The Conciege
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(TLO) Chapter 136: A Lesson In One Strike
🕑 Added 2024-01-22 05:03:05 +0000 UTCThe world was cold here was cold. It was like walking in the faintness of winter’s approach.
As annoying as it was, it was acceptable. Everything between realms was cold.
However, the true annoyance did not lie in the temperature. It laid in the fact that Velroo was not here of his own accord. It laid in the fact that he had been strong armed into coming this far out. Into walking the cold void of a winterless path.
He touched an absent hand to the hilt on his waist, wondering not for the first time why he had been required to carry a single sword and no more. The very way of his existence was in the sword. To demand he carry only one and seal away his power of sharp reia if only temporarily vexed him.
In his long life he had made his way with the sword. He had lived by it and almost died by it too many times to count. He’d attained the vaunted authority of Sword Sage and scaled mountainous accomplishments with it to the point where even divinity acknowledged him.
He had slayed fellow sages, bantered gods to silence and slain saints for the crimes of their gods. He had changed sceneries with a single stroke and ended wars with nothing but the cut of presence. Death had taken him by the soul and he’d fought it off with a sword in hand and a blade in his chest.
And when a god had challenged the very audacity of his nature he had taken out a sword and bid it come. Perhaps there was the beginning of his strain. He had stood at the pinnacle of his realm, a sage and a Dynast. Then rather than transcend it, he had let his power get to his head and remained. Then he had challenged a dead god. Innocents had lost their lives in the conflict that followed.
They had rearranged topographies and changed mountain ranges in their clash. They had made the world tremble and the sky bleed. He had waged war against something once divine with the mere stroke of his sword and condemned many to death.
He had been a Sage of Swords. Then the Sword Sage had slain a god. But rather than be burdened with the title of godslayer and the perks that came with it, existence had stripped him of his Sagehood and given him something he did not seek.
Velroo was the sword sage no longer. As if balancing the scales, another sword sage evolved amongst the countless sword sages and he shed his sagehood for something else. The most powerful sword sage to walk his realm became the sword god.
It was laughable. A human becoming a god.
Velroo tried not to dwell on it too much as he waded through the thick darkness. Many would’ve since lost themselves on this path. Here the senses were useless. None could see here, just as none could hear or feel or taste. He’d tried his soul sense and found it just as useless. Divinity was his only guide and he used it generously. Still, he walked in a straight line, clad in a robe of dark purple with lines of blood red. The timeless colors of his house. A house that now bowed to him as their god.
But despite their worship, he often felt it in their hearts. Their disdain for him. It festered in their hearts, infecting what little good was left of them. And they kept it close, for none without true power would dare offend a god.
He did not hold it against them. As a sage and dynast, he’d been begged to let the slight of a dead god pass. He’d been pleaded with to think of the taunting of the dead god as the ramblings of a child. But he could not. How did they expect him to let such insults lie when they scored his heart so gravely? How was he supposed to allow it pass for the ‘greater good’ when the monstrosity had taken from him things that none should take from a man. Then, he had thought to himself, the greater good be damned.
Walking through the cold void now, he queried himself seeking to know if even now, even after his egregious evolution and pathetic past, he still believed his decision justified. If he would do anything different with all the new wisdom that came with the extra years he had lived.
He chuckled lightly and the sound existed nowhere in the void.
“The greater good be damned,” he said.
He might miss sagehood. He might even miss being a Dynast. But there were decisions he’d made in life he would never take back. Killing that arrogant piece of monstrosity was one of them.
So he trudged on, a sword god displeased with what he was, making his way to a task given to him by a guide he’d followed since before he’d stepped his foot into the world of the soul arts. A guide who’d been the one to lead him into it and guide him to its pinnacle of his realm.
He sighed, and the sound of that, too, existed nowhere.
As a sage he’d wondered how travelers moved between realms. As a sword god he’d wondered how they persevered doing so. Walking on a path were nothing existed. How they guided themselves along it so that they came out the other end unharmed and sane. Without his little shred of divinity, he didn’t think it was something he could accomplish.
In the end, he tried not to think too much about it. Travelers were simply built different.
The sound of something familiar drew his attention to his arrival at his destination. Natural senses only worked as one drew closer to a realm. He listened vaguely to the sound of swords and war and violence. He listened to the sound of a soul artist dying. There was, hidden amidst it, the sound of a soul artist in triumph. The commendation of brothers and the squabble of enemies putting aside their true grievances for the sake of a greater good.
It seemed he was here.
He held out his hand and the darkness parted before him like a drawn curtain. Beyond it he watched the light of a realm. Its brilliance unable to pierce the nothingness of the void.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said, and stepped through.
He left the void behind him and found himself in a room unkempt and left to disuse. The walls were crawling with cobwebs and spiders skittered along its lengths chasing after one gecko or the other. The reia here was weak, terribly weak. It would not hold his presence here for very long.
If he stayed here too long, the world would break, and what would pour forth from its injury would be beasts with authorities he was certain this world could not even begin to fathom. It would be the end of this world.
From his knowledge, intrusions like this usually invoked the wrath of the supervisor. But he doubted the supervisor would come for him. Not for this. As long as he did not dally too long, he would be safe. The knowledge that there a existed a greater being even more powerful than those greater than himself was laughable. But as commendable as this supervisor’s strength was, attaining divinity had taught him one thing.
None was above the Endless.
He looked at the disheveled room once more and scoffed. There was a ripped up and tattered mess beside him that could once have been a bed. Different decorations hung on the walls, old and filled with gangrene that they served more as putrid incenses to a dying smell than anything else.
Was this what he’d been reduced to?
He’d been beyond this once. Soul artists of varying authorities, even his fellow Dynasts, had come to him seeking enlightenment in the way of the sword. They did not dream to become sages as he had been, but believed whatever insight he gave them would prove beneficial.
In fact, he’d once led to the evolution of an Oligarch to the realm of sage hood with a simple swing of his sword. According to what he’d heard, the soul artist had engraved the sight into her memory and gone into isolation. Her affinity for the aspect of sharpness had morphed into an affinity for the aspect of the sword and she had returned a sage after fifty days.
He had been a man of such greatness. But here he was, stuck in a decrepit room not even fit for a servant of his household.
Behind him, the path back into the void refused to close and its nothingness seeped into this reality. He touched his divinity to the fabric of this realm, spread it softly around him. He tested how long this realm could hold his presence before it broke and found an answer in a short amount of time.
Eighty-two hours, he thought. This realm was truly new. An infant in the wider scope of things.
Even now, he felt the world fight back. The very fabric of its reality fought against his divinity. It pressed against it from all ends, willing it to suppression. It was like having an infant try to smother him. This realm was so weak it was laughable.
Still, he drew his divinity back in. He folded it within his core. When it was tucked tight and safe, he drew in every touch of reia from his reia channels. Forced them down into the same core. Then he veiled his core. With the fissure he sensed not too far away, his very presence would already be affecting it. Whatever it had been capable of once before would be less than what it would do now.
So, to save whatever poor soul artists burdened with the misfortune of closing a tear in the world during his arrival, he wrapped a veil of thread around his core, wound it twice and thrice and times numbered enough to be countless until it was sealed perfectly, like a tightly wound yarn.
This world’s weakness did give him some benefits. For one, it assured him that this realm had no gods. At least none capable of manifesting a physical presence. But should one exist, he doubted it would come to him. He doubted it would want anything of him. After all, every god he’d come across had smelled the stench on him. They smelled his crime against one of their own.
With the chaos around him, his curiosity met with a certain restlessness and he wished to see the view of children fighting. So he stepped forward, intent on leaving.
Despite the distraught nature of the room, it was large. Wide enough to be fit for a king. From where he stood to the exit was at least thirty steps, and he took each step with calculated attention.
The door to the world beyond this room was made of weak wood. The only reia that touched it attached itself from the world around it, residues of those who’d cared to interact with it. If this room had been built for a king, then the materials for its construction would’ve been amongst the finest that could be found. With a door like this, any soul mage could break in and kill its occupant while they slept.
Standing before the door, he reached for its round knob. He wrapped a calloused hand around it and paused.
Exiting Quest Perimeters.
Leaving Quest Perimeters Will Lead to Failure of Quest [A Lesson in One Strike]
He took his hand from the knob and the words disappeared like chalks of reia wiped from a board. Even now, a god in his own rights, he continued to be led by a guide almost as old as him.
He turned around and counted measured steps until he stood before the open slit in this realm. Within, nothingness stared. He turned his back to it and faced the door. Normally, he would sit, but there was nothing normal about this. He took his mind from his mild annoyance and pulled up his quest once more.
New Quest: [A Lesson in One Strike]
You have chosen to go beyond your world to help a seemingly helpless soul artist. Once a sage, you have taken it upon yourself to teach one of the new generations, to show them a taste of what it means to walk the path of the sword. Your choice has been made. However, you remain one who reached a pinnacle of the sword, you would not teach just anyone. So you have made up your mind, the new generation must prove themselves worthy of your teaching and you shall prove yourself insightful in the way of the sword. You will teach in one strike and they must learn from one strike.
Objective: [Find the New Generation] 0/1
Objective: [Do Not Kill the New Generation] 0/1.
Objective: [Skill Learned by the New Generation] 0/1
Reward: Supremacy
Consequence: Divinity.
He scoffed as he read the quest. It was a hilarious read. Claiming he’d made the choice to take on this unnecessary endeavor even when he did not was always its way. It did not tell him what to do; it never did. Instead, it told him he had made up his mind to do it.
Even now, it offered rewards it knew he wanted and punishments it knew he shirked away from. More supremacy would lead him towards the path he so desperately wanted now that he was beyond the hold of his world. Divinity would only serve to entrap him in the hold of godhood.
It continued to scam him till the end. But he had no choice.
So he stood, hand on the hilt of an unnamed sword chosen from one of countless in his household’s training room fastened to his hip.
There he waited for the unfortunate child he would have to teach.
