Brian did as I asked, gathering his soldiers and preparing to leave. I practiced making wooden carriages, and he made six giant lizards to pull them. Jing went to prepare The Family, so she was away from home. We were waiting for her to finish up.

I put my hands over my cauldron. A pill the size of the tip of my pinky lie at the bottom of the caldron, rotating under my flames. The sides of the pill turned black and flaked off, revealing the yellow underneath. I stopped my flames and reached into the cauldron. I pinched and lifted the pill. The surface was bright yellow with a light sheen. “Good boy,” I muttered and tossed it into a bottle of nineteen identical pills.

A murderous aura exploded above me. I shot off my seat, and my feet splayed out on the grassy floor of my basement-garden in a defensive position. This aura was almost as powerful as mine, and it was so filled with hatred it made me shiver.

Hui Ming, who was making pills next to me, shot to her feet as well. “He’s dangerous,” she whispered.

This was Brian’s aura. My brow wrinkled, my mouth getting drier by the second. I jumped to the trap door leading out of the garden and found myself on the first floor, with the ceiling that was too tall. His aura came from one of the bedrooms on second floor. Running up the spiraling stairs and down the lamp-filled hallways, I pushed opened the door to the bedroom, nearly ripping the handle off the door. The smell of piss assaulted my nostrils.

Brian sat at the edge of his bed, one knee in the air and the other fanned out to the side. His hands clasped together, relaxed. His most powerful soldiers stood scattered around the room in a roughly defined half-circle. They surrounded a girl prostrating on the floor. She rubbed her face into the carpet.

Brian’s title was ‘The Conqueror’, and now I knew why. Brian felt like a true conqueror. Powerful, ruthless, and charismatic. Even on my territory, I felt a hint of fear. Hui Ming was right. Brian was dangerous.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“Vincent,” Brian’s head sagged, losing that frightening feeling, “Please, stay out of this.”

I reexamined the situation. This was too bizarre. The person on the ground looked familiar. “You. Stand up,” I said. She did, facing me and quivering. She saw my face and her mouth opened a little. The muscles in her lower lip shook, and her eyes widened.

She bowed hurriedly. “Grandmaster, please save me.”

She was one of my students. One of the better ones, too. She was a triangle ranked student with a history of helping fellow students. She was tall, about as tall as Jing and I, but now she looked small and insignificant, a leaf caught in two colliding hurricanes.

“Stay out of this,” Brian said softly. His aura warped with maliciousness. Not a drop of that maliciousness was pointed at me. All of it went toward that girl.

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“Get back on the ground,” I told her. I walked past the rows of soldiers and sat on the bed, next to Brian. My weight pressed on the bedsheets and they bent around me. “Explain,” I said.

He grinned bitterly, “You asked me how I lost my eyes. I didn’t respond.”

“Don’t tell me she…”

He gripped the sheets. “You lived an easy life when you got to this world. You got your title and ability seconds after arriving, but I did not.”

“Explain.”

“I will. I was dropped here in this school with nothing but myself and random stuff I’d shoved in my pockets, which happened to be a pencil, five bucks, and a small bag of weed. In other words, I had nothing.”

The dominant law of this world was ‘the weak are the meat, and the strong do eat’. There were some written and unwritten laws to stop the strong from doing whatever they wanted, but those laws were weak. Most were more like social expectations than laws.

“I would’ve been fine I were dropped in the rest of the city, but I was dropped in this school, where the weakest student is a superhuman. You can imagine what happened to me. I spent two weeks, scampering around and hiding. I couldn’t steal anything to eat. Even the shopkeepers could kill me with a finger.”

“This girl found me on my fifteenth day here. I was hiding in some bushes. She tore off my clothing and rummaged through it. Of course, she also found my bag of weed. She tore my eyes out next. I thought I was going to die. For whatever reason, that triggered something and I got my title.” He pointed at the muscular man standing across the room. The man stared at the girl on the ground. “The eyes she tore out turned into Geodude, and he was enough to scare her away.”

“Grandmaster!” the girl exclaimed, “I thought I was doing the right thing!”

This situation was turning increasingly sour. Brian’s mistake was the bag of weed he kept in his pocket. This world had its own set of ‘common sense’ rules, and one was that marijuana was an exclusively upper-class drug. While the city didn’t have formally written rules, this rule had more power than most laws in my old world.

The enforcers of this rule were the upper class, and the most common penalty was death. The lower class could still get the drug, but it was all secret and in the black markets. This was why Jing could make an underground business out of it. By this world’s standards, tearing out Brian’s eyes was being nice, and we all knew this. Normally, she would’ve killed him on the spot.

“Brian,” I said.

“I know. I don’t care. She will die. She should be thankful I’m not torturing her.” Brian was slouched over, as if he had suddenly become very tired.

Brian loved talking about ethical philosophy. I forgot most of it, but the main points were bound to stick. I knew more about his beliefs better than his mother. “I thought you didn’t like the death penalty? I thought you held people to a reasonability standard? What she did was reasonable by this world’s standards. I don’t know her too well, but I know her well enough to say she is a good person. What about the forgiveness you preach?”

“Vincent. That was before somebody clawed my eyes out of their sockets. That was before she made me feel like a helpless nobody. You have to understand. I already thought I was going to be a weak piece of garbage for the rest of my life, and then she took away my sight. You know how this world is. At that point, suicide was a better option than living. I know I’m being a puppet of my emotions, but I always have been, and I always will be. Fuck forgiveness. I’ll never forgive her.”

“Vincent,” he repeated my name. He groped for my arm and gripped it. I winced. “This is just another blip in your life, but this is the climax of mine. I’ve been looking for my revenge for months. Please, just turn the other way. Let me do this.”

I trembled, and my muscles felt weak. I could pinch diamonds to dust, but right now, I could hardly raise my arms. Brian felt my trembling and tightened his grip on me. My head throbbed. I had two choices. The first was to choose my loyalty to Brian and walk out of the room. The second was to choose the right thing to do, which was to stop him.

I stiffened the arm Brian was holding, and his hand slipped off. I stood up, and I walked towards the door, refusing to look at the girl on the ground.

“Grandmaster!” she cried. “Grandmaster!”

“Grandmaster!” Something gripped the helm of my robe, stopping me. I looked back and down at her hand, hanging onto my robe like drowning little girl hanging onto a life ring. My heart pounded and my breathing sped up. My head cleared, and I became sharply self-aware. A blade flashed from one of Brian’s soldiers, slashing the arm gripping my robes into two. The hand, no longer attached to its body, lost its strength and let go.

She screamed, and I exited the room.