Chapter 43

When Zeth returned home, he was greeted by the mercenaries his mother had hired. It was a relatively small group, with just a handful of individuals, none of them too high in Level, and considering she was paying for discounted services, they didn’t seem to ever take their jobs too seriously. Out in front of the house, he saw them playing cards at a table they’d brought with them. They nodded to him as he passed.

Despite how minor their protection was, he had to admit that he did feel far more comfortable knowing they were around. Especially when he was gone, there was nothing protecting his mom and sister from a potential attacker. So even if they didn’t actually defeat anything, the sounds of fighting would at least serve as an early warning for them to run. At least, he certainly hoped so.

When he got inside, he was glad to see that his mom was out at the time, so he’d be able to dodge any questions about where he’d been during the mannitor attack. With the number of disasters that’d happened recently, all of them occurring at a time when he was suspiciously absent, he knew it was getting more and more likely by the day that someone close to him would eventually put two and two together.

If Sophie did, he had no doubt at all that she’d keep the secret for him. And Turin would probably hear him out before he did anything rash, as well. But his mom? Well, she certainly seemed to care about doing the right thing for him, but Zeth didn’t know what her version of “the right thing” would end up being. Ideally, she would never know more about him than he explicitly told her.

While his mom may have been out, though, Sophie was inside. When he peeked through her open door, he found her sitting on her floor, playing with some dolls he didn’t recognize.

“Hey,” he said, knocking on her doorway. “I’m back from work.”

She looked up, eyes brightening when she saw him, and instantly climbed to her feet, running over to give him a hug. “Zeth!”

He returned it with a single arm, his other holding the books he’d bought. “What’s up?”

“Oh,” she looked back at the little set of dolls lying motionless on the floor now that she was no longer there to puppet them around. “Mom made those for me.”

He walked over to look at them more closely. They were all made of straw, in varying sizes. Two of them were larger, about five or six inches in height—one wore a little tunic and pants, while the other wore a dress—and then there were four smaller ones, each only two or three inches tall. Seemed like they were meant to be a little doll family.

“So, what, is that one the mommy, and that one’s the daddy?” he asked, pointing the larger ones out.

“Oh, no,” she said, sitting back on the floor. She picked up the two larger ones. “This one with the dress is the queen, and the little ones are her warriors. She’s commanding their attack against the dark lord,” she held up the larger man, “while he uses his strength to fight back. But they outnumber them, and the queen is a strategist.”

“...Uh huh,” he said, watching as she arranged their formation.

“So now, while the dark lord is busy fighting against these two who make up legion one, the queen will tell legion two to sneak around the chair legs, using the broken line of sight to set up a sneak attack,” she said, moving the dolls as she spoke. She tipped over one of the ‘soldiers’ who were fighting against the larger doll. “Then, when legion one starts suffering major losses, the rest of the soldiers will pretend to retreat, over to the chair legs for safety, but they’ll really be leading the dark lord into a trap.”

As Zeth watched, she waddled the rudimentary dolls around the floor and underneath the chair, where the other two sat. Once the larger doll was there with the others, she picked them up and used them to push the large doll over.

Zeth grinned. “I dunno if that’s what mom had in mind when she made those for you.”

“Yeah, but it’s okay. I think it’s more fun this way.” As she picked her dolls up, she glanced over at his other arm, which was still holding the books, and her eyes grew wide with excitement. “Are those new?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, grabbing the two that he’d bought for her and holding them out. “Here.”

She snatched them from his grip, instantly looking down and reading their covers, the enthusiasm in her eyes only growing more intense as she realized what they were about. “It’s more stuff about magic!”

Zeth couldn’t fight the smile off his face. “Yep.”

“Thank you so much!” she said, tackling him with another hug before quickly moving to sit on the bed, where she opened up one of them and instantly began skimming through its introduction. “Woah, this one’s like a tutorial! It says it’s gonna tell me all the Skills I need! This is awesome!”

“Yeah, I thought you might like it,” he said. “Hey, um, just…Don’t tell mom about these, alright? She might take them away.”

The smile on her face faded. “Oh. Right. Yeah, I won’t tell her. I think I can find a spot to hide them.”

He wanted to kick himself for erasing the passionate grin that’d been planted on her face just moments ago, reminding her of her unfortunate situation, but it needed to be said. Zeth sighed, crouching down to meet her eye level. “Hey, so…You really want a magic Class, right? That’s seriously what you want?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Again, don’t tell mom I said this to you, but…You should get a Class. As soon as possible. Whichever one you want, just go for it. I know everyone says to wait until you’re an adult before making a decision like that, but you’re a really smart kid. If you know what you want—if you really know what you want, and you’re one hundred percent sure about it—then go for it. I don’t think mom’s gonna make it any easier on you as time goes on.”

“But she says I shouldn’t,” Sophie said in a small voice. “What if I’m wrong? And I don’t like it?”

Then she can go fuck herself, Zeth wanted to say. “Then she’s probably wrong. I don’t know if this is a good thing to say to a kid, but…Sophie, mom’s wrong about a lot of stuff. She’s got some ideas, and she believes in them a lot. And she does care about you, I’m sure. But I don’t think you’re as high a priority in her mind as you should be. And I don’t think she’s able to figure out what’s best for you, even when she is trying to help. There’s gonna come a time in your life when you’ll have to start disobeying her if you want to be happy. I had to start doing that, myself. And I wish I’d started doing it sooner. So, my advice for you is to go for it. If you know what you want, then just do it. Don’t worry about what she says. Don’t worry about what she thinks is best. I promise I’ll back you up every step of the way.”

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She sat silent for a few seconds. Eventually, she looked at him and asked, “...Can we be a team?”

He wasn’t sure what that really meant, but wasn’t about to refuse. “Of course. One hundred percent.”

The smile returned to her face, and Zeth’s heart warmed. “Okay! I’ll start reading these right away.”

He took a breath and nodded, getting back to his feet.

As he did, he saw her eyes dart over to the two more books he still held in his arms. “Oh! Do you have more books about magic?”

“Oh, uh, these are just for me,” he responded.

She craned her neck to read what was written on their spines. “What are they about?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, turning to keep her from doing so. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if she knew what he was reading—it was all completely legal literature straight from the library, after all—but he wanted to avoid any inconvenient conversations that he could. “Anyway, uh, I was just stopping by to say hi, and drop those off for you. I gotta go again.”

“Where?” she asked.

“More work stuff.”

“You work a lot now,” she said, not quite in a whiny tone, but one that didn’t hide the fact she was sad about it.

“Yeah, well, next time I get paid, I’ll go find you another book to read, huh? I’ll even let you pick—what do you want it to be about? I’m sure there’s still some more magic stuff, or maybe general System theory…”

“What about war?” she asked.

He blinked. “War? Like, history books? I think you should already have one or two of those.”

“Not like that,” she said. “Um, like, war strategy.”

He looked down at the dolls she’d been playing with, moving them around like they were soldiers on a battlefield. “You mean like combat tactics? Generals talking about troop arrangements and stuff?”

“Yeah, that stuff!” she said, familiar glint of unstoppable enthusiasm reappearing in her eyes.

“I mean, sure, I can see if I can find something like that. But why?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t have a book about it yet.”

“Huh. I guess that could be an interesting way to come up with new strategies for Scrim. It’s just a card game, but you still do use those cards to move armies around and attack cities and stuff.”

“Yeah, I wanna learn more about Scrim,” she said, perhaps a little too hastily.

Zeth looked at her for a moment, waiting for her to elaborate, but she didn’t, instead averting her gaze back to her new books.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll look for one.”

She nodded, smiling. “Thanks!”

He knew she was hiding something, but wasn’t entirely sure what it was. Still, he trusted her judgment. Whatever it was she was planning on doing, he hoped she’d think it over carefully.

On his way back to base, Zeth tried to see if he could find the corpses of the mannitors. They still had quite a lot of blood in them, and the town would have to get rid of them somewhere. But when he looked for them in the attacked portion of town, it seemed like they’d already been taken away. And no matter how hard he looked in the outskirts of town, in the forests, and everywhere else he could think to check, he found nothing. It was like the corpses had simply disappeared.

An unfortunate loss of quite a bit of blood, but Zeth didn’t let it get him down. He still had quite the exciting day ahead of him. With fifteen Skill Points collected, and Otherworldly Excellence costing seventeen, he only needed two more. Ritual Circle Mastery and Vile Focus has both been maxed out now, Empowerment Ritual he wouldn’t be able to Rank without also Leveling up, Self-Destruction would carry with it some inherent risks when attempting to Rank, and Demonic Covenant would need him to summon a demon, which he wasn’t particularly eager to do for no reason, after the disaster that came with his last one.

That left one last Skill—one which was conveniently sitting at Rank eight, ready to earn two more Skill Points. Hellfire Ritual. Spend some time drawing a few more of those, and he’d finally have enough to buy the Skill.

So, he figured, he’d just prepare some in case of any future emergencies. Nothing wrong with a stockpile.

It was for that reason that he found himself down underground, kneeling over a set of torn squares of fabric, painting ritual circles on each one.

With Vile Focus at max Rank, Hellfire Ritual currently had an upkeep time of around fifteen minutes, down from twenty. He’d been keeping track of his base’s defenses as he made them; currently, there were a total of ten Hellfire Rituals drawn at different spots in the base. Most were in the entryway, but a couple more were spread out through other halls and doorways to pick off anyone who had a way to get past the first defense.

With ten currently drawn, that meant he had around two and a half hours of total upkeep time to do on these circles each day, which was already relatively sizable. A big part of his morning routine had been keeping those things active ever since he got his base set up. And now adding these ones he was drawing, that time spent keeping up with his rituals would only continue to grow. Of course, most of these were simply for practice, and so Zeth wouldn’t be upset if he ended up simply letting them fade away after a few days, but he still wanted to keep at least a couple around on these easily mobile pieces of cloth, in case he ever needed to go on the offensive.

He planned to use all the hours left in the day to complete his mission. The base was done, he was defended, and he had a job—now was the time to consolidate his power. Zeth didn’t want to spend even one more day stuck at Level six. So he worked. He drew one, then two, then three full circles, each one taking forty-five minutes, before he finally got a notification.

[Hellfire Ritual’s Rank has increased to 9.

+1 Skill Point. You have 16 Skill Points.]

That Rank was the easy one; he’d already completed a portion of its requirements during previous days. The next one he’d do the entirety of in this single evening.

With no demon in the base to keep an ear out for him, Zeth avoided allowing himself to sink fully into Vile Focus, but he certainly used a portion of its ability to mentally skip past the monotonous yet intensive labor. And it was when he’d finished five additional full hellfire circles that he was finally removed from this state of mind

[Hellfire Ritual’s Rank has increased to 10.

+1 Skill Point. You have 17 Skill Points.]

The moment he got the Rank-up notification, Zeth collapsed to the ground, exhausted. Even with his extra Stats and the natural muscle lining his body, this many hours of kneeling on the stone, carefully tracing his fingers along those scraps of cloth left his body feeling utterly destroyed.

Zeth was a little disappointed he didn’t immediately unlock an Evolution for Hellfire Ritual upon it hitting Rank ten; it seemed like he’d need to bring some other Skill to max Rank before he’d find any Evolutions for it.

But really, he didn’t mind. On his sweat-covered face lay a satisfied grin. He’d done it. Seventeen Skill Points.

Zeth looked over the Skill’s description once more, reading one line in particular.

[Upon purchasing this Skill, choose a Stat. Whenever this Skill Ranks up and whenever you Level up with the Blood Magus Class, increase the chosen Stat by 5.]

There was still a little bit of time left in the day. Just enough, he hoped, to choose which Stat he was gonna give this incredible boost to.

And gods, he had absolutely no idea which one he should pick.