Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 9) - Chapter 30 - This Will Cripple Him

He almost turned around and walked straight out of there. Xavier had let innocents die before. Sometimes there was simply nothing to be done. There were more important things that required his attention. These people always lost this war with the Empire of Servitude, what he was doing was more than enough.

But that was wrong, and he knew it, because if there was something he could do and he stopped short of exhausting every angle, he would feel it in his bones.

What was happening to these people wasn’t his fault, but if he could do something about it, it was his responsibility to do it.

If he walked away without even trying, that failure would live with him.

Xavier released an internal breath and came to kneel before the mental construct. “Roln,” he said, reaching out to touch the man’s shoulder. “Roln, can you hear me?” He’d tried this before, knew it was no use.

God, why am I here?

Xavier knelt there, for how long he wasn’t sure. Time lost meaning in this situation, with the world outside frozen, and his mind working in overdrive, pushing his processing speed to its limit. With the powers he was exerting, this moment could very well stretch on for an eternity.

Xavier spent what felt like weeks sitting inside that room, thinking on every bit of knowledge he had about how his mind worked, and how the mental construct must work. He’d never created a mental construct before. That was a path he’d never looked deep into, even after this one had been inserted into his mind, but he was beginning to realise that the mental construct was almost like another piece of him.

The leader of Roln’s Wanderer faction had imprinted the entirety of Roln’s mind onto Xavier’s, creating an entity that could function outside of Xavier’s main awareness, an entity that Xavier could restrict but not control.

Roln wasn’t Roln. Roln, the man the dead Wanderer had been in life, was gone. This Roln was nothing more than an imitation of that man. A copy.

Yet there was something remarkably real about the mental construct. He acted as though he had a true personality. As though he had true feelings. Feelings that were separate from Xavier’s. Xavier had at first thought of the dead Wanderer as though he were a computer program. Like the man’s mind had been uploaded into a digital world, and those “emotions” it possessed were simply pieces of that program, not actually real.

But the longer Xavier sat there thinking, the more he wondered if he was wrong about that. What if there was more to the dead Wanderer than Xavier had realised? What if, by imprinting another person into Xavier’s mind, in order to become what it had become, the dead Wanderer had needed to utilise parts of Xavier?

Even as he had these thoughts, he was struggling to wrap his mind around what they might actually mean, but it was the experience that he’d had with the other part of his mind—the part that had been sitting in this room since he’d discovered what had happened to Roln in the first place—that made certain things clear.

Roln wasn’t an independent being inside Xavier’s mind. When Roln had been imprinted into Xavier, he became a part of Xavier’s mind. Which was why Roln wasn’t Roln.

Roln was Xavier.

A small, compartmentalised part of Xavier.

It hadn’t been his choice, but it was the truth.

And because of that, because they were technically one in the same, the damage that had been done to Roln had also been done to Xavier. That damage was a part of him, and right now all the damage that Arrack’s memory mages had inflicted upon him was suppressed and hidden inside this separate part of his mind.

He didn’t remember anything that had happened when he’d suffered from the memory mages’ attacks. The mental construct had taken on all of that.

This is a wound. A mental wound.

Right now it was contained, and all the memories it held—the traumatic ones along with all the information this personality possessed—were trapped.

But if Xavier opened himself up to what had happened, maybe he would be able to access those memories. The good ones, and the bad.

Maybe Roln would become a functional part of his mind again.

But if I’m going to do this, it’s going to hurt.

Xavier pulled his awareness outside himself and looked, with The All-Seeing Eye, at the thousands of innocents. The men, women, and children, that were about to die.

He didn’t know if Roln knew a way to stop the explosive wave from killing those people. He didn’t know if there was an answer hidden somewhere in the mental construct’s memories. And he didn’t know what the cost of unleashing the trauma the construct was suffering from on the rest of his mind would be…

But if this helped him save those people, he had to try.

Otherwise, how could he say that he was fighting for the side of good?

Xavier returned his full awareness back to the room with Roln. He opened his mind up to integrating Roln into his main consciousness, just as he’d done with the other part of himself that had resided here caring for the mental construct.

There was a block, something stopping him from doing what he needed to do. A safeguard programmed into the mental construct to stop this very thing from happening. But that block had been damaged when the memory mages had attacked Xavier’s mind. It, like the mental construct itself, had been weakened.

Xavier pushed past the block.

He flashed to a dark room, four figures hovering over him. One he recognised instantly—Arrack. The man who’d imprisoned him. The man who’d tortured him. But this wasn’t something Xavier had remembered. This wasn’t the same, circular room he’d been stuck in where Palini had died.

The three other figures around him wore robes of dark purple. Their staffs looked to be made of glass, orbs of glowing white energy constantly swirling around inside the shafts, large clear crystals at their tops.

Memory mages.

They leant over him, light flashing from their crystal-topped staffs.

Xavier tried to pull back from the memory. Tried to return to the room inside his mind where he’d been kneeling next to Roln. But he couldn’t. He was frozen inside his body, unable to move, barely able to thing. Abject terror filled him as the glow from those staffs shot into his head, playing havoc with his mind, causing unbearable mental anguish the likes of which he’d never felt before.

They were trying to pry Xavier’s memories from him.

No! a voice shouted, except none of the people had spoken, and the voice was inside his mind. Roln’s voice. This will cripple him! I won’t let you!

The mental construct threw himself in front of the attacks, the dead Wanderer taking on all the pain of them, every little bit.

Xavier was experiencing that pain now, and he was experiencing the panicked, tangled thoughts the mental construct had. It was being torn apart by what the memory mages were doing to it. The memory mages weren’t able to take the mental construct’s memories—the faction leader who’d placed Roln inside of Xavier would never have let that be possible by mere A Grades—but defending Xavier came at a cost.

Xavier tried and failed a thousand times to yank himself out of experiencing the memory. He was trapped inside it, unable to even know what was happening in the real world. Had he lost his grip on his spells? Had Chronomantic Mindforge failed? Was the explosion even now flinging outward, killing the very innocents he did this in hopes of protecting?

Had he fallen back into phase, about to die himself?

The pain was all-consuming, killing every thought in his mind until nothing was left. All he felt was a frozen vulnerability, no way to act, no way to fight back. His sense of self—Ron’s sense of self—being ripped asunder over and over, until finally the memory ended and Xavier was back inside that room, his awareness slowly returning.

He felt dazed.

He pulled his awareness outward, seeing the state of the world.

Nothing had changed. He was in the exact same place he’d been before, the explosion emanating outward from the A Grade captain, about to engulf everything within the shielded area, frozen.

Returning to that room he took an internal breath and looked over at Roln, only… the mental construct wasn’t there.

Except, he could feel Roln. A pain stabbed at his mind. The mental room he stood in was fuzzy around the edges. The floor didn’t feel solid. Xavier stumbled. He clutched his head. Not even his real head, he was merely a mental apparition, but somehow it helped.

A deluge of strange memories tried to fight to the surface of his mind, but something stopped them. Xavier had been strengthening his mind for many, many years. The memories almost felt like they were foreign attacks. Blocks came up, defensive walls to stop them from bleeding into the other parts of his mind.

When those blocks solidified, the pain… ceased. But so too did the memories that had tried to surface.

He frowned. He could no longer feel Roln’s presence as he had a moment ago, and the mental construct hadn’t returned to this room.

He thought that, by integrating the mental construct into his main consciousness, he would be able to access all the construct’s memories.

But it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

Xavier summoned a chair into that room, sitting his mental apparition down. He ran a hand through his hair and wondered what exactly he’d achieved. The memories, Roln’s memories, they were inside him, somewhere. But with those memories came all the damage that had been done to the mental construct.

They came hand in hand, and his mind was protecting himself from that. Because if he allowed himself to feel it, he’d be frozen by that fear. If he took it all on, he wouldn’t be able to function—he would be a huddled mess in the corner of his mind, rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself for the rest of eternity.

What the hell have I done?

Xavier stood from the chair and shook himself off.

He was about to step out of the mental room, perhaps make his way back to the central room of his mind, when he stopped.

This mental room had always had two doors, each on opposite ends. Now, to his left, there was another door. A door that hadn’t been there before. The door was red, and it didn’t have a handle.

The red looked suspiciously like blood.

Xavier stepped up to the door and reached out for it, falling short of touching it, wondering exactly where it lay.

Wondering how to open it.

He braced himself, then touched a hand to the door.

It creaked open, swinging backward. The creak of those hinges caused a stab of pain to reverberate throughout his mind, but the pain was nothing like what he’d experienced a moment ago.

Peering through the doorway, he saw a long hall. At first, it reminded him of the hallway back in the Tower of Champions, the one that held all of the Champions’ quarters, as that hallway had seemed to stretch on forever.

Except this hallway looked far more sinister.

Every single one of the doors on either side of the hall were the same blood red as the door he’d just touched. Some of them had deep gouges, claw marks, even full-on holes with light shining in from the other side, or nothing but darkness.

None of them looked inviting. None of them looked like a door he actually wanted to step through.

Xavier swallowed.

He’d entered other people’s mind before, many times, and he instantly knew what this was—it was Roln’s mind.

But it wasn’t, because Roln didn’t have his own mind anymore.

This is all a part of me. And it’s damaged.

Xavier stood at the threshold for what felt like a very long time. Whatever he’d done to himself by trying to integrate Roln into his main consciousness, he was beginning to think he’d made a mistake.

But it was too late to turn back now.

Xavier stepped over the threshold and made his way to the first door.