Lily
Mutitasking in and of itself was already incredibly useful and certainly worth putting some effort into keeping Taylor’s father safe. Multitasking mixed with High Probability basically letting me scan everything in my range in detail at the same time was worth it ten times over.
Taylor, I knew, experienced information overload sometimes. I didn’t because both Man of the New World and High Probability had increased my processing power to a level where I could do this with ease. Well, it was either that or controlling however many bugs she usually had with her gave her more info than High Probability gave me at the moment.
I didn’t end up getting the trait that made her magic worthwhile, that being her extreme awareness of the bodies of her targets, which I suspected was either due to its complexity or its currently diminished state because of her soul’s efforts to keep the Monarch in her body at bay.
Either way, with me now having an even greater awareness of all things around me as long as they possessed mana, finding the Slaughterhouse Nine in Brockton Bay didn’t take me particularly long.
Mannequin, Burnscar, Shatterbird, Bonesaw, Manton and his projection as well as Crawler were all easy to find because Mannequin was the one with the lowest mana of them at high A-Rank amounts and, if not for Bonesaw or Mannequin implanting devices inside their bodies that perfectly contained their mana inside their bodies in such a way that most people’s mana senses, picking up on emitted mana rather than the mana inside one’s body, would not notice it they would have been caught by the PRT already.
Manton actually lacked that device but he constantly shunted all his mana onto the Siberian and her mana seemed to actively glitch through reality in some way that made it a headache even for me to detect. If not for that constant flow of mana from him to his projection, it’d have taken me a lot longer to notice either one of them.
Cherish, meanwhile, was simple to notice because her mana, subtle in the way a lot of master-type magic I’d seen so far was, stretched out over a large part of the city. She was definitely hidden well but, if I could see the Simurgh’s spell, I could see hers.
Jack was actually the hardest of the lot to find because he was basically just a B-Rank with delusions of grandeur and magic that let him pull it off well enough to survive to get to this point. How close he was to the others was what ended up giving him away.
“If you’re quite done, come and visit me before the sun rises and you have to take care of other tasks, please.” Tenkuu Niwa requested, intriguing me.
‘Sure.’ I replied casually, smiling already as I wondered what my sword’s spirit had in store for me this time.
So, returning home, I then entered my inner world once again to find Tenkuu Niwa sitting on the floor, surrounded by some of the plants of the garden, not a trace of elegance to be found in my blade’s countenance at the moment. “What did you want to discuss, Tenkuu Niwa?” I asked, ignoring the distaste I felt at seeing such behaviour from a being originating from my soul.
“Your plans for the near future. Specifically the ones for the Nine.” Her answer didn’t surprise me in the slightest. There was little else I could’ve imagined her wishing to talk about at this moment.
“What about them?” I questioned, willing to hear her out despite getting the feeling she wasn’t about to tell me that they were flawless.
Indeed, Tenkuu Niwa seemed almost disappointed at my response. “They are so flawed as to be worthless. Oh, I will admit that it is theoretically possible for you to enact them but you will never succeed at doing so.”
“And why not?” Her reply to my reasonable request for her to elaborate was to suddenly jump to her feet and very nearly cut off my right arm.
“Because you’re holding yourself back enough that your skills are only worth a fraction of what they should be.” Tenkuu Niwa told me, blade lashing out several times in an instant, each swing aiming to sever a part of me and each one blocked by a hair’s breadth. “You seem to have this idea that an immortal must be elegant in all things and the only times you’re ever free from it are when you’re unaware of your own movements. Now that you getting distracted has gotten exponentially more difficult, it is a flaw that must be eliminated one way or another.”
“And what’d you know about what an immortal has to be like? You’re less than a month old!” I argued fiercely while blocking yet more attacks.
Previously, Tenkuu Niwa had primarily relied on her Shikai in our spars to give me some ideas of what to do. This time, she pushed me into a corner purely through swordsmanship, effortlessly dealing with it even when I threw out some sorceries to try and stop her, simply evading them or dancing out of the way of the gravity ones to then dart back in and try and stab or slash me.
“I know that an immortal who enforces elegance to such a degree won’t stay an immortal for long!” She replied, her blade grazing my aura as it suddenly sped up or, rather, as Tenkuu Niwa decided to try a bit harder.
She…wasn’t wrong. Every instinct of mine was screaming at me to just let go and fight without a single care for how it looked but I couldn’t. ‘An immortal must be elegant.’ I reminded myself. There were exceptions, yes, but all of those were related to family or other people close to the immortal. Those exceptions weren’t for combat. Combat was an art. To fight was to create a painting of violence and bloodshed that made me smile and laugh and would awe and scar mortals in equal measure with how beautiful such brutality could be.
“Ask yourself this, Lilian, what is most important?” Tenkuu Niwa began, yet more slashes wearing away at my aura bit by bit. “Your enjoyment of life and it continuing or the opinions of people you do not care about?”
The question stumped me for long enough that the next cut ran a lot deeper, the pain forcing me to focus even as I did not want to give the answer, it feeling too much like admitting that I’d been wrong for my liking.
“You admire elegance. That is understandable and acceptable. To enforce elegance on yourself even in combat, however, I will no longer tolerate.” My zanpakuto spirit declared. “Shunko, for example, is a technique you possess and are, by now, perfectly capable of utilizing. You merely refuse because it would damage your clothes and you believe these ones to be the epitome of elegance. Even if you were to accept other clothes, you wouldn’t accept any that are compatible enough with Shunko to not get damaged by the technique. You could’ve easily had your personal tailor create such outfits for you and had them made as elegant as possible. Instead, you decided to deny yourself a technique that the likes of Yoruichi viewed as a worthy trump card.”
As if to emphasize her point, lightning Kidou burst to life all around Tenkuu Niwa, destroying the back of her kimono in the process only to reveal a backless, sleeveless outfit similar to Yoruichi’s beneath it. Whether she always wore it or had it on for this occasion only, I didn’t know.
Shunko could theoretically be used with any elemental Kidou. Lightning Kidou was simply what I myself was best at and I was already aware that Tenkuu Niwa was tied to my own skills so I suspected that that’s the primary reason why she picked that one instead of any other.
Lightning Kidou was also the most likely to take my head off if my zanpakuto spirit miscalculated even once – though the difference there was really quite small – and, while I had no idea what that’d mean in this inner world of mine, I didn’t want to find out.
Desperately, I tried to defend against her attacks as she blurred forwards but she delived ten in the time it took me to ready myself to block or twist out of the way of the first four my combat instincts and the Force warned me about and even a blocked hit had been enough to take out a good chunk of my aura.
Taking several more broke it and then hurled me off into the distance, every part of me aching after I bounced off the ground of my inner world, coughing up blood that really made me even more worried about how this little ‘spar’ would affect my body.
The presence of my aura in this place was not a good sign in my eyes.
“We both know you cannot defeat me as you are and I will go back to using a blade now. Tell me, is an ideal immortal someone who stubbornly clings to elegance in the face of such a threat or are they someone who does as they please?” Tenkuu Niwa warned me and, true to her word, alarms were blaring in my head as she blurred into motion yet again and I made a split second decision in response, my own Shunko activating so I could meet her blow for blow despite it ruining my outfit and the damage to my body definitely making it so Tenkuu Niwa had to be holding back for us to be equally matched.
Oh, I was getting more and more angry as my sword spoke but part of me couldn’t help but feel elated by it all. Yes, Tenkuu Niwa’s methods were…questionable but… “Hahaha! HAHAHAHA!” I laughed as I continued to fight more, my movements lacking a stiffness I’d pretended not to notice for so long. I exhilarated in the newfound feeling of freedom the lack of it had given me. “Good! Tenkuu Niwa, do as you please! If the results keep making me grow like this, I won’t complain!”
Growth. I loved nothing quite as much as knowing that I was greater now than I was moments before and, the greater and more profound the growth, the more I loved it.
“Then have you already realized the mistake that led to me needing to intervene in the first place.” Tenkuu Niwa questioned, probably making use of Talking Is A Free Action, too, as she continued our much more casual brawl during our conversation.
“Feel free to enlighten me.” I had an idea but my zanpakuto had an advantage in this that I was forced to acknowledge just now. She knew my personality, beliefs and thoughts intimately well but wasn’t me.
There were many thoughts and beliefs that I didn’t voice because I acknowledged how…foreign they would be to the average human. Even Missy didn’t know all of those, though she definitely knew more than most. She just didn’t know the ones I’d developed after I’d learnt to shut up about certain things.
Tenkuu Niwa knew them all and could judge them from the perspective of someone who sought my growth.
“Isolation. You might be right in believing that getting attached to mortals is just bothersome but you isolated yourself too much. You do not speak to them, do not listen, do not seek to learn. You took two teachers, both of whom were long-lived and otherwise simply decided to grow through books. As it stands, you permit no one to challenge the nonsense you come up with because you simply don’t speak of it. If you truly wish to grow, interact with others more. Learn their thoughts and opinions not because they matter but because they might inspire you.” Tenkuu Niwa explained patiently.
Part of me wanted to protest but…had I not come up with my image of an ideal immortal through reading the works of several philosophers and observing humanity, deciding what I liked most and discarding what I didn’t? In general, Tenkuu Niwa wasn’t wrong that it was easier to get good ideas if I were to communicate more and the worst that could happen would be me wasting some time on listening to mortals when I didn’t have to.
Considering the fact that I was ageless and had no need for sleep, what did wasting time really mean to me?
Still, there was one question I had to ask, “Wouldn’t it work just as well for me to just talk to you?”
Tenkuu Niwa sighed in response, shaking her head. “That would run into the same problem. I am but one voice, one opinion to weigh against your own. Gather as many as you can. If you still seek endless growth, you must never stop learning more and the best way to do so is to communicate even with those you view as lesser.”
I couldn’t say I appreciated hearing that truth but I wasn’t stupid. Tenkuu Niwa wasn’t wrong. And I at least liked to think I listened to reason. Besides, it did sound kind of fun to talk to people and just share opinions. I’d mostly stopped doing so in the past because… ‘I had become set in my ways.’ I realized with a grimace, the thought of stagnation causing me the same disgust as it always had.
Eternity was beautiful but stagnation was not. Stagnation was a disgusting thing. If something stagnated, it had been too isolated and needed to be forced to interact with different things to cause the beginnings of growth once more.
Seeing that I had been stagnant in this got rid of the last of my anger, replacing it with gratitude. I could hardly blame Tenkuu Niwa for recognizing the signs and applying the treatment I myself believed to be necessary in such situations.
Maybe there had been a better method to go about it, one that didn’t involve hitting me a bunch, but I was fine with the end result so I’d accept the methods, too.
Sighing, I began to slow down as a sign to end our spar.
“Any other advice before I leave?” I did still have to work on Sellen’s body tonight. I expected I could get it done in one or two nights considering the fact that I just had to remove features from the schematics of another gigai I intended to create but it would still take some time to actually build the thing since sith alchemy wasn’t quite as quick at just transmuting things into the right shape as to be worth using for this.
Tenkuu Niwa nodded without hesitation. “I am aware that I have just informed you of how problematic your focus on elegance is but, also, I want you to be aware that your beauty alone would almost certainly be enough to make you fighting while unrestrained a work of art that’d awe people and, knowing your tendencies, horrify them in equal measure. And…maybe use your tailor for tasks other than recreating the same outfit over and over again. We are both aware of her frustrations by now and you could easily get your hands on or even create materials that you could have her use to make different outfits for you if you want to experiment with those.”
“And you really couldn’t just have led with that?” I asked, frustrated as I picked up my hat so I could run my hand through my hair.
“If I’d thought you’d have listened, I could have done that.” Tenkuu Niwa conceded. “However, my dear wielder, you are stubborn enough to need evidence of your shortcomings. If I hadn’t proven the flaws in your approach to combat to you, you would’ve simply acknowledged my point but then added on something along the lines of ‘wanting to be even more elegant’ as if being the most beautiful existence in your world weren’t enough on its own.”
“There’s still Missy.” I argued just for the sake of arguing at this point.
“And Flower Power boosted your beauty. It’s ultimately minor compared to the absurd level that you naturally possess but it’s enough that I can confidently declare that none can match you.” Tenkuu Niwa shot down my attempt immediately.
Groaning, I ran my hand down my face. “Fine. I’ll see about getting Sabah some less monotonous work. And I’ll have someone record me fighting to see how true your words are.” I conceded.
“Good. As for my next piece of advice, try to enjoy your journeys more. At the moment, you look towards the goal too much. You do not take in the worlds you travel to despite your desire to do so and I can feel your regret here each time you do so. Take your time. Sample the worlds you visit, see what they have to offer.” She told me, sounding strangely sad as she spoke.
“I actually need to be focusing on the goals I set for myself.” I pointed out, raising an eyebrow at her. After all, Scion was at some unknown point in the distance.
“You have two methods of seeing the future already, Lily. Your eyes and the Force. Use either or use both. With a bit of practice, it should let you figure out how much time you have. Besides, you can hold stars in place now. You can afford to take some time to relax and take in the sights.” She waved off my concerns.
Considering her awareness of my feelings, I didn’t bother hiding my wince in response to her pointing out that aspect of my abilities.
Tenkuu Niwa sighed as she saw me do so. “You do not have a fate. If not for Only A Sith Deals in Absolutes making it so that your future vision can trump that, you wouldn’t be able to even use future-seeing abilities. As it stands, you can do so only when you will your future sight to win, such as when you accidentally activated the perk by being too curious about how long Faultline would survive if you told her about Cauldron. As such, you don’t have to worry about seeing a future you don’t like. If you hate it so much, just change it. Your future is as malleable as you desire it to be.”
I thought over her words for several moments before sighing and nodding. “Fine. I’ll at least practice with using it a bit and try to enjoy my journeys some more.” I reluctantly gave in.
“Then let us move on to the final topic.” Tenkuu Niwa said and I suddenly had a bad feeling. “You have an entire guild at your disposal. I understand that the Nine are perhaps not who you want to deploy them against but other threats will come and you are paying them to risk their lives. Besides, Taylor, at least, can reach into parts of Brockton Bay through the doors in your Traveling Home. Make use of all the pieces on the board if you already tie them up in enough vows to render them certain to be useful.”
That I wanted to vehemently disagree with on principle alone. Alas, I knew that Tenkuu Niwa was right about this, too. I was, perhaps, a bit slow to seek help even from those I could get it from. “Alright, alright. Next time, I’ll make use of them in my plans.” In all honesty, depending on what I was doing, having a bunch of guild members helping me out in other worlds would be useful, too.
“Great. Now, before you leave, do remember to warn your friend in case she hasn’t been warned yet. Bonesaw is likely still quite interested, after all.” Tenkuu Niwa told me just as I was exiting my inner world, reminding me that Amelia was almost certainly a target, too.
‘I’ll end that bothersome group once and for all for how much work they’ve caused me.’ I promised myself.
Of course, such promises had to wait until after I downed a can of soda and changed my clothes because the injuries from my inner world seemed to have transferred to my body.
Tenkuu Niwa
Looking in disgust at the chains after Lilian left, I had to wonder how much easier things might’ve been if the third of them didn’t exist. That one was what ensured that Lilian was forced to seek to be ‘ideal’ in all things. Oh, her past self had already sought to be the same but there hadn’t been a supernatural enforcement of such behaviour. Now, my wielder was cursed to be her ideal of all she identified herself as.
Her detachment, in that regard, was a blessing. If she took on too many roles, they’d tear her apart because her perfectionism wouldn’t permit her ideals to be so simple that it’d be easy for her to embody them.
Most people had countless attachments, held themselves as part of several groups just from existing. Nationality, region, town, clubs, classes – anything and everyone that one was even remotely a part of, many would consider to be part of their identity to varying degrees.
For Lilian, her roles at the moment were simple. Sister, Daughter, Guild Leader, Traveler – little though she truly understood the latter yet, still unused to the freedom of having the ability to access infinite worlds whenever she pleases. Four roles she truly considered a part of herself.
Oh, she was slowly coming to consider herself both a student and a teacher, too, but the former overlapped with her understanding of Traveler while the latter was still something she herself did not fully understand. Ozpin’s words helped begin to guide her but she was still confused, still uncertain. She enjoyed this role she took solely due to her Guild Leader duties and her curiosity at the time and she still had yet to come to terms with why that was.
I could’ve given her the answer, of course. It wasn’t even particularly complicated. Despite that, it was not my place to just hand her the answers. She would not grow into her roles like that. Maybe the feelings I saw and knew would change as she grew and then the answers I simply handed her would end up wrong. Maybe I was simply wrong. Maybe my own understanding was incomplete.
No, I would let her grow and focus my efforts on helping her do so and getting rid of these abominable chains.
Benign. That’s what her past-self had thought those disgusting curses to be. Things to steer Lilian towards perfection. Instead, they were exactly what they looked like, chains tying Lily down and preventing my wielder from growing as much as she could.
With a bit of luck, Lilian would soon grow enough to begin the process of getting rid of the first one. The greater the changes enforced by the Geass, the stronger it was so she wouldn’t be able to get rid of them all at once but, at the very least, her obsession with being ‘ideal’ had left the third fairly weak. The sixth was weaker still but it was perhaps the least consistent and certainly unstable in some regards. The effects of a Geass that turned out to be mostly unneeded in the end but would still potentially have a major effect should it ever come to it, I supposed.
The fourth…I couldn’t let Lilian touch that yet. It had to be the final Geass removed. I also needed her mental fortitude to be a great deal stronger before dealing with the effects of removing that chain in particular. The first was similarly bad but I could see Lilian dealing with it. The fourth was infinitely worse than the first.
At least the second was fairly irrlevant. Oh, it was the height of stupidity but such was the result of a Geass born purely from emotions. At least the second was easy to work around if incredibly limiting and the fifth wasn’t technically a problem from a combat standpoint but it had caused problems already and was, in some regards, the most actually damaging one of the lot. Despite that, the fifth was fairly low-priority solely because of how much stronger the damn thing had grown due to Lilian’s abilities making it more and more active. By the time she would be able to destroy that one, she’d be able to destroy any of the others with ease.
Of course, the Geasa weren’t all the flaws Lilian was afflicted with but they were the most urgent simply because Lilian couldn’t grow past them until they were destroyed.
“Do well, Slaughterhouse Nine. My wielder grows best when she’s pushed and I need her to grow a bit more before she can get rid of that eyesore.” I muttered, amused by the thought that I was hoping for Lilian’s enemies to make her struggle.
Probably not what a blade was meant to do but I desired nothing more than her growth and this is what she required for it.
Azur
“So this is to be Sellen’s body once it is complete?” I questioned, looking over the humanoid puppet embedded with glintstone at various points. Oh, ‘puppet’ wasn’t quite an accurate term and some of the materials were either entirely unfamiliar to me or simply used in a strange manner but it was interesting to witness Lilian’s work on the construct.
Apparently, there had been some kind of emergency not long after her return to the castle that had kept her from starting on it immediately but it was, apparently, not quite so urgent that she couldn’t start on my student’s body now and make what looked to me like quite a lot of progress.
“It is.” Lilian confirmed. “The basis is something from another world called a gigai, an empty vessel for purely spiritual beings to occupy in order to interact with the world. And adding in glintstone should remove any need for her to even use a staff from now on. The conductivity of her body alone will improve her sorceries enough.”
“She’s not wholly reliant on a staff in the first place but I suppose it is good to hear that it will no longer be necessary for her. Really, had I known about this, I might’ve requested for you to do the same for me.” I mused, only slightly serious.
“And do you think I’d do so for someone who killed a guest in my castle without my permission?” Lilian questioned, sounding understandably annoyed but not actually angry.
I shook my head. “I do apologize for causing you trouble but I couldn’t suffer the existence of a sorcerer from my school who had stood guard over my body against my best interests.”
“You are lucky the binding vow I’d made with him didn’t get broken by your actions. If it had, I would have found a way to transfer the consequences to you.” Lilian told me, parts still moving to incorporate themselves into Sellen’s body to be even as the girl turned towards me and her hands moved away from the workbench. “However, since the vow has not been broken by your actions, I’m not angry. I am, however, now in need of an assistant teacher for my glintstone sorcery classes since you killed the one I intended to use for that. So, at least until Raya Lucaria has been reclaimed, I expect you to help me teach my subordinates.”
“Very well.” I accepted my punishment with grace, not really bothered by doing what I had done for a long, long part of my life, anyways. Perhaps I could’ve taken offence at the apprentice of my student ordering me around but she had saved me and was letting me stay in her home where I had killed a guest.
“Good. And, just to be clear, no more killing my guests. If anyone except for the maids had seen that, it might have caused me issues.” Lilian explained firmly.
“You have my word.” Lifting my hands did little to show my sincerity but it was an amusement an old man such as myself was allowed to indulge in, I decided.
My actions would be much better at showing that I wouldn’t repeat this, after all.
Amelia
“You’re here, good.” Lily told me, seeming to be trying way too hard to be acting casual after I’d met her at the Traveler Guild’s office for lunch.
“What’s so urgent?” Lily’s messages had definitely made it seem like there was something important going on.
In response, she took out a slab of meat for some reason, some grey or maybe greyish green scales on the outside of one side alongside some crystals for some reason. “Officially speaking, I want you to check if this meat is safe for consumption.”
“What is it?” I questioned as I reached out to touch it, almost getting overwhelmed by the information of the various new things inside it. There was some weird mana everywhere in it, too, but I was pretty sure that mana wasn’t toxic to humans and definitely not to whatever Lily qualified as at this point.
“Dragon meat.” Lily answered, almost making me choke on my spit as the first image that entered my head were old pictures of Kamish. My friend had the gall to laugh at me for it. “Not as bad as you think, I promise.”
“It better not be.” I replied, still looking through the meat for anything that might make it harmful to consume. Eventually, I shrugged. “You can eat it. Obviously, you should cook it, especially if people whose bodies aren’t as weird as yours and Missy’s eat it but it’s generally safe to eat.”
“Perfect. Remind me to invite you once the maids have figured out a good recipe for it.” Lily told me, grinning as the flesh vanished back to wherever she was keeping it.
“Sounds great.” I told her. “Now, why did you actually call me here?”
Lily sighed before resting her head on the palm of her hand, her expression turning serious. “The Slaughterhouse Nine are in town. I did a bit of future-seeing earlier today and you’re definitely a target for recruitment for them. I have every intention of wiping them out before it comes to that but I still recommend you stick close to your dad and, if you want, I can probably assign Millicent to guard you.”
Whatever I’d expected her to say, it wasn’t that. Once her words sank in, I felt a bit dizzy as I realized just what was waiting for me. “I don’t suppose I can stay in your pocket dimension?”
“You’re welcome to stay there.” Lily agreed easily. Her eyes flashed for a moment before she continued, “Your father is, too. I’m just not hosting his entire guild so he won’t accept.”
I grimaced at that entirely too accurate statement. Dad wouldn’t just abandon the entire guild of mostly non-combatants for his own safety if the Nine might take it out on them. “I’ll talk to him and try to convince him. I will call you later.” I promised, mind racing as I desperately tried to keep myself calm.
Lily nodded in response. “My offer to at least have Millicent protect you stands.”
“I’ll think about that, too.” I told her. “But, for now, I need to try and figure out what to do with dad.”
“Do you want a portal home, at least?” My friend offered, showing actual concern.
“I didn’t know you could make portals now.” I replied, ignoring the shivers running down my spine the more I thought about the situation.
Lily sighed but nodded in response, waving her hand to open a swirling, dark purple, oval-shaped rift in space. It looked kind of like a person-sized purple Gate, really. “It’s not something I use particularly often since I don’t really need them for myself but they’re at least more comfortable for others than my usual method of travel.” She reassured me.
“Then I’ll take you up on that offer. I’m guessing this is already a portal leading to my home?” I knew Lily well enough to guess that she’d known that I’d take her up on her offer.
And, indeed, my friend nodded. “Just go straight through and you’ll be home. You should probably be quick about it, though. No need to have your dad get worried about the portal in his backyard.”
“Got it. Thank you. Both for this and for telling me about all this.” I told her, keeping myself as calm as I could manage while walking through the portal before rushing to my father so I could figure out what we’d do.
Glaistig Uaine
Walking through the halls of the PRT headquarters in Brockton Bay, I had to say that the work the hunters of this city did was certainly more thorough than I’d have expected. The Gates I could find were almost entirely taken care of already.
“Before we reach the meeting room, I feel like I must remind you that the Chief Director has requested for you to do your best to cooperate with the leader of the Travelers Guild.” Thomas, always nearby to make it easier for me to fulfill my role, told me.
“I am aware and I shall, in turn, remind you that I have the freedom to decide how far this cooperation will go on my own.” I pointed out, ignoring the man’s sigh.
Calvert had not been my first, second or even tenth choice for my assistant because, in truth, I didn’t need one as far as I was concerned and I would have preferred a loyal one over one placed there by my associates. Alas, the man did make my dealings with the average mortals a great deal easier, preventing me from having to address people with souls so dull I could barely even perceive them, while also possessing a soul whose presence near me wasn’t an offence against me.
So, despite my misgivings, Calvert was here to stay and had been for many a year now. Nearly a decade, in fact. In that time, he may not have served me loyally but he had, at least, fulfilled his role well enough that I always made certain that he survived whatever attempts at survival my targets made.
“I know but…are you certain you would win should a fight break out?” Thomas, both due to who had sent him to me and how long he had worked for me, knew my limits quite well and almost certainly was capable of sensing the mana in the meeting room even if his own spell was failing him now that we were so close to a blindspot.
I could kill with a touch, yes, but only if the victim’s mana was incapable of resisting. Judging by the amount I could sense and how well it was controlled… “One percent.” I did not elaborate. I did not need to, either. Calvert knew very well what the number meant if his grimace was anything to go off of.
Yes, were it just my personal spell against Lilian Biron, my chances of victory would all depend on whether or not I could get her to waste almost all her mana. It was a surprising thing but not entirely so.
After all, she had been interesting enough to make my associates warn her and send me to aid her. Such power was only appropriate considering the circumstances under which we would meet. Besides, I had countless spirits with which to wear her down if it came down to it.
Part of me was quite interested now in how a fight between the two of us would end but I knew better than to indulge such idle curiosity when either outcome almost certainly meant death for the loser.
If nothing else, I could now no longer wait to meet her.
So remember all the fun hints at hunters really fearing consequences for causing too many issues? The Fairy Queen’s not in a prison and willing to go along with being used like this for reasons I’ll get into later
Anyways, hope you enjoyed and let me know if you have any feedback