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“I just need to see,” he said, trying to keep his voice under control. They’d caught the fucking Blood Mage? The person he’d been hunting ever since he got out of that cave? How? It was Zeth who had been working in this shed, not them. Why would they even come out here? Had everything seriously ended right now, without him ever even seeing it?

As he came closer to the shed, one of the guards walked up to him with a gauntleted hand out. “Sir, you can’t—”

“Please move out of my way,” he said, sidestepping the man and continuing in his stride. About a dozen guards were milling about near the shed, plus the two guards that had been personally speaking to Zeth’s mom over by the house. Seemed like, whether or not this really was the Blood Mage, they were taking it seriously.

“Sir!” the guard shouted after him. A few more glanced over from near the shed and rushed over, forming a wall of personnel to keep him from advancing. The guard walked up from behind Zeth. “Sir, I understand you live here, but this is a matter of town security. You don’t understand how dangerous an unsecured location under control of a Blood Mage can be. One wrong step can mean your death.”

“I want to see this person,” he said.

“You can see her later. Right now, it is far too dangerous.”

“The danger comes from their Fire Ritual traps, right?” Zeth asked. “They activate when you step on them. I don’t see any of you catching on fire, so it looks like the ground immediately around the shed is fine. If you’re really that scared for my safety, then you can lead the way and I will step in your footprints, that way you can know for sure I’ll be safe. All I want is a peek through the door.”

The guard stared at him. “Where did you learn that? Information on the Blood Mage Class is heavily restricted.”

“Zeth, honey, why do you care so much?” his mom asked, still holding onto his arm. “Stop bothering them while they work; we can hear about it later.”

“I learned it from the last time you guys came to speak with us,” Zeth responded to the guard. “If you have an issue with what I know, take it up with your captain, or whatever. He told me. But that’s the danger you’re worried about, right? I won’t go running into the shed or touch stuff I shouldn’t be touching, I just want to see their face. That’s it.”

He sighed. “...Fine. But you need to go back into your house directly after, and listen to exactly what I say. If I tell you to run, you run. No questions, no hesitation. Okay? Same is true for any of the other guards here. They all know more than you ever will about Blood Mages.”

“Sure.”

“Can I come too?” Sophie begged, bobbing back and forth on her heels. “I wanna see the mage. Do they have any magic active right now?”

The guard looked down at her, then up at Zeth and his mom. “No kids. The suspect is heavily injured; the sight will likely upset a child. Also…we believe the suspect is a Wicked thrall.”

“Oh!” Zeth’s mom drew backward at the statement, grabbing Sophie’s arm and bending down to her. “Sophie, honey, we should head inside, alright?”

“Why?” she whined. “I wanna see!”

“Honey, this woman is a Wicked thrall. That’s not something a child should witness.”

Zeth’s own face hardened. A Wicked thrall? He remembered what his mom had said to him when he’d first come out of the cave—when she told him his dad was dead. He’d been killed by Wicked thralls, too. Could it be that the two were connected? If this even was

the Blood Mage.

As Sophie and his mom walked off, the guard led Zeth toward the shed, whose doors were currently shut tight. He stepped over and gripped the handle, looking at Zeth. “Brace yourself for some obscenities. She’s a shouter.”

Before Zeth could respond, the man cracked the door open, and Zeth caught a glimpse inside.

Within the shed, a woman was impaled by a gigantic steel spear stuck in the ground. Her entire body had been lifted in the air, held suspended by the pole that refused to budge, ratty black hair covering her face. The moment a stream of light came through the crack in the door and hit her eyes, her previously unmoving body spasmed, limbs flailing uselessly in the air as she fought to twist her head around to look at Zeth properly.

Her eyes met his—wild, like an animal’s—and she screamed out, voice ragged, “You! Motherfucking shitstain! I, I don’t recognize you, you’re not a guard?”

Zeth frowned. “I—”

She interrupted him immediately. “You’re an ugly whore’s son, you know that?! She takes it so far up the ass it comes out her mouth! Fucking kill yourself, you worthless shit stick! I’ll—”

The guard closed the door, and Zeth looked at him, not sure what to say.

“She’s pretty far gone,” the guard said, apparently sensing Zeth’s shock. “I take it you haven’t seen a Wicked thrall up-close before?”

“I…No, I haven’t,” Zeth said, frown stuck on his face. “I didn’t realize they’d act so…She’d been impaled all the way through the gut, right? How was she not in pain?”

“She almost certainly was,” the guard replied. “But when it’s that bad, you stop caring about your own survival. Pain doesn’t even register.”

“But isn’t the whole deal with Wicked thralls that they want to maximize the misery of people around them? Surely they have to understand that to do so they have to stay alive.”

He shook his head. “How much do you actually know about thralls?”

Zeth shrugged. “The basics, I guess. Just what you hear in passing. They’re people who got stuck with the Wicked Skill from committing an unjustifiable act. It’s one of the only Skills that cost zero Skill Points, and is automatically purchased the moment you unlock it, with an effect that reduces how much you care about other people. So with each Rank in it you just keep caring less and less and become willing to commit more and more horrific acts, until around Rank five, you get to the point where you feel no emotions toward other people at all. And if you keep raising it past Rank five, it flips around, and instead of feeling nice when you help other people, you start wanting to hurt other people. So now it’s not just removing your normal emotions, it’s replacing them with an active desire to commit those unjustifiable acts that Rank it up in the first place. By the time it hits Rank 10, your mind is basically replaced, and your sole goal in life becomes to hurt as many people as you can.”

He nodded. “That’s the basics, sure. But you’re a little off on the specifics. Wicked thralls aren’t just people with a different ‘goal’ to their actions. The nature of their behavior is more…animalistic. Really, they essentially are animals. You’re pretty correct about the Skill up to Rank five—all it does is remove the empathy we feel for others. That voice in your head that tells you not to hurt someone for your own gain. Really, a person who has just one or two Ranks is pretty hard to tell apart from any other decent citizen. Of course, having even a single Rank in it is still punishable by death because of what you have to do in order to get it in the first place, but the Skill doesn’t do too much at that point. Even at Rank five, with all of that empathy and emotion stripped out of them, they can still blend in with society by just pretending.”

“So why was that woman so…like that?” Zeth asked.

“Because she brought it past Rank five, it looks like. It’s after that point where the Skill starts taking a more hack-and-slash approach to changing your psyche. From my understanding, it pretty much starts making a person feel pleasure whenever they think they’ve hurt someone else. Small at first, but it quickly grows more and more intense. By Rank eight, they’re getting such an intense feeling that they can’t resist an opportunity to harm another person when they see one. And by ten, all you’re doing is chasing that reward. It’s so extreme that pain is nothing in comparison. And they’re so short-sighted that self-preservation is totally thrown out the window, too.” He nodded toward the shed. “She probably got the Blood Mage Class, killed a few too many innocent people in pursuit of whatever ambition she had, and picked up the Skill. From there, it’s all downhill.”

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“So that’s what happened to her,” Zeth said. “It’s a little scary to think about; you make one mistake and suddenly your mind is just…taken over.”

He shook his head. “It’s not one thing that’ll do it, and it’s not a mistake, either. You only get the Wicked Skill if it’s an action that you, yourself would find morally reprehensible. You’ll know in your heart when what you’re doing will get you the Skill. And you can try to repress it, or convince yourself it’s not true, but the System knows. But you’re right about one thing—at this point, the mind is long gone. You’re more a puppet being controlled by the Skill than anything else. Only, when you’re impaled through the gut and stuck to the floor of a shed, you’re not left with much else than your words.”

“So that’s why she was just hurling insults around?”

“Yep. Depending on the person, they might try to sweet-talk you into giving away valuable information that they can turn against you, or try to convince you to hurt the people near you. Or, for the dumber ones, they might just devolve into shouting random obscenities and hoping it offends you. We see stuff like that all the time when making arrests. Though, of course, we don’t ever know for sure whether a person has the Wicked Skill until the Inquisitors come to town and confirm their Status. And the Inquisitors do the honors of executing them, too, of course. As you can see, though, it’s normally pretty obvious when someone’s got the Skill at a high Rank.”

Zeth nodded, mulling over the information. He thought back to when he’d seen the Blood Mage, himself. Back in the mineshaft, they certainly hadn’t been uncontrollably throwing insults at him the whole time. In fact, when confronted with Zeth standing in between them and the activated ritual circle that would give them the Blood Magus Class, they actively chose to run past Zeth in an attempt to get to the circle. They weren’t in some mindless mode of doing whatever they could do to cause human suffering as quickly as possible; if that were the case, they’d have just gone up and killed him. Whoever that person was, they weren’t even close to being this far gone with the Wicked Skill.

“They can’t fake being a normal person when it’s this bad, right?” Zeth asked the guard. “Like, if someone had this many Ranks in the Skill, there’d be no way for them to act like they didn’t?”

He shook his head. “Not as far as I know. You don’t need to worry about any of your friends secretly being monsters.”

“And how quickly could someone feasibly Rank the Skill up? Say, if someone was around Rank five or six, how long would it take for them to get to the point this woman’s at?”

The guard took a long breath. “I dunno; I’m no expert. From what I’ve seen, you normally end up needing to do quite a lot to get a Rank-up by the time you’re in the latter half of the Skill’s progression. So, assuming you’re not talking about someone who could fly around and blow up entire villages at a moment’s notice or anything, it’d probably end up taking at least a couple weeks. Though, that’s as fast as I could see it possibly happening. Normally, it takes years.” He chuckled. “Again, you don’t need to worry about your friends turning on you. Sorry if I scared you by showing the suspect. But I warned you.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Zeth said absent-mindedly, frowning as he stared off in thought.

If that was all true, then there’d be no way for this woman to be the same person as the Blood Mage he’d seen down in the mines. She had to be a different person. But then, why was she here?

“So why do you think she’s the Blood Mage?” Zeth asked.

He chuckled. “Getting info out of the dumber Wicked thralls is easy. All you gotta do is convince them you’d be real upset if they told you what you wanna hear, and they immediately spill their guts. Of course, we’ve got specialists back in town who’ll conduct proper questioning, but most anyone can ask a few basic questions. She told us she was a Blood Mage within seconds of us pretending to chat with each other in her earshot about how much we’d hate it if we knew what her Class was. Made up a little story about how the captain forbade us from knowing that information because it was classified, and we’d be fired if we ever knew. She shouted it out instantly.”

Zeth’s frown deepened as he nodded along. “...Uh-huh.”

“Well, if you don’t have any more questions, you should probably run back into your house while we deal with this. Always happy to help out a curious soul, though. You seem like you’d do well on the squad; come by if you ever want to become a guard. I’ll put in a good word for you.” He chuckled and lightly slapped Zeth’s arm. “Just don’t become a criminal in the meantime, huh?”

“Uh, yeah. I’ll think about it,” Zeth said. “Just…Thanks for catching the Blood Mage.”

“Eh, just doing my job, cleaning up the town. Someone has to.”

“Right,” Zeth said with a nod. “Someone has to.”

Once he was back inside with Sophie and his mom, Zeth sat down on the couch in the living room and chatted with them. Sophie was standing by the window, staring intently through it at the shed, while their mom leaned against the wall, also gazing out at the guards.

“So,” Zeth said to his mom, “you glad they caught the Blood Mage?”

She frowned. “I’m not sure they really did catch whoever was out here fighting that monster. Sophie, you said it was a man, right?”

Sophie nodded. “It was.”

“Do you think they might’ve just been doing a deep voice? Or using a Skill to change the way they sounded?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hm. Well, I told the guards what we knew, but they seemed confident enough that this was their Blood Mage. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve done what we can to help with their investigation.” She shook her head, the exhaustion of sustained anxiety showing on her face. “Still, the thought of a Wicked thrall coming onto our property…Whether or not that woman’s the Blood Mage, I don’t think that we’re safe here. I’m definitely going through with hiring those mercenaries, as soon as I can.”

“How do you plan to pay for it?” Zeth asked. “My last pay from the guild will only go so far.”

She sighed deeply. “I suppose I’ll just have to figure something out. We’ll wake up earlier and stay out later. But I refuse to be here, on the outskirts of town, relying on guards who evidently only ever come do their jobs when there’s a murderer literally trapped in our shed. It’s just not enough anymore.”

Zeth thought for a moment. He was faced with two problems. One, he needed a better excuse to steal off and have time alone to work on his rituals, and two, his family needed money. Not only because his mom was under the assumption that the person who had killed the fleshtaker—Zeth—was someone dangerous to them and thus felt the need to hire protection, but also because this family genuinely was in danger. Maybe not from Zeth, but that woman had to come from somewhere.

She certainly wasn’t the Blood Mage he was looking for, which meant she really was just some random extremely dangerous Wicked thrall who had stumbled onto the property. Or perhaps something else was going on. Either way, it wasn’t good. He agreed with his mom—they needed some sort of protection. And for as long as Zeth wasn’t yet prepared to offer it to them with his own power, mercenaries would have to do.

There was one solution he could think of that might help with both problems.

“Hey, mom,” Zeth said, “do you think I should start working again?”

“Oh, yes, now that the shed’s cleared out, it would be good if you went back to butchery. I’m not sure if we have anything quite ready for slaughter yet, but—”

“No, like, somewhere else. I know the guild’s not an option, but maybe I could pick up an apprenticeship somewhere? I don’t know; I could look around.”

She frowned. “Why would you need to do that? You can work right here.”

“Well, the guild paid a lot more than what I was doing on the farm, for one.”

She waved her hand. “The guild also pays more than any other job you could find in this place. Taxes are too high. You know those same taxes are what land us in financial trouble, too.”

“Okay, but it can’t hurt to at least look, right? If I find something that could cover the cost of the mercenaries, it could help out a lot.”

“Unclassed labor isn’t exactly in high demand. I don’t think you’ll find anything with good pay.”

Zeth couldn’t tell her his other reason for wanting to find a job—that with it, he could lie and say he had to work an extra day when in reality he’d be out in the forest working on his rituals—but he still needed to convince her. “Well, y’know, I also think it’d be good for me to have an excuse to go into town every day, anyway. With all this craziness going on, I could talk with the guards there and get news on what’s going on, I could check and make sure Turin’s okay…That sort of thing.”

She shrugged. “I’m still not convinced you’ll find something that gives you a good reason to go into town, but sure. If you think it’d help, feel free to look around for today. The guards seem like they’ll take a while to clear the shed out, anyway, so it wouldn’t cost you any time working here.”

Zeth nodded and stood up, walking over to the door. “Alright, I’ll go ahead and head out, then. Don’t expect me back too soon, though. I’m gonna spend a while looking around.”

“Okay. Stay safe!”

“I will,” he said, and stepped through the front door.

Right. He was going to spend a good while trying to find a decent job, but only after he finished what he’d been working on for what felt like far too long.

He took a shaky breath, excitement coursing through his veins.

Okay. Holy shit. Gotta get prepared. Get a sacrifice, draw a ritual circle. And then summon a fucking demon.