Chapter 88

Zea was quite satisfied with her shopping trip. Not only had she managed to find everything she needed both for the ritual and her own enchanting needs, she’d even negotiated free use of an enchanter’s workbench to make the masking enchantment for her slave runes. It was currently bound up inside a small stud-style earring that she’d put in sometime in the next few weeks when the old one lost its power.

She’d also managed to snag a few small ceramic jars with some spices and a pot to boil water in, and a thick fur blanket that was so heavy she wouldn’t even have considered it if not for her recent stat gains. Carrying five pounds of blanket a thousand miles was not her idea of a good time.

Combined with a luxurious hot bath, one she knew she shouldn’t have spent money on and felt just slightly guilty over, and she was ready to face the road once more. She woke up early, got everything packed up, and headed out to find Luke, who she sometimes still called him Aldrick in her head, but had more or less adjusted over to using his real name.

They needed to pick out new fake names and get some practice with using and responding to them before they actually needed the disguise. Hopefully they wouldn’t encounter any problems prior to reaching Sicanti and purchasing passage across the ocean, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

She found Luke at their agreed-upon meeting point. His eyes were sunken into his head and he had a hollow look to his face as he just stared at the city. “You ever wish everything wasn’t such a pile of shit?” he said by way of greeting.

“Frequently,” she told him. As she got closer, she realized he was still wearing the same trashed clothing he’d had before. “You didn’t get new clothes?”

“Spent all my money before I got that far. Didn’t have enough to rent a room either.”

“Spent it on what?” Zea asked, a twinge of annoyance spiking through her. He knew how important that money was.

“A healer for a little girl who’d been crushed under some machinery when a rival homeless street gang attacked the factory her and her friends were squatting in. Why did they need to do that? Why are there hundreds of homeless children to begin with? Why does this city suck so bad?”

The annoyance vanished. With a heavy sigh, she sat down next to him. “The monsters are worse up here. Losses are heavier, even with organizations like the Guardians. You just can’t keep every farmer and lumberjack safe out beyond the walls, but people still need food and timber. And people die, people who have kids. Sometimes those kids have to survive on their own.”

“They shouldn’t have to,” Luke said. “It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

“Life’s not fair or right. I know this sucks, but you’re going to need to accept reality here.”

“Does this city even try? Are there orphanages? Any social welfare programs?”

“I doubt it,” Zea said. “I doubt Kazos can afford anything like that. There’s a reason this is the northern-most city in Thalasa. The farther we push away from the center, the harder it gets to survive. We’re not going to find much in the way of towns if we keep walking north, just a thousand miles of untamed wilderness, stuffed full of monsters killing and eating each other.”

“Maybe we should do something about that?”

“Like what?” Zea said. “What could we possibly do? Even if you threw your life away for it, and were extraordinarily successful, you’d kill what… five hundred monsters? A thousand? And then you’d start to go crazy and become the monster that needs to be put down.”

“No, that’s what they would all do,” Luke said. “The question is what can I do with my bloodline? Can I just lower the level of every monster on the planet? Can I make them disappear? What exactly are my options here, System? What can I do to make this place not such a hellscape for the people living here once I’m standing in front of the God Machine?”

Zea watched Luke have a conversation with himself, or rather, talk to the system, which looked like pretty much the same thing to her. He brightened up a bit and nodded. “That could work. What about the people though?”

“Want to let me in on what you’re thinking?” Zea said.

“Hmm? Oh, sorry. System said we can screw with the dial to lower the amount of XP circulating around. More of it will sit in the God Machine and everything will be weaker. Unfortunately, that includes the people too, but I think it might be worth it. People can build tools and weapons. People can work in groups. Without the raw power monsters get from skills and stats, they’ll be weaker threats.”

“You can’t know that for sure though,” Zea said.

“Sure I can. That’s how it is on my world. Nobody has any levels or stats at all, and humans are unquestionably the dominant species. We have no natural predators left anymore.”

“What about all the other races?”

“Ah, well… there aren’t any. It’s just humans and animals where I come from.”

“So you don’t actually know then. If you don’t have any monsters, then you don’t know how much damage even a level 1 shardmane could do.”

“That’s… true. Hrmm. Well, this is still something worth exploring, and we’ve got plenty of time to do it,” Luke said. “Maybe I can find a way to selectively turn down just monster levels. That’s more likely than getting the people at the top of the shitheap to stop exploiting everyone around them, anyway.”

“Maybe.” Zea wasn’t sure she liked the idea of Luke just screwing around with how the world worked on a whim, even if he had good intentions. That line of thinking was exactly why the Pantheon wanted him dead. They’d set things up the way they had for a reason, and she doubted they were looking for a mortal to come audit their design and make changes.

It was no wonder the church’s standing policy was to immediately declare an off-worlder to be an apostate and mandate their death. That kind of power was beyond dangerous. If people found out Luke could do that kind of stuff, they would want to capture him and control him. It was better for everyone if knowledge of an off-worlder’s capabilities never spread.

That left her in the unfortunate position of collateral damage. She understood why the church would go to such extreme measures to kill Luke and contain any knowledge of his abilities, but on a personal level, she wasn’t okay with being killed as the most expedient solution to that problem. Since she doubted they’d leave her alone even if she promised not to tell anyone, there really wasn’t an option besides not letting the church get their hands on her.

Last week, that hadn’t been much of a moral quandary for her. All Luke wanted was to get the rest of his family back and go home. That was fair. None of them had asked to be taken to Aros, and they were all going to disappear when he was done. Now he was talking about something completely different, about changing how a world that he wasn’t even part of functioned. That had a high potential for catastrophic unforeseen consequences of such changes.

“Luke,” she said. He looked over at her, and she felt her heart clench tighter in her chest. “This idea… it’s not a good one. You should leave it alone.”

“It’s not good to want to stop little kids from dying in the streets because there’s no one to take care of them?” he said, incredulous. Mad.

“No, it is, but not the way you’re talking about doing it. You want to trespass on the domain of the gods here. What you’re talking about doing, it’s going to affect the entire planet. Millions of people will have to deal with the ramifications of the changes you want to make. How sure are you that things will be better when you’re done? How many people are going to die if you do this?”

“It might be bad at first, but things will get better in the long run. It would be an overall win.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t. This line of thinking is exactly why the church wants to kill you. You’re threatening to turn everything on its head.”

“What am I supposed to do then? Just go on letting things be horrible, and know that I could stop it?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying this change is too big. There’s no way for anyone to predict what could happen, and who are we to say we know better than the gods do anyway?”

Luke let out a short, bitter, little laugh. “Who’s to say they know what they’re doing? Or maybe they do, and they just don’t care. Why does everyone assume any of these gods give a fuck about what happens to us? They stuffed one of their own into a machine that breaks a divine entity down into little bite-sized XP chunks. Is that something a benevolent deity would do?”

“I… don’t know.” It wasn’t the first time Luke had told her what he’d learned about XP Madness and its true source, but she wasn’t as trusting of this invisible being as he appeared to be. She was still going along with him, and part of herself thought she was absolutely crazy for that, but it was a bit too late to turn back now.

“This whole thing is fucked up,” he muttered. “I don’t know what the right thing to do is. It would be easier to just not give a fuck. I’ll go get mine and the rest of the world can go to hell. Worked for the Boomers.”

“The what?” she asked.

“Never mind. Something from my world. Just a bunch of people who were selfish assholes.”

“If you really want to help those kids, maybe we should stay here and do something ourselves,” she said. “I’ve got everything we need to try the ritual. That will give you some more options.”

He blew out a heavy sigh and scrubbed his hand across his face. “Need to shave again,” he muttered before standing up. “I can’t stay here. The only way to get my family back is to keep going forward.”

“I’m okay with whatever you decide, as long as you don’t try to change the fundamental laws of my world.”

“Thanks. Okay, first things first, you said you have everything needed to do the ritual?”

“I do. I have enough supplies for two tries, but I think maybe I should level up two or three more times so that I can raise the rank on some of the support skills. We can try now if you want, but I’m not promising it will work. I don’t think there will be any side effects to failing it other than wasting some supplies.”

“Okay. Well, if you think it would help to get you more AP, then let’s do that. I think we’ve got time now. Nobody’s really come after us since that incident in Landston.”

“Nobody has come after us yet.”

“Good point,” Luke said. He gave the city one more long, troubled look, and then added, “Let’s get walking?”

“Yeah.”

* * *

Cardinal Gnox was not accustomed to being woken from a sound sleep in his own bed in the middle of the night, but that was the situation he found himself in. A hand had a firm grip on his hair, what was left of it anyway, and another one held a knife close enough to his throat that he could feel the scrape of steel against his skin.

“Where the fuck is my apprentice at, Cardinal?” Adrevald Lath asked.