“You have been witnessed committing acts of Banditry. In accordance with the Laws of the Kingdom, I, Lord Xavier, sentence you to death. May the gods have mercy on your soul.” X seemed to decide that trying to transport him alive would pose unnecessary risk to the travelers we were hired to guard, so he gave him a quick, and relatively painless execution, decapitating him while he was still paralyzed. Meanwhile, Ash was still chewing me out about how I’d handled the army of bandits.

To be fair to her, that lightning spell easily could have failed on me, but I mean it wasn’t like I didn’t have a backup plan if it did! The spell had an extremely simple design, where I used half of my mana to fill the sky above the bandits with a negative charge and contain it, then used the other half of my mana to give the ground a positive charge, then released the negative sky that I was still restraining. Given that that’s exactly how lightning bolts work in nature, I had every reason to believe that it would work out, and because I wasn’t attacking with magic directly, most people wouldn’t have a defense for it. By my understanding most magical defense relies on dispelling the mana that you’re being attacked with. Regular lightning bolts on the other hand, do not have mana, despite the fact that I used mana to create them. A little loophole I’d predicted when I came up with the spell on my flight there.

X walked up to me, smiling wryly at Ash’s….let’s call it enthusiastic concern. He turned to me and asked, “So this is the area of specialization in which You are practically unstoppable huh?”

I gave a noncommittal shrug. “I do tend to do well in chaotic situations, where there are no rules, and I can basically just control the situation as I please. Unstoppable is a bit much though. I kinda messed up the lightning spell by teleporting around a few times before casting it, so a lot of them made it out, though not unscathed. If they’d organized better after escaping, it would have been a lot harder for me, and if they attached a melee guard to the detached ranged fighters, I couldn’t have gotten them so efficiently. Though, I must admit, they were oddly organized anyway for being a group of bandits. An army in ranks with the ranged fighters separated, if they’d gotten the drop on us those ranged fighters could’ve hidden anywhere in the trees around camp, and we’d have been too focused on the charging army to do anything about them. Is that level of organization and strategy normal for bandits around here?”

X nodded gravely. “It is during the Bazaar. Large convoys like the one we’re escorting are extremely common this time of year, and because the start date isn’t exactly fixed, they travel these roads very sporadically. The early ones like ours generally get used as kind of a warmup, a trial run so that the bandits can learn how to raid a camp as quickly and quietly as possible. Last year, around the end of the traveling season, I heard about one group of bandits that was so well practiced that they managed to kill an entire convoy in less than 30 seconds. The reason anyone knew about it was that there was another group of travelers just down the road, and the timing between the opening strike they’d heard and the time they arrived at the scene was only about 45 seconds apart.”

I nodded in understanding, then asked about another odd thing I’d noticed. “When you executed him, you said ‘gods have mercy on your soul.’ Is polytheism common around these parts?”

X looked at me in confusion. “There’ve always been several gods, more gods than can be counted.”

I returned his confusion, “Yeah, I know that because I know Sophia, and the two of us are working on becoming gods ourselves. It’s only logical that there’d be several gods since others have no doubt walked this path before us. What I’m asking about is how you guys know that or why you believe it? As far as I’m aware, Titled are already rare enough, but amongst humans they should be practically nonexistent. Unless that’s an Elf thing, do you guys actually have really long lifespans so you end up having more Titled?”

X tilted his head, “I don’t know what Titled means, or really get what you mean by ‘becoming a god yourself’. The people of the kingdom know of the existence of gods because of our founder, King Sebastian Miner. History tells us that he was a friend of the God of Death, and as such, had lived several lives before, and is constantly sent into the cycle of reincarnation. He’s probably somewhere in the world right now, living a completely different life. Supposedly he told his family that he was on something of an eternal journey to comprehend both Existence and Non-Existence, whatever that means.”

Their founder was a multiple run reincarnator who was friends with the God of Death? On one hand, it definitely fit the fantasy vibe of this world, but it also very much sounded like the kind of legend that kings in my old world would commonly spread about themselves, in order to use the power of religion to generate faith from their subjects. There was only one problem, one key piece that suggested that it was actually true. The eternal journey to comprehend Existence and Non-Existence. As far as I was aware, those two were something like the Original Aspects. That was the primary difference between Angels and Demons after all, that Angels were attuned to Non-Existence whereas Demons were attuned to Existence. If he was a human that had the potential to awaken both Aspects within himself, could the gods play favorites and let him keep his conscious mind whenever he died? But why? Would that ‘strengthen reality’ in some way to have a god that united both extremes? What even were gods actually? Weren’t they just powerful immortal beings? Or do gods serve a purpose?

For now, I decided to put all of those questions to the side. I had no way to actually answer them after all, unless you count stories that were potentially thousands of years old by this point. Thousands of years of compound misunderstandings and slightly altered stories could and had in the past taken completely true stories and twisted them into the stuff of folklore. Wasn’t it actually believed that King Minos’s Labyrinth was actually a real thing, but millenia of embellishing had transformed it from a simple underground maze into the home of a monstrous half man half bull creature?

Once I had enough mana, I took care of what I could control, and put my explosive knife drones back in my shed in the subspace. The four of us had spent the time waiting going around and collecting all of the Spectral Quartz and equipment the bandits had had on them, as apparently I was free to keep all of it since I’d defeated them. I gave Ash as much as her soul could stand before absorbing the rest into myself. An interesting thing to note: Due to how much Spectral Quartz was circulating the kingdom, it would be most reasonable to believe that the average level of power was extremely high, and yet I’d wasted an entire army single handedly. This had two possible explanations.

1. The bandits, all of whom had a large amount of Spectral Quartz in their soul, did in fact have very high magic potentials due to the innate strengthening property of the substance. However, they failed to meet that potential due to subpar training techniques leading to inefficiency in expanding their mana pool and/or lack of imagination in spellcasting.

1. The soulbond I have with Sophia is strengthening my soul far faster than either of us had anticipated. It had to be remembered that the soulbond essentially functions as osmosis. There is a thin barrier between our souls, but due to Sophia having a ridiculously powerful soul, the pressure on her side is immense, whereas the pressure on my side is extremely weak. Sure, it will take a few centuries to catch up with her, but it won’t be a linear progression. The rate of change of my soul’s state of power and the shift from human to demon is proportional to the difference between the two of us. That means that the fastest and most noticeable changes will occur at the beginning, and progress will slow the closer I get to Sophia’s level. Add that to the fact that my previous life on Earth had made me all but immune to mental exhaustion, allowing me to empty my mana pool several times every day for the past two years, and it’s only natural that I’d become ridiculously overpowered.

Rather than either/or, my belief was that it was some combination of both of these possibilities that led me to this particular outcome. If all of the bandits had made full use of their soul’s potential, this battle could have gone completely the other way. Then again, I had never experienced any sort of inability to expand my mana pool, and still felt it grow day by day, signifying that I was not making full use of my potential either.

Is there really no way for me to make my maximum mana pool increase faster? As far as I can tell, my soul is increasing in quality at an absurd pace, leaving a shit ton of room for improvement. I asked Sophia through the soulbond.

“I think if anyone else had heard you say that they would have slapped you. I want you to fully realize the fact that you just basically decimated an army of over a hundred humans with practically a single spell. Not only that, but it was only two years ago that you were sitting in your living room playing around with demon summoning rituals because, and I quote, ‘I was bored so why not?’ You have the single greatest improvement speed I have ever observed, from a person of literally any race. ”

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

Fair point, fair point. I should stop looking for instant gratification and play the long game. Especially when I’m apparently winning at it. Gotta love demon contract hacks. Once we had all of the bandits’ equipment and clothing all gathered, we piled the bodies on top of each other, and X lit them in a massive funeral pyre. We then walked back to where we’d left the convoy, meeting the 16 other adventurers, all now awake and battle ready.

“Stand down,” X announced. “The situation is handled.”

“You woke us all up for a situation that the four of you could handle alone?” One of them called out, “That’s bullshit.” Called another. X shook his head seriously. “There were over a hundred bandits. Luckily, Leo here managed to take them by surprise and wiped them out before they really knew what was happening, but there was a significant risk that some of them might’ve escaped and come this way.” He gestured at me.

“You shouldn’t have told them that.” I said under my breath. “Why not?” He asked.

“You expect us to believe that there was ‘significant risk’ from ‘hundreds of bandits’ that couldn’t even handle one blind guy?”

Ash scowled at the man who mocked me. Or was he mocking X? I wasn’t actually certain. Either way, Ash wasn’t happy about it. “Listen up dumbass,” She started, “At any given moment, Leo here could kill all of you annoying shitheads and protect this convoy himself, or have you already forgotten the first time you saw him?” Silence fell as they remembered my teleportation, which in this world generally signified a master of magic. “So just shut the hell up and be grateful you didn’t get killed in a surprise attack tonight.”

Ash then flounced her way through the small crowd of adventurers to catch up with Mike and Liz. It had been a few days since we’d seen them after all, and apparently she was the sort to enjoy staying up to date on all of the gossip. Meanwhile Duke, X, and I sat down next to the fire, me and Duke embroiled in a passionate argument.

“No you can’t have my goddamn knife, make your own!! You’re an enchanter too for god’s sake!”

“Then at least let me stab something with it so I know how it works!! How do you even steal someone’s health?? Does it work with any living creature, or are there stipulations?”

“The only stipulation is that it has to have blood, so no elementals, and no plants. I did try stabbing a tree to verify that chlorophyll doesn’t count, and no, I can’t just go around stabbing any old tree and stealing its life force, as cool as that would be.”

“But what was your imagery for the enchantment?”

I showed him the set of fangs engraved into my dagger. “I don’t know how they actually are, but where I’m from, we have legends of vampires, that they are immortal undead beings of the night who rejuvenate themselves by drinking the blood of the living. Those legends are probably off when compared to reality, but if I do meet a real vampire and my understanding of them changes, I get to see if my enchantment will change its function in conjunction with my new understanding.”

X asked, “Wait, so it wasn’t some form of enchanted or magical defense? You were actually just taking all of those hits and healing from them by killing more bandits?

Duke brought his hand to the bottom of his helmet. As though stroking his chin through metal.

“Why don’t you at least take the helmet off, isn’t it stuffy under there?” Ash returned and asked. Apparently she had decided to let our two companions sleep for the rest of the night, satisfied with her nosing into their love life for the time being. When he heard the question, X seemed to stifle his own laughter. “Oh even worse than you think.” He replied.

Duke nodded, “It does indeed get hot in here.” Confusion ran through me.

“Wait, you’re actually here?” Duke and X seemed to turn to me in surprise, but Ash just looked confused. “What do you mean he’s ‘actually here’. Isn’t he sitting right there?”

“I thought the ‘armored knight’ was some kind of enchanted drone, so that he could travel around without actually putting himself in danger.”

“““Why would you think that?””” They all asked, probably with different tones, though I couldn’t really make them out normally, much less when they all spoke simultaneously. I pointed at Duke and then my blindfold and reminded him,

“You already know how I see the world. Bruh you have literally no heat coming from your head, like you would if there was an actual human under there. Your movements are choppy as hell so I figured it was simple enchantments that you’re controlling remotely in order to move around. And finally, I’ve never observed someone’s mana flowing while it’s still in their body, and yet for some reason I can see yours. Put 1 and 1 and 1 together and you get three. The other option I thought of is that you’re some kind of lifeform that doesn’t have a physical body and instead possesses a suit of armor, but the problem with that is your detailed enchanting work.”

X stared at me in amazement. “You’re astoundingly close.” He then turned to Duke and said, “You may as well come out of there, seeing as how he pretty much nailed it.” A few seconds later…. Pop. The armor’s breastplate…opened up? And inside of it…. “I’d make fun of you and call you pint size, but honestly I think you’re closer to a cup.”

Duke, the real Duke, was approximately 10 inches tall, and well muscled despite his miniature size. He looked like the world’s smallest strongman, like he could knock out 100 reps of a 5 pound bench press without breaking a sweat. I asked him, “You’re a….dwarf? Fairy?”

He shook his tiny head, replying, “Gnome, though I can understand the confusion. Gnomes are generally people of the land, one with the plants and nature and all that crap, but I’ve never been all that good at magic. I’ve got decent enough mana control, but whenever I try to infuse a concept into it to make a spell, it always just….fizzles out at the last second. I’ve tried using different concepts that I understood better, but it’s never worked. I was pretty much useless, so I got kicked out, and I ended up in a Dwarven Village. While gnomes are normally more magically focused, and are generally good at growing plants, dwarves are very much people who work with their hands. They’re tinkerers, builders, artisans. It’s like every dwarf has the concept of Creation embedded into their soul, and to them, race, magical prowess, none of it matters. The only thing that’s important to them is what they make with their own two hands, and they judge you not on what you’re supposed to be able to do, or how you’re supposed to be, but solely on your craft, and the skills you hone.

“I ended up staying there for a few years, learning about how to build things from this lovely couple. They had lost their son a few years back, and I think that in some way, they wanted to feel needed again, to have someone to take care of and look out for. The husband, Drake, taught me about metalworking and how to craft pieces to make machines move without spells, just pure mana manipulation. The wife, Corina, taught me about enchanting, and the language that they used to do it. Dwarven language, like a lot of things in their lives, is almost entirely designed around how effective it is in the crafting process. Words don’t have multiple meanings, and they don’t really change based on context the way a lot of other language’s words do. It’s….simple.

However, due to its simplicity, there are a lot of things that it’s impossible to enchant if you only use the Dwarven language, so I started mixing in some Gnomespeak to make my enchantments more specific. I can’t use magic normally after all, so I got the idea to make an enchantment for every single spell I could ever want to do. After a while, I ran out of enchantments and concepts that Dwarvish and Gnomish could cover, so I decided to start traveling, to learn as many languages as I could, to make my dream a reality. This armor is the culmination of everything I’ve learned, whether in metalworking, mechanics, or enchanting.”

Now that it was open, I got a good look inside of his suit of armor and saw that instead of a large amount of simple enchantments like I’d originally thought, it looked more like something you’d see in a science fiction movie. It was a beautiful combination of delicacy and stability. A mess of perfectly aligned levers, gears, pedals, and…

“Holy shit are those magic pistons?”

Duke looked at the pieces I was checking out and replied, “Yep, though not sure why you’d specify magic. What do the pistons you know use?”

“Generally some kind of pressurized gas. If you just wanted a piston that resisted change in movement gently, then you’d basically have a piston set up that had a small amount of allowable airflow, so that how fast the object moved depended on how fast air entered or exited the chamber. More complex systems on the other hand, were things we called ‘engines’, and those worked by pumping in just a little bit of a combustible gas into a piston at a time, then igniting it. When the gas combusted, the pressure inside would increase, sending the piston up and then back down. The top of the piston was attached to a lever like this one, but it would go all the way around, turning the up and down motion of the piston into a rotational motion. This rotational motion would then use gears like these guys to connect to another rotating axle, and on that one, you could put wheels, or fan blades that catch and push air, or a big wheel of copper that’s chilling next to a magnet, and BAM, you have a carriage that drives itself, or a metal bird that can carry a human into the air, or something we called a generator, that gathered lightning and used it as a source of power.”

“Wait, you know how to make all of these things?” Duke asked.

I shook my hand, signaling yes and no. “I know the theory of how to make them, but I’ve never actually done any metalworking, and even if I could make all of the pieces, it would take a shitload of trial and error.”

“Yeah but with your knowledge and my craftsmanship, what could you do?” Duke asked, an unconcealable excitement flooding his voice.

I thought about it, tilted my head up, and pointed at the moon. “You wanna go there?”