The building was occupied. Not full, but there were plenty of bodies inside of it, and two or three of them were far higher tier than Rhys wanted to fight one-on-one, let alone multiple at once. That was bad enough, but not unanticipated. What he hadn’t anticipated, or rather, what he’d hoped wouldn’t be true, was that all those bodies were oriented at the door he stood on the other side of. Some of them were even humming with mana or resting hands on their weapons.
Rhys pressed his lips together. Oh hey guys, didn’t see you there. Haha, I totally wasn’t breaking into this building, so I’ll just go about my day, haha.
He could always warp out. But on the other hand, the ground was spotless on this side of the barrier; for once, his hoop stood out. He couldn’t guarantee that it’d stay there if he left, and if he did leave, they’d probably strengthen the defenses and the barrier even more than it already was. Of course, he retreated with his life and dignity somewhat intact, so there was that, but he really wanted to know what they were doing. To leave now would be to give up on ever finding out. They’d strengthen the barrier. Pack up house and move. This was his opportunity to satiate his curiosity, and maybe also to foil a huge plot, big-damn-hero style.
Curiosity killed the cat. He wasn’t a cat: upside. Downside, he still died like any other man. And the exit was right there. He could still warp out. He could do it. Right now, this second, he could do it.
Rhys sighed at himself. But I’m not going to, am I. It’d be so anticlimactic. So damn boring, to make the right decision. And could he live with himself, if he got this close to stopping a great calamity, then turned around and left? If he could’ve stopped thousands from dying and just said ‘nah,’ could he live with himself?
No, I don’t think so, he admitted reluctantly. He could always leave and find the police, but he already knew they were politically aligned and aggressively looking the other way on several topics. The best bet was that they were also aggressively looking the other way on this one. Sure, if they knew for certain that it was a horrific plot to kill thousands, they might step in, but he wasn’t even sure about that, and the chances that he instead walked right into the jaws of the same enemy under a different guise were way too high for his liking.
He could go back to Ryota. Ryota, who had very little political power and a stipend so stingy he couldn’t afford a new ship. Sure, maybe Ryota could pull the threads with what power he had and spread word, but it would take too long. Likewise with trying to go to other, more powerful princes or the king. It would take too long, and they might just identify him as the serial killer and arrest him, putting Rhys’s whole effort in the shitter.
Rhys pressed his lips together. So that was their game with letting me run free. He found their base, but he wasn’t a threat; they weren’t scared of him. Meanwhile, they cornered him by letting him accumulate charges on his head, meaning that if he tried to go to any authority or upright prince-slash-other-source-of-power, they were more likely to—and had every right to—arrest him than listen to him. He had to admit: it was a great plan. Better than most of his plans. And he’d run right into it.
Don’t like that. I like it when I have plans, but not when my enemies have plans. Don’t they know that only the main character is allowed to make plans?
Damn my lack of main character energy!
“We know you’re there. Come out, little mouse.”
“Shut up! I’m thinking!” Rhys called back.
Okay. So retreat is off the menu. Running for help also unlikely to work. Fighting is also not the best angle, since they out-tier me. There’s at least one Tier 7 in there, maybe a Tier 8, I’m not too sure about that one in the back. I can probably take Tier 6s, but 7 or 8 is right out. I might be able to take one weak 7, but not a 7 and several 6s, and that’s the reality we live in. This was a losing battle, but if he didn’t try to win, but just recon and get the fuck out, maybe he could pull it off. Maybe. Some part of him knew he was deluding himself, but he couldn’t stop, even so.
Rhys took a deep breath. Let’s get in there, get out, and hope against hope that I execute the quickest and cleanest retreat known to man. I can do it! Gambatte!
Haaaa. Even I don’t believe, huh. Nonetheless, he was trash. With his back to the wall, did he give up? Did he give in and walk out with his hands up? No! Not Rhys. He was going to struggle to the last, make as much noise and mess as he could, so even if everything went wrong and he ended up dead, he at least pissed them off on the way out.
Though… I don’t think they want me dead. If they wanted him dead, they could’ve killed him already. They were more powerful than him; there was no reason to wait for him to walk in the door. They could bust out and take his head in a flash, faster than blinking, and there was very little he could do about it. The fact that he was still standing here meant they probably wanted him alive.
Why? That was the key to all this. If he could figure that out, he’d unlock the way out. He fired up the old braincells, but didn’t come up with much he hadn’t thought up already. I just don’t know enough. I think we leave the braincells hot, but wait until I step inside and get a look at things to hit the afterburners.
He pinched his chin and looked at the door. For some reason, they hadn’t come out yet. Was there a trap on the door? That was fine; he was a master at not using the door. Step one: OH YEAH. He thought a little longer, but that was all he came up with. Step two was way too complicated. Or rather, it was a rare plan that survived contact with the enemy, and step two was defined by contact with the enemy.
If it’s not going to survive anyways, why bother planning? “Leroyyyyyy MmmJenkins,” Rhys muttered to himself, and ran at the wall.
The people inside instantly reacted to his motion, turning toward the point he was charging toward, which was within Rhys’s expectations. He was dodging land mines, not hand grenades. The enemy formation just inside the door wasn’t going to be vastly overcome by his pivot, given the narrow alcove he had to work with, but maybe they’d set up some complicated enchantment on the floor or something; he could at least avoid that. If it was him, he would’ve trapped the entire available surface of the alcove, but who knew? Maybe they were lazy. Besides, enchantments took resources. They might’ve followed the first rule of end-stage capitalism and cheaped out.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I might not have bothered to trap the whole alcove, were I the one with a vastly stronger cadre trying to catch some little bug. Too much effort. Plus, if I had this many higher-rank people than the one person I was trying to catch, why bother with a trap at all? I mean, efficiency, laziness, sure, but… it kinda seems like overkill to bother trying to do the equivalent of trick me with the old bucket-on-the-door when they’ve got a shotty and a machine gun turret also pointed at the door.
Of course, on the other other hand, he sure did put down a bunch of cockroach traps when he had bugs in the house. They didn’t work; the cockroaches were smarter than his maniacal plan to trap them with bait and glue. But he did try trapping them despite being massively more powerful than them. All things were possible, and he couldn’t assume anything just based on power levels.
Wait, did I just compare myself to a cockroach without so much as hesitating? Man. I’m fucked up.
He pushed his impurities ahead of him, weakening the wall as he approached it. As he closed in, the wall’s integrity rapidly crumbled. He charged into it, and it burst into a spray of powder, no longer able to hold itself up. On instinct, he reabsorbed the impurities behind him, but kept his eyes on the situation ahead of him.
It looked like a scene out of a science fiction movie, or maybe one of those really overdone eighties fantasy films with the overbuilt sets. There were a bunch of people standing around in mage robes, weapons and spells at the ready, and behind them, behind a secondary transparent barrier, was a huge round gate carved with intricate runes. Complex rays and controlling structures pointed at the gate from both sides, loaded with shiny rare metals and big bright crystals. Largest of the control structures was a focal point, a secondary lens pointed at the big ‘lens’ of the gate, and that stood up six feet from the ground, with a hollow clear crystal pillar open to the world.
Bad vibes. Instant bad vibes. In the split second before violence broke out, Rhys gazed down at the bottom of the other control structures. Human hands pushed against the crystal pillars, and human faces screamed silently out from under other pillars.
He eyed the open pillar again. I’m going in there, aren’t I. They’re going to stuff me in that thing like I’m back in high school and it’s a gym locker.
It explained why they didn’t just kill him. They were trying to capture him alive. The real question was why, and what for. Well, maybe not ‘what for.’ That’s transparently “some big bad attack thingy.” Death ray, portal to a death world, something. Doesn’t really matter; what really matters is that it’s bad, and I do not consent to being part of someone else’s death ray. If I’m going to become part of a death ray, it’ll my own damn death ray, thank you very much. The why was a little less transparent. Why did they need people in the death ray at all? What did this have to do with Ryota’s fierce mana and the general proliferation of fierce mana in the area?
The high tier mages started to rush him, and Rhys could feel the beginning of the end. This was a well-oiled operation; it wasn’t their first time stuffing mages into proverbial lockers. In another second, they’d grab him, stuff him in the crystal gym locker, and that would be all she wrote. He’d just be a component in someone else’s death ray.
But in that instant, Rhys grinned wide. Because that was what they wanted to do. But what he had, was the power to change the world.
His trash star flared, burning hotter than ever before. Power surged from him, enveloping everyone in the room, the room itself, the air, the barrier, everything. The stronger mages jerked back, startled, and pushed his filth-mana away from them—but he wasn’t targeting him. He was targeting the world itself. This situation. Whether or not he clutched these mages was irrelevant; he had already grasped the situation, and in grasping it, gained the power to control it.
After all, this was the trashy situation. The trash endgame, the endlessly repeated scenario that he’d seen play out so many times that even he was a little sick of it, even if he also secretly loved it. Games, television, books and movies; it was an inescapable trope, and what a trope it was. One of the all-time greats, a trope that could be horribly executed and nothing but trash from top to bottom, or excellently executed so well that even the pretentious awards-givers pretended like it wasn’t the same old trope trotted out for the seventeen billionth time, shut their mouths, and applauded. It was the endgame.
He was here, in the big bad’s final hidden lair, and he was staring right at the big bad’s master plan. What kind of big bad would this baddie be, if he didn’t emerge just this instant to order his lackeys to stop, seconds before they successfully offed-slash-locker-stuffed the hero and ended any threat the hero might have posed to the plan, in order to grandstand and explain his entire evil plan to the hero? Why, it would be a big fat letdown. Everyone would be disappointed if he didn’t come out and tell Rhys exactly what was going on right this instant. In fact, the world itself would be sad if the man didn’t emerge, show face, and tell them what was up.
The world shifted. Something only Rhys could hear clicked into place, and the well oiled mages who’d done this locker-stuffing operation dozens of times paused in midair just for a split second.
They didn’t experience the split second; Rhys could tell that. They froze, clutched by the world itself, their eyes, bodies, and even mana seized by the trash mana floating around them. In the next instant, they continued to fly in, and Rhys stood there, waiting for the big bad. Come on! They got closer, only a few feet between him and them now. Sweat began to drip down his back. Please…? I did it, right? His trash star was still hot and a huge chunk of stored impurities had been burned away. He should have done it. They should be beholden to the trash trope, but still, they came. Hey! Hey, hey, hey. I didn’t burn my energy for nothing, did I? I felt it take hold, right?
A spell closed in on him. Rhys shoved his impurities outward, defensively corroding the spell as it darted for him. It’d seemed like the perfect time to use his spell, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was just some subsidiary plan, and the big bad was therefore not beholden to show up and rant about his grand plan. Ah, shit. Well, here goes nothing—
“Stop.”
The voice was quiet, but it demanded authority nonetheless. All the mages jerked to a halt and hastily called back the spells they were unleashing at Rhys. Rhys looked up, his eyes sparkling. Internally, he did a fist pump. Hell yeah! I knew it! Hahahaha! You guys are done for! The hero always reverses things after the baddie monologues!
And then he froze. Uh, wait. Fuck. I don’t actually have a way to reverse things. It wasn’t like backup was on its way and he was stalling for time (the most classic way to close out this trope). Ryota didn’t qualify as backup in the first place, and in the second place, Rhys hadn’t told him to come. He wasn’t preparing a spell, or rather, even if he did, it wouldn’t change anything. The mages were simply too strong. No matter what he did, he was destined for the gym locker.
Wait, but… is that so bad? He eyed the gym locker. The hero getting frozen for an age was also a classic trope. As long as the big bad wasn’t planning to use this immediately, which Rhys was pretty sure he was, he might actually be able to power up from this. And not only that; he was exactly where he needed to be to one, prevent the baddie from using it immediately, and two, to ensure that the baddie didn’t actually depower him in that crystal—in other words, he was standing right here with his belly full of impurities. There was a barrier between him and the evil plan, but that was immaterial. He’d already broken through the stronger exterior barrier. All he needed was to put a teleport hoop on the inside of that weaker barrier, and the evil plan was his oyster.
After all, he didn’t object to being in his giant death ray. He only objected to being in someone else’s giant death ray.
A man descended slowly from a door high in the building, gazing malevolently down on his underlings, who gazed back. With all eyes elsewhere, Rhys began extending impurities through the ground toward the inner barrier. He had a new goal. Just like the little brother in a sibling battle, if he changed the parameters of success, he couldn’t lose. He grinned internally while externally cowering. That’s right. Shove me in the gym locker, idiot. All you’re doing is handing me the giant death ray!
And then the man spoke. “I take it you know who I am?”