Rhys, totally not focusing more on the impurities he was shoving toward the death ray than the conversation, looked at the man. “Uh… no.”
The man had been descending the stairs, but he stopped dead. “No?”
“Nope. Never seen you before, actually. Hi, I’m Rhys, nice to meet you.”
The man chuckled under his breath. “Indeed, we haven’t met, but I know much about you. I’ve been watching you for some time.”
“Creepy.”
“I presumed you would realize who I was when we met, but I see I overestimated you.”
“You know, I really prefer it when people underestimate me. Try doing that, next time. We’ll both be happier.” If he had more braincells to devote to thinking about this guy and not to pushing impurities undetectably through the floor, he probably could’ve figured it out, but he was too busy focusing on the new endgame he’d just defined as success for himself. As it was, he was paying just enough attention to talking to the guy to keep him from immediately ganking him or looking just hard enough at what the antlike him was doing enough to realize Rhys was trying to sabotage his grand plan in a very incremental, low-tier kind of way.
“I am—”
It struck Rhys like a bolt from the blue. He snapped his fingers and pointed. “You’re Ryota’s grandpa, aren’t you?”
“I am Qin Yulin, the last of our family to remember our true origins,” the man declared.
Rhys frowned. He looked the man up and down. He appeared as a young adult, trim and dapper, though of course a mage’s age was nothing but a matter of choice and vanity. He wore the finest robes, tailored to show off his muscular body. He radiated mana, at least Tier 7, if not 8. Ryota was right; there was no immediately overcoming this man. It would take time and effort to become strong enough to defeat him, and the man clearly had no desire to give Rhys that time. Stalling, he quipped, “Yulin? That’s not Ryota’s surname.”
“Yulin is my given name. My surname is Qin.”
“That’s not his surname either.”
“Indeed. My descendants… our descendants, have forgotten their true origins. They only remember the false name that we took on in desperation, when we were so weak, so distant from our true power, that we had to blend into the pitiful primitive locals until we regained enough strength to truly conquer.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re using some real colonial language there. Let’s not get too crazy calling people primitives. Just because they don’t live the way you do doesn’t make their culture any less valuable. Also, how the hell are they primitive? If they’re primitive, my country is downright Stone Age.”
“This whole world is pathetic. It should have been overwhelmed by our superior might ages ago. If only the pathway had stabilized… Instead, we merely arrived. Four of us, joined by three primitive tribes, our cultures mixing and mingling until everything we were that was worth anything was washed away. Now, very few remember our origins, and fewer hew to the old ways. I… am one of the very last who still remembers our original goal. Who still works toward our grand purpose.”
“God, glory, and gold?” Rhys asked. “Still sounding real colonial, bud.” He eyed the portal-thing he was still pushing impurities toward. The man’s eyes were squarely on him, so he surpassed the barrier with a tiny surge of impurities and kept pushing through the hoop. It’s not a death beam, it’s a reverse iskeai invasion portal! Which… might be the only trope trashier than a death beam. It was rarer than the death beam for being less acceptable, relegated to the dark holes of fringe fantasy and science fiction, specifically science fiction of a certain age (the kind written in the 1980’s). He supposed it showed up fairly often in science fantasy too, and of course there was always the occasional milfic or milfic isekai that sported a reverse isekai invasion portal, but it almost always showed up in fringe, rare, or small genres. The kind of primo trash that was simply too much for the normies to handle.
Though… I don’t really know why. It doesn’t seem like that complicated of a concept. “People are invading from another world!” Call it system slash apocalypse and call them monsters, and it’s a relatively large niche, but call them people, and it’s truly fringe. He shrugged to himself. In any case, now was not the time to puzzle out why the concept only appeared in fringe genre works. Now was the time to figure out how to stop it… or, rather, to keep the big bad monologuing so he had enough time to truly sabotage any control or restraint mechanisms in the locker with his name on it. His impurities reached the crystal, and he began quietly overwhelming it. He didn’t go immediately for breaking its dense, complicated enchantments, which would take more time to figure out than he could stall for, but rather slowly saturated the whole crystal with impurities so that whatever happened, he’d maintain a modicum of control.
“Far more. Far, far more,” Yulin murmured dangerously.
“It’s good to aim high,” Rhys offered.
“You speak as though this does not involve you, but it involves you more than you could ever know.”
Rhys glanced sideways at the crystal locker. I think I know, but also, let’s not linger any longer on that topic. “So… you come from some great world on the other side of the portal, or whatever?”
Me too, he almost added, but wisely held his tongue. He was pretty sure Yulin wasn’t talking about Earth when he was talking about a grander, more powerful world with ‘superior might.’ He wasn’t completely sure, but he was reasonably confident. Earth had hella weapons, but it didn’t have mages. Sure, a nuke could take out a good chunk of low-level mages, probably even some high-level ones, but aside from nukes, he wasn’t sure what Earth had that’d do much against mages. He was currently more-or-less bulletproof and had techniques to mitigate non-atomic explosions, and he was only Tier 5. Someone like Yulin could probably shrug off more or less all conventional weaponry, and while he wasn’t sure where the can-tank-a-nuke cutoff was, he was pretty sure it existed.
Besides, he didn’t want to muddy the water. The more time he could milk out of this big bad’s origin story, the better, and cutting in with his own would probably just bore him and make him move on faster. He couldn’t put his finger quite on why, but Yulin seemed like the kind of guy who deeply enjoyed speaking about himself.
“That’s right. Hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, we came through the portals to this primitive world. Our founders worked spells that have still not been surpassed, not by a single mage in this world. Our world was so far beyond this one… but the connection was too tenuous. We came through, but before our armies, clans, and weapons could follow, the portal snapped shut.”
Is this world riddled with portals or something? There’s people getting isekai’d left, right, and center. At the same time, a thought wiggled at the back of his head, demanding a tiny scrap of his attention. So far, everyone who’d been isekai’d had been brought over to help fix the world’s trash problem, probably. It was his working hypothesis, anyways. Were Yulin’s people also brought over for the same problem? If that was the case, how long had it been a problem? And moreover, what techniques did his people have that the world thought they were worth bringing over? Lots of questions he could ask Yulin, and so much time to stall.
“So… you came through this portal?” he continued. He was trying to buy time, but also curious. He was pretty sure Ryota had said something about some grand ancestor grandma, which put enough generations between Ryota and the original ancestor that Yulin shouldn’t have been able to come through the portal, but maybe lots of generations had crossed over at once… or an old gramma had picked her favorite 5x descendant to take with her through the portal. Lots of things were possible. Just because it sounded improbable for Yulin to be one of the original people who crossed over didn’t mean it was impossible.
“No. I merely uncovered our grand truth years later. The ancestors are complacent. They’ve grown old and forgotten their glorious destiny. But I discovered it. I uncovered the truth and adopted a name according to our original culture. I became what so many wanted to forget, and I will lead our armies to victory.”
“It’s been a long time. Are you even sure the armies still exist?”
“They sleep in a dying world, waiting for a lifeline to call them forth toward victory. Frozen until the day the chosen one comes to lead them to the promised land.”
It was some real classic reverse-isekai-invasion bullshit for the invaders’ homeland to be dying, so it wasn’t like he was surprised into a sudden bout of sympathy toward the colonializing would-be conquerors. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt. At the end of the day, they were still colonizers and conquerors, so evil twice over. Still, he had to admit: “Rough deal.”
“Sleep… for now. But not for much longer.”
Rhys barely bit back a snark: Is it because you’re about to wake them up? Every fiber of his being wanted to say it, but at the last second before the words left his lips, he remembered that he was stalling while he turned the deadly trap into a powerful cocoon for him to grow stronger within. So instead, he made an awkward humming noise and nodded.
“Because the time has almost come for me to call them forth, take the helm of my waiting army, and sweep this pitiful, regressive nation with the worthy army that should have overcome it long ago.”
“What? That can’t be!” Rhys said in as heartfelt a tone as he could muster.
The man narrowed his eyes at Rhys. Rhys smiled and shrugged back. What? That’s what the heroes always say in this situation! I’m just trying to move the conversation along, dammit. Appreciate me playing along!
“I think we’ve dallied enough. Men!”
The mages all around him jumped forward, closing in on Rhys again. Their weapons gleamed, and spells sparkled.
“Wait!” Rhys shouted, throwing his hand out. “At least tell me what you’re using the fierce mana for!”
Yulin paused, and his men did as well, gazing at their boss for direction. He paused, staring at Rhys in confusion. “Fierce… ah, you mean qi. It is remarkably similar to mana, but not quite; it has a few properties mana does not, like its higher potency and explosiveness, which I take it you’ve observed?”
“Sure have. I get all that; I kinda guessed most of it by now. What I really meant was, why give it to Fifteenth? Why hide scraps in all the princes?”
Yulin chuckled. “I needed a worthy successor. Ryota, my blood, was unfortunately lackluster, unable to properly bear qi without losing his mind. In our ancestors’ world, he would have been branded a crip—”
“Whoa, whoa. What did I say about not using that word?”
“—and left in the dust as he deserves, treated as the sub-human he is.”
“You just said some really cringe bullshit, I’m not going to lie,” Rhys informed Yulin.
“Lacking a successor of my own line, I searched amongst all the other clans for traces of our ancestors’ blood, manifesting, as it does in me, in the ability to properly use and process qi as easily, if not more easily, than mana. The princes, as the result of long careful breeding, are the strongest repositories of our ancestors’ blood.”
“I don’t know if I’d brag about them being inbred personally, but you do you.”
“Most of them did not respond to the qi at all, or responded negatively. In despair, I even turned to seeding commoners out of desperate hope that one of our more degenerate ancestors lowered themselves to breeding with their ilk.”
“If choosing not to inbreed is degeneracy, then mark me degenerate.”
“I did not foresee that killing those implanted with it or forcibly removing the mana might lead to someone discovering this place. In fact, I’d like to thank you for drawing to my attention the fact that such a process was occurring. I suppose our ancestors’ qi longs to return home, even when I so painstakingly draw it forth.”
“Then… what about that qi bomb you built?”
“The…?” Yulin stared at Rhys for a few beats, earnestly lost.
Rhys nodded. He gestured. “You know, the one on Fifteenth’s ship? There was a vault and everything?”
Yulin’s brows furrowed, and then he snapped his fingers. “Ah, that’s right. Fifteenth’s precious toy. He was so proud of it that I didn’t have the heart to tell him how primitive it really was. Then again, as primitive as it was, with it alone, he could easily take a decent chunk of land.”
“Eh, wouldn’t be so sure about that.” The bomb was a big boom, but it wasn’t that impressive. Maybe Fifteenth could take some distant island no one cared about, but any faction that had an expert over Tier 5 wouldn’t be too bothered by it. Then again, with a few well-placed surprise blasts, he could probably put a decent chunk in a faction, so maybe Rhys was the one being too blasé about it. Still, he’d need Yulin’s support in the fallout, or else the faction’s experts would squash him, so it still wasn’t unreasonable to underestimate the bombs.
“No?”
“Nah. I mean, I beat one, and it wasn’t that tough. I mean, it was scary, but it wasn’t that scary.”
“Most curious.”
“Right. Um, before you guys off me… Why let me come all the way here before killing me? Stealth? Or uh, did I just finally cause enough of a problem to get killed?”
He was pretty sure they weren’t going to kill him, but he didn’t want them to know that. Conversely, he was very interested in why they were going to stuff him into the crystal gym locker. By bringing up the topic, not only could he buy himself more time to corrupt the big ol’ death beam (ahem) portal, but he could also learn what he’d be doing in there, to find out how, if, and what he should sabotage. For now, he was just loading up his obvious future coffin with impurities and a few hoop-shaped impurities built into the crystal, ready for teleportation holes whenever he was ready to activate it. But if he knew what they were going to do with him, he could strategically destroy the most essential parts of the array… or strategically leave them untouched, so he was free to do what he wanted while they wouldn’t notice too much amiss. It really depended on what they planned to do with him.
Yulin waggled his finger. “Kill? We would never waste such a successful dark mage as yourself. Or in the terms of my homeworld, demonic mage.”
Man, I swear, I talk about my world less than this guy, and I’m actually from another world…and I talk about my world a lot, so that’s a high bar. He’s never seen this other world, he barely has ancestors from this supposed world, and he won’t shut up about it. Dear lord, shut up. “Don’t they call them that here, too? Also, I’m not a demonic mage. I don’t suck other peoples’ life energy or anything.”
“You manipulate impurities. That is enough to qualify.”
Rhys shrugged, not sure if he should keep fighting this fight, let alone if he wanted to win it. “You got me there.”
“The qi flowing through the portal needs to be exceedingly pure in order to form a sustained passage from this world to the next one. You will become a glorified filter, forced to draw the impurities out of the qi torrenting through you even as it cooks you alive. A life of torment, to make up for all the pain you’ve caused me.”
“What pain? What, the mild inconvenience of paying attention to Ryota?”
“And impeding Fifteenth. You have no idea how much he complained. I began to long for deaf ears.”
Rhys nodded slowly. “That is what happens when you throw in with a brat. Trust me, I got my fair earful with Ryota.”
“Did you?” Yulin asked, cold as ice, a note of sarcasm in his voice. It was pretty clear to Rhys that Yulin was incapable of comprehending others’ pain, which made him either a psychopath or the average internet goer. As someone who was used to talking to the latter, if not necessarily the former, Rhys ignored his clear disinterest and pressed on.
“And then I threw him at a bunch of gorillas repeatedly until he stopped complaining. Worked wonders. You should try it.”
The crystal locker was so corrupted by now that Rhys was afraid of corrupting it any further for fear of it becoming visibly corrupt, so he stored some impurities in the ground around it and in the equipment it attached to. He didn’t really mind being used as a filter. It sounded like a free way to gain impurities without any effort on his part, like hooking his mouth up to a garden hose and letting the hose do the work. The dismount was going to be the hard part—on the locker as on the garden hose—but he had confidence in himself. Plus, he’d had several epiphanies lately, and even chatted with a concept. He could probably rank up with some serious sitting-down-and-meditating, or better yet, slurping up sufficient impurities, and Yulin was basically threatening to force him to do both at once.
Never one to feel threatened by a good time, Rhys was totally game. In fact, if Yulin had kindly asked him to step right on in and be a good little filter, he probably would’ve saluted and said ‘yes sir!’ His only concern was that there would be some kind of control mechanism in the locker or in the locker’s floor hole—the slot it would clearly recede into once he’d been shoved in—but he’d packed so many impurities into it that he could overcome just about any control mechanism, so long as it wasn’t several tiers above his own, or Yulin himself wasn’t standing over him.
Well, the locker’s cooked. Shove me in it, big boy, and let’s get this show on the road! It’s time for you to hand the big fat death portal.
But he couldn’t just say that, so he pointed at Yulin and narrowed his eyes. “You’ll never get away with your evil plan. You may have captured me, but as long as good people exist…”
“What, like Ryota?” Yulin asked, with all the derision in the world.
“…you’ll never succeed!” He paused. “Probably not Ryota. He’s not really a self-starter, and I’m not going to be there to start him, as it were.”
“Then who?”
“You know, I guess I’m speaking in the general case. There are good people out there. Some of them, surely, will rise up and overturn your evil plan before you attack the good people of this town this weekend!”
“Will they?”
“Eh… probably not. You know, I was trying to go out on a cool line, but it’s really not working out for me. I just don’t have enough faith in humanity for the hero’s perspective, I suppose.”
“I’m also… not attacking this weekend. What gave you that impression?”
“What? Isn’t there an event coming up?” Rhys asked, shocked.
“There have been many events since I began my master plan. Why would I launch my attack during one, when there will be more high tier mages in the capital? Besides, I’ll need to run tests and diagnostics once you’re slotted into place. It would be foolish to obtain my final piece and immediately use it without any research after all the time I’ve put in to get here.”
He makes several good points, Rhys allowed. That, and he had to admire Yulin for going with the long-enough plan rather than rushing into his endgame the second he got all the pieces in hand. A ridiculous number of movie villains made unforced errors because they got their last macguffin, then immediately tried to fire the death beam without taking the time to make sure the whole thing was in working order first. Honestly, hats off to Yulin for that one.
He wasn’t too shocked that he was wrong about the attack on the capital; that part had been pure conjecture, after all. Still, he pressed the point anyways. “Why build the portal in the capital, then?”
Yulin looked at him like he was stupid. “To behead the snake before it knows it’s under attack?”
Rhys grimaced. You know, if I stopped and didn’t let myself get all hyper with ideas and wild conspiracies, I probably could’ve realized all these obvious things. His line of thought had been not just trashy, but utter trash, just completely worthless. Feeling supremely stupid, he put his hands up. “Just finish the job before I make any more of a fool out of myself.”
Yulin waved his hand, and his men closed in on Rhys. He wasn’t visibly struggling, so they didn’t attack. Gripping him by the shoulders, they marched him toward the crystal locker. Rhys put in a token effort to fight back, just enough to not be suspicious but not so much that the people carrying him hurt him to get him to stop. One step at a time, he approached the locker.
Sorry, Ryota. I’ll have to work on that religion stuff once I get out of here. But don’t worry. I’ll be back.
The crystal locker loomed. The men pushed him in, and a crystal door slid shut behind him. He sunk into the ground, and the mechanism clunked shut.