Path of Dragons 18 - Chapter 2 - No Pushovers (Patreon)

Sadie Song sat at her desk, signing requisition forms she’d been given by her Chief Administrator.  Esther was as committed to the Adjudicators’ mission as anyone else in the entire order, which meant that she was extremely tight with their funds.  Unless the petitioner’s reasoning was airtight, they always went to one of the other Administrators. 

That was fine by Sadie.  Esther was, nominally speaking, her Administrator, so everything that went through her eventually landed on Sadie’s desk.  Given how few people wanted to deal with Esther – or her almost inevitable rejection – that seriously cut down on how many administrative tasks Sadie had to deal with.

In turn, that freed her up to engage with more important duties.  Like bringing criminals to justice.  Or working on her cultivation.  She even managed to participate in towers or primal realms from time to time.  Her leveling speed wasn’t what it once was, but she was perfectly fine with that.

So long as she steadily made progress, she was happy.  After all, her lifespan was now measured in the thousands of years.  What did it matter if it took an extra decade or two to reach deity.

The only call for haste came from the fact that her status as one of the most powerful people in the world was what lent the Adjudicators enough cache to garner the respect of nearly every major faction.  That wasn’t to say that everyone always did what the Adjudicators told them to do, but for the most part, they followed the law.

And when they didn’t, they at least feared the Adjudicators enough to hide their crimes.  The situation as far from perfect, but Sadie wasn’t certain that anything more was an achievable goal.  Even before the World Tree’s touch extended to Earth, when law and order were much more prevalent, there were still people who thought nothing of committing crimes.

That hadn’t changed, and Sadie didn’t think it ever would.

“Where is Enoch?” she asked.

“Off-world,” Esther said, her prim demeanor and youthful face at odds with her stern reputation.  She wore a simple white dress, unadorned save for the sunburst crest of the Adjudicators on her chest.  Otherwise, she looked like nothing so much as a fresh-faced acolyte, rather than the strictest Administrator in the entire organization.  “Misakar, if I remember right.”

“That’s the war planet, right?” she asked.

Esther nodded.  “Conflict-attuned and nearly overrun with rifts,” she explained.  “Many among the new generation of Adjudicators believe it to be a trial specifically meant for them.”  She frowned. “Some of the elders as well.”

Sadie was well aware of the custom.  The idea was that, as Adjudicators, they were supposed to stay calm and focused in all circumstances.  So, going to a conflict-attuned world where the very atmosphere pushed them toward the edge was considered a tailor-made quest for their philosophy.

The only problem was that almost half of them failed and ended up succumbing to the bloodlust that pervaded that place.  Every now and again, one of the lost might return, having somehow halted their descent, but most would never be seen again, save for if someone ran into them on Misakar.

And those sorts of meetings never ended well.

“How long as he been there?” she asked.

“One year, seventeen days, and six hours,” answered Esther without skipping a beat.  “And a handful of seconds.”

“Do you think he’s lost?”

“I have no way of discerning that, Prime.”

Sadie almost sighed at the honorific.  At some point over the past few years, someone had decided that their organization needed an aesthetic overhaul.  That included labeling her the Prime Judge, which sounded just ridiculous enough that Sadie hadn’t been entirely certain if they were joking or not. 

They weren’t.

If the rest of the changes hadn’t been so necessary, she might have killed the entire idea.  As it was, she didn’t want to sunder their progress, so she had been forced to go along with the ridiculous honorific.

She still ground her teeth a bit every time someone referred to her as Prime, though.

In any case, she hadn’t really expected Esther to know the answer to her question.  Instead, she’d hoped for a personal opinion – a futile hope when it came to the Head Administrator.

“We need to put a stop to that, don’t we?”

“I believe we do,” Esther answered.

Sadie signed the last paper, then set her pen down.  “Okay.  Let’s make it a reward thing,” she said, having given the subject some thought over the past few weeks.

“Add it to the contribution store?”

Sadie nodded.  “Right.  We’ll pay for passage,” she said. “We will also have one of the veterans of Misakar teach a class about its dangers.  Only when they say their student is ready will we send them.  But don’t frame it like that.  Make it seem like we’re awarding them extra training opportunities.”

“Technically, we are,” Esther acknowledged.  She didn’t like dishonesty, but she was comfortable with using every tool available when it came to protecting the Adjudicators.  Often, Sadie wondered if her loyalty was to justice or to the organization.

“Right.  Technically.  This way, we’ll limit the entrants to people who really want to test themselves,” she reasoned.  “And we’ll prepare them as best we can for what they might face.”

“I will get –”

A knock at the door cut Esther off, which she didn’t like one bit.  Still, she primly turned around, crossed the austere office, and opened the massive oak door.  It had been carved with a representation of the tree at the center of the Temple of Virtue, and some artist had even copied a few lines from the Chorus of Angels onto the surrounding wood.

Sadie tried not to look at it, largely because she regarded her old efforts to have been vastly underdeveloped for what she intended.  Since then, she’d worked long and hard to expand upon her concept of justice and the way it related to the Chorus of Angels.  She had made some progress, too, and she had even managed to advance her core to the third tier.

Sadie knew she wasn’t a savant like Elijah, but she wasn’t trying to compete with him.  She was running a race against herself, and so long as the current version of her was better than the past, she was perfectly happy.

Or that was what she told herself.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she desperately wanted to pass him.

In any case, when Esther opened the door, she did so to reveal a young Adjudicator in his pristine armor.  He clearly hadn’t had it for very long, because when he stepped inside, he looked more than a little awkward.

He came to a noisy stop, then saluted Sadie with a fist to his chest.  The clang echoed through the office, like nails on a chalkboard.

“Prime,” he said, his voice quivering slightly.  Nervousness.  Fear.  Probably a little of both, Sadie allowed.

“What is it?” she asked, standing.  She wasn’t wearing her armor, but she didn’t need to.  Every single Adjudicator knew what she represented.

“There has been an incident in Ironshore,” he said.

“Has Elijah returned?”

“The Druid remains off planet,” the young man said without even a hint of a reaction.  Probably because he was too young to have even seen Elijah, much less to know what kind of a calamity he represented.  Sure, everyone had heard the stories of Bloodrock Bay or Meridian Lux, but they hadn’t been there to sift through the wreckage of a ruined city, knowing all the while that one man had destroyed it.

Sadie didn’t really blame Elijah for those particular actions.  In fact, by doing what he did, he had reminded everyone that the Adjudicators were the lesser of two very heavy boots that could find themselves to everyone’s necks.  They were reasonable.  They would listen to negotiations.  But Elijah?  If he decided to destroy your city, there really wasn’t anything any of them could do about it.

Sadie used that fear to establish a new order to the world.  With that hanging over everyone, people were quick to accept a few limitations.  Of course, her public relationship with Elijah made it all the easier.  After all, only a few people really knew enough details to know they weren’t together anymore.  For all most of the world’s leaders were aware, Elijah was only a message away.

She wasn’t proud of it, but Sadie hadn’t really corrected anyone’s perception in that arena.  It was just too useful to let people believe what they wanted to believe.

“What happened, then?” she asked.

“The dragons,” he said.  “One of them murdered someone.”

“Dammit,” Sadie sighed.  “Which one?  It was one of the deities, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes, Prime.”

Sadie let out a string of curses in Mandarin.  She never would have done so had it not been for the fact that no one in the order understood the language.  In fact, there weren’t very many people left in the entire world who could have understood her native tongue. 

All thanks to her brother’s horrible mismanagement of Hong Kong.  After his execution, the area had descended into chaos.  Sadie had attempted to bring order, but it quickly became apparent that she wasn’t welcome there.  Nor were the other Adjudicators. 

For a while, they managed to hang on, but eventually, war broke out amongst the necromancer clans.  Then, when one emerged victorious, it was to find that they were too weak to hold onto Hong Kong. 

The guilds moved in, forcing them out.  If they refused to leave, they were killed.  And not even the Adjudicators could stop them from doing so, largely because the necromancers had developed a terrible reputation for grave robbing.  And when they lacked ready materials for their necromantic arts, they were more than willing to kill whole villages and harvest their corpses.

In the end, Hong Kong had been abandoned by its former inhabitants, and the guilds had taken over the city.  Or more accurately, the Primal Realm.  For them, it was just another leveling resource.

The worst part about it was that Sadie didn’t even regret not acting.  When she’d visited the city, it had been everything she could do not to go on an avenging crusade against the necromancers.  Every single one of them stunk of death, and there weren’t many among them that Sense of Sin could tolerate.

Her lack of regret came with a degree of shame, though.

She’d worked through it, but every now and again, it came back to bite her.

“I’ll go myself,” she said. “Esther, get a squad together.  The best.  High demigods only.”’

“Yes, Prime Judge,” she said before hurrying away.  The messenger followed, leaving Sadie alone.  It wasn’t long before she’d crossed the office to the hidden compartment containing her sword and armor.  Donning it only took a few moments, largely because of how well-engineered the system of straps and harnesses were.  They practically fastened themselves.

Soon enough, she was striding through the expanded Temple of Virtue, fully armored and ready for a war.

Hopefully, that wasn’t what she would find when she arrived in Ironshore.

She reached the exit after only a couple of minutes, only to find eight other Adjudicators standing there waiting for her.  Each and every one of them had proven themselves time and time again.  They weren’t the deadliest in the order, but they were the ones she trusted the most. 

“We’re heading to the Spires,” she said.  “I’ll explain on the way.”

And so Sadie did.  Fortunately, getting to the Conclave Spires only took a minute or two, courtesy of the hovering discs they’d bought from one of Paris’s best Engineers.  They could move incredibly fast, which meant that the team of Adjudicators reached the Spires in short order.

Sadie didn’t even break stride as she entered the compound.  The Conclave employed powerful guards, but they knew better than to stand in the way of an Adjudicator, much less the Prime Judge.

Finally, Sadie reached the Spires themselves.

“Ironshore.  Now.”

The crowd had already dispersed, so the space mage didn’t have any excuse not to send them to their destination straight away.  So, Sadie and the others stepped between the half-moon shaped spires and waited for teleportation.

The activation went off without a hitch, and after only a second or two, Sadie smelled Ironshore’s salty atmosphere.  She breathed deeply, reminded of all the history she had with the place.  Good times, like that brief period after the first Primal Realm.  That was the honeymoon phase for her relationship with Elijah, and she remembered it more than fondly.

But Ironshore was also where she’d executed her own brother.  He had deserved it.  Many, many times over.  And she knew she should have done it much sooner.  Even knowing all that, Sadie couldn’t escape the guilt that came with killing her only remaining sibling.

Her only family, given that her grandfather had long since died as well.

She shook her head.  “Be ready.  We act swiftly and decisively.  This is a deity.  There can be no hesitation.”

“Yes, Prime,” they all said in unison.

That was all the assurance Sadie needed before she headed away from the Ironshore Conclave Spires and toward the city itself.