Death's Favorite Warlock

by Charles Dean

  “No,” the woman answered. “We were on our second sweep of this area. We didn’t expect to find you. Please, you have to believe me. We didn’t want it to be this way. Please let me live!”

  “Fine,” Ramon said. Then, turning to Lars, he added, “We need to get out of here before other disciples show up looking for these three.”

  Don’t let her off that easy. She was going to torture and kill Ramon, if not you both, just moments ago. You know you want to kill her.

  “Wait,” Lars said. He could feel rage building up inside him as he looked down at the woman. “Your second sweep? That means you knew about every person in those buildings who was barely clinging to life. You left them to die slowly, didn’t you?”

  She just gritted her teeth. “It was Rickett, not me,” she said, trying to absolve herself.

  “That means they should still be alive. There should be survivors,” Lars said, only to draw out a painful sigh from the woman.

  “No, this was the final sweep of one of the final areas. We were supposed to collect and tend to the women and children who had been left, so that . . .” She didn’t finish what she was going to say. The meaning was clear. They had come back to heal the tortured women enough to not be dead weight as they marched them back to the sect to sell them as slaves. The Qi techniques needed to heal people instantly, rather than wait as rest and time did it naturally, were very rare in villages, but every large sect likely had their own healers. It was even easier to imagine that the person Ramon had just killed hadn’t put up much of a fight even though Ramon was only a Stage 2 Qi-Gathering Cultivator because the man wasn’t combat specialized. He had been the trio’s healer.

  “Ramon,” Lars said, looking over at him, “I don’t want to let her live.”

  “But she told us what she knows. We have to keep our word. Let’s just get out of here though, okay? Come on, man. The Falling Flowers sect is not a joke. They’re going to kill us!”

  “Right! And they’ll murder you once they find out who you are! But if you leave me alive, I’ll say that this was someone else’s work, that a villager died fighting us, that—”

  The woman kept talking, but Lars wasn’t really listening anymore. The only thing he was thinking about was what she had said: that everyone was either enslaved or dead. This meant that, right now, his mother was probably this sect’s slave. The woman who had spent her entire life worrying about him, caring for him, taking care of him, and making sure he could survive in this twisted world had either been brutally murdered by these sociopaths or was wearing the collar and chains of a slave.

  “If you were going to enslave them, then you must have the shackles on you somewhere,” Lars said, looking at her.

  “No . . . I . . .” Even as she protested, her eyes went to Rickett, the man whom Lars had killed first. Lars followed her glance and noticed the cursed bindings hanging from the right side of the man’s waist. He went over and grabbed them, bringing them back to the injured woman.

  “You don’t have to die,” Lars began. “I don’t want to make a liar out of Ramon, but if you want to live, you’re going to complete the contract.” He placed one of the finger-thick silk bands around her neck and tightened it. “I can’t have you staying alive and reporting back to the sect who we are and what we look like. If you’re not with us, we have to kill you, or else we’ll be hunted down in every town within the empire, and I’m not going to be your jail keeper either.”

  Lars knew very well how the collar worked from stories and the books he had read in the past. The person being enslaved had to willingly submit, whether that submission was coerced or otherwise, since the magic required the target to channel their Qi into the collar. Afterward, the soon-to-be master would then have to channel their own Qi into the end of the silk chain hanging from the collar after tightening it. The proof of the contract would appear in the form of the collar’s end being burned off by the joining Qi. The only problem with the little ceremony was that Lars may have been much stronger and faster, but he still couldn’t channel Qi. His gambit was that when the piece failed to burn off, he could tell Ramon he gave her a chance and then kill her. Killing is better than enslaving anyway, Lars thought.

  Just use your energy as if you’re channeling a Knife Hand.

  He would normally ignore these messages and brush them off, but at the moment, the distance between a thought entering his head and his completing the action was nonexistent. He was running entirely on instinct, and before he could remind himself that this wasn’t what he wanted to do, he had already started trying it out. A moment later, he felt the excess leash burn away inside his hand.

  Congratulations! You have used an item to complete the skill Enslavement. Repeat this process 5 more times for a chance at learning to use the skill without the assistance of an item.

  “There,” she said, her voice cracking as she sniffled. “You’ve won. You’ve broken me. Can I please, please live?” she begged. “You've gotten what you want. Just don’t kill me.”

  This isn’t what I want though, he thought, looking at the enslaved woman. She was doing her best to hold herself up and not let any of the quills push farther into her back, and her new collar was barely covered by an outfit that had been torn to pieces from the fight. This isn’t what I wanted at all. An image of his mother appeared in his head as he remembered she was probably going through roughly the same treatment if she were still alive. I just wanted to save Mom.

  “Yeah, she’s not going to rat us out to anyone now. Let’s get her out of here,” Ramon said. He began to carefully, yet somehow incredibly quickly, remove each one of the sharp objects lodged into her back.

  “You’re fast at that,” Lars said after a moment, regaining his thoughts.

  “I had to learn how to be,” Ramon explained. “I’ve accidentally put these into friends, family members, and even myself more times than I would like. It’s why no one likes me.” He chuckled softly at himself as Lars got down and began to help the woman.

  After they had finished taking out all the needles, which only took a few minutes, Lars grabbed the robe from Rickett and used it to wrap her up, making sure there wouldn’t be any more bleeding as well as covering her up in the process. He then took all the items he could find on the two dead disciples, which amounted to little more than thirty-eight silver pieces and two lesser spirit stones, items that were supposed to help people cultivate but were more often than not just used as a type of base currency.

  Lars still wanted to stay, to try and “mercy” kill a few more people for stat points so that he would be able to grow stronger and rescue his mother, but reason won out as he, with Ramon’s help, carried the nearly dead woman out of the home he had lived in his entire life. He knew that if it had been tough to fight just three of the errand boys, it would be nearly impossible to fight the others. If he wanted to find his mother, to confirm whether she was alive and save her, he needed a lot more strength than a few dead bodies would provide, and staying around longer to mercy kill would almost certainly result in his being another dead body too.

  “Thanks,” Lars said when they were over two miles away from the town. “Thanks for staying with me.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Ramon replied, shaking his head. “I just . . . After my family . . . I just didn’t want to die alone. I’m not a high-level cultivator, and we’ll probably get eaten by monsters on our way to the next town or jumped by bandits, but I just didn’t want to die alone.”

  Is that really the only reason? Lars wondered. “Well, either way, thanks.”

  If I had just kept my mouth shut, we could have killed her.

  Chapter 2

  Name: Lars

  Level: 1

  Power: 48

  Speed: 31

  Fortitude (HP): 19

  Resistance: 33

  Unspent: 0

  Elemental Abilities

  Fire Qi: 18

  Ice Qi: 8

  Wind Qi: 6

  Water Qi: 6
<
br />   Abilities

  [5] Advanced Reading Level 1 [5,835/1,000,000 Words Read]

  [5] Knife Hand Level 1 [0/5 Unaware Combatants Killed]

  Item Skill Progressions

  Enslavement [1/5 People Enslaved]

  “You really gonna carry her the whole way?” Ramon asked as Lars continued to plod forward with the injured woman on his back. “I can take over for a bit if you need.”

  “Huh? Oh, no, it’s fine,” Lars answered after taking a second to process what Ramon had asked him. He wasn’t trying to ignore the other man; he was just trying to focus on the task at hand: taking one more step. They had been walking for a few hours, and between the monotonous boredom that came from having nothing to do but focus on putting one foot in front of the other and the slowly growing aches in his muscles from carrying the hundred-pound woman on his back for nearly six hours after already being fatigued from combat, his brain had turned to soup. The only way he was able to maintain the fast pace as they climbed up and down through the mountainous forest was to give his mind a simple task: count each and every step. At first, it had worked. He had been able to distract himself from the pressing need to stop and rest, but after losing his count multiple times, he had simplified his method to only noting every four steps he was making: one, two, three, four; two, two, three, four—over and over again, resetting when the first number hit ten.

  That same focus also meant that he hadn’t noticed Ramon picking berries or paid attention to where they were until he was broken out of the daze, and his brain started functioning on a higher level again.

  “Wait!” Lars called in a loud, throaty voice, doing his best to shout without actually yelling. He didn’t know if anyone was close enough that he would draw unwanted attention, but he had to stop his newfound friend immediately. “Don’t eat those!”

  “What? Why not?” Ramon asked, looking at the clumps of slightly fuzzy fingernail-sized orange and red berries in his hand. “Krowenberries are delicious, right?”

  Yes. They are. Which is why we must kill him and confiscate his berries for the greater good: your—or more accurately our—taste buds. Please proceed. I approve of your protest.

  “Those aren’t all krowenberries,” Lars warned, doing his best to point at one of the short berry bushes without dropping the woman on his back. “Those are joowangberries.” He couldn’t blame Ramon for not knowing the difference. In fact, he expected his ignorance. After all, bloodlines determined everything in this world, and Ramon’s porcupine bloodline was a good one. It was a pedigree which insured that Ramon had never needed to forage or do the menial labors of weaker people like Lars. That, in turn, meant there was no reason for him to ever learn the subtle difference in plants and berries or for him to find out which was which.

  Even if Ramon wasn’t really the qilian he seemed obsessed with being, a porcupine was no laughing matter either. By using Qi-infused tail attacks, porcupine cultivators could take out opponents of higher Qi levels, even if it often cost them their own lives. Their deadly capabilities were the exact reason why many villages used them as defenders if their population didn’t have the bloodlines needed to foster high-level cultivators who could protect them. The only downside—and the main reason they were rarely included in hunting parties or employed outside of defensive groups—was that their tails took a very long time to regain their quills. Ramon had already spent the great majority of his during the fight with the sect cultivators, and until more grew, which he assured Lars wouldn’t take too long, the poor porcupine would have to walk around looking like a soft-tailed otter- or beaver-blooded demi-human.

  “I don’t get it. Those definitely look like krowenberries,” Ramon objected, eyeing the berries in his hand carefully.

  “It’s because they’re meant to,” the woman on Lars’s back said, saving Lars the effort. “It’s how both of the species stay alive.”

  Lars knew how to tell the two apart, but he didn’t know how one looking like the other insured both of their safeties. “Really? Explain how that works,” he replied, genuinely curious. It was a harmless response, but he winced as soon as it left his mouth. He held no regret over his own curiosity, but he knew that, as a slave, she would be magically forced to obey, and just the thought of her being compelled to do anything made him think of his mother and what she was going through.

  “The krowenberries are soft, easy to chew, sweet, incredibly nutritious, hold moisture well, and can slightly stimulate the eater’s Qi. Yet, despite that, one look around will show you that the berry is so abundant that you’ve been able to fill two small pouches with them while we’ve been walking. This is because of the joowangberry, which, unless processed right, is the opposite of the krowenberry. While a krowenberry’s Qi is gentle and restoring to the consumer, the joowangberry’s Qi is harsh and wild, capable of rampaging in the eater’s gut. They both taste the same, but if you eat the wrong one, it will leave you with stomach pains. In some cases, it might even kill you. Since they look nearly identical, grow on identical-looking plants, and ripen at the same time, most animals can’t tell them apart and thus avoid them entirely if they can,” she explained.

  Lars frowned to himself as she spoke, unable to enjoy what would have been otherwise fascinating information if not for the way he had extracted it.

  “So, the joowangberry protects the krowenberry from being overeaten,” Ramon concluded.

  “If the krowenberry were overeaten, the berries would never get a chance to ripen, and the plant would go extinct. But the krowenberry and joowangberry both need to be eaten eventually, when they’re ripe, or else no new bushes will spawn. So, while the joowangberry protects the krowenberry from being overeaten, the krowenberry returns the favor by making sure the prize is tempting enough to draw in animals desperate enough to take a gamble eating them—generally ones that are starving or that might have gone a while without water. These helpless animals are how the berries made it from one location to the next, filling the forests of Yeongju as they do today.”

  “How in the heck do you know all that?” Ramon asked. His curiosity about herb lore seemed genuine—something that Lars hadn’t expected from anyone belonging to a combat-specialized bloodline. “They didn’t teach us any of that when I was growing up.”

  “Outer-sect disciples are no better than the lowest of servants. I spent most of my days picking different herbs, ingredients, and berries in the hope that I could gain enough points by turning them in to earn a place to sleep at night,” she replied, sighing.

  “So, that raid on our village . . .” Lars had to ask, but he didn’t want to make it sound like a question. He didn’t want to force her to speak about it.

  “Each gold coin worth of treasure we brought back would have been a point, and each slave we captured would have been fifty,” she explained. “A full day of foraging wouldn’t get me more than ten, the amount I’d need to afford three meals and a night in a warm bed in a room with a fire. And, believe me, it’s far better than being forced to sleep on a cold floor in the sect’s ice chamber, their idea of discipline for those who fail to perform.”

  Even though her description painted a horrible picture of what life was like for the outer-sect disciples of Falling Flowers, Lars wanted to drop the woman and beat her when he heard what she said. Her words left a rage slowly boiling inside him—an anger that was strong enough to narrow his vision and cause his breathing to become slightly ragged. My mother’s life and the lives of so many women and children are only worth a few meals and a few nights’ rest for someone a clan treats like a servant already?! He wanted to scream, but he wouldn’t let himself just in case someone might notice. A person’s life is so worthless?

  That’s right. That’s how the world thinks of life. You thought I was the evil one, but you’re just soft. It’s okay to be mad. It’s okay to kill them. Lives are worthless to people in this world. This world is nothing but a game, and lives are the currency. Go ahead. Drop her. Kill her. You know you want to. Sh
e would have traded your precious friend Dawn’s life for five nights’ comfort. She deserves to die.

  “So, how can you tell the two berries apart?” Ramon asked. His question thankfully interrupted Lars before he lost his temper and succumbed to the voice in his head—a voice that, as much as it pained him to admit, was sounding less and less insane by the hour.

  “It’s the color. A lot of beasts and animals have trouble seeing colors. They see only different shades of red, whereas we can tell that’s dark orange, and that one is light red. No matter what shade of red it is, it’s a krowenberry. If it’s orange, it’s a joowangberry.”

  “Ah . . .” Ramon nodded in understanding and began picking the orange-colored berries out and tossing them on the ground.

  Tell him to keep the berries.

  Lars, never having heard this request from her before despite the number of times they had traveled through the forest, didn’t have any idea what would come of following her advice, but he still did as she said. “Separate out the orange ones into a different bag. I have a use for them later,” he told Ramon.

  His trusting porcupine companion seemed relieved to hear the request. “Sounds good,” he said, dropping down into a squat. “I’ve been picking all these berries for two hours. I’d hate to think I’ve been wasting my time.”

  “Can’t we do that later?” Lars asked. “I’m not tired yet, and we need to keep moving. We need to make it to town as soon as possible.”

  “Lars, don’t talk to me about safety now,” Ramon said. “You had us run back into the village, where we were almost butchered by the clean-up crew, just so that you could mercy kill a friend and some random people and bag yourself some girl to enslave. I followed your pace and risked life and limb to help you send off some loved ones, so now you can follow mine and get a little rest.”

  “That’s . . . Those aren’t the same,” Lars argued. But even as the words left his mouth, he was already looking for a place to set the woman down.