Considering the numbers he’d brought with him, Bron found the length in which the elites of Ascension lasted against his little surprise party. But when all went silent, Bron waited patiently for the result, wondering if his men had, in fact, won at all.
“Let… me go…”
Olor, with a stiff limp and more blood than reasonable coating his chest, dragged in one of the Ascension elites, just as Bron had asked. “Here ye go, boss.”
Like a heavy sack, the barely alive Ascender, minus his mech, thudded on the ground. Bron clapped slowly, grinning viciously.
“One escaped and half the ambush party is dead, including Alamir and Dimavar. Even more are injured,” Olor reported with a sly grin, glancing back the way he’d come.
Bron gestured toward the blood on Olor’s chest. “Time for in-faction fighting, I see.” Olor looked stunned, but Bron waved away his concern. “If we find the treasure trove I think is locked behind these doors, I can hire ten—no, hundreds more of their caliber.”
Scratching the back of his head guiltily, Olor nodded. “Aye.”
“Now, take this one,” Bron leaned down, lifting the barely conscious Ascender’s hair in a firm grip to raise the man’s head and meet his eyes, “and do whatever it takes to get me in that lab.”
“A-anything?” Olor gulped, sadistic glee in his voice as he asked, “You really mean it, boss? I can do anything?”
“Hurry up before I change my mind.”
“Oh, buddy.” Olor leaned close to the man and licked his lips. “You’re going to wish you’d died with your friends.”
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Laril's family didn't want to listen to his claims at first. They were preoccupied with a disruption at a recent auction, when an outsider with a full epic aura demanded to have the primary card at any cost before disappearing.
The spells that bound the place wouldn't let them sell it to anyone else, and that meant the Patine family were without recourse. No matter what amount they offered, it only increased the amount that the other customer would be paying.
It was like a false auction, where the end was already determined, only the numbers uncertain. That made Hars and Rynia Patine furious, distracted, and had them sorting through their family stores to find how much they could possibly bid on this thing just to spite whoever thought they could lock down a major event like this.
What was even more interesting about this all was that their attempts to trace the card back to its origin were a dead end. Absolutely stalled.
No reports of a card like this existing had ever been made.
Not once.
Not being awakened. Not being merged. Not being upgraded.
It was a complete unknown from nowhere.
Laril couldn't help but draw parallels with another unknown from nowhere who'd descended in a flash of death to ruin their hopes and chances.
So when Hars Patine finally deigned to listen to his aspirant-heir's story, Laril had a lot more context and details ready to bring to the table.
He laid out the story as though it were a fait accompli, starting at the end with the Legendary card user whose family did not exist and whose history was a blank, who appeared from nowhere with a card that any of them would readily murder for. From there, he traced backwards through the steps to discovering this, how one of his classmates had made a terrible mistake and brought the whole Ascension faction crumbling as a result.
He detailed his blueprints for the new Retribution faction, exactly how to market their new rise to the other Epic users they'd need to recruit in order to take down this new interference to their lives and plans. He told them everything without emotion, only facts and precision.
The plan was simple. The execution wasn't.
But Laril was nothing if not persuasive. It was his strongest ability, one he'd cultivated over the entirety of his life, and it wasn't one without versatility.
If he hadn't been able to convince his parents of things, he'd never have survived his childhood. Being prideful and stubborn were not valued traits among the Patine, and only by outmatching his more pedestrian traits with appropriate cunning could he hope to stand among his family in any reasonable degree.
His father added several modifications to the plan before bringing it before the family council. The council modified it further and added significantly more backup--both of the contingency plan variety and the additional fighters sort. The suggested minimum for tackling a Legendary card was fifteen to twenty. They insisted on thirty. Even though it meant they'd be putting their family in debt to several other major groups, the potential benefits of having a legendary card was worth the cost.
"Better to overspend to ensure success than skimp on the necessities and lose the gamble," Laril's mother Rynia lectured, when he protested the escalation. The new plan would cost almost four times as much as his initial proposal, and if it failed, their family would be all but bankrupt.
Laril didn't imagine the actual attack could fail, not now that they knew what they were up against, but working with mercenaries who outnumbered the in-house resources meant that they would have all the more opportunity to betray them.
He didn't want to spend his entire inheritance on a card only to have it snatched away by one of their rivals at the last moment. It would cost half as much to bribe the mercenaries away as to hire them in the first place.
But his calculations weren't sufficient, so he swallowed his pride and conceded the point to his older and wiser family members. If things went wrong, he could point to his original plan and show that he'd been operating with other assumptions in mind. They wouldn't be able to pin it on him then.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
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“Are you really a goddess?” Erad grabbed tight to the bars, staring at the towel-clad woman across the cargo hold. “Can you save us?”
She glanced his way and shrugged. “Probably not in the way you imagine. But I am offering miracles on a payment plan these days. What are you after? With the understanding that I am currently on vacation and won’t be granting any wishes until we’re back to my… homeworld.”
“When you say miracles and wishes… what’s your domain?” Erad tried not to get his hopes up too high, but… “Creation? Healing? Beauty?”
The maybe-goddess scoffed without any pretense of dignity. “Do I look like someone so limited? I am personally aligned with retaliation, but my ability to grant miracles and wishes is bounded only by your imagination and the amount you’re willing to pledge.”
Erad was so overwhelmed by the possibilities that his mind went fully blank. He couldn’t think of a single thing to wish for, except his freedom. But if she could only grant wishes from her home planet…
“I’ll find a way to get you home,” he promised with conviction. “If there’s any way…” He glanced around at the other prisoners. Though most of them looked too weary and resigned to do anything, the handful who retained some defiance nodded in agreement. “We’ll find it.”
But, as it turned out, no one needed to find anything. Erad felt almost cheated when their captor brought in a glittering gown with a very simple cut but intricately embroidered with shining thread that turned the simple garb into something truly worthy of a goddess, then escorted away by their captors with great ceremony.
Hopefully she wouldn’t forget them, even if he was completely useless to her.
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"You're not serious."
Xian turned back to frown at Ivy, or perhaps he was trying to be fawning. It was hard to tell with how vicious his face always looked. "Of course I am, your Glory."
Ivy stared at the doorway into the Heartship. It was large by Xian's standards, but she'd still have to duck down to enter. "Please tell me the hallways are normal sized."
"They're significantly expanded to have room for giants such as yourself."
She grimaced. "You want me to crawl around in your ship's transport corridors in a sparkling goddess dress? You realize that'll make it all scuffed and grubby in no time?"
"No, no, we wouldn't require you to crawl." Xian looked horrified at the thought. Or perhaps hungry. Hard to tell. "You need only come far enough to enter your conveyance."
He gestured to a curtain at the end of the short hall.
"My conveyance."
"Of course, Your Glory. There is nothing we will not do to provide for the great herald."
Ivy hesitated, huffed out a breath, then crouched and waddled into the hall.
[Co-Owner Ivy! What are you doing here?]
She stopped dead. "Shop-kun?"
[My name is Loke, and I think you just found one of my fragments.]
"That sentence is going to require a lot of explanations."
A girl with white hair and brilliant green eyes appeared in front of her with a huge grin. She immediately charged and tackled Ivy with an aggressive hug. "Ivy! I'm so glad you're alive! James is... well, breaking things with great inefficiency."
"I think you need to start explaining things."
Xian stood back, staring wide-eyed between them. Loke had a white dress on that matched Ivy's, only shorter and a lot frillier. Apart from the eye and hair colors being the exact opposite of Ivy's, they could easily have been sisters. Loke's facial features looked similar to Ivy's in an almost unsettling way. A little too perfect, almost airbrushed.
"I don't know how much I can explain,” the girl said. “One minute I was searching through the database of eighty thousand years of sealed memories, then you were disappearing from my scan range—which is considerable, and terrifying that you were able to leave it at all without warning. James came running, but of course neither of us could find you, so he started breaking stuff immediately. Didn't even bother stopping to collect the lifespan. Though I suppose being in the tower took care of that for him, so it didn’t matter in the end."
"I'm sure he thinks I'm in great danger."
"You are."
"Enough about me. You were explaining how you're here. And how you're..." She waved at the girl's form. "Like this."
"Of course. Your arrival on this ship activated a connection I'd not gotten to yet. This ship is running off a fragment of my splintered essence. A part containing my name and avatar." Loke gestured down at herself. "I think there was a war and I lost. I don't remember for sure."
"Wait, if you're here, does that mean you can start granting wishes now? Xian there has something to ask for. And the other people here. They're tiny, but they have big lifespan numbers."
"Certainly. If Co-Owner Ivy wishes to make a deal, I can facilitate it from here very easily."
"Perfect." Ivy grinned and spun to the cowering ratman. "Xian, you still want to be smaller?"
"I... It is not possible."
"Sure it is!" Loke said. "To remove the human DNA from your body and reconfigure your remaining substance into the form of your tiny grandparents will cost you forty years of lifespan. According to my comprehension, you have two hundred seven years available."
Xian stared back and forth between the two of them, as Ivy manifested a scroll from nowhere and held it out. "That's not possible."
"Sure it is. Sigh here, hand over your lifespan, and brace yourself. Anything that changes your body will take a bit of adapting to."
"You expect me to believe that you can trade my lifespan for changing who I am?"
"Not who, just what."
"That's... unbelievable."
"If it's unbelievable, then you have nothing to lose by giving it a try, right?"
Xian nodded and took a half step forward. "If it is possible, then... yes."
"If you agree to surrender forty years of lifespan to the shop in return for turning you into a pureblood, then we have a deal." Ivy handed the rat man the contract. "You'll need to sign it with blood."
"Blood..." He hesitated, then shook his head with a snort. "Why would I be more hesitant to use my blood as ink than to sell my very lifespan." He bit the tip of one finger and scrawled a quick signature across it.
Golden light enveloped him, transferred to Ivy, then from her to the girl who'd called herself Loke.
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Anomaly detected.
El Ray 7's head snapped up as the alert pinged across her consciousness. She'd only a few more volumes left to her decorative corn binge, but this was no mere abnormality.
Red lights flashed in her awareness. She scanned the error codes until she found the corresponding set of numbers and letters, then her substance paled as she turned almost invisible from shock.
Sealed entity reversion. Subcategory: Chaos deity. Threat level: absolute.
"No, no... this can't be." She scanned through the letters and numbers again, searching for any other explanation.
There was no other explanation. The anomaly that had been detected... was a sealed chaos god breaking free of its restraints.
She jumped up and slammed the lever to summon a transportation disc. A moment later the disc materialized and she all but ran onto it, nearly overshooting into the void beyond. "Take me to the Council of Creation," she instructed. "Alert level absolute."
The disc flared crimson, and then both it and El Ray 7 disappeared without a sound.
The blinking alert on the screen continued to flash.
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