Ruthless: Path of Conquest

James opened his thoughtfully closed eyes, and a smile unfurled across his lips.

The Galts might be a weak link, he thought. I need to figure out how best to use them.

What’s the evil smile about, Master? asked Roscuro.

That made him discipline his expression in an instant. He was still outside, for the moment, having only briefly stopped to spy on the new arrivals. He didn’t want other people to see a creepy expression on his face and make their own assumptions about the reasons for it.

Cyrus and his right hand man, Christopher Smith, had given nothing away while James watched them. But some of the ordinary folks following Cyrus were already giving James little hints about what he was dealing with.

Evil smile? James replied. My good character is the stuff of legends!

The human and the Soul Eater shared a quiet internal laugh.

Then James opened his front door and ascended the stairs.

Mina was waiting in the living room, feeding the baby.

“How did it go?” she asked. “Did we make new friends?”

James shrugged and tilted his head back and forth uncertainly. He recounted his conversation with Cyrus and the interactions he had witnessed between the man’s followers using his Fisher King senses after he separated from them.

“Wait, so you can see anything that happens in the territory now?” Mina asked, raising an eyebrow.

He nodded. “Seems that way. My powers continue to grow with every Ruler I conquer.”

“Well, don’t you dare use it to look at other women,” she said, giving him a scowl.

“I didn’t even think of that,” he replied in an affronted tone.

They each maintained their pretended emotion for a few seconds before Mina cracked a smile. Then they both started snickering.

James took the baby from Mina, and they caught each other up on the events of the previous evening. Mina told James all about Zora and Alice’s contributions to the fight with the Wraiths. James told Mina about Sister Strange’s death, omitting the details of the visions the Wraith had shown him. They had both observed how, in the aftermath of the battle, some Wraiths had managed to flee from James’s Solar Ray attacks.

“So, exterminating the rest of them will probably be my first task of the new day,” James said. There was a weariness to his voice. He would have liked to take a nap now, or even simply lay down on the roof of the apartment building. With his Solar Recovery Skill, sunbathing for a few hours might be enough to restore him to full power.

He had not slept last night at all, unless one counted part of the struggle with Sister Strange as sleeping. This was after fighting and killing the Bat Queen.

No rest for the wicked…

“Do you have to go?” Mina asked.

“I can sense where they are,” James replied. “The Haunted Forest is my territory now, but they’re still lurking. I can’t have people wandering the territory, thinking they’re safe, when these creatures are still on the loose…”

He let his voice trail off.

Do I have to go myself, though?

“You thought of something?” Mina said.

James nodded quietly. “It might work.”

“Can you watch the baby while you do whatever you’re thinking of doing?” Mina asked. “I’ll make breakfast while you do.”

James nodded again. He waited for Mina to walk to the kitchen, out of sight.

Then he held baby James up to make eye contact with him.

“Hey Junior, you want to see something cool?” James whispered.

“Oo goo,” the baby replied with a serious expression.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” James said.

He set James Junior down on the floor and began imbuing power into his outermost layer of flesh. Then James started shedding his skin.

He shed five layers of skin over the course of the next ten minutes, with breaks in between as his body regenerated.

The baby watched, wide-eyed, as the layers of skin separated themselves from James’s body but remained connected to each other.

“There we go,” James muttered, looking at his handiwork. The remaining skin on his body was a raw reddish color. He knew it would be back to its normal shade in a few minutes, but the baby looked at him as if he was worried his father was going to die.

“Uh, don’t worry, son,” James said quietly. “I swear, it’s on our side!”

As he spoke, both father and child stared at the new creature James had created. He had decided to name it the Solar Glider, based on the fact that the only Skills he had seen fit to pass on to it were Solar Ray and Solar Recovery, and that like his other skin creatures, it could fly. The hulking monstrosity had a head with no teeth and a long tail, but the bulk of its creepy-looking body was in its wings.

I’m glad it worked, combining multiple layers of my skin like that, he thought.

The thought had struck him earlier that Solar Ray reliably killed Wraiths on contact. If James had more surface area, he could gather more solar power to charge that attack.

So, he devised a creature that should be more powerful in terms of that single Skill than James himself was.

James Junior pointed at the large monster, whose bulk made the living room look small, and he let out a noise that sounded like a giggle.

“Oh, you’re not scared,” James said, a little surprised. “Do you want to pet it?”

This is a good place for him to be, emotionally, when he sees a monster. He’ll spend his whole life living alongside them. It’s good that he’s not scared.

Baby James bobbed up and down, showing body language that felt a lot like a nod.

Does he actually understand what I’m saying? There’s no way, right? He’s not even a month old…

But the old rules of human life had been left behind somewhere in the past. James could not know for certain what was going on with his son. He would make certain to tell Mina about this behavior and ask if she had noticed anything similar.

James sent a mental command, and the Solar Glider crouched so that James Junior could pet it. And the baby did. He was surprisingly gentle. James thought his son was treating the giant monster as something like a pet.

Then he heard the door to the children’s room open.

Abhi stepped out, and before James could put his finger to his lips, the little boy was screaming.

“Monster!”

To Abhi’s credit, he rushed in to try to protect James Junior rather than running away.

James ordered the Solar Glider not to do anything and then watched, slightly stunned, as Abhi beat his skinny fists against the giant wings.

Then Mina rushed in, and James raised a hand.

“It’s all right, guys!” he said loudly, before she could unleash magical fire on the creature he had just created. “This thing is one of mine.”

After he had explained the purpose for the Solar Glider to everyone and sent the creature out to seek and destroy the remaining Wraiths—and praised Abhi for his courage, which had genuinely impressed James—they brought the younger children and Yulia into the dining area, and the whole family ate breakfast together.

The tabletop conversation was anarchic that morning.

Abhi excitedly relayed the story of what had happened between him and the Solar Glider to Indira and Yulia. James mentioned the new arrivals to Yulia and then shifted to telling her and Mina about a new idea he had, to build large, habitable fortifications around the core of the Fisher Kingdom. He also mentioned how the baby had seemed to understand some of what James said to him.

Yulia bounced back and forth between participating in Abhi’s conversation—the little boy wasn’t getting much back from Indira, who thought that Abhi was saying he had fought a dragon—and listening in on James and Mina’s dialogue.

“James, how did last night go?” Yulia asked when the two parallel conversations had hit a rare simultaneous dead spot. “When I arrived, I just saw a lot of people who needed help.”

“Well, we destroyed most of the evil spirits,” James said. “The creature that Abhi fought with earlier is taking care of the rest of them now.”

“I’m glad the mission was a success,” Yulia said, “and that you seem to be all right. Were there um, a lot of casualties?” She winced as she spoke, as if she thought she might have said something wrong.

James gave her a sad look.

“Most of the people who went into the forest are okay,” he replied. “You saw how many people were in bad shape afterward. I don’t know what’s happening with them at this moment. There were some dead, but not many. A small fraction of the hundreds who went in. But the people you were treating—the unconscious folks seem to still be unconscious. Or at least they haven’t moved from the community center, where we left them.”

Yulia frowned and nodded. “Should I—will you be asking for Healers to keep an eye on them, and keep working on it?”

“Rotter’s taking care of that,” James said. “You can go volunteer again if you feel like it, but I think we did what we could on the night in question. The rest might be up to them. I’ll go and check on the patients after we finish eating, of course.”

Yulia seemed a little relieved to hear that. And James felt good.

I’m taking care of the family and the Kingdom. Now, if only there was something I could do to help the fallen out.

His mind leaped suddenly to what his mother would be doing right now, with the bodies of the truly fallen. Would she be able to save them, after her fashion as a Necromancer? Should he have even asked her to try?

It was impossible to be certain. James was the King. In the midst of the exigencies of battle and its immediate aftermath, he had acted decisively and unilaterally. But if he was wrong, he would live to regret these decisions.

Need to check how things are going with Mom after I look in on the patients, he thought.

Once the meal was finished, Mina and Yulia cleared the table, with Abhi trailing after them, helping. James watched the smaller children for a little while until Abhi came back.

Then he said goodbye to everyone and went out again, to take another tally of the damage that Sister Strange’s ethereal army had done to his nascent country.

As he left the apartment, he saw the doors to the community center opening.

Striding through them, looking almost as weary as he had when James arrived at the aftermath of the battle, Dave Matsumoto instinctively squinted and blinked. His eyes needed time to get accustomed to the sudden exposure to the morning sun.

The doors started to swing shut behind him, but a pair of hands stopped them from closing. Two men stepped out after Dave.

“Wait a minute, Captain,” protested one of the men loudly.

James recognized them as two of the Healers he had met the previous night when he called for aid in the forest. Rajesh Gupta and Isaac Zirndorf. Just from looking at the gray-haired men, James had the feeling that they had both been doctors even before the System.

“Why?” Dave Matsumoto’s voice came out somewhere close to a growl, and the two Healers stepped back as if stung.

“We just want to examine you, make certain you’re all right,” began Gupta. “Most of them aren’t waking up—”

“All the more reason for you to get back to them,” Dave said. His voice sounded more civilized now. The undercurrent of violence had faded. He was trying to reason with them.

It was at that moment that James stepped in.

“Dave, I’m glad to see you’re awake,” he said.

“James,” Dave said, a little startled.

“Sir,” Gupta said.

Zirndorf remained silent but stiffened his posture as if he was about to salute or say the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Do you guys still need Dave for something?” James asked. “Seems like he should probably go home and get some rest. Right?”

“Right,” Gupta said a bit reluctantly.

“We were hoping to examine him, sir,” Zirndorf broke in.

Gupta let out a small grunt and looked at Zirndorf as if he wanted him to shut up.

“You’re hoping to figure out what’s special about him?” James guessed. “Because the others aren’t waking up?”

Dave’s eyes opened wider. “Was that why?” He turned his head and looked back and forth between Gupta and Zirndorf.

Gupta swallowed and looked down at the ground. “Yes, that was the main reason,” he said.

Dave stepped in closer to them, and James wondered for a moment if he was angry. But no. He could see something else in Dave’s posture.

Relief?

Gupta and Zirndorf flinched as if expecting a blow. What was visible to James was not obvious to anyone else.

“I’ll help in any way I can,” Dave said in a low, intense voice. “You should have said something fucking sooner. Come on.” He started to walk back through the doors of the community center. “Oh, shit.” He turned around, exhaled, and made eye contact with James. “Was there something you needed from me, sir?”

James resisted the urge to give Dave a big grin. He kept it to a small, thin smile instead. Buried in his goatee, one could almost think it was simply the shadow of the beard hairs playing over his lips rather than a change in his expression.

“There was not,” James said. “I came to check if you and everyone else was all right. I’m glad to know you’re in good physical condition.”

Dave nodded, and a flurry of microexpressions passed over his face.

Slight joy, sadness, and guilt, in that order, were predominant.

“Yes sir,” Dave said simply. “Thanks to you.”

James nodded, and Dave left with the two Healers.

I need to watch him, James thought. He could not know what was in Dave’s mind, but the man’s reaction to having awakened alive and in one piece was troubling. I hope he’s not too guilty that he survived while others died. I can’t have him killing himself or something. He did so much for his fellow soldiers back there—and for me.

James shook his head and followed through the doors before they could close behind the other men.

What he saw made him frown.