Ruthless: Path of Conquest

James slept for a full eight hours, missing most of the day after the battle.

When he woke, Mina was lying next to him.

As he stirred, she rose up, left the room, and brought him a tray of food.

When did we get that? he wondered silently.

But he ate and quickly forgot about the question of where the tray had come from.

“I was starting to worry you were the last casualty of the battle,” Mina said, trying to sound light and funny. The humor fell flat, because she clearly meant what she was saying more than she had intended to let on.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said slowly, making eye contact as he spoke. “I just tired myself out—”

“Saving people, yes, I know,” Mina said. “I can still worry. You didn’t say anything about this beforehand.”

“It was sort of impulsive,” James admitted. “Alice told you about it?”

She shook her head. “No, Rotter. He visited half an hour ago to check how you were. I told him you were napping peacefully.”

“Rotter?” James frowned. “How does he even know?”

Mina gave him an amused look. “I think he makes it his business to know things that might be of interest to you, but you should understand, this isn’t a Rotter thing. Everyone knows what you did. They’re all talking about it. The miracle worker.” Her lips curled into a playful smile. “Even those religious folks we just welcomed. They’re apparently talking about you like you’re the Second Coming.”

“Is that so?” James asked. He smiled and tried to affect modesty “I guess I should have known.”

“People here are always interested in what their leader is up to. Couple that with what happened in the forest last night. A fresh crisis, post-Orientation, after they thought they might be safe. The good thing is that you combined both topics and changed what would have been a tragedy into a story of hope.”

“The way you say it, it’s very nice,” James said. “Anything from the people whose friends or family members actually died in the forest?”

Mina’s smile slowly drooped. “No, not yet. Not many people died, though, you remember. Of those who did, not many had family members. According to Rotter, among the people who had family members that we know of, there are only three people to talk to. The other two are in a coma.”

“Okay.” James nodded, then sighed. “Thank you for the update.”

I look forward to having those conversations…

“Guess I’ll go and revive some more people,” James continued.

Mina shook her head. “Wait until tomorrow, skapi. Let your body recover. While you were out, Yulia tried to use healing magic on you. It didn’t do anything. So you have to be careful using your blessing this way.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go back in the morning. This has to get done, though.”

“You’ll get no argument from me. The people want their savior. I just don’t want you to die so they can have him.”

She smiled at James, then, but it seemed to him there was little joy in it.

In the morning, James got up, ate breakfast, slowly revived twenty people, and was helped back to the apartment.

Several days passed, in which this became the routine.

His blessing was effective each time he used it. The only flaw was that the process of blessings was slow and energy intensive.

A few people were intubated by Gupta and Zirndorf, but most of them did not have to be. Regular infusions of healing magic seemed to delay the onset of starvation, and with James ‘miraculously’ waking a score of sleepers each day, the population in the community center had soon shrunk to a manageable size. While James was sleeping off the effects of his energy expenditure, Mina ran the Kingdom.

Fortunately, there was little that needed to be decided during those few days. People were licking their wounds, slowly recovering from the battles James had led them into, trying to find ways to contribute to the Kingdom.

James used some of the little bit of downtime he had where he was not unconscious to visit the handful of family members of those who had died.

He had decided that the matter of the resurrection of the dead was something that he should seek permission for, if he could. He sent a message to his mother accordingly, instructing her to work on raising those who had no families before she looked at people whose loved ones might object to the desecration of their bodies.

The conversations were awkward, but on each occasion, he managed to get permission to at least attempt to raise the fallen as an intelligent, independent undead. None of the handful of people consulted were very religious, which helped. James could not imagine how this conversation would have gone if they had been.

The only other break from the routine of waking, eating, healing, and sleeping again was when James went to see his mother.

She had erected a small building just after the battle. The exterior was covered in strange runes that made him feel slightly uncomfortable when he looked at them.

Nevertheless, he needed an update on what had happened since he asked for Zora’s help, so he knocked.

James had to knock several times, increasingly loudly each time, before his mother finally opened the door.

“I’m glad to see you’re all right, Your Majesty,” she said, her eyes twinkling with mirth. “I heard you’ve been napping a lot. When I heard that, I was worried at first, but then I remembered, that was how you were as a baby, too. Quiet, sleeping a lot, conserving energy.”

“I’m surprised you’ve heard anything, Mom,” James replied. “I was under the impression you hadn’t been out of here much since you went in.”

Or since you suddenly built this place.

“Nice work on the building, by the way,” he added.

“Oh, thank you!” Zora said. “My natural affinity was for earth magic, you know, before I adopted my particular specialization.” She looked around at the outside for a moment as if scanning for anyone who might be watching them. “You should come in, son.”

James walked inside the dark building. Inside, it was lit only by candle light and by mystic runes dug into the wall that glowed with unwholesome energy.

He could still tell that the interior was larger than it looked on the outside, because the bulk of the structure was underground.

Though he did not walk down any steps initially, she led him down a dark hallway with a downward sloping floor. He recognized that they had quickly moved below ground level.

Finally, they emerged into a vast, dimly lit room that reminded James of the interior of a morgue—or what a morgue looked like on network television, at least. The space was larger and more open than a morgue—perhaps because Zora did not need to put the bodies away anywhere. They lay out in the open, resting on stone slabs, in various states of modification.

None of the corpses, James noted, had begun to noticeably decompose. None of them gave off any odor. It was obviously unnatural, as if they were in a state of suspended animation.

“I’m impressed you were able to dig such a large basement in Florida without hitting an underground aquifer or something,” he said, avoiding the topic he had come here to discuss.

“Magic finds a way, son,” she replied. “If you’re interested, maybe I can show you one of these days.”

“I’m not a Necromancer,” James said.

“Not yet,” his mother said. “You haven’t tried it. Even if you don’t learn any Skills from reading the book that I’ve been using, your wife could pick up my abilities by watching me, and she could trade them to you. That’s how her Quick Study works, right?”

James nodded, his eyes still moving from corpse to corpse. There was a strange quality to the atmosphere around him. It wasn’t just that it was creepy being in the presence of all the dead bodies. He had seen far too many cadavers before to be as bothered as he might have been pre-System.

Rather, he had the distinct impression that something else was in the room besides himself and his mother. Some presence inside of one of the bodies, or perhaps more than one. His instincts could not tell him for certain. Nothing moved within the room. That, he would have sensed.

But something made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“Did you come for an update, then?” she asked.

James realized he had stood staring at the bodies for a few seconds now, while his mother stood waiting for him to answer her question. He wondered if he was making her uncomfortable. He guessed she already felt how prone people were to judging her Class.

“I did,” he said. “I wanted to know if you’re able to do anything with the dead, to help them in any way, and if not, I’d like us to get ready to bury the bodies.”

“I’ve been working on them, but I hit a roadblock. To create intelligent undead—undead who have some degree of personal dignity, rather than being mere puppets—”

James nodded. This was exactly what he had asked for.

“—you need special items or Skills to bring them to life and keep them alive,” she finished.

“I guess you don’t have those yet,” he said.

She shook her head. “No such luck. I could afford to buy a couple of the items from the System Store, but I was going to ask you if you had some spare credits I could use to increase the number. Otherwise, most of these bodies aren’t going anywhere except the ground.”

“How are you keeping them, um, in such great condition?” he asked.

“It’s this place. The magic runes. Keeping the souls from escaping. Preventing decay. That was my first task, and I’m proud that I accomplished it for most of them. I can’t tell for sure which ones I might have failed with.”

“I see. Well, at least you have your workshop set up for future purposes,” James said.

He could see the disgusting and abhorrent side of what his mother was doing, and the very nature of her Class probably would have creeped him out if it was not someone he loved and trusted implicitly.

But Zora was one of the people he trusted most in the world.

“How many System Credits do you need?” he asked.

She told him.

The amount was more than he had left, and he said so.

But he agreed to give her as much as he could.

Money was worthless except to improve people’s lives, after all.

If he did not use it to keep some of his loyal citizens in the world of the living, a better use of his money was not likely to come around in the future. His wife had already said, quite directly, that she did not want to be raised from the dead if she were to fall.

He transferred the money to her and left his mother to her own devices once again.

The pattern of days continued until James’s Blessing of the Fisher King reached level five. At that point, he unlocked Mass Blessing of the Fisher King, a much less energy-intensive way of doing what he had been doing.

James woke the remaining coma patients in just two days with that Skill.

There was much rejoicing, much talk of the miracles that James had performed, and great appreciation for his performance as King, though he could not honestly say he was certain that he deserved it.

James went to see his mother again, and Zora reported that she had succeeded in raising just over half of the fallen from death, creating fourteen new Vampires. They would remain underground with her until James figured out how to reintroduce them to the community—or how to use them outside of the Fisher Kingdom. He knew this was something he would have to play very delicately.

With the dead either raised as monsters or finally, definitively dead—some had apparently refused to come back, by Zora’s account, while others had willingly returned to their bodies—and the other survivors all finally awoken from their coma, life could move on.

There was no longer a reason to wait to hold a military funeral for all those who had permanently died.

Sadly, the ones who had refused to come back were among those dead whose family members had given permission to resurrect them.

James had to visit those families and break their hearts with the bad news all over again.