Surprisingly, the answer I needed didn’t need long to arrive. I was seeking pretty much the same things that Master Kostis had said in his reply, but not here. Not right now. So what I said wasn’t a lie at all.

  “I want—” I cleared my throat and spoke louder. Firmer. “I want to free the Councillor from whatever you’ve done to her.”

  “Is that so? For what reason?”

  “Because I came here to stop the Blight Swarm without having to sacrifice anyone, and if there’s anything I can do to stop an unneeded death, then I won’t hesitate.”

  We stood and stared at each other for a long time. Maybe I should have been soothed by the fact that the Paragon wasn’t immediately trying to obliterate me like he had tried to do with Kostis. I couldn’t relax, though. Not in front of a man who could wipe me out of existence with hardly a thought.

  “Without sacrificing anyone, eh?” he mused. “Does that include yourself?”

  I really didn’t get this guy. The way he was questioning everyone about their wants, I figured he was trying to judge who should be spared his malice. Since, apparently, he had been sent here by something or other to judge everything in the vicinity.

  For a second, I had started to think that replying with an answer that was seemingly selfless would put me in the clear, but of course, that was shallow thinking.

  I shook my head. “I said I won’t hesitate to do what’s needed. I’ve Sacrificed a lot. Even parts of myself. Literally. If that’s what’s needed now, then…” I grinned. “I’ve got practice.”

  “I see. Then how about this?” He held out his hand like he was offering me a deal I’d be stupid to refuse. “I will release this Councillor of yours. In return, I’ll take one small part of you with me.”

  “And you’ll leave after?” I asked. “You won’t return what you took only to destroy and kill us all in the next moment?”

  “Believe me, interloper, I am not one to go back on my word. I do hate liars, and I am not in the business of hating myself. So what will it be? Are you ready to surrender what you hold dear to get what you want? Isn’t that what sacrificing is really all about?”

  I considered it for a second. “That depends on what you’ll be taking.”

  “True. It always depends, doesn’t it?” It was the Paragon’s turn to consider for a few moments. “How about I take a leg?”

  I did my best not to show any reaction, but I felt my soul shrivel. There was no reason for me to accept. Well, there hadn’t been to begin with. Was losing a leg worth the life of Se-Vigilance? Did I care that much about a woman I had interacted with only a handful of times? Was I biased in favour of this sacrificial exchange because we’d had friendly, positive meetings?

  Because if it had been someone else, someone innocent but someone I didn’t know, would I immediately reject this deal?

  Once again, I was reminded of the time I had been summoned here against my will. Of the time I had allowed Escinca to die, Sacrificing his very heart to gain the power I needed to defeat my foe. Of the time I had ripped open Tural’s chest, beat him to a pulp, traumatized him for who knows how long.

  I wasn’t regretting any of that right now. It wasn’t that regret didn’t exist for them. Rather, now wasn’t the time for regret.

  No. Now was the time I realized each and every single one of those instances were all sacrifices too.

  Willing or unwilling, coerced or otherwise, every moment that the Heart Demon had used to assault me was when I had given something up. Wasn’t that the essence of Sacrifice? I had given up my past home, given up the life of the one who had possessed more faith in me than even I had, given up my own moral compunctions as the circumstances had demanded.

  In the face of all that, what the fuck was a single leg worth?

  I stood resolute. “Deal,” I said.

  A blue tattoo writhed off the Paragon’s shoulder to drip down to the ground, before slithering over to me. Bile rose up my gullet and my whole body was screaming at me to run. To get away. To decline the offer while I still had time and save my leg before—

  The navy energy spread around my foot, then curled up my leg until everything beneath the knee was encased in a cast of glowing azure energy.

  I placed the top of my hand in my mouth, gritting my teeth against the skin and meat there. “And the rest?”

  “Fear not, interloper. The very first person I told the words don’t lie to was myself.”

  His threads, enormous, blisteringly bright, bulging with power, thundered out from his body. A storm of the huge writhing blue tendrils twisted and warped everywhere. My eyes went wide. He had unleashed them all. The Paragon was returning everything he had seemingly consumed.

  “What—?”

  My question didn’t even fully materialize, especially when I didn’t even hear myself over the din of energy. Especially when the thick thread encasing my leg pulled away.

  With my leg in tow.

  The agony turned my whole world red. I screamed hard enough to rip my own vocal cords as I chomped bloodily down on my hand, using the only remaining bit of my consciousness not focused on the pure torture of losing a leg on Sacrifice.

  [ Sacrifice

  You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Experience of Pain. Windfall bonus activated.

  Reward: Pain Sense Control: Modifiable threshold of pain sense by up to 4x for 4 hours ]

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The shock that almost made me black out went down immediately as I pushed my Sacrifice reward to its maximum threshold. No pain. After what the Paragon did to me, to my leg, even if it had been for mere seconds, I never wanted to feel agony ever again.

  Of course, the reality wasn’t so cushy and ideal. The pain wasn’t completely gone. My leg was what was fucking gone, a small waterfall of blood emerging from where it had been. But I couldn’t focus on it. Not when the bastard Paragon hadn’t just released the Councillor but had vomited out every single thing he had eaten since arriving here.

  And his threads were still going wild, lashing out at everything, destroying the Nether Vein itself with his insane power.

  “You still stand!” the Paragon said. I couldn’t tell if he was amused or amazed. Or both. “The more I see of you, the more I understand why you of all people are here. Why you stand before me while all others are gone. Why you were the mess I was supposed to clean up.”

  “You promised,” I said through gritted teeth. “You said you would—”

  “You don’t have to remind me, interloper. I know what I promised. I said I’d let your precious burden go. Which I have. I also promised to leave afterwards, so I shall.”

  His eyes almost lazily flickered to where my leg was gone. “Fair fortune to you doing the same.”

  And then, he disappeared. Just like that. The threads retracted back into him in the space of a couple of heartbeats, and space itself seemed to compress upon him before he was gone. There was no trace of him left at all. I knew he was gone because I couldn’t sense that oppressive aura any longer. That incredible, overwhelming pressure wasn’t trying to crush me into fleshy putty anymore.

  I wanted to take a few moments to centre myself. The sheer shock of losing a limb like that was making my thoughts terribly sluggish. I needed to come to terms with it.

  But the Nether Vein was collapsing. The world was falling apart. I had to act.

  My mind was turning woozier by the second. The only reason I was still standing was because I had used Gravity to staunch the blood flow. With the wonder of Pain Sense Control, my mind was still mine despite my horrific wound, letting me keep my body light with Siphon while I combined it with Field Manipulation to keep the debris from falling on me.

  Siphon was also vastly reducing the blood loss, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  Although I did keep my eye on one “debris”. The Councillor had been spat out at some point pretty far from me. I saw her land in a heap, glimmering blood pooling around her body.

  The sight made me curse. Was she even alive? Had I really sacrificed a whole leg just to drag a corpse back to Zairgon?

  If we even made it out of the collapsing Nether Vein. The lightness via Siphon was all that helped me get to the fallen Councillor as fast as I did. I wasn’t even maintaining any semblance of balance or posture on one leg, especially not when every little motion was causing vicious pain to lance up the remainder of my limb in an effort to paralyze my whole body.

  It would have been so much worse if I hadn’t had Pain Sense Control.

  A quick second Field Manipulation on my gloved hand was what got me to Se-Vigilance. She was a real mess. I couldn’t even begin to tell if she was alive, and I certainly wasn’t about to waste time trying to find a pulse or something. For all I knew, Se-Targa biology didn’t even have the pulse points I was familiar with from human bodies.

  All I did just then was pull up Se-Vigilance onto my shoulder. That was all the time I had. Even though the bugs that had been consumed by the Paragon were dead, they were still raining down all over the area.

  Then there was the Nether Vein’s entire chamber crumbling around us. Chunks of metal tore off the cavern’s walls and ceiling to crash onto the similarly metallic floor with deafening clangs.

  Field Manipulation with Siphon was preventing anything within my vicinity from collapsing right on top of me. Once they were caught in the artificial anti-gravity field, their plummet slowed, allowing me to forge onwards in relative peace. Peace I needed because hopping forward with one leg while the stump of the missing one bled out wasn’t exactly easy.

  I was starting to curse my lack of real choices. The ideal option would have been to get down, tie up my leg to fully stop the bleeding, then keep moving.

  As it was, I just focused on carrying the possibly-dead Councillor along while I tried to use Granular Control to drag a makeshift prosthetic of metal to my bleeding stump. No doubt it was supremely unhealthy, but it wasn’t like I had time to waste.

  Despite my best efforts, the blood loss was starting to target my consciousness. If I didn’t get out in time, not only would Se-Vigilance die, but so would I. Screw that Paragon’s eyeballs with a rusty fork.

  It wasn’t surprising at all that I collapsed. I had managed to create a weird peg-leg with the metal particles pulled free from the floor, but it hadn’t been enough. Not surprising. I had no practice in healing, in using my powers creatively to do medical things such as staunching blood flows or cauterizing wounds or whatever it was.

  All that had kept me going for this long was the fact that the direction of blood loss was straight downwards, so I could manipulate gravity to vastly reduce the flow.

  I forced my body to float, forced Field Manipulation with Siphon to keep me airborne while little blasts of Flare with its Concentration Affix kept me and my burden moving forward. It was harder when I had to carry someone significantly larger than me.

  But the fact that I couldn’t lighten the Councillor directly was actually good. It meant she was still alive. I wasn’t dragging a corpse along with me.

  For all that I was ready for chunks of the ceiling crashing down on me, what I hadn’t thought about was the floor giving way. It cracked, and my panicked, pain-riddled, barely conscious brain really couldn’t do anything more than just curse the Paragon yet again. Because as the floor broke, Field Manipulation shattered as well, ruining my artificial field of repulsive force.

  The first metal chunk that crashed into me and the Councillor sent us painfully plummeting into the void that had opened up under the Nether Vein’s broken floor. What in the world was this thing made over?

  But we only fell for perhaps a few seconds—during which I had screamed my lungs out, naturally—before our descent slowed down. A warm, prismatic glow enveloped me and Se-Vigilance. Feathers that looked like they were made of pearls criss-crossed around us in a little protective cage. I forgot to breathe for a second as I watched her powers put a stop to our fall.

  “Rest easy, Interpreter Moreland,” Se-Vigilance said. “You’ve done more than enough.”

  “I almost thought you were dead,” I wheezed out. The words came with difficulty. My mind was really starting to rebel against the oppressive, agonizing consciousness I was forcing upon it. “Or close enough.”

  I tried to look up at her bleeding, broken form and see for myself if she really was alive. Well, she was since we were talking, but my pain-delirious brain didn’t want to believe it easily.

  “Close enough, but not quite,” she said. Then she laughed. “I had not expected my first meeting with a Paragon to be so overly climactic for me.”

  I recalled the brief talks we’d had about things like the Nether Vein and the Ascendants. I wondered if she was disappointed that it was now rather obvious how these people could have been responsible for the lack of a sun, for the missing rain and wind and warmth, for all the plants and animals and prosperity Ephemeroth would never see again.

  Then the pain hit me again. A violent flash of agony worming up my leg, numbness following soon after. It was almost scary.

  “I cannot heal you,” Se-Vigilance said as we began floating back upwards. Debris was still raining on us, but her Jade-ranked cage was more than a match. “But I can put your body in a stasis that will staunch the flow of blood. At least until a real healer can get to you. So you need not worry. Just give in. You can trust me. After all, I owe you my life.”

  I fought back against the call of darkness for a bit. Se-Vigilance was right. If I could trust her, then I didn’t need to keep struggling. But then, it looked like the Weave had decided I had done enough too.

  [ Rank Up!

  Your Vitality Attribute has risen by one Rank.

  Vitality: Gold III ]

  Ah, alright. Now I could let temporary oblivion claim me. Especially since the scaly, winged bastard who had abandoned me against the Paragon had finally returned to help carry us back.