We are now going somewhere near the center of the city. Everyone from the Purple Dragons was called to this place, probably to get some payment. It’s almost night. I spent so much time in that house with Arnold that I forgot to even eat. Right now we decided to go separated because it would be too awkward for us to be together right now in front of everyone.
Almost an hour later after running through this stone city, we reach our destination, a big stone hall just outside the castle that the city was constructed around.
Inside it is just a big empty warehouse, now filled with benches and a small stage at the end of it. We all sit there and wait. There is not only our group here. Lots of soldiers from the kingdom and some other military groups I didn’t have contact with are here too. As well what I can only identify as adventures. I am pretty sure that the adventurer’s guild exists in this world, I heard about it while coming here, I just didn’t see it.
A few minutes of wait later, the place is full and people have to stay standing. The Boss and some people that look like high military figures as well as a priest are all on the stage. One of the guys in a really decorated in sparkly heavy armor is talking. I can’t get the details on this face but he is bald and has a dark beard. Also we can hear him like he is talking with the sound amulet that the boss uses sometimes.
“Soldiers and adventurers, I am the Head Knight of the Kingdom and my name is David. On the behalf of the king as well as my own I thank all of you. Without your help and sacrifice we couldn’t have survived this crisis.”
People stopped small talk the second he said his name. He is probably important.
“You were gathered here for three reasons. The first one is to let all of you know that you can get your pay tomorrow on the banks or in the guild. All you need is to identify yourself.”
Everyone, including me, cheers to that.
“Second thing is to congratulate the exceptional warriors among all of you that fought and helped win against the most powerful undead.” He then pulls a list. “Out of the group that went to the center of the circle, only myself and two members of the Purple Dragons accepted to be publicly acknowledged, Aria the white healer and The Boss of the Purple Dragons.”
A lot of people are confused about the boss. Everyone in the group just starts to laugh a little as the Boss and Aria wave to the people as we clap for them.
“The next groups of people were the ones that defeated really powerful enemies near the center of the circle after the main group stopped the circle. Without these people we would have a lot more bodies.” He says while he takes another list.
“First is the Great Magic Institute group that not only came running as soon as they could when we found the center, but they also fought with us when the time came and defeated one of the powerful undead that spawned. Sadly they had to return, but I have to acknowledge them. The other ones are all from the Adventurer’s Guild, they asked to remain anonymous with the exception of the Great Shin. He will retire in a few days and just asked that we inform the following. If you think you have what is needed to learn his style, go look for him.”
Some people started to get excited. This guy is also probably a big deal.
“Lastly, two members of the Purple Dragons who alone managed to fight off the enemies. Arnold and Lucia.”
I am kinda surprised but why not take the fame while I can. It’s not like I did it alone and it’s not something I can replicate right now.
As both we and Arnold stand up, the room is in silence minus the people of our group.
“What the fuck is this? These children didn’t do anything!” One man in the crowd shouts.
“HEY! We defeated an advanced undead, just the two of us!” I shout back.
“Stop lying little girl, we know you didn’t do anything.” Another man shouted.
“Shut your mouth you piece of shit. She did defeat it, I was there to see it!” Arnold shouts at the other man.
“We don’t care if you want to defend your girlfriend, but stop lying, there is no way you defeated something like that, not just you two.” Someone says a little louder through the noise.”
Arnold and I start to become visibly upset. I am almost jumping out of my seat to hit these people. But then the Boss does something I never knew even was possible. He opens a fissure in the middle of the warehouse using a buster sword from another guy on the stage. Everyone stops talking in shock and the Boss begins to address everyone.
“If you don’t stop talking shit about my family I will personally introduce you to the ground, and trust me, she is a possessive bitch.”
Everyone stops more, if that is even possible.
“And if you think you are hot shit, why don’t you try to take the two of them alone in a fight. If you manage to win I will personally give you all the money I got from this. But if you lose, you better be ready to become my bitch, because everything you own will be mine and you will have to beg to get even a piece of it back.”
Everyone just sits down and David begins to talk again.
“Well… with this out of the way. I hope some of you didn’t lose your balls. But continuing.” He takes another piece of paper. “Starting tomorrow a few of you will be drafted for a special mission. If you don't want to take part on any more missions tell your superior officer. Be it the guild, the army or whoever is in contact with me that you don’t. That is it for now. Go have fun and for the few of you that were selected, I see you tomorrow.”
Everyone begins to leave the place. Me on the other hand go running full speed towards the boss and give him a hug.
“Thanks Boss!” I say with a smile.
“It’s nothing. I was actually surprised when I saw your names there.” The boss says while patting my head.
“Were we selected for this next mission?” Arnold asks while he walks towards us.
“You had to.”
“Boss” I yell to everyone near me.
“What Lucia?”
“I am hungry, let’s eat.”
“Didn’t you have lunch?”
“I was… occupied…” I say while blushing a little.
“The lunch we got was not really that good, I want to have a decent meal too.” Aria interjects.
A lot of other people are also of the same opinion.
“Well, we already got paid part of the contract so why not? Let’s hit the taverns!” The boss says in an energetic voice and everyone cheers with him.
--//--
We are now at a tavern. Some people went to a restaurant, but since I have to go with the Boss I am here. On the table with me are Aria, the Boss and Arnold. Boss gave a bunch of money to people and we all went our own ways.
I am eating the first meal somewhat familiar to what I used to eat in my past life. Some rice, tomatoes and red meat with salt. I have no idea what meat this is but it’s good. Arnold is also eating what I am eating. Aria is eating fish with mushrooms and the boss is eating everything. I think he is already on his fifth different plate. Between bites I heard something from the Boss about him telling us something about the mission from tomorrow and I am too focused on the food. Love does not fill your stomach, It can make you forget about things, but not forever.
A few minutes later we all finish eating and we start to drink a little. Me and Arnold only get water as there is no juice here.
“Before I tell you what is going on I have to ask. How did you two do it?” The Boss Asks.
“I am also curious.” Aria comments.
“Lucia pretty much did it alone.” Arnold answered.
“That's not true, you helped a lot too.” I say with an annoyed voice.
“But it was you who did the last hit, and that was really powerful.”
“If that thing started using magic from the beginning we would have won without either of us almost dying.”
“But because of that you discovered how to use your sword, didn’t you? Maybe I should start to get hit more so you can find ways to finish things faster.” Arnold jokingly says.
I throw my cup at him and he narrowly dodges.
“Don’t say that…” I say in a low voice while pouting.
The Boss and Aria just ignore what happened there as true professionals and they ask again.
“So, can someone explain?” The Boss asks.
“If I put mana on my sword it hits really hard. So I did that.” I answer.
“If you managed to defeat that undead with only one hit, imagine what you will be able to fight if you constantly fight doing that.” Aria suggests to me.
But sadly life isn’t about to become easy.
“I probably can only use that once or twice per day. Doing that takes too much mana.” I say.
“Better than nothing, trust me.” The Boss says in a cheerful voice.
“We should have someone take a look at that sword, there are blacksmiths in this city, aren’t it?” Arnold asks.
“Yeah, let’s do that later, I know someone.” Aria says.
“Ok, now I am going to explain to you kids the next job.” The boss says after he finishes his beer.
We both start to pay close attention.
“Do you remember the job we had before this monster break happened?”
“The Dragons were contracted to help the war effort of the kingdom against a group of bandits and then a full war broke out between the Maka kingdom and some nearby small independent nations.” Arnold answered.
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“Those are only the basics but you are correct.” The Boss takes a breath. “But the thing is that our real job was to find and kill some really bad people and due the monster break they are now blending in society and we still have to find them.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to have people like Katia go after those people than us?” I advised.
“Trust me, if that was an option you two would not be here.” Aria declared.
“Yeah, they aren't the type of people that you can just take them down on stealth or dirty tricks. They would see that a mile away.” The Boss explains.
“I still can’t see why both of us would still be considered.” Arnold says.
“If you can hold your own against that level of enemy, even if you need some help, makes you strong enough. And there is also the fact that you two are perfect for at least one out of the two targets that you are qualified to go after.” Boss says.
Aria gets visibly angry.
“If I find one of those pieces of shit on the street I will personally kill them.” She says angrily.
“Calm down Aria, if you could find them on the street we would probably have no need to do this.” The Boss says.
“So, what exactly are we doing?” I ask.
“Killing.” The Boss says in a monotone, he is serious.
“If you two accept, you two are going to be living here in this city for a while and track down your targets. After you find them you will have to kill them and anyone who is helping them.”
“Seems easy enough.” Arnold says.
“If only it was that simple” Aria points to us.
“Yeah, the one you two would be in charge of is a S Ranked Criminal. He kidnaps and does bad things to children for pleasure. You two are probably the only people we have that can realistically find the targets and be able to fight them without turning part of the city into a trash pile.”
I can only imagine what they do as the Boss didn’t use any words to describe their acts.
“You two should refuse.” Aria suggests to us.
Me and Arnold look at each other in silence and begin to think a little. After a few minutes of silence we speak.
“I want to do this job.” Arnold says.
“Me too.” I say.
“But…” Aria tried to say something.
“Aria, they decided. They chose that after thinking for themselves and we are in no position to refuse their help now.”
Aria just stays in silence.
“The hows and whats are for tomorrow. For now let’s check that sword. I am also curious.” The Boss says while leaving the table.
He pays for our food and Aria begins to guide us through the city.
It’s already night and the lamp posts are turning on, probably magic. She guides us through the stone streets out of the area we were before and into the middle of the city. There she knocks at the door of a house adjacent to a forge.
“Who’s there?” I hear a male shout.
“The white lady.” Aria answers.
“Come in, it’s open.”
Aria opens the door and we come in. The outside of the house is made of stone but the interior is made out of wood. It looks like you are inside a wooden crate as the room is also empty. On the other end of this room another door opens and a bearded man the same size as Arnold comes out. As he comes closer I begin to notice that I can’t see his mouth behind his thick beard. Besides that he is a bald dude without any hair anywhere I can see, even his eyebrows. His beard is gray and black in different spots, he is using a black jumpsuit with some black lens goggles covering his eyes.
“Hello Aria, I see you brought company” The man says while he hugs Aria.
“Good to see you Martin, I see you finally moved from the workplace.” Aria says laughing.
“Well, my wife was getting tired of the smell of metal and this past year has been a blessing for me, at least monetarily. May the gods take care of the warriors who had fallen in this crisis.” He says in a positive tone. “So what do I owe this visit?”
“I need you to take a look at this girl's weapon.” Aria says while pointing to me.
“Ok, girl, give me your sword. I would tell all of you to sit somewhere but there is only the ground now.”
“You can’t pick up this sword. It will be too heavy for you.” I say.
“Girl, I can hold things twice your size, ten times your weight. I doubt it will be that heavy.” He says in a snarky voice.
Everyone else looks at me in expectation of what is about to happen. I just go with it and give my greatsword to him. Obviously as soon as he touches my sword he falls to the ground. At least he was intelligent enough to not try to hold it so my sword just dropped to the ground.
“Girl, take this thing and hold in front of me.” He says while standing up and trying to look like he didn’t just drop to the ground.
Everyone else, including me, laughs for a few seconds before I comply with the man.
He begins to use a spell on his eyes. I can see the circles in front of his goggles.
“Oh! This is unique. I only saw this in books. Where did you get that girl?”
“From my dad” I say.
“I hope he is not dead.”
“Why?” Everyone asks.
“This sword has a lot of curses on it. More than what any normal smith can place. There were probably a lot more curses on it but they were removed somehow.”
“Care to explain?” The Boss asks.
“Give me a minute, you're gonna need to sit down for this.”
He leaves for a few moments and comes back with wooden chairs from the room besides this one. As we sit he begins to explain.
“This sword has a curse that makes it as heavy as the maximum weight the user can possibly hold. Also has a curse that anyone or anything but the current owner will try to pick this up if they think they can, ignoring any outside reason. This has a curse that only people from the original user family can use it in actual combat. And lastly, anyone that shares blood with this girl that is older than her that dies will have their soul converted in mana and sent to this sword so it can become stronger.”
Everyone is in shock. Me specially.
“Three of these curses are fairly new. Only the one locking people out of the family from using this sword is part of the original design. The one about weight and the one that makes people or things try to pick this sword is around 6 years old. This last one is only around a day or two old.”
We are all still in shock.
“Hey the good news is that the sword has a blessing, and a pretty rare one too. It doesn’t even have a name so I can only tell the effect. You can increase its power with mana.”
I snap out of my shock and ask.
“Hey, what day and year are we right now?”
“It’s the 20th of Taurus, 242. Why do you ask?” The Boss says while looking at me.
I get this feeling I can’t describe too well. It’s like trying to think something you can’t think about, you can’t put a form to it, be it words, sound or image. But after a few moments inside my mind I get the message. It's something from Lucia’s soul, something that she locked me out of as well as herself. The only piece of rational tough she was ever able to do alone. After putting things together in my head I start to cry.
“Lucia!? Lucia!? What is wrong?” Everyone says while looking at me.
I just fall to the ground and Aria catches me. I am crying in anger and sadness. The realization I just had shook me down to my souls.
After a few minutes of me crying and everyone trying to console me I calm down.
“There, there, it’s all fine.” Aria says while stroking my head.
“Lucia, what happened?” Arnold asks me.
The Boss is just looking at me and Martin left the room.
I stand up a little shaky, wipe my tears. These emotions were something I had no control of. Those were feelings that were supposed to stay locked up forever inside Lucia’s soul but I accidentally found them and opened them. I then begin to explain things as best as I can.
“I have, or to be more correct, had 3 blessing that no one would be ever able to identify.”
“What do you mean?” Aria asks while still hugging me.
“Exactly what I said.” I say in a serious tone.
Everyone sits down on the chairs again along with me.
“You will need to explain this better.” The Boss says to me.
“One of my blessings you can’t see is called Half-Truths of the Soul. That makes sure anyone, including me, can’t identify half of my blessings unless some conditions are met. Until then I will forget everything it does as well what the other blessings it is hiding do. And I just happened to meet those conditions a few minutes ago.” I say in my most serious voice and face.
These are all lies. I can’t tell them about having two souls, much less that each one has a set of blessings. The thing is I only know about two, there is still one that even Lucia doesn’t know as she didn’t see what she took when I was leaving the space the gods made for me to choose my own blessings.
“What about the other two.” Arnold asks.
“The second one is called Curse Eater. I can eat any curse that directly affects me and transform it into mana for myself if it’s not a temporary curse.” I answered him.
“This still doesn’t explain why you broke down crying.” Aria says in a worried voice.
I was about to start ranting but I stop and just continue to explain as best as I can as calm as I can.
“The last one is called Happy Memories. This gives me the ability to use a spell called Happy memories. This spell can rewrite my own bad memories into less bad or even good ones and make me forget that I did it.”
“So you remembered something you shouldn’t?” The Boss asks.
I just stay in silence. Just thinking about it makes me want to smash something and cry after.What I remember doing when Dad and Mom told me to run and what really happened were two things so completely different that I get angry with myself for forgetting it and sad at Lucia to have had to use this magic so she could forget what happened. Right now she is giving me full control so she would stop crying. But her sadness is so great that even I can feel it and I am pretty much a heartless bastard most of the time.
Mom didn’t say she loved me, she called me a demon. She said that if she knew what I really was she would have killed me the day I was born.
Dad did the same. He also didn’t give me the sword out of care. He wanted to get rid of that sword and the only way to do that was giving it to his successor, me. That sword would eat its owner alive if they didn’t take care of it. That's why he took so much care of a sword he didn’t use.
They didn’t hug me, they slapped me, and tried to strangle me but stopped because if they did that it was the same as saying to the church that they wanted to die with me. They said it to my face.
When I started to run after that I was in tears and in rage but I couldn’t do anything. Surviving was the only thing left to do. Lucia used the spell without me noticing at this moment changing it to some happy memories of mom and dad saying that they loved us.
The fruits I got were also something I got myself and didn’t remember and the spell made me think dad gave them to me.
With these new set of memories after running for hours, I used my astral projection to go back to the house and there I heard even worse things.
They talked about how they saw me picking fruits and how they poisoned them. How happy they would be when I died. How they would laugh at my misery because demons don’t deserve love. How after they are cleansed by the church they will have a true family and if they found out I was somehow alive they would hunt me just to be sure I was dead and not a torn on their side.
Being hit, being called a demon, being thrown away were traumatizing enough for Lucia, at that point she just felt that they were angry at her because she did something. But when she heard through me that they openly would kill her if they got the chance and how she didn’t deserve to live or to be loved, she broke harder than me and used the spell a second time, but this time it couldn’t become a happy memory so it became just a less painful one. One where mom and dad still loved her, but they could do anything and thought that would be better for her if she died and went to the gods. I still held a little love for them, but now they are not our parents, they are just two people. I don’t know if my parents in my old life were this bad, but they never said something like that to me, especially in my face. I would probably be a lot worse if I had heard something like that when I was a child.
Everyone in the room is looking at me. Arnold tried to say something but the Boss stopped him. After a few moments they got that I don’t even wanna think about what happened and that it's better to ignore it, at least for now. I already removed that from my system for the most part. But Lucia is broken, she can’t use that spell anymore as it lowers our total mana. That was the reason I have so little mana. One more use and I probably will be unable to use magic again.
After that we just leave. I see Aria saying something to Martin as we leave but I didn’t hear what. The Boss pays for some rooms in an Inn not that far away so we all could stay close.
As we were all going to our rooms, I stop Arnold.
“Come with me.”
“Ok…”
I make him come to my room. Right now Lucia’s soul is literally in pieces and she is putting itself together again. She can feel what happens even if she is not in charge right now, and she needs to feel some love, and the person she likes the most is Arnold.
I throw him in my bed, I jump on top of him, give him a small kiss and hug him really tightly. He says nothing and just hugs me back.
I still feel a little awkward in this situation. If Lucia is not here I can’t see this boy in her eyes, but I can ignore it as my sexual desires are non-existent now.
As I am in bed with Arnold I start to think and look inside myself. At this point I could probably overtake Lucia’s soul and make this body truly mine. But this would be dick move and a really bad one. Without Lucia I would have been a pretty emotionless person again. In my old life I could only truly feel anger at various degrees. Everytime I helped a person or solved a problem it was because of anger. Anger that this one person was bitching too much about something and I want them to shut up before I hit them, the wall has a hole in it and it’s making me angry to look at it so I will fix it. I was unable to love, to truly care about others and in more than one occasion I pretty much kicked other people, that were somewhat close to me, under the bus, figuratively and literally one time.
With Lucia’s help I feel human again. Little by little I can feel that our souls are becoming one, maybe someday we will get the best of each other and truly be one person. But until then I will live life as it is. I can’t feel the love of this boy right now, but she can, and that is enough, enough to not feel anger right now.