Infinite Mana - Chapter 176: What He Could Live With (Thank you for your support, AL!) (Patreon)

Sieghart did not return to the main road after leaving the battlefield behind. Instead, he turned the carriage toward a narrow animal trail cutting between low hills and scattered woodland, choosing terrain that ordinary wagons would normally avoid. The route was slower in theory, but being difficult to follow mattered more than maintaining perfect speed. Guards arriving at the robbery site would undoubtedly find the surviving couple, six bodies, burned faces, frozen bruises, and enough magical damage to raise questions.

Someone might mention the strange horseless carriage afterward. Even if nobody connected it to Sieghart directly, allowing an obvious trail to continue from the battlefield toward the nearest settlement would make tracking him unnecessarily easy.

He reduced the mana feeding the engine and activated Elemental Imbuement across several sections of the carriage. Wind Mana spread gradually through the frame, settling around the wheels, axles, and structural supports instead of forming an external blast. The effect was imperfect, but useful. The carriage became noticeably lighter as controlled currents supported part of its effective weight, reducing the pressure each wheel placed against soft ground while Sieghart guided it between trees.

Deep tracks became shallow impressions.

Shallow impressions became scattered marks that blended much more easily with animal paths, fallen branches, and uneven terrain already disturbed by rain and wind. Sieghart glanced behind himself several times while adjusting the enchantment. The carriage still displaced grass and occasionally broke small branches, but anyone trying to follow would need considerably more patience than simply tracking wheel ruts.

“That’s better.”

The spell also reduced strain on the engine. Less effective weight meant the Fire Runes did not need to produce as much force to maintain movement, while steering across uneven terrain became unexpectedly easier.

Sieghart immediately added another idea to the growing list of carriage improvements. A permanent weight-reduction circuit would help with speed, suspension, fuel efficiency that still did not matter, and even emergency movement through terrain designed for animals rather than vehicles.

The problem remained stability. Making the carriage too light would allow sharp wind, sudden turns, or uneven ground to throw the entire structure sideways, potentially transforming a useful improvement into a spectacularly embarrassing accident. Still, temporary magical support worked well enough for now. Sieghart kept the vehicle moving parallel to the main road while remaining several kilometers away from anything likely to contain witnesses.

At this rate, however, his route toward the capital was becoming increasingly absurd. Greymill had already become somewhere he preferred avoiding, and now every nearby settlement connected to the robbery site carried another possibility of recognition. If he continued getting involved in local trouble every few days, Sieghart would eventually create a growing trail of towns and cities he could not comfortably revisit without changing his appearance completely.

He sighed and leaned slightly against the steering wheel.

“Maybe traveling anonymously works better when you don’t repeatedly kill people near populated roads.”

That seemed obvious in retrospect. Unfortunately, the alternative would have been leaving the old couple to the bandits. Sieghart disliked attention, but not enough to deliberately become useless whenever nobody important was watching.

The carriage passed through a shallow stream and climbed another wooded slope before Sieghart finally relaxed enough to divide part of his concentration toward training.

He still needed to improve Poison Magic. The giant earthworm had proven Poison Sphere could become far more dangerous when combined with Enhanced Smell and environmental control, but the spell itself remained painfully limited.

Smelling terrible was useful. Actually weakening opponents would be better.

Sieghart began forming a tiny Poison Sphere above his left palm while keeping his right hand on the steering wheel, maintaining just enough mana to preserve the unstable little construct without firing it.

Poison Magic worked by making mana invasive rather than merely destructive. The spell wanted to enter biological systems, cling to tissue, and interfere with whatever processes kept the target functioning normally. That principle remained broad enough to be useful. Sieghart narrowed his eyes while studying the swirling green mana. What he wanted was not simply greater toxicity.

Something that weakened physical performance directly would be far more valuable, especially against opponents whose entire fighting style depended upon their bodies operating at ridiculous efficiency.

Aura users immediately came to mind. The swordsman from earlier had been terrifying because his reinforced muscles, joints, reflexes, and stamina allowed him to convert simple movements into lethal attacks. If Sieghart could attack those systems instead of trying to match them physically, the entire balance of a fight could change.

Poison that attacked muscular endurance. Poison that accelerated fatigue. Poison that prevented the body from recovering stamina efficiently. He liked that direction. Rather than killing immediately, the spell could make every movement increasingly expensive until an enemy’s own fighting style consumed them from within.

Against Aura users, that sounded especially useful.

They might possess tremendous physical reserves, but unless Aura somehow removed every biological limitation, exhausting those reserves faster should still matter. Sieghart guided the carriage around a fallen tree while maintaining the tiny Poison Sphere, trying to alter its structure toward interference instead of tissue damage.

The result collapsed almost immediately. Green mana dispersed harmlessly across his palm. He formed another. This time, he imagined something closer to metabolic sabotage, though his knowledge from Earth was nowhere near detailed enough to reproduce real biological chemistry accurately.

Perhaps accuracy was unnecessary. Magic responded to concepts as much as mechanisms.

Slowness.

Fatigue.

Heavy limbs.

Burning muscles.

Breathing harder for less result.

Sieghart tried building those ideas into the spell while keeping the existing invasive behavior of Poison Sphere intact. The mana changed slightly. Then destabilized again.

“Closer.”

He started a third attempt.

Then the old woman’s face appeared in his mind. Sieghart’s concentration broke immediately. The unfinished poison collapsed. He stared at the road ahead without really seeing it. Her expression had lasted only a moment.

Fear.

Not of the bandits.

Of him.

Sieghart tightened his jaw and forced his attention back toward the carriage, but the memory refused to disappear.

The old man had looked almost the same. Not grateful. Not relieved. Afraid. That should not have mattered much. They were strangers who had watched an unfamiliar teenager kill six people violently within several minutes.

Fear was reasonable. Sieghart understood that. His mind apparently did not care. The old couple’s faces shifted inside his memory. Wrinkles changed slightly. Hair changed. Clothing changed. Suddenly, his grandparents were standing beside that wagon instead.

His grandmother stared at him with the same frightened eyes while his grandfather leaned away from the blood covering the road. Sieghart’s hands tightened around the steering wheel.

“No.”

The image vanished. Then returned. His grandfather looking at the headless bodies. His grandmother watching the Fireballs destroy two faces. Neither saying anything. That was worse. Sieghart knew the memory was false. His grandparents had never seen him fight like that. They had known he could be dangerous, especially after the Firian war, but that had been different.

War made violence easier to categorize. Bandits on a roadside felt smaller. More personal. Sieghart had killed the first three before they could hurt him seriously. The other two had been attempting to take hostages, but he had still paralyzed them and burned their faces off without hesitation.

Then he had beaten the Aura user nearly senseless with Glacial Fists and cut off his head after the man could no longer fight properly. Every decision had been deliberate. That was the part his conscience kept returning to.

There had been no panic. No loss of control. No desperate accident. Sieghart had chosen exactly how each person died. His grandparents’ imagined faces returned again. This time, his grandmother looked disappointed.

Sieghart closed his eyes for half a second before immediately reopening them. Driving while emotionally distracted was already stupid enough without adding blindness.

“Stop it.”

His own voice sounded harsher than intended. He had killed before. Why did this bother him now? The Firian commander had been trying to kill people. The Orc King had led an invasion. Chimerians had kidnapped a child and modified people into weapons. Those situations came packaged with clear categories.

Enemies.

War.

Monsters.

Threats.

Roadside bandits felt ordinary enough that the violence surrounding them suddenly looked uglier. Sieghart hated that distinction. Someone did not become more deserving of survival merely because their crimes were mundane. Those men had attacked an elderly couple, crippled their horse, stolen their belongings, and prepared to use hostages once somebody resisted.

Their leader had openly admitted killing mages before. None had behaved like people one unfortunate decision away from becoming decent. Sieghart knew all of that. Still, knowing did not silence the discomfort.

Being reborn with memories from Earth had advantages everyone in this world would consider absurd. Sieghart possessed concepts, references, engineering ideas, medical fragments, and an entire lifetime of experiences nobody his age should have.

It also meant he carried another world’s expectations inside his head. A world where killing six people on a road was not something a normal person simply accepted before continuing toward the capital. Even when self-defense justified violence, people were not supposed to become comfortable with it.

Sieghart had become comfortable enough to optimize it. That realization made his stomach feel unpleasant. Reincarnation was not simply free knowledge and convenient maturity. Sometimes two different lives disagreed about what kind of person he was supposed to become.

His previous self remembered laws, police, courts, trials, and societies where individuals were not expected to decide life and death personally. His current life remembered war, monsters, kidnappings, noble violence, corrupted humans, and situations where waiting for proper authorities simply meant somebody died before help arrived.

Both sets of memories belonged to him. Neither could be discarded simply because the other became inconvenient. Sieghart slowed the carriage slightly. The forest around him remained quiet except for the engine, distant birds, and the soft movement of wind through branches.

He needed to think clearly. He had not killed those men for amusement. That mattered. He had not hunted them down because he wanted money. That mattered too. He had intervened because they were harming people who could not defend themselves, and once fighting began, every surviving bandit remained a potential threat to the old couple or to Sieghart himself.

The Aura user especially had nearly killed him multiple times. Leaving that man alive after incapacitating him would have meant trusting guards to arrive before he recovered, escaped, or attacked the couple again. Could Sieghart have restrained him somehow?

Probably.

Enough Mana Swords, Earth Creation, Telekinesis, barriers once he learned them, perhaps even freezing his limbs completely.

There had been alternatives. That thought made the guilt worse for several seconds. Then Sieghart shook his head sharply. There were always alternatives afterward. That did not mean every alternative was intelligent in the moment.

He could construct endless hypothetical solutions after surviving a fight. Maybe he could have captured every bandit. Maybe he could have healed them after disabling them. Maybe he could have waited for guards and spent several hours explaining everything.

Maybe he could have politely convinced six armed criminals that robbery was morally questionable. At some point, considering every possible kinder outcome stopped being conscience and started becoming stupidity disguised as morality. Sieghart exhaled slowly.

“I’m not doing that.”

He had prepared himself years ago for the reality that protecting his own life and the people he cared about might require killing. Pretending otherwise now because the victims had frightened him afterward would not somehow make him better.

It would only make him inconsistent. Worse, it could make him hesitate the next time somebody genuinely dangerous threatened someone important. Sieghart imagined Mira, Ronan, or another person he cared about standing behind an enemy while he debated whether lethal force was morally uncomfortable.

That image bothered him far more. He could question himself. He should question himself. But questioning did not require becoming useless. The last thing Sieghart wanted was to become someone who killed casually without thinking.

The second-to-last thing he wanted was becoming a moron who believed refusing to kill obvious threats automatically made him morally superior. That would be the apex of stupidity. He had seen enough people weaponize weakness, hesitation, and compassion already. Bandits taking hostages were a perfect example.

If Sieghart decided never to kill because killing felt unpleasant, then every sufficiently cruel opponent would simply exploit that limitation. He refused to build his morality around making criminals safer. Sieghart’s grip relaxed around the steering wheel.

The imagined faces of his grandparents did not disappear completely, but they stopped feeling as sharp. Perhaps they would have been disturbed by what he had become capable of doing.

That possibility hurt.

They might also have understood why. Sieghart could not ask them anymore. That remained the worst part.

He had to decide what kind of person they would have wanted him to become without letting an imaginary version of them control every decision. That was unfair to them too. His grandparents had loved him. Turning their memory into an internal judge that appeared whenever Sieghart did something morally complicated felt like using them against himself.

He frowned at that realization.

“Yeah. That’s probably not healthy either.”

The carriage continued through the forest while morning sunlight gradually strengthened between the trees. Sieghart formed another Poison Sphere above his palm. This time, he deliberately separated the magical problem from everything else occupying his head.

Fatigue.

Stamina loss.

Muscle weakness.

Reduced physical output.

The mana twisted.

Sieghart maintained the structure more carefully, creating something less corrosive and more invasive than Poison Sphere’s usual configuration. The spell still failed after several seconds.

That was fine. Failure meant he could try again. Sieghart looked toward the trail ahead while the remains of the failed spell dispersed between his fingers.

The old couple’s fear still bothered him.

Maybe it should.

If killing ever stopped bothering him entirely, that would probably be a much worse sign than feeling uncomfortable afterward. He simply refused to let discomfort decide reality for him. Sieghart gathered Poison Mana again.

“Now, where was I?”

The carriage moved deeper away from the main road while another green sphere began forming above his hand, smaller and denser than the previous attempt. This time, Sieghart imagined stamina draining away with every breath. That idea felt promising.