“I accept your request,” I said to the Emperor who was looking at me with raised eyebrows, his glasses leaning slightly forward on his nose, so he was looking directly at me. He was working on his desk, his face directed at the laptop that was in front of him with a few papers spread to the side.
“I-I am so sorry Your Majesty! We tried to tell her to wait, but she just kept on coming! And not even Her Ladyship the Knight-Commander wanted to stop her!” a servant, short of breath and sweating from the side of his head pleaded as he stood by the door of the office.
I came here almost unannounced and just skipped every formality there was in this palace as I didn’t want to waste my time with the same things from yesterday. Nicole had tried to convince me to stop and do things the right way, but I didn’t care about any of that.
“Heh,” the Emperor chuckled once he regained some of his composure.
“Y-your Majesty I—”
“It’s okay. You may go back to your duties. Don’t worry about this,” he said to the young servant, waving his hand to dismiss him.
“Y-yes. I shall, Your Majesty,” the man said with a bow of his head as he turned and closed the door behind him, leaving me and Nicole alone with the Emperor.
Lodrick removed his glasses and softly placed them on the desk, before interlocking his fingers in front of him as he looked up to me. “That was a rather quick response. People in this world usually take days—if not weeks—before they even listen to a request from us. What caused you to change your mind?”
“Salrak did,” I replied, reaching for the phone stored in my Magic Pocket.
“Huh?” he exclaimed, his eyebrows raised once more, before it changed to a frown. “You mean… the God? Are you hearing the voices of the Gods once more?”
With a nod, I used my dark powers and called Salrak once more. This time, it didn’t take as long for the call to connect and the being’s deep, bassy voice to come out of the artifact.
“Hello, Lodrick,” he said with a rather cheery tone. “It’s good to see you turned out to be such a fine Emperor.”
Lodrick was incredulous as he looked at the phone. His eyes lingered on it for a moment, after which he turned to look at me, then back at the phone, until finally, his gaze settled on me. “Is this some sort of jest?”
I shook my head, presenting the phone forward to him. “No. This is Salrak—though in a different kind of form.”
“Is he… a phone?” Lodrick asked, narrowing his eyes on the phone.
Salrak loudly laughed. “That would be an interesting way of putting it! But I guess I could be closer to that than the being I used to be in Arretia.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, and I hope that you’re not playing games with me,” Lodrick said, frowning deeply as he leaned back on his chair.
“As you may already know from Asteora, I have Darkness and Hellfire powers now; from Salrak. All I did was attune some of that dark power into the phone to get a signal from what remains of Him,” I explained, “The only issue is that I have to sustain the power with the phone number he provided for us to speak with Him.”
“At least, for now,” Salrak followed up.
Lodrick looked momentarily at the phone in my hands as he rubbed his chin for a moment, seemingly processing the information. “How can I be sure that this is the real thing? Are you sure that you’re not just talking with a—”
“Hannah,” Salrak interrupted, causing Lodrick to widen his eyes in surprise. “How was it that you put it last night…? ‘You are the stars of my sky, the blooming flowers of my field, the twinkling reflection of the sun on a clear summer beach, and the cheese of my cassava bread’.”
Lodrick quickly stood up from the chair, his hands on the desk as he looked with a fierce frown at the phone in my hands. “How do you…?”
“Conversations with future and past lovers… Threats to nobles such as ‘You wouldn’t want to go to America and live with all those demons, would you?’ and the nice deals you’re doing with the German government. I know it all and more,” Salrak followed up.
“Is this… a threat of your own…?” Lodrick said, his posture indicating that he was about to pounce forward. “Some form of retaliation against me and the Empire for what happened in the Final War and before that?”
“No. Not at all. I was just proving to you that I’m not just some random guy scamming Althea or you,” Salrak answered.
Lodrick looked at the phone for a while with a fierce glare, but after a moment, he sighed, and sat back down. “I can’t say that I like the way you’ve done this… but I guess only a God like yourself could ever know those sorts of things. The words of the Faith claim that you were even stronger than The Mother of All, so it’s no surprise that you’d be privy to the private things in my computer… though I’ll appreciate that you don’t look at them.”
“I can’t help it. It’s part of my existence right now,” Salrak said, “Still, there’s too much information in this world, and a lot of it is completely worthless. I guess I can place the things that you say to women into that worthless category.”
“Salrak, are you just going to antagonize the Emperor?” I asked, since I could feel a certain spite in his tone of voice.
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“Is that how I sound?” He asked back. “It’s not my intention. But I did have a desire to talk to the Emperor of Leyfall at least once and let him know that he’s a pain in my tail.”
“Too bad father’s not around anymore so you can tell that to the one that actually did damage to your people,” Lodrick immediately followed up with a shrug.
“That doesn’t mean that I can’t at least—”
“Don’t make me cut off the call. I didn’t bring you here to have an argument about what happened in the past. We should focus on what’s important,” I interrupted Salrak.
Lodrick nodded and picked up his glasses. “You are right. It doesn’t matter if he’s the God or not. What I cared about was whether or not you’d take the request that I had for you.”
He put the glasses back on, and shifted his attention to the computer on his desk. He fiddled with it for a moment, after which he turned the screen so I could see it. Once more, he was showing me the map from last time with all the Followers of Leyfall bases.
“You are missing a couple,” Salrak said as Lodrick was opening his mouth.
On the screen, the map shifted a couple of times, and as if being drawn by a black marker, a couple of dots appeared in the map, which soon after turned from black to red. They were almost on the other side of the world from each other, in places that I couldn’t recognize.
With his eyebrows raised, Lodrick looked at the screen. “Well… that might’ve been better proof of who you are than just speaking about my private information.” He then turned his attention to me. “If you’ve accepted the request, then I’ll send you the information regarding the places you’re going to strike.”
I looked closer at the map. There were plenty of places… spread almost all over the world. It appeared like those Followers of Leyfall were much more powerful than just the base I attacked… and judging by the ‘important targets’ symbol that Lodrick had drawn on the map, it seemed like the one I hit back home was considered a rather small and almost insignificant one.
“This one in particular is the one that has the most important figures,” Salrak said, and one of the red dots on the screen shone brighter. “That’s where the ones that started this whole thing are, and that’s where they’re mass producing the ‘Holy Weapons’ that you might’ve seen before.”
“Huh, is that so?” Lodrick said, placing a hand on his chin as he looked closer at the screen. “Isn’t that… China? I was sure we already had the people from that place already figured out.”
“You were following the trail of those that touched the Empire in some form, or those who speak of magic and the Holy Gods like crazed lunatics. But in this place, they’re just working for the sake of technological and magical advance, and getting a profit out of it—regardless of where it comes from—and since the Empire’s been so closed off with the Holy Magic knowledge, they’ve found a rather nice place to do their things over there with the help of the Followers of Leyfall,” Salrak answered, showing then a picture of a couple of people.
One of them looked no different than a Holy Knight of Leyfall. He was a pale man with blonde hair and bright golden eyes. But the next picture left me amazed. It was a horned skeleton.
“These are the ones that are working in that place,” Salrak said. “I haven’t been able to get their names, since from the start the people of Leyfall refuse to use a lot of technology, and the ones that have, have been rather careful with their names.”
“So, if we were to hit these people, we might be able to reduce the production of weaponry…” Lodrick followed up with a nod. “Then, I guess we should start from there.”
“No,” I said, catching Lodrick by surprise, “If we start from those places, they’re likely to spread out everywhere else, making it harder to catch them all. I think the best way would be to first deal with the smaller bases and force them to bunker down.”
“Hmm… that could also cause them to go into hiding…” Lodrick pondered, tapping his finger on the table a couple of times.
“That wouldn’t be a problem for me,” Salrak said, “As long as there’s some form of interconnected technology being used, I can track them anywhere they go, and if they decide to burrow in a few key locations, then finishing them off in one fell swoop would be easy.”
“Heh, it seems like we’ve got a plan,” Lodrick replied with a rather… evil smile. “Well, in the end, you’re the one that killed a God. So I’ll leave it up to you; whether you want to be clever about it, or just brute force it.”
As we were getting ready to finish things up, Nicole stood up with her hand slightly raised. “Umm…”
I turned to look at her. “What is it?”
“Do I—Do I also have to fight and come with you to do those things?” she asked with a rather worried expression.
With a shake of my head, I replied to her. “No. I would rather you didn’t join these sorts of things if you didn’t want to. I know you’re not used to killing, so coming with me might be far too dangerous… however… I don’t know if Asteora has the same plan for you.”
“Ah… right, she’s the one that’s supposed to be training me…” she said with a wry smile.
“If The Embodiment of Magic is the same as always, then she’ll likely want you to go do these sorts of missions—at least on the smaller bases,” Lodrick followed up, standing from his chair to look at Nicole. “But you’re not a citizen of Leyfall, so like her, I can’t order you to do anything. At most I can force you out of here.”
I frowned and looked down at the phone. “Perhaps I can talk to her and make sure she doesn’t tell you to do these missions.”
“I might say, however,” Lodrick continued, “Nicole's quite the special mage. It would be a great asset to have her join on these sorts of missions. If she can grow even stronger, then she can ensure that things go smoothly from now on.”
“Smoothly… Stronger…” Nicole whispered, looking down at the floor.
Noticing the strange reaction she just had, I walked over to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need to worry about this. There’s always those tournaments of mages that are done in this world—the Magic Olympics?—so you can just focus on getting stronger for those sorts of things and the Tainted Lands.”
After a moment of silence, she lifted her face to look at me with determined eyes. “No. I think I should do these sorts of things as well.”
Her response was something that I wasn’t expecting at all, so with raised eyebrows, I asked about it, “What? Why would you? You’ve been rather unwilling to do anything like this.”
“Because…” she said, swallowing her saliva before continuing. “As I’ve told you before, I don’t want you, or any of my friends to die under the hands of dangerous people. So if I can become stronger and prevent that from happening, then I’ll do what I must… E-even killing.”
“You… you don’t have to force yourself. I can carry those burdens for the both of us…” I said, “It’s better for you if—”
Suddenly, I felt heat coming from her shoulder, forcing me to let go of her as I looked with surprise. But she was just confidently smiling, not at all hostile towards me. It was then that her clothes were ignited by the power of her Fire Mana, creating the thing that she calls ‘The Fire Phoenix Battledress’.
She lifted a Fiery fist in a pumping motion, and the edge of her irises flared as if there was a fire in her eyes. “I’ll do this. I can do this. I’ll make sure to make this into a peaceful world.”
The heat spread slightly for a moment, and I couldn’t help but put on a smile as I looked at her confident stance. From the phone, Salrak chuckled, and behind me, I felt Lodrick shifting in his place.
With a calm tone of voice, the Emperor said… “You’re burning the floor.”