoulder with his war pick. Unconcerned, Leo lurched his side forwards, yanking himself off the spike, and stabbing another man in the throat. He then turned and killed the man who’d stabbed him, and the three of us still hidden in the brush could see that the wound in his shoulder…was nonexistent? Had he healed it already? With no magic?
The way he fought was filled with a simple kind of carnal beauty. It was like nothing existed to him except the throat of the next person he intended to kill. This was not a fight between fellow people, this was a natural disaster, an unstoppable force of death and destruction, as it uncaringly carved its way through. Nothing the bandits hit him with seemed to matter, as Leo would simply move just a little bit out of the way so that the blow would strike him in a non vital area, and then he would sink his dagger into another bandit. Then, by the time we got a better look at where the attacks had landed, there would be no evidence that he’d ever been hit in the first place. And while he was working his way around the lightning zone where the main body of the army had been, his flying knives were still darting around, taking out the detached ranged fighters before they could run. In a matter of minutes, the only two left were Leo, and the man who’d been called ‘Boss’. Leo’s hand disappeared for a moment, grabbing something from his waistband, before tossing what seemed to be an old rag at the man. “If you don’t want to die like the rest of your men, then run your mana through that.” The man called Boss complied, and instantly seemed to stiffen. Leo then grabbed him by the ankle, and dragged him towards where the three of us were hiding, waiting for the moment to jump in that he just hadn’t given us. He tossed the paralyzed form of the bandit leader towards the bush we were in and said, his usual lighthearted tone back,
“I probably should’ve known you wouldn’t listen huh?”
I walked up and smacked the back of his head. “What the hell were you thinking, fighting a whole ass army by yourself? Because we have giraffes and they have horses?!? What kinda bullshit cause is that?? Are you really willing to risk your life over something so stupid??”
Leo rubbed the back of his head and muttered, “How was I risking my life?? I had that completely handled!”
“Yeah well I know that NOW!!! You couldn’t have said ‘hey don’t worry, I’ve got a plan’ before flying off?!”
“No, I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a plan. I came up with that on the way here. My other options were tornado, fire, or space magic. Space magic would’ve gotten them all the most efficiently, but if I screwed up, I might've accidentally opened up a hole in reality. Fire magic would have been the easiest for me to use, but then I run the risk of starting a wildfire that I just can’t stop. Tornado would’ve been cool, but is also the one I would most likely screw up, and also had the same risk as the wildfire. So I went with lightning.”
Since he currently had the back of his head protected, this time I slapped the side of his head. “So you’re telling me that this was one of your damn experiments that backfire on you half the time?!? Honestly Leo, I do believe in you, but that doesn’t mean I’ll condone you charging into battle with a half baked plan!!! What the hell were you gonna do if the lightning failed!?? You’d have been left with no escape!!!”
This time he brought his arms up, fully protecting his head. “Hey, I made a drop by my shed on the way, and grabbed some ‘just in case’ stuff, that’s where I got the chain enchantment failure I used on this guy!” He nudged the paralyzed bandit leader with his foot before shooting to X, “You should really restrain him if you wanna imprison him by the way, or just kill him. And Ash, if my lightning spell failed, I had Code Elemental ready and waiting. Speaking of which:” The three flying knives he’d been controlling during the fight flew toward him, and laid themselves down on his left hand side, then from all around us, flying knives came from the woods three at a time, forming a small pile of about 30 explosives on his right. “Once my mana’s refilled I’ll put them back, just give me like 10 minutes.”
What the hell am I supposed to do with this man?!