Ruthless: Path of Conquest

When the morning light hit her face, Mina felt better able to continue their conversation.

She also noticed the possible increased gravity hitting her immediately, she thought. That, and something else in the air. Not a smell or a taste. Nothing she could put her finger on easily. She decided to think about whatever it was later.

James was already awake. After they exchanged “Good morning”s and kisses, she launched right into what they’d been talking about yesterday.

“So, you think the Earth increased in size?” Mina said. “Or the Earth’s matter is denser?”

“I don’t know for sure,” James said. “But I can tell you that the distance between the buildings seems like a clue. The fact that they seemed to have moved. And there are creatures under my control, flying creatures—you remember the severed hand creature from yesterday? Well, I have some balloon monsters made from my skin. Anyway, I have them scouting the skies. They’re just supposed to give me the dimensions of the regions they’re flying over. I just wanted the very basic lay of the land.”

“Okay. What did your magical flying skin scouts tell you?” Mina couldn’t help but find the image of monsters made of James’s skin flying around grotesquely funny.

James smiled in response to her question. “They should have reached the beach by now on each side,” he said. “But instead they’re still flying over land. It’s a lot bigger than it was.”

“Any other world-shattering revelations while I was asleep?” Mina asked.

“Yulia wanted to call your sister Elena and make sure she was okay, but her phone died while she was sleeping. Naturally, I wanted to check on my Mom and Alice, too. So I took my phone out of my magic satchel—”

“You mean the Small Bag of Deceptive Dimensions?”

“If you like,” he said with a shrug. “Anyway, cell service doesn’t work anymore. Just like before Orientation. So we’ll have to make do with whatever technology we can make. I stuck my phone back in my magic satchel—” She stuck her tongue out. He smirked. “—so that should save the battery.” She wondered for a moment if her other sisters were okay, but James was already moving onto another subject, and she resolved to think about that later. “The first task once we start the day is going to be dealing with our neighbors. Then maybe we install some plumbing. That was the main thing about the structure of our building that I couldn’t figure out when I copied it to make this. For right now, though, why don’t we start by going over everything that happened in Orientation?”

Mina nodded. This would hopefully answer several questions she’d been wondering about. But she would let James take his time telling the story of his experience.

“I’ll go first,” she said. She launched into a thorough, chronological retelling of Orientation as she and Yulia had experienced it.

The narrative was interrupted a few times. Occasionally, James reacted. He expressed his strong approval of how Mina handled the first challenge.

Next, the baby started fussing, and Mina realized that he wanted to be fed. Then Mina’s stomach started rumbling, and James went up onto the roof of the building to build a fire and cook her some monster meat he had stored in his Small Bag of Deceptive Dimensions. The story paused at that point until James went around the apartment and made sure everyone was fed.

When they resumed, and she came to the challenges where she and Yulia had been separated, she made sure to say that for the full story, he’d have to talk to her.

Despite the interruptions, she gradually managed to get the whole story out.

When she reached the part where she was shoved into a wall and began going into labor, James’s face turned a bit scary. She couldn’t help but smile. The man who’d done that was lucky Cara had killed him. If her husband had gotten to him, she could imagine James doing worse than just murdering them.

As she recounted the ensuing part where she gave birth, safely and without apparent complications, James relaxed again and put an arm around her and the baby.

“I’m glad that Cara girl was there to help you out and take care of those guys,” he said. “When I meet her, I’ll have to thank her.”

Mina suppressed a look of sadness at that. She quickly moved on to the part of the story where she discovered Cara was a killer.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” James said. “Were you okay?”

She assured him that she was, or at least she would be, and she finished the story.

“Incredible,” James said. He was smiling. “Yeah, you’ll be alright. You’re amazing. You did all that, solved a series of murders with literally no clues except the way the System works, and you became so proficient in magic that you got a blessing from a goddess of magic. I don’t know how a little death could keep you down.”

“It was more than just a little death,” she said, but she was smiling even as she shook her head. How did he do this? He was making light of literal mass murder, but he could still make her smile. It felt almost as if they’d never been apart.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said. “What happened to you?”

James took a deep breath. It was time for him to share his half of the story.

—

So much to tell, he thought. Mina was so concise, but I can tell that she really told me everything she could remember that might be important. I even feel like I have a sense for the people she met and how they connect to each other.

He still didn’t think of himself as much of a storyteller, despite having a blessing from Anansi. Back when he’d needed to go to a job every day, he would tell Mina things about it, but only when she asked. The bitter distaste of his job was part of the reason he was reluctant, but he also didn’t feel the need to share as much verbally as she did. Eventually, since most of his stories were about how much he disliked his work, or simply had no passion for it, she learned to stop asking. That kept them both in a better mood.

It was around the time that she’d figured that out, he realized for the first time, that she first suggested they have a baby. He instantly wondered if the reason she’d come up with that was just to give him something happier to think about.

The idea of having kids was something they’d discussed before, but given when she broached it, he felt fairly certain that he was onto something about the timing.

So as he began to recount his own experiences, he had a smile on his face.

It quickly faded, as he remembered the story began with a bloodbath. But he tried to put a pleasant face on his journey even while leaving nothing important out in his retelling. Rather than emphasizing the horror of a pack of wolves tearing into the unprotected population on the first day, he tried to focus on how clever he was in seeing the attack coming and getting away. Even so, he expected some parts of the story to repulse her.

In particular, when he had eaten part of a human body and fed part of a human body to Tim in the forest, he imagined that Mina would react with horror. She hadn’t seemed too bothered or even surprised when he mentioned fighting and killing the group that accompanied the Corpse Eater. But given her experience with Cara and her monsters, he thought actual cannibalism might be too horrifying for her to accept.

Before he realized it, his voice had trailed off. The room turned silent as he stared at her expectantly. It took her a moment to notice.

“Why did you stop the story?” she asked.

“I guess I wasn’t sure what your reaction would be to everything,” he said. Especially those last bits, where I ate a piece of a human body and fed some to a teenager… She seemed to be taking it all in calmly, but considering the circumstances of her own adventure, that was surprising.

“I’m relieved that you survived it all, skapi,” she said. “And I’m glad that you’re not a Wendigo. You acquired the Cannibalism Talent, you said, because the System judged you for the things you did years ago. I don’t care that you ate human flesh—” She stopped herself and frowned. “Honestly, it is a little disgusting to think about. But it wasn’t my flesh. It wasn’t the body of anyone we care about. I won’t judge you for doing it—or even for tricking that teenager into eating it too.” Her face took on a slightly morbid smile. “It sounds like he almost victimized you, from the way you told the story.” James nodded along. “Anyway, the last person in the world you need to worry about judging you is me. All I was hoping for from Orientation was that all three of us would survive. Even if you killed everyone else in your Orientation so that you could escape alive, I would just be happy that you made it out.”

James let his body sag with relief. Mina was the only person whose judgment he truly valued. She accepted him. All was right with the world.

She sensed his tension and put an arm around him. They lay together quietly on the bed for a while, her hand stroking his hair softly, until she noticed something.

“Skapi, don’t move,” she said. “There’s a spider on your head. I’ll just—”

“No, wait,” James said, half-rising. “That’s actually Hester. She’s a friend.”

“Please don’t crush me,” Hester said in her tinny voice. That made both James and Mina smile. The little spider changed the mood in an instant.

“A pleasure to meet you,” Hester added. “I’m a big fan! I guess it sounds weird to say I’ve heard a lot about you, when I’ve been sitting on James’s ear the whole time you explained your story.”

“A little bit weird, yes,” Mina replied, giving James a rather uncomfortable stare.

He looked away and pretended not to notice it. Okay, that was a mistake, he thought. I genuinely forget she’s there sometimes, though!

Fortunately, Hester resumed talking. After brief introductions, the mood had changed. Finally, he felt ready to resume the story.

When James recounted the events of the Spider Queen fight, Mina looked a bit sadder than he expected. He could tell that she felt the Queen’s loss of her children more deeply than she had any of the human deaths in the story thus far. Even though she kept silent, her face was an open book to him.

He arrived at the part with Anansi’s descent, and she took on a knowing look. Based on her interactions with Hecate, he knew she had already heard about his Chosen One blessing.

But he still had more surprises to come. When he explained what happened with the Moloch cult, she looked as disturbed as she had been discussing the Wendigo threat. She took his hand when he explained his decision to kill the pregnant woman the cultists were tormenting. She could tell that this was the most difficult part of the story for him to relive.

In the later parts of the story, she smiled at his triumphs, both over the cult and against the remaining monsters of Orientation. She seemed especially intrigued when he mentioned that he now had control of a wolfpack, the leader of which had contacted him telepathically while he was telling the story.

“My conquering hero,” she said, kissing him tenderly on the lips. “Somehow I knew you would make everything right in the end. It was nice that your story had such a happy ending. Thank you for telling me.”

James couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was dwelling on the losses in her own Orientation as she said those last two sentences. He decided to distract her with the final revelation. The one last thing he’d been worried she would judge him for, though now that concern seemed silly.

“I received several power-ups for defeating the primary antagonist of the Orientation,” he said. “One of them was a Skill that my body couldn’t contain. It threatened to destroy me. The System said I needed to lose a Skill, or my ‘vessel,’ meaning my body, would shatter.” He held up his left hand and showed her his ring finger. “So I used my Skill Transfer ability, and I moved the Skill into my ring.”

She looked at it curiously, leaning in to take in the slight changes in his wedding ring’s appearance. Then she looked back up at him and gave him her glowing smile. “Is it strange if I say that it sounds sweet?” she asked. “I know it was a desperation move, so you probably didn’t have much time to think about it. You were about to die. It’s just that, I know this was the most natural place for you to put some important superpower, if you had to store it in any object that wasn’t your body. Since I know you never take your ring off.”

A few drops of liquid seemed to condense in James’s eye for some reason, but Mina was looking down at the crown etched into the Ring of the Sovereign again, so he was able to quickly wipe them away with his other hand.

I must have been a really good guy in another life or something, to deserve you, he thought.

He kissed her again, long and deep. They exchanged a look of shared understanding. Then he brought James, Junior over to Yulia and the other children to watch for a while, and he politely asked Hester to hang out on the ceiling in the living room. He even removed the Soul Eater Orb from where it sat, attached to his bicep in the form of an arm band. He put that into his magic satchel.

He needed to spend some time truly alone with his wife.

—

Afterward, Mina ignored the thin sheen of sweat on her body and wrapped the wolf furs around herself. She curled up close to James, almost ready to sleep again, until a thought occurred to her.

Not an urgent thought, perhaps, but it seemed important, given the context he’d given her earlier.

“What sort of Skill did you transfer into the ring, anyway?” she asked.

“It’s called Dominion,” he replied.

He explained what Dominion did, and then added that he’d experienced Job Evolution after the final boss fight he mentioned. Then he went into how his new Skills from becoming the Fisher King complemented Dominion.

“I see,” she said, still a bit sleepily. Though she couldn’t completely grasp all of the interconnections between James’s new Skills, it sounded to her like he would be able to exert complete control over land within some defined territory. “When are you going to try out the new Skill?” she asked.

“Oh, I already did,” he replied. He seemed lively and energetic, as usual. She didn’t know how, but in these moments in bed, it seemed almost as if energy left her body and drained into his. His face took on a slightly guilty look. “I tried it last night, as you were falling asleep. It used up a lot of Mana, but I recharged overnight. I think it’ll probably be a once daily thing for me. That way I can keep up a steady pace of expansion.”

She pushed herself upright slightly, to keep from falling asleep. “Well, this time, you have to show me,” she said. “Maybe I can learn it by looking at you, and we’ll be twice as dangerous.”

Mina did not bother to add, Plus, I’m imagining that it looks cool!

“There’s probably not much to see,” James said, but he half-smiled as he spoke the words.

He raised his left hand theatrically in the air, and he said the Skill name aloud, which she knew was completely unnecessary. “Dominion.”

The ring glowed orange like it was being forged in fire. And a huge surge of dark-colored Mana enveloped his body in an instant and pulsed outward in all directions.

Mina sat up all the way, wolf furs forgotten as she looked at him in shock.

I didn’t just see that. I felt that, she thought. I felt it in my bones. And she remembered. I knew I felt something different when I woke up this morning. I thought there was something in the air. Now I know there was. His Mana. His energy. The power of Dominion.

It was a heavy, thick aura that she felt slightly more intensely now than she had before. She’d never felt raw Mana from someone other than herself before. Only seen Mana used in magic. This was something else. When it hit her, it was like a wave of incredibly dense fog.

I knew he could change the environment, but to feel that. It was so intense…

Afterward, he breathed as if he’d just done some heavy exercise. And it did seem draining. Though the movement of Mana was almost too quick and sudden for her eyes to track—so quick that she still wasn’t sure what color it was other than something dark—it was obvious to Mina that the quantity he’d used was substantially higher than whatever he’d expended to make the building they were in.

There was also something different to the quality of his voice as he spoke the Skill name. Although she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, the intensity of the sound made her feel as if she was back in Hecate’s chamber beneath the stadium from the final challenge.

That was it. It felt a bit like a god was speaking.

Mina didn’t voice that thought. She wondered if it was blasphemous, although she wasn’t sure if she cared. From James’s story, it didn’t seem as if gods and goddesses were truly omnipresent or omniscient, the way myths had often tried to depict them. Then again, there was no need to tempt fate. And she didn’t want to say something like that unless she was certain.

“Well, impressed?” he asked once he’d caught his breath.

She nodded, uncertain of her voice. She was more than impressed. This power, she felt certain, would transform their lives.

She breathed in and out deeply, then finally tried to speak. “Wuddya—ahem, sorry. What do you plan to do with this power?”