Volume 1, Chapter 29: Fake Confidence Is Still Confidence (Patreon)

White walls crumbling toward the sky and a sense of unease accompanied me in that strange, bodiless place where I found myself once again.

This time, however, shortly after I awakened, a fiery spear streaked across the sky, pretending to be some kind of morning comet. Instead of fire, though, rainbow colors trailed behind it. I wondered what any of this was supposed to mean and where the hell I actually was when the wavering black line across the walls, imitating a horizon, began to vibrate.

Then it expanded and split apart, destroying both the wall surrounding me and the space beyond it—tearing a hole in whatever it was that made up reality.

A wild scream shattered the silence my ears desperately craved. My head was spinning so badly that I rolled onto my side and vomited whatever remained of the food I hadn’t digested yet. I listened for a moment and managed to figure out that it was Milo screaming his lungs out for some reason.

I threw up again, this time nothing but bile, and with my eyes half closed, dragged the front half of my body onto the tower wall in front of me. I didn’t fully open my eyes until my head was above it, and immediately regretted doing so when everything around me started spinning all over again.

Still, I was about seventy percent sure I could see three Milos running across the courtyard, clutching their crotches, stumbling over their partially lowered pants, then scrambling backward on their asses with their heads turned toward the forest.

A moment later, fireballs came flying from that same direction at a speed that did absolutely nothing to help my current perception, following trajectories that were at the very least zigzagging and possibly even spiraling.

“I'll help you!” Bri shouted. Her voice echoed through the chamber, striking the inside of my skull like thunder.

“Fuck off!” Milo shouted back. His voice broke immediately afterward, and for a moment I didn’t hear another word. “I saw the way she looked at me… she wanted it!”

I spent only a moment wondering what the hell could have happened down there before Plasario appeared, walking calmly out of the forest but repeatedly glancing back between the trees. After taking three steps, he stopped and pointed his sword at Milo, who sat bare-assed beside the orc corpses, rocking back and forth.

“Carnal violation of another man or woman is punished with the offending person’s manhood. I explained all the rules exactly as they apply. Justice has been served.”

“What fucking justice?!” Another scream tore through my head from the inside. “Nothing fucking happened. I didn’t get the chance. Fuck!”

“That is why only half your babymaker was cut off!”

“Fucking hell. Everyone here is some kind of savage,” I whispered to myself, abandoning the wall and crawling on all fours toward the metal door. Around me, the sacks of arrows were still burning, while the bodies of the orcs glowed from within.

As I moved in this broken manner, I found myself wondering why had I already woken up and whether that scream had really been enough to bring me around. Every sign in the sky, on the ground, and in my own body suggested that I should have been sleeping peacefully for at least a few more hours, until my Psyche had recovered. And yet I could feel that something inside me had changed. The belief that I could keep abusing my magic until my Psyche simply gave out had cracked.

There had been too much self-inflicted damage and abuse in too short a time, and I needed to establish clear rules for myself and actually stick to them.

Never again would I push myself into a state like this. I decided that from now on, even mild dizziness would mean treating my soul as incapable of using magic.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Milo shouted. “It burns!” he screamed again.

“I’m sorry, um… but cauterizing the wound so it wouldn’t bleed was the only thing I could do for you right now.”

“It does not befit a man—though in your case, Mr. Milo, perhaps half a man—to cry when receiving a punishment he deserves. Furthermore, the sentence already carried out concerned only the attempted rape. There still remains the matter of striking the other woman unconscious, which may yet become a more serious offense if Ms. Nickolette Leben does not wake,” Plasario spoke in a monotonous tone that was slowly beginning to get on my nerves as well.

Even though Milo was a massive dick—now slightly less so—and deserved what had happened to him, continuing to torment him seemed unnecessarily cruel. Or maybe it only seemed that way because my head hurt so much.

“As for you, evil spirit,” Plasario continued, turning toward Bri. “Get out of my sight before the respect I hold for your master stops outweighing my common sense.”

“I’m… sorry?”

“Every child knows that djinn feed wicked thoughts and stir stupidity and lust in men. You do not seriously think I failed to notice how quickly you flew after me. I know this was your doing.”

Even in the state I was in, I could feel that the situation below, despite my valiant sacrifice to lessen the rain falling from the towers, was growing dangerously more intense instead of de-escalating.

I was afraid that if I remained inactive and separated from the other Earthlings much longer, I would eventually find myself completely alone. And even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I enjoyed Bri’s company.

Her unrestrained optimism and positive outlook on the world helped calm the predatory thoughts I had toward the bastards who had put us here.

So I took a deep breath and, holding onto my head to keep it from rolling off my shoulders—which it seemed determined to do—I quite literally dragged myself, against every need and protest of my body, toward the stairs leading down from the tower.

“I didn’t, um… I wasn’t feeding anything in him!” Bri shouted somewhere in the distance, but Plasario’s response—if there was one—was unfortunately swallowed by the walls that grew to surround me as I ventured downwards. I silently thanked whatever luck I had left for putting me inside an unlit, narrow passage where I could crawl down the stairs feetfirst.

I felt along the walls with one hand, first on one side and then the other, making sure there wasn’t some sudden drop I could accidentally tumble into. None appeared, though, and after several sharp turns I finally reached a straight section descending farther down, partially illuminated by flames dancing across the walls.

“If you value your lives,” I heard again from somewhere in the distance, a voice whose tone reminded me of my lion companion, “we shall receive your surrender with open arms. Despite the battle just fought, there remains room for forgiveness within our hearts, yet with every second spent in this impasse, that space diminishes once more in favor of the savagery we restrain.” After that last statement, I was certain it was Khufu’Ri. He was the only one who spoke that way.

Perhaps Plasario came close, but I knew perfectly well that the latter had no forgiveness in his heart for the orcs.

“What do we do, boss?” I heard a strangely nasal voice that put an odd emphasis on every word.

Another voice answered in a similar tone, but with syntax and words completely incomprehensible to me, which I took to mean the orcs were talking among themselves.

Crawling farther down, I reached the final turn and a passage that, as it turned out, led directly to the place where the creatures had more or less dug themselves in.

I peeked around the corner only once, trying to understand the situation and match the number of voices I had heard with the number of creatures I could see.

If I wasn’t mistaken, then even though my eyes were telling me there were sixteen humanoids, eight of them larger than the others, once I accounted for the repeated movements there were really only four creatures here. One of them held a bow and peered through gaps in the wall of furniture they had built.

The second orc seemed to double and triple as he hurried back and forth, carrying more pieces from deeper inside the hall and stacking them along the sides of the fortification, adding several more feet to its width.

The goblins ran in circles, bumping into one another, looking for somewhere to flee while getting in each other's way.

“Will your answer come in words, or shall we seek it in opened veins?” Khufu pressed, his voice echoing through the hall.

I straightened up, bracing one hand against the wall as I slowly forced my aching body upright. I took a deep breath, testing whether I could stay on my feet for longer than a second, and when it seemed there was maybe a seventy-percent chance I could manage it, I wiped my mouth clean of the remaining vomit and stepped quietly into the room.

The second orc had just returned from farther back with another load of broken furniture and started adding it to the pile, while the goblins rushed up to the barricade to peer through the gaps toward my people.

I stopped beside the fire they had lit for themselves and sighed.

Keeping my fingers metaphorically crossed that this wouldn’t finish me off completely, I used Pyrography. I watched Soma manifest across the skin of my hand in orange, red, yellow, and, strangely enough, faint traces of green. Then I pressed my already burned palm into the flames for a moment and pulled out a line of fire, quickly drawing something resembling a ball of flame in the air.

I cut the drawing short and held my hand beneath the sphere, palm up.

So much for me keeping up with my own rules.

“Excellent!” I shouted, doing my best to remain upright and wear a confident expression.

The orc building the barricade turned toward me in surprise and dropped the piece of crate he had been holding.

The one with the bow spun around so quickly that every arrow resting on his string slipped free and scattered across the floor. His jaw hung open.

The goblins, meanwhile, both dropped onto their asses and began scrambling backward away from me, dragging themselves across the floor with their hands while muttering something in fear.

“I’m glad you didn’t go anywhere. I was worried I’d come all this way and you wouldn’t even be here anymore!” I shouted again, signaling to my companions that I had drawn the orcs’ attention.

“What… human…” one of the orcs began.

“Don’t kill us!” a goblin finished for him.

“Look, he has fire in his hand!” the other shouted.

“My companion, Khufu’Ri—the one you’ve been listening to—has offered you the pleasant option. I’m here in case you decide to choose the other one.” Then I closed my eyes. Not as a gesture of contempt toward them, though they were free to interpret it that way. I closed them because the images spinning in front of me were making me want to vomit again.

“It’s a trick!” the orc shouted back at me, waving one hand dismissively to the side. Strangely enough, he was using a language I could understand. “If you could kill us, you would’ve done it without a word, just like you killed the rest of us!”

I opened my eyes and focused on the version of the orc that remained in the center of all the other copies of him circling around it.

I narrowed my eyes slightly, furrowed my brow, and reached for Pyrography once again, beginning from the sphere that was still connected to the living source of fire.

Drawing a line from each of my fingers, I crouched and pulled them all the way down toward the ground without breaking eye contact with the orc. When they touched the floor, I stopped drawing and glanced at my creation.

It looked like a column of fire stretching toward the ground from a miniature sun suspended above it. Flames danced along the construct, pleasantly warming the skin of my face.

“You know what this is, right?” I asked, dragging my gaze from one humanoid to the next. “I started the same spell on every tower above us. You know where they are now…”

I cleared my throat when I felt a piece of vomit in my mouth, making a decidedly less-than-terrifying face, but quickly returned to my interpretation of the villain.

“Forgive me. A piece of roasted goblin got stuck in my throat,” I added, spitting out the phlegm that had gathered there. “I’m giving you one last chance to surrender, or I blow this entire place to hell.”