The plant women in the cage writhed, screaming, biting, and tearing into one another. They were mute, and likely blind and deaf too, nothing more than tortured souls bound into unwilling forms. Their lives were miserable, trapped in a hideous undeath, denied even a proper rest.
Rhys looked at them, twisting his lips. Surely there was something he could do. Some way he could make this a little better that wasn’t just killing all of them. They didn’t deserve to die, after all. They would probably prefer dying to continuing to live such a torturous existence, and he didn’t mean to force them to continue to live, but were those really his only options? Force them to live this half-life, or consign them to death, never knowing what had happened to them?
I don’t believe that. There has to be something I can do here. Some way to exploit their trashiness. He could feel something tickling at the back of his mind. These things were trash, somehow. They’d been thrown away. Not by Tooru, maybe, but…
No, that’s it! They were thrown away by Tooru. Not the creepy plant women, but their original forms. Their bodies, their previous selves, were disregarded and tossed aside by a filthy prince pursuing his trash goals.
And if that’s the case, then…
Taking a deep breath, Rhys stepped forward. He rested his palms on the glass of the birdcage, gazing at the beings within. “I’m going to fix this.”
The plant people thrashed, no more aware of his declaration than of anything else outside of their cage. But that was fine; he hadn’t expected a reaction. Instead, Rhys extended his mana, reaching out. He brushed against the first of the plant people, connecting to them and the soul within them, and almost jerked back instinctively. Twisted. Repulsive. Disgusting. Within the plant people, nothing was right. Not the flow of their mana, not their mental state, not the shape of their soul. It was all so broken and mangled that it was truly hard to look at, snarled and tortured beyond recognition. For a second, Rhys hesitated. Could he set that right? Was it even possible?
No. It is. I have to believe it. Trash isn’t always beautiful. In fact, it’s more commonly hideous and broken than it is whole and gorgeous. If I give up now, if I look away, then I’ve not only abandoned these people; I’ve abandoned my entire path.
Rhys steeled himself and stabilized his connection with the first plant person. He reached out, connecting with the next, and the next, and the next. He didn’t look away, not once. Nausea rose up in his throat, and his eyes felt like they were burning, but he kept looking. Someone had to. If everyone else in the world would throw these people away, call them ruined and kill them, or worse, continue to force them to live this way, then he would do the opposite, and embrace them. He looked at them, at their flaws, at their disgusting pustules and seeping open wounds, and accepted all of it.
He didn’t have to like it. It wasn’t his to like or hate. It was simply his to record, as the trashman, as the collector of filth. This was an episode that would not appear in the history of this world. This was a moment, a black mark, that no one but him would know of. How could he look aside from it, as the only one who’d ever see it?
So he kept going, reaching out one at a time, gazing all of it in the eye, until he connected to all of them. That was almost too much, too much hideousness, pain, and horror for him to comprehend. Their pain and terror flooded him, making his hands shake and his body scream, but he refused to let go.
Everyone. I don’t know if you can hear me, but please, if you can, I’m begging you: trust me. I know I have no right, I know you’ve been betrayed time and time again, and you don’t know me from anyone on the street. But please. Trust me. I will help you.
There was almost no reply. One or two began to scream louder, internally, unable to use their mouths but able to use their minds; the rest didn’t react at all.
He opened his eyes, looking at their physical bodies for one last time before he shut his eyes again. But that’s fine. Whether you trust me or not, I’m going to save you all!
Rhys tensed, bracing himself, and gazed at their cores, preparing to plunge in. He’d done this once before, when he returned the lost cores the Empress had stolen, but then, the people had been relatively fine, in comparison. Downtrodden and oppressed, but usually not physically tortured for years on end. These cores were different. These people weren’t in any shape for… well, anything. Their minds were distorted, their mana ran rampant, and what souls they had were no more than mangled scraps. If he’d used all his mana, he might have been able to restore a single one of them, but that wasn’t fair to all the rest, and besides, he couldn’t afford to be defenseless right now. So instead, he did the best he could for everyone, all at once.
It was trash. It wasn’t his best effort. He was holding some mana in reserve, and he acknowledged that. If someone better had been there, he was sure they would’ve made a different decision. Decided to pour their all into perfectly reviving one of them, even if it didn’t work out, or simply ended their suffering and decisively killed them all. But he was who he was, and this was what he could do for them. It was better than nothing, and nothing was what everyone else was doing right now.
“Prepare yourselves,” he murmured, and dove into all their cores, all at once.
There’d been pain before. There’d been horror, fear, disgust, and every other negative emotion before. But it was incomparable to the anguish trapped inside their cores. It slammed into him like a wave, like a tsunami, picking him off his feet and washing him into the deep end. For a moment, he was lost, overcome by the weight of their pain, unable to find himself, think, control his mana, or anything. He was gone.
And then it passed. The pain diminished, and Rhys returned. He looked up, startled. Why…? He hadn’t done anything. Had it just passed on its own?
A will brushed against his. Tenuous, fragile, but present. Help, it whispered. Help us.
They’re still here. They’re helping me! They want help! Rhys widened his eyes, and he threw himself back into the task, reinvigorated. He couldn’t lose himself now. Not when they were all counting on him—whatever was left of them. Counting on him to save them.
He could. He could help them. Their previous appearances had been thrown away. He couldn’t give them everything, but he could give them that much. Peace, before they died.
No, wait. Why stop there? Their appearances had been thrown away, but so had their bodies, their selves, everything. He could give them so much. Not a perfect replication, but something close enough to what they’d been that they could say goodbye.
Unfortunately, what remained of the people Tooru had killed was the scraps. Not even that; the scraps of scraps. Unless he poured all his energy into one person and tried to drag everything they had back, he would only be able to give these people a few days to live without Tooru constantly forcing them to stay alive. Even if he did put his all into one person, he wasn’t confident he’d succeed, and one, he’d already decided not to do that, two, he might not have enough energy as it was, and three, did any of these former people even want that? Plus, it wasn’t fair to the rest of the greenhouse if he saved one of them alone. But it did mean that they would have hours, maybe days, to survive.
A warmth welled up out of the chaos and fear. That was fine. Anything was better than this.
“Okay.” Rhys took a deep breath and turned his attention back to all the people, individually, all at once. He reached further, beyond their cores, to an ephemeral place beyond the present… or at least, that was a poetic way of putting it. In reality, he tapped into the peoples’ memories. Their images of themselves, as they’d been before Tooru had happened to them. He called out to that, to all they’d lost and Tooru had thrown away, and as he dragged their memories out, he stimulated their bodies with mana at the same time. For the mages, they remembered how their mana passages and cores had been, and he recreated that to the best of his ability, too. For the mortals, he recreated the passages he’d seen on healthy villagers, simply wanting to give them the ability to survive the day.
The mana he’d just gained from Tooru quickly fled his body as he grew the plant people into their own people, but in a way, he felt it was deserved, or poetic justice. Tooru’s mana should be used to free these people. What else could be better?
Under Tooru’s ministrations, all the people in the greenhouse had the bodies of idealized women, but as Rhys corrected that, they grew guts and scars, their faces changed, and some even swapped genders entirely. He gave them back their eyes and their vocal cords, hard won muscles, and even the callouses on their hands. The plants responded well to mana, quickly growing where he stimulated them. If he needed to kill anything off, he used impurities instead, in the rare case the original person had been smaller or weighed less than Tooru’s ideal woman, though he always retracted the impurities when he was done. He didn’t want to waste them, after all.
At last, he stepped back and opened his eyes. A dozen different people stood in the greenhouse, plucking their feet out of the vines that had bound them. The mages quickly grew their own clothes, either modifying their flesh or adapting the plants and vines around them using the same mana-stimulation technique Rhys had, and distributed extra clothes to the mortals. They had precious little mana, but he made sure they’d all had enough to get home, wherever home was. He couldn’t recreate their magehoods, but he could at least gift them that much.
Some of them, especially the mortals, screamed and cowered in the corner, too traumatized to properly react. Others stepped forward. “Thank you.” “I can’t believe… thank you so much.” “I will never forget this gift.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Rhys muttered. The glass was reinforced, and the door to the greenhouse was locked, but then again, he had impurities. He pressed his hand against the glass and corrupted it until it shattered, absorbed the scraps, and stepped back, letting them out. He looked the coherent ones in the eye. “You don’t have long. I couldn’t actually revive you. I just gave you time to say goodbye. That was all I could do… I’m sorry.”
“Better than vanishing without a trace.”
“No, no, this is incredible. Thank you.”
“Don’t apologize. We understand.”
One of them, an older man, approached Rhys and put a hand on his shoulder. “We saw you when you saw us. I know you won’t believe me, but I need to say it anyways. You aren’t trash, and this isn’t a trashy solution. You did the best you could, and that’s more than most people would.”
Rhys smiled. “I appreciate it, sir. But you’re wrong. I am trash.”
The mages filtered out, and slowly, the mortals did as well. One of the mages hung at the back, and stepped forward only after the others had left. She approached Rhys deliberately, looking him in the eye. “We saw you.”
“Yeah, I know. I heard the old guy. You don’t need to thank me, just get moving.”
“I saw you. I… was part of that group. The ones in black.”
Rhys stilled. He turned slowly, looking at her.
She lowered her gaze. “I have no one to return to, but I owe you for freeing me from that pain. We die if we speak of the clan’s secrets, but why hold back now, when death looms? That man who approached you. Ebi. He works with us. Not always, but often. If he has approached you, you should treat whatever he’s offered you with suspicion.”
That… huh. Rhys raised his brows. She had a point, actually. The man should be annoyed at him for his standing up to him in the line. It was suspicious that he’d immediately turned around and been friendly to him. True, he could simply be a true businessman… but what if he wasn’t? What if his goal wasn’t to hire a bodyguard who appeared far lower tier than he ‘was,’ and additionally had admitted to being badly injured, but instead, to get Rhys out of town?
No, now that I’m thinking about it… doesn’t everything fall in line that way? Ebi had accepted Rhys’s ‘injury’ without question, and hadn’t questioned his ‘high tier’ either. Rhys had admitted that he might not fight the thing Ebi wanted him to fight, and Ebi had simply smiled and nodded. He could see it all as a businessman who’d legitimately been conned, who earnestly believed that he was currying favor with an elder… but he could also see it as a deliberate plan to remove him from the capital at the end of the week for an unknown goal—or even kill him, if Ebi knew his true tier and intended to pressure him into or throw him in front of a powerful monster.
For that matter, the giantess bodyguard was visibly stronger than Rhys, and seemed to know that he was faking. Why hadn’t she spoken up? Why wasn’t Ebi relying on her? No… there were more questions than answers, if he assumed Ebi was earnest. If he assumed Ebi wasn’t earnest, suddenly everything lined up.
Don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. It was a kinda trash adage, but it stood up nonetheless. True, he could attribute this all to incompetence. But now that this woman had spoken up, he’d be dumb, blind, or both to overlook the possibility that he was being removed from the capital for a reason.
“I don’t know that he approached you on our behalf. I can’t say for certain what he wants. He might want your help, and nothing more. I only know that you should be suspicious of him.”
Rhys nodded, still lost in thought. He glanced at her. She could be lying to make him miss out on a business opportunity… but she’d have to be real committed to the bit of her clan to sabotage a kind of silly opportunity for him when she was on the brink of death. I don’t think she’s lying.
“Thank you,” he said at last.
“No, thank you,” she said, and put her hand on her own chest. Vitality drained out of her body, the plant withered, and she dropped to the floor, a dry husk.
He looked at her, then sighed. “I guess she wanted to go out on her own terms.” He respected it, in a way. After everything they’d been through, the plant people should be allowed to end things however they wanted. He wouldn’t, but hey, he’d had to work hard to stop the other assassin from killing himself. It wasn’t a shock that this woman felt the same way about life and death. It was kind of like veterinarians, though that was a whole can of shitty worms that he didn’t really want to open right now.
He poked his head into the birdcage-slash-greenhouse. “Anyone in here want me to end things for you, real quick? Or are you all happy to scream in the corner?”
No one replied. One person abruptly stood up and walked out, moving stiffly past him with an embarrassed aura.
“Hey, no shame in a good scream. We all need ‘em sometime. I’ll leave the rest of you to it!” Rhys saluted and walked away, leaving the rest of them to it.