211. Wipe Out

The Tier 3 reached him first. Rhys struck fiercely, knocking him off-balance. Before he could punish the man, a dozen lower-Tier soldiers reached him. No emotion passed over Rhys’s face. He spun, slicing from low to high. The flexible blade swirled around him, slicing the attackers to ribbons. The Tier 3 lunged, trying to exploit the moment he turned his back, but Rhys was prepared. He summoned a scrap of trash to his free hand and materialized it behind his back, and the Tier 3’s sword bounced off an end table.

The other Tier 3 rushed into the fray at long last. Rhys snapped his fingers, and a swarm of rats materialized around the man. He screamed as they tore him apart, and when they were done, the swarm scurried to the next soldier, encasing him just as they’d encased the first. One of the more enterprising soldiers cast a fireball at their friend, in an ill-informed attempt to break the swarm, but only succeeded at burning his compatriot. The rat swarm, freed of their burden, turned to him, and the fireball-shooting soldier only had time to scream before he was overrun.

Rhys threw his hand out. The skeletal hands bore a group of soldiers into the ground, and his mount, the skeletal rider, charged into the fray. The rider fought as though he wielded a lance from atop a horse, but his tier was powered by Rhys, and so he was nearly invulnerable.

No, that’s not quite true. There was an upper limit to the rider’s power; he could feel that from here. Like how his rat-retribution attack had topped out at Tier 3, or how the swarm was good for Tier 4, but he wasn’t sure how useful it would be at 5. It was just that the rider hadn’t capped out yet, so it was still able to grow when his Tier grew.

The first Tier 3 struck at him again. Rhys lifted his hand and called on the fire from the trash star. He didn’t manipulate it directly, since that would fly too close to the sun, but instead, lit the impurities flowing through his arm on fire, then shot those through his palm at the man. A sticky, burning, dark fluid full of filth splashed over his face and body, and the man screamed and fell backward, patting at his face and body in a mad attempt to kill the flames—but the flames would not be so easily extinguished. The sticky fluid had a will to burn in of itself, and when he beat at the flames, all he did was burn his hands and spread the fire around.

Rhys raised his eyebrows at himself. “Inventing napalm mid-battle? That’s a war crime.” He really needed to stop counting his war crimes. The number was getting a little too high to be funny. Either that, or he was just getting to the point where the joke was getting annoying, but right before the point where it got really, really funny. He pinched his chin. Which is it? Should I stop, or do all losing gamblers quit right before they hit diamonds? Hard to say, hard to say.

This battle was over. The skeletal rider rushed around, clearing up the low-Tier soldiers that weren’t worth Rhys’s time. He strode ahead, through the gates and into the palace.

This whole time, he kept carrying Laurent on his shoulders. The man really was an important part of his plan. He was one of the Empress’s trusted soldiers, after all, someone who’d even been given the rights to take Rhys’s core, but he was really not waking up. Rhys patted his face as they approached the palace. “Hey, lover boy. Come on. Wake up.”

“Wha… uh… huh?”

“Oh, there he is, there he is. Hey. I’m about to do something to fuck over the Empire and the Alliance, but mostly the Alliance, because I don’t trust anyone who’s in power right now. You wanna help out?”

Laurent blinked at him, then fought on Rhys’s shoulders, struggling to break free. “You—you—you—”

“Right. I killed the Empress. Sorry about that, but she was kind of a jerk.” He gave the struggling Laurent a look, as though he were carrying a troublesome toddler to bed instead of kidnapping a grown man. “Listen to me. Listen.”

Laurent settled down. He turned his head away so Rhys couldn’t see his expression, not that Rhys really cared. This was more important than whatever was going on in Laurent’s head right now. “I’m listening.”

“Your Empress stole a shit-ton of cores. I killed her, because it was necessary, but that created a power vacuum. It means that all her holdings are up for grabs, including those cores.”

Laurent stiffened. “If criminals get their hands on them—”

“Or worse, some kind of warlord, or worse, the Alliance,” Rhys prompted him.

A core on its own wasn’t so dangerous. One core couldn’t do much. It could explode, and blow up whoever was next to it, like a powerful hand grenade, or be installed into someone else, but one core wasn’t that big of a deal. The problem was hundreds of cores. Hundreds of cores, that could be used as leverage, or sold, or bartered; it was immense power. And, of course, if multiple were used at once and exploded all at the same time, or combined into a larger core, that was dangerous. But mostly he was worried about the ‘best’ case: the grinding, slow bureaucracy bogging down the process of returning cores to the people who they belonged to—and with mages, bureaucracy could last decades, if not centuries. He didn’t want the politicians to be able to hold people’s own cores over them until they died. That sounded like the worst thing possible. So he was going to speed things up. Keep the cores out of anyone’s hands, so they couldn’t be weaponized, given to friends and family of the politicians, or anything like that, but simply hand them back to the people they belonged to.

And if he also kept any country from getting a mega-weapon or the ability to craft their own ultra-loyal army with the cores, bonus points.

Laurent shuddered, then paused. He looked at Rhys. “Aren’t… I thought you were fighting for the Alliance.”

Rhys shrugged. “Eh, kind of? I was fighting for me. I was fighting because I personally thought the Empress should die. Sure, I’m from the Alliance, kind of, but if I’m being very honest, I have my own misgivings about the Alliance. They’ve started messing with my friends, and that’s the shit I don’t like.”

“O…oh,” Laurent said, in a small voice.

“You’re an Empire guy through and through, aren’t you? You never even thought of something like ‘fighting for yourself,’ did you.” Rhys snorted. He set Laurent down, stepping away just far enough that he could grab him if he decided to run. “Well, you’d better get to thinking about what you want, because there’s no more Empire. You’re fighting for yourself from now on.”

Laurent looked at his hands with almost the same broken expression as he’d given Rhys just the night before. “I can’t. I don’t even know—”

Rhys clapped, jolting Laurent out of his internal spiral. “Hey, hey. Have your mental breakdown after we fix the problem of the room full of mini-nukes, okay? Fix the problem first. Mental breakdown later.”

“Okay. Okay.” Laurent nodded, then snuck a glance at Rhys. “I thought… I was planning to never see you again.”

“Oh. Sorry about that. This was—”

“No, I agree. This is more important. It’s bigger than us… than m-my holdups.”

Rhys looked at him. “I can never see you again after this, if you want.”

“No! …No. I think.” Laurent rubbed his shoulder. “Um… could I ask that you don’t just pick me up and carry me places in the future?”

“You were ko’d, man. What was I supposed to do, wait for you to wake up?” Rhys threw open the doors to the palace.

“Kayohed?” Laurent tried.

“Knocked out. Slang from my hometown.” He stepped inside.

Two powerful guards jumped at him, one from the left, and one from the right.

“Wait! He’s with me!” Laurent shouted.

The two guards paused mid-swing. One crashed to the floor, rolling across the marble. The other caught himself nimbly, twisting so he sliced the air, not Rhys. He frowned at Laurent, then at Rhys. “He’s not an Empire soldier.”

The other one rolled back to her feet in one smooth motion, blades re-materializing in her hands. “He’s cute, though.”

“Damn, you have the same trash taste as Laurent,” Rhys told her, shaking his head.

She blinked, taken aback. “Huh?”

Laurent blushed but threw his hand out, persisting. “He’s with me. We have something essential to do. Let us pass.”

Rhys took the moment to look around. The palace was overwhelmingly white, like he’d expected. The walls were a smooth, shiny white stone, creamy as milk, and the floor was a tasteful, almost pure-white marble, shot through with veins of gold. Gold leaf edged the room in tasteful restraint, decorating the tops of the few pillars spaced around the large lobby. A sweeping staircase descended toward the door, and hallways vanished off in either direction. It was tasteful, it was quietly extravagant, it was… kind of boring, if Rhys was being honest. He wrinkled his nose, a little disappointed. Where was his over-the-top gilt palace? The twenty foot high ceilings and giant throne, the solid gold pillars and the koi pools full of rare and expensive fish? There wasn’t even a large statue of the Empress—not even a small one! Not a single tasteless statue to be seen! For a dictator, her taste was disappointingly good.

“What was all that about killing the Empress?” the male guard asked. He carried a glaive, and spun it around to point the blade’s tip at the floor instead of at Rhys.

“It’s true. The Empress is dead. Mirai, the vault keys?” Laurent said, his voice taking on an air of command that Rhys had never heard before.

The female guard, Mirai, bounded after him. She somehow, improbably, had bubblegum-pink hair that curled just above her shoulders, and though she wore the usual uniform, there were a few fanciful, cutesy medals, patches, and braids that he hadn’t seen any other soldiers wearing. “Oh, really? I knew that old hag would eat it eventually.”

“Mirai. She was our leader,” the male guard admonished her, falling in behind them. He had dark hair pulled stiffly back into a strict braid and a serious expression, and his uniform didn’t sport a single braid, award, or medal, utterly regulation in every way.

“And you are?” Rhys asked.

The male guard glanced at him. “Grave.”

“Indeed,” Rhys agreed.

“What’re we going to the vaults for? Looting?” Mirai asked excitedly.

Rhys blinked at her. “I take it you didn’t take the ordinary route to employment by Her Majesty?”

Mirai grinned at him and struck a cute pose. “I just stole a little something-something from her silly black ship. It wasn’t even that important, it was just worth a little cash. She didn’t need to be that bothered by it, you know?”

“She stole a star orb. It’s a highly complex dynamic map enchantment that sells for hundreds of thousands of gold,” Grave informed Rhys.

“Ohhh, GPS. I get it,” Rhys said, nodding. Gods only knew how he navigated this world without the stuff. He’d considered it essential to life, and a godsend that he’d been born after it. Luckily, becoming a mage had strengthened his natural sense of direction, but even so, he sometimes mourned it a little in his heart.

“Gee-pee-ess,” Laurent murmured to himself.

“Don’t learn bad words,” Rhys quickly corrected him. Him and Mouse both, honestly.

“And she did it as a mortal,” Grave continued, ignoring Rhys and Laurent’s aside.

“What, really? Damn. Good on ya, Mirai,” Rhys said.

“Teehee!” Mirai posed again.

Dear lord, I love these two, Rhys thought, a warmth rising up from the depths of his heart. What a classic trash pair, the overly serious guard and the unable-to-take-anything-seriously cutesy one. If he’d seen it once, he’d seen it a thousand times, and he’d loved it every single time. Classics were classic for a reason, even if they were trash classics.

“What’d you mean by ‘having the same taste as Laurent?’” Mirai asked.

Laurent glared at Rhys.

“Oh, you know. Where’s that vault, by the way?” It was rude of him to de-closet Laurent before he was ready to leave the closet. His quipping skills had moved faster than his politeness checker, but he could at least try to move on from his mistake without doubling down on it. Besides, he wasn’t sure where Laurent fell on the rainbow scale; for all he knew, the man was straight as an arrow—so straight that he couldn’t get over Rina’s cuteness, but could get over Rhys’s maleness.

No, wait, I’m pretty sure that’s not quite straight, Rhys thought, then dismissed it. It was for Laurent to define, not him. He was the one at fault for setting such a complex where the fuck does this sexuality lie puzzle in front of the poor guy, in a world that didn’t even explain the simpler options to people.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Mirai prodded, bouncing in front of Rhys to walk backward in front of him.

“Hahahaha, the vault,” Rhys repeated. This was not the time or place for that question. He didn’t even know himself, but he knew that he didn’t want to say anything yet-more-hurtful in front of Laurent… and he himself had no idea where Mouse had wandered off to, but for all he knew, she was standing right next to him. He wasn’t sure if there was anything between them, or if she wanted anything, or anything, but he knew he didn’t want to answer that question. He was that kind of trash.

“It’s just ahead,” Grave said, gesturing.

Behind them, something slammed into the palace. Grave looked at Mirai. “Did you lock the doors?”

“Yeppers!” Mirai said, giving him an enthusiastic thumbs up and a peace sign at the same time.

Rhys raised his brows. Curious.

“Right. If they brought the Sword Saint—”

Gold light flashed by the windows, full of an intent to cut that Rhys could feel even from within the building, behind whatever barrier and protections enrobed it.

“—and they brought the Sword Saint, then we have two minutes.” Grave sped up to a run. Without a word, the others followed him.