In a bath, she made bubbles with her mouth sunk beneath the surface.
She felt like she’d gotten scammed, but she didn’t know how yet.
Yes, let’s summarize.
She’d been led to some sort of quarters made probably for guests where the cult leader had left her, asking her in an unreasonably reasonable way how she shouldn’t destroy her room nor kill the servants catering to her needs. That old guy was a schemer, she knew it.
She joined her fingers together and brought them beneath her nose to think harder about this.
Her guts were yelling at her that she was getting scammed. She knew that she was getting scammed. Was it only because she’d been told that of course the transfer of her prize money had to wait? Was there more? Why try so hard to buy time?
She observed the bubbles in the bath. They gave her no answers.
M'kay. Brain, do your thing. Keep going.
A few minutes ago, she’d immediately made the servants leave through the power of saying “leave”, and she was left to her own devices to be able to uninterruptedly think. Which was good. Forcing her not to be able to reflect by being constantly surrounded by people could be one of the ways that this cult leader used to manipulate people. She’d already witnessed how he overworked his cult followers, exhausting them until they couldn’t think. Yes, hm, she’d make sure to be extremely lazy as a countermeasure.
But honestly, those were good accommodations. She even had a platter of appetizers on a gilded table next to the bath. It felt like the treatment a vip star would get at a hotel.
She did take another appetizer and shoved it down her mouth.
They were not poisoned. Even if they were, it didn’t matter.
She had a strong stomach.
Literally.
She even had an achievement with that name that gave her a bonus. She wasn’t quite sure how exactly the bonus worked, but it did. Heh. Poison was for losers.
She longingly chewed on the delicious fat cheese and caramelised bread. The dried tomatoes really made it all the sweeter. It was all very rich and savoury, and she’d been famished. It was perfect.
She was, yes, perfectly relaxed. Her strained muscles had been relaxing in the hot water, and really, it was good to finally melt like a marshmallow in a hot chocolate. Mm. Chocolate. She’d have to ask them if this wretched city had ever seen the sight of cocoa trees or something. Probably not.
She sighed, carding a hand through her… clean hair.
Was the point of all of this to get her to indulge in luxury and forget that she was not safe here?
Mm. How cute.
She squinted at the bubbles. She brought her hands up from beneath the surface, and shoved them out of the water to clap them together, popping all the bubbles that had been trapped in-between out of existence.
She got out of the light grey water. It was starting to get a little cold, after all.
Yes.
The cult leader wanted her not to meddle, as he’d said.
He wanted her to rest. But now, in his very own words, an interest had been piqued. What were those other crises? How could she get something out of them?
She left a trail of water behind, drying herscelf with a towel, and squinted at the clothing she had been left with. She smiled. How naive.
It was a cultist’s attire. It was made of so many different layers of robes.
And they’d taken away her old clothes, oh woe.
She opened her inventory and shrugged. She pulled out some old clothes she had and put them on.
Hopefully that would make them brainfreeze as they tried to figure out where she could have possibly grabbed them from. Heheh.
She did lack a coat. She rubbed her chin, and settled on what she had at hand. She took the light blue copper trimmed one left by the cultists and put it on. She’d have to figure out a way to disfigure it to get it to fit with the rest of her clothes, but otherwise, that should give everyone the right idea that she was an ally that should definitely be allowed to stroll around freely.
She chuckled. And headed for the door.
For now, it’d do. After all, if someone wore a garb from a cult, it meant that they were part of it, and that surely, she meant no threat and was allied to them. Didn’t it?
__
“My lady, His Eminence-”, one of the servants she’d shoved out of the room earlier said, trying to block out the way, but got interrupted.
“Not to worry! I’m only going for a walk.”
“He asked us to make sure you were well-rested for the day”, a guard nervously said behind her.
“A short walk!” Vic said, brightly smiling. “Ah, surely I need a little walk for my sickly lungs. Being cooped up is no good for an old lady like me!” She dodged seamlessly the second guard who tried to get respectfully in the way.
“See ya!” Vic said, having dodged and now running. “The unstoppable path of progress cannot be stopped!”, she shouted, making her best impression of the self-proclaimed God Emperor.
She was so kind, she was too kind. She could have discreetly gone out through a window and made sure that everyone would be none the wiser, but at least now the God Emperor would soon become aware that she was going for a walk, and start losing some hair about it. Truly, she was trying her best to cooperate. It wasn’t her fault that her legs moved on their own sometimes.
And maybe, just maybe, she was too petty to even allow that cult leader to think that he’d managed to manipulate her to do the one thing he’d asked her to do.
She would never stay still. She would always be in movement.
That was the difference between the dead and the living, the difference between the brainwashed and the smart, cunning, beautiful, few ones. And she wouldn’t be the former.
__
“You see, I’m wearing those robes. It means I’m one of you. Yes, an evil spirit was squatting my brain. Yes, yes, very dreadful affair. I’m all better after taking one or two pills of tylenol”, she said, all alone, preparing the next speech she’d have to say if any higher ups got too curious. None had, because she’d met none in the palace’s halls, and it was very sad, because she felt that her cover stories would never get to be used. She even had multiple ones, to give a different version to everyone. She was getting so creative with them too!
She was rushing through the corridors, each footstep being comically wide thanks to her shadow armour.
A notification suddenly popped up.
[Warning: User is still in the close vicinity of a near [Divine] threat.]
Was the game interface telling her to get out?
Mm. It’d given her a bonus before when telling this. The additional mana had been juicy.
The question: could she milk this? Would the game interface give her more and more bonuses the longer she stayed there? Hm. She didn’t know how much she liked the sound of that.
She needed to test it out.
However, the game interface didn’t seem to react. No bonuses were added. She swiped the notification away.
The next guard she came across tried avoiding her eyes when she stopped right next to him.
“Hey!” she said. “Hey you!” she said, widely moving her arms.
The guard stared at her, standing still.
“Yes?” he carefully, slowly said.
“Where did Alberon go?” she asked. “Any idea?” she rubbed her still wet hair. Eh. With enough running, it would end up drying. Wind was magical like that.
“…His… most gracious Eminence is in the lower city”, he said, looking at her oddly. He seemed to be hesitating to ask her something.
“Well bye! Thanks for the help!” she said, and started running away.
She rubbed her chin while doing so. It was strange.
She’d reached the part of the castle that was close to the ground level. The exit was close.
…If the game system had told her that she was still in close proximity to a nigh divine threat, why was Alberon in the lower city?
She stopped in her tracks. She turned back towards the guard, who was some twenty-five metres behind.
“Hey, are you really really sure he’s out of the palace?” she yelled.
The guard stood a bit frozen. He still answered.
“YES?” he yelled back.
Oh well.
He might not being lying. She turned around one more time to keep going.
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The tall fake god-dude had root powers, did he not? His “presence” could be spreading in the ground itself through roots, not necessarily just around him. Hm.
She scratched her chin again, keeping along her stroll. The place was a fancy maze. Eventually, she’d have to make her own door if she didn’t find the exit. Tsk tsk, the price of being diplomatic was too high sometimes. A plasma spit would be a definite way to build her own door. Construction, through destruction. She was such a poet.
…Wait. She should have asked the guard where the exit was. She turned around, but there were no guards left along the corridor.
Had she taken a corner without noticing? Guh. Anyway. The presence of guards had to be a constant value in here. It’s not like she needed to go back to find a new one.
She turned her head again to go forwards once more, and in the depth of silence, there before her, stood a tiny doll with beady eyes.
It slowly moved its mouth, mimicking the motion needed to speak, only for a notification to open.
[Warning: Foreign magic attempted and managed to invade user’s mind]
‘Hello hello, Chosen One!’ it said in its high pitched uneven tones warping along such a deep baritone that she thought she’d hallucinated her eardrums shaking.
The doll remained perfectly still.
Vic shot a beam of plasma at it. It disintegrated instantaneously.
“HELL NO, GO TO HELL”, Vic calmly said, with the confidence of a student of the most stoic martial arts who’d spent years mastering the skill and focus required to react appropriately to any situation, “FUCK YOU FUCK YOU”.
Vic breathed calmly in deep, controlled breaths. No notification appeared to inform her of experience points gained, as expected.
‘Please, hear me out, Chosen One’, the voice continued. But it wasn’t a physical voice.
Vic looked around, trying to figure out where the next doll was.
“Where the FUCK is your main vessel? Did you spread out through multiple ones? REALLY? In a city that’s already governed by a half-baked god?!” Vic screamed, trying to figure out why there were no guards. Had the dolls disposed of them? Had they? Had they?!
‘Ah, so you know about his hubris’, the immaterial voice said in her mind. ‘The humane cannot remain for divinity to carve the flesh-’
“Shut the FUCK UP”, Vic yelled in her mind.
The voice stopped. Yeah, take that, old fetid fart. Right. An excellent idea. She pictured the noise of long-winded wet farts as a defensive mechanism, and it seemed to work for a few instants as the ominous, transcending voice did not say a single thing while she made them in her mind and with her mouth.
‘…Chosen One’, the voice said, trying to interrupt her, sounding a tiny bit faint. ‘The hour is grave. Please, I beg of you. A single conversation is all we require, but we need you out of his core of influence before- before…’
Vic rolled her eyes. It was trying to poke her interest. Hell nah.
“Before whaaaat?” Vic said. “You think I’d even want him as a patron god? What??? Getting jealous, you fucking stalker?”
‘Chosen One’, the voice replied in her mind, like it was about to monologue in a reproaching, parenting tone, and oh no, anything but that. Not again. If she had a bullshit-o-meter it would be blowing off the charts from how much fake benevolence it’d have detected.
“Show me where your closest vessel is and I’ll allow you to finish a single sentence without making fart noises”, she spat out.
There was a silence.
A deep, unsettling silence spread far and wide, like her words were being considered carefully.
‘Up here’, the immaterial voice said. Vic felt a shiver down her spine and slowly looked up.
There, holding itself onto a chandelier, the light reflecting onto its beady black eyes, another puppet hung from the roof.
‘Worry not, Chosen One’, it said, while Vic lunged herself out from the spot where she’d been, just beneath it, ‘My powers are greatly diminished here, and I wouldn’t want to ever take possession of your body in such an unholy sanctum. I would want a proper, sizeable part of my mind to wrap and mould my-’
“NO MONOLOGUING PLEASE”, Vic said, “FOR THE LOVE OF FARTING NOISES”
Her hands raised towards the direction of the puppet. She wanted to disintegrate all of those things.
She needed to stay as calm as possible.
The puppet stayed still, studying her, turning its face to properly watch her. It had no eyes to see, yet it still pretended to do so.
“Did you kill anyone to enter here?”, Vic suddenly asked. “Where are the bodies?”
Where were the bodies? This was insanely important.
‘When you fought with the CursedBlood, I felt for the first time your power spread far and wide, deliciously so, beaconing me after having lost sight of you for so long, and I shortly believed you dead after that demonstration of raw power, but I knew’, the voice thought in her mind, ‘I knew you, Chosen One, you could not die. But haste, I had to. I would never abandon my champion. I had husks buried here centuries ago, but this was a fine time to start spreading anew. You are worth that price.’
Vic grimaced like she’d chewed on lemons.
The voice in her head continued.
‘My Chosen, my future prophet, my one and only- please heed my call, at once. The souls of many hang in the balance. The Emperor will deceive you and corrupt all, just as he’s done with the land. You are the righteous heroine needed by the tens of thousands of deceived souls who have been misled by that vile shepherd.’
“Is this still about me killing Gadeast? Please?! Please let that go!?” she interrupted, because her guts yelled at her that a monologue was incoming. Haha, yeah, this was about her aversion to monologues.
An otherworldly snort in her mind occurred. It was very gross. And unwanted. Definitely unwanted.
‘No, it is not about you replacing him, Chosen One. It is not as fickle as replacing one of my precious, highly regarded preachers. I have found you, and I tarry, for I cannot distract the low-blooded one from my presence here for much longer. He already grows suspicious and stale, the foul hunk of flesh that he is. Follow me, please, my dearest fleshsuit. We can talk on the way.’
Vic had her mouth grimacing and seething on its own, both at the same time. She slapped her own face, trying to get back on track.
Wait. Did it know of a secret passage within the palace’s walls themselves?
She stared at the puppet move, using its limbs like they actually were living limbs.
…It could be great for her to know of the location of secret passages. For… research purposes. Yeah. In case she needed that later once she decided to really leave her temporary spot in the Cursedblood Emperor’s team. Between the stalker puppet and the fake god, she’d rather side with the faction that didn’t want to mindcontrol her.
Wait…
Okay, she’d rather side with the faction that hadn’t managed to worm their way inside her mind. Yeah. She made a face. She was siding with the weak losers, technically. Huhuh.
She stared while the puppet leapt up unnaturally fast and high to push a hidden mechanism.
“And where are you leading me?” Vic asked, staring back at the sculpted murals and trying to memorise them to find back this place. Those ones depicted some weird historical event where heathens were being hung or something, while the other self-proclaimed god shone as a beacon of light against the sun itself or something.
Hopefully all the murals didn’t depict the same scene over and over again. It’d be a shame to memorise propaganda for nothing if the murals repeated motifs from time to time.
‘Out of the palace of thorns, my sweet herald’, it said, while several heads popped out from the dark enclosed place that had just opened, like they wanted to get a better look. Vic stared back at the other dolls.
“You’re such a fucking creep”, Vic said. She patted her sides. Victorya would not fear, not against a few dolls that were most likely moved telekineticaly to look like bipedal living beings. Yeah. That’s what crept her out the most. That the thing behind those dolls didn’t need to make them move this way, but still did it. That it did not need eyes to see or mouths to speak, but still liked to pretend to use them. And that it also used living creatures as its toys, too. All while not needing to do it. That was the worst of it, because even when all the dolls were destroyed… it didn’t mean that it was gone.
No. It didn’t need eyes to see.
Victorya squinted at the doll that invited her to go forward after a long moment where she hadn’t moved. It opened its mouth to speak.
‘It’s good that you’re taking care of your skin and hair’, the voice said, like it was humouring her. ‘Each time I see you, it feels like you’re letting go of yourself. I wouldn’t want my fleshsuit to accumulate irreparable damage. I see brittle hair at the end of your strands. Ah... truly, When I get my hands on you, before I mould you, I’ll have them cleanse you and refine you by removing your imperfections of flesh or mind and eternally preserve your animal skin-’
Victorya blasted a sun spit on the doll that had been mouthing the words.
“You still have seven other puppets. Careful, that number will go down fast”, she said, and walked forwards, walking over the luminescent burning plasma just as she formed a few more layers of shadow armour beneath the ones she already had.
‘How rude’, it replied. ‘even to your own saviour.’
Victorya snorted. She watched the puppets on the opposite side pretend to be climbing along the walls to avoid walking in the burning plasma, before landing on the opposite side. A puppet suddenly brought up a bulbous stone and hit it twice against the wall. Light started being emitted from it. Another actioned a lever and the entrance to the secret passage closed, cutting off the day’s light. All that was left was the weak light coming from the stone, the thick darkness devouring nearly everything. They started walking. The ground was slanted downwards, going deeper within the guts of the earth.
“You are not my saviour”, she said, and took notice of the fact that while walking in the dark, the puppets were forming a circle around her, both guarding and possibly cutting off her exits. But… she had constant multiple layers of shadow armour on… So… Wait.
Was she fully immune to their effects now that she’d levelled up enough?
‘Oh truly? Were you not running in the halls? Were you not running from someone? Who comes to save you from the claws of the CursedBlooded? He would ruin you by sharing his curse. It’s a preposterous mummery of true divinity. I’ll have you know it is no blessing, even if he disguises it as one’, it said. The puppet was turning its head while walking to move its mouth and pretend to talk to her.
“And you’re a blessing?” Victorya asked. Oh. Oh no.
‘Of course I am! Have you never listened to me when I spoke to you? Don’t you know how blessed you should feel? Not many of my followers hear my godly voice, and you run from it. Truly, despicable.’
She’d encouraged a monologue. What had she done.
‘You killed one of my precious proficient preachers, and I spare you instead of returning the favour. Quite the contrary, I recognize your potential! I grace you with a patronage, and you deny it, you deny me, you force me to seek you out. And now that I save you, you call me unwanted yet again. You’ll have to be careful, or soon, you’ll antagonise me.’
“If only”, Victorya said, bringing a hand to her face to brush off the sweat there.
‘No, never. You’re too exceptional to pass up’, it said, like she thought Vic was some sort of shiny rare pokemon. ‘Such growth in less than two years. Don’t you realise how much of my power you could wield by now? It would make you dizzy and drunk from the folly.’
Victorya shrugged.
“More like, the power would wield me”, Vic said, “you would wield my body like a tool. Like them”, she said, motioning to the puppets.”Do you have any clue what degree of fucked up that is?”
There was an insanely high pitched laughter going through Vic’s brain. It forced her to stop walking from the backlash as her ears rang. The voice going through her brain… she needed, wanted it gone.
‘My dear’, all the puppets said, at the same time, opening their mouths like they had anything to say, ‘That would be selflessness. That would be virtue. That is abandonment for a higher purpose, which I am. Don’t you know my name?’
“Keep walking”, Victorya said, showing no emotion at all. They’d passed an intersection.
‘I am so glad I sunk my claws into you before you grew proper mental defences. If you could, you would shut my voice out, which would be blasphemy’, it said. “And I don’t want a heathen out of you.”
Vic froze. That had been spoken outloud. She turned around.
An elf looked at her blankly. Its head twitched slightly. It smiled, but it was too stilted. The gaze was still hollow. That guy was not himself anymore.
“Follow me”, he spoke, for the second time. Yeah. She remembered that way of speaking. It’d at least been a day since he’d been held in that god’s grasp. It was not done by a preacher, but the god itself, so the effects had to be way worse and much more intense. Two puppets took the enthralled elf’s hands, guiding him forwards towards the trapdoor. They took a right turn towards stairs. Two other puppets tried to invite Vic to take their hands.
She blasted them with plasma instead. Five were left.
And it’s not like they could touch her hands anymore thanks to the shadow armour.
She released a sigh, seeing the trapdoor open up.
“Ahead, careful”, the elf said, looking back at Vic, his neck nearly making an 180 degrees angle.
“You’re gonna break his neck. You be more careful”, Vic spat.
‘Oh, don’t mind it, I was only making sure you were paying attention to what was at stake’, it said, releasing slowly the pressure done against said head and allowing it to return to its normal position.
Vic squinted.
“What do you… oh. Of course”, Vic said. Right before the trapdoor, a couple more people were staring blankly up at Vic, all waiting for her to reach it. Some were even reaching out with an open hand to help her up. How kind.
Yeah. Definitely how kind.
“I don’t care if they’re part of a sentient species, make them back off or it’s blasty blast”, Victorya said. She needed to make it very clear how little she cared about its hostages. Otherwise it was already over.
‘Such a sad, unloving thing that you are’, it said. ‘I will help you, soon. You’ll know what it means to be complete. You’ll know what it’s to love and care again.’
Holy fucking shit.
Vic blasted all the remaining puppets behind her.
She heard the godly groan inside her head.
‘You didn’t have to do that’, it said. ‘So petty. And pointless. I have more upstairs.’
“Ah, thank goodness, and me who thought I’d have to get some blood on my hands and blast something other than non-sentient dolls to prove a point again”, she said, snorting like she was being sarcastic.
The puppeteered humans and elves backed off, letting her climb up the ladder and hop above the trapdoor. She looked around. She was in a workshop of sorts, with loads of differently coloured fabrics hanging from hooks. There were a lot of tools arranged in nooks and crannies. Was this a shop where clothes were woven and made? She stared at some looms and unfinished works.
Yeah, that sounded like a place that that god would enjoy taking control of.
A bunch of piled puppets that were stacked on top of one another’s shoulders approached her. They held an enormous, carefully folded bundle of fabric with two strange nearly transparent side pieces. They handed it expectantly towards her.
Victorya did not.
“And what’s this?” she said, like she was being bothered, which actually was the case.
‘Here’, it said, trying again to force her to take it in her hands again, but failing to do so, because Victorya kept her arms perfectly still at her sides, ‘It’s to replace the one of the Cursedblood. I don’t want a trace of his cult on you. You’ll be much… lovelier like this.’, it said, with a strange apologetic tone then. ‘I made it through those faulty husks with limited time, and it is not quite as it should be…but-’
“That’s a coat’, Vic asked, frowning. Why did it have a pair of butterfly wings attached to it? They looked incredibly thin and fragile.
‘Yes’, the disembodied voice stiltedly said. It sounded bothered. ‘It’s a gift. It’s rude to refuse a gift. If you’d be so kind to remove the coat from that upstart and put on this authentically, godly crafted one instead?’
Vic stared at the folded coat. It looked incredibly intricate, with silver threads and some rare precious stones enfolded in the crimson fabric. Gold marks were laminated over all of the junction points. She wondered if it gave any bonuses to stats, as it was, after all, crafted by a god.
She raised a single finger, feeling suddenly the focus of all the puppets on her, and pushed a window open to [examine] the coat. It didn’t register as a living being so that was good for starters.
Instead of opening a description of the object and its durability, a new window opened over her previous ones.
Eeeeesh. That bad, huh?
“Yeah uh about this”, Victorya started. How was she supposed to say this? Did she even want to explain herself? Ah, right, not really. “You’re aware I’m not a game character that has different types of skins. I’m not customisable. That’s a hard no”, Vic said.
‘What do you mean?’, the voice quickly asked, sounding strange.
“No”, Vic helpfully provided as an explanation.
There was a silence. There was a distinct lack of… breathing from the enthralled elves and humans. That might not be too good for them. People needed to breathe to live for extended periods of time.
“Mmm maybe not a hard no”, Victorya suddenly said. But she pointed upwards her index finger of her already raised hand, right as the puppet before her opened its mouth to protest. “Listen, I think you have issues, but I’m willing to… talk. This is just…” she said, sighing. “…A part of the problem.”
She smiled like a fox. People left and right had started breathing again.
“See? I’m open to negotiations”, she said. “I’m so… open-minded. I’m sure we can figure it out.”