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“...Yes? You didn’t know?”

“Where is Otis?”

“I-I don’t know. There are guild branches in plenty of different towns. He doesn’t come by often.”

“What does he look like, then?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, they all kept their faces hidden. B-but he’s a public figure, so maybe you could find out…somehow…?”

Somehow, after finding out who the Blood Mage behind all this was, Zeth only felt further from his goal. He’d been treating this whole thing as a sprint—just get the bare minimum amount of power, kill some random asshole in his town, and be done with it. But it was seeming more and more like this would be a much longer race.

“L-listen, are you gonna let me go?”

“What about Roul?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s ‘Otis and Roul’s.’ You’ve told me about Otis being involved in all of this. What about Roul?”

“I-I dunno. Maybe. Like I said, I really don’t know much. It’s just random little tidbits I’ve overheard. I certainly haven’t been able to personally meet them or ask them any questions.”

“Gods, you are so fucking stupid. Okay, then. What’s next for your cabal? What are your plans? Is Otis coming to town anytime soon?”

“I don’t know.”

Zeth glowered at him.

“I really don’t know! Promise! I-if you keep me alive, I can maybe listen more carefully and feed you information. But all I know is my own job. I was meant to serve as the new puppet leader after the old mayor started getting unruly. They’d give me orders when I needed them. They were gonna send me out on some sort of mission tomorrow, but I didn’t know what it actually was, so…”

Zeth heard a shout from up ahead, further down the hallway. Yet more boots began thumping against the wooden floor as people ran toward them.

He hadn’t gotten all the answers he wanted out of Garon, but it didn’t seem like this dumbass actually knew much to begin with. Still, what he’d gotten was far, far more than nothing. Zeth finally had a basic foundation to work off of.

“You mentioned bringing Inquisitors into town in your speech. Why would you do that? If you’re working outside the law, using Wicked thralls as your servants, wouldn’t Inquisitors only cause more problems? Were you lying about calling them? Or are they all in your pocket, too?”

“No, no. They’re the empire’s soldiers—we don’t have nearly enough influence to totally undermine them like that. Leadership asked me to call them because the Inquisitors have to come on a regular basis, and our time for another visit is coming soon. So, if we called them now, we could get it out of the way early, and keep them busy while they were here with some big public execution ceremony. And, with the rogue Blood Mage running around—I-I’m assuming that’s you—they supposed they could use you to their advantage, have the guards point the Inquisitors in your direction, they’d kill you, and once you were dead, they’d assume the problem was solved. The Inquisitors aren’t corruptible, but the rest of town is, and they have to get their information from someone. It’s easy to keep them under control as long as they only know what we want them to know.”

“So they really are coming into town soon, then? When?”

“I-I didn’t actually finalize that yet. I just announced it.”

Another shout came from down the hallway—this time much closer.

“So you have nothing left to tell me, then? You’re just some random Blood Mage working for this cabal? You know nothing else?”

“U-um, I’m not a Blood Mage.”

Zeth stared at him. “What?”

“I’m not a Blood Mage. They just started paying me because I was a manager from the guild.”

“Do you have any Class at all?”

“N-no, nothing. I-I promise, I’m no threat to you, alright? If you let me go, I’ll be like a spy! An informant! I won’t tell them anything, and I’ll just gather information for you!”

Zeth tossed the knife aside, and it skidded to the edge of the hallway.

Garon’s eyes lit up in relief. “Oh, thank—”

He was interrupted when Zeth slammed his fist into his nose. Garon’s head was thrown back and thumped against the floor.

He looked up at Zeth. “Wh—”

Zeth threw another punch at him, exerting every bit of force he could to send his knuckles into the man’s face. When he drew his hand back, he found blood leaking from a cut on his cheek.

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He got up to his feet, clutching the wound on his gut, and stomped his boot into Garon’s head. At this point, the man wasn’t responding, simply curling up into a ball to try and protect himself from the strikes. But Zeth kept stomping on him, using the full weight of his body to try and crack the man’s skull open.

“You are a selfish, worthless sack of shit!” Zeth shouted, letting out every bit of anger he’d built up at Garon. Not only had he been a horrible, exploitative boss all these years, not only had he worked with the Blood Mages to kill so many innocent people and order the executions of his own coworkers, but apparently, this man had killed Zeth’s dad. After so long searching for the thrall who had done it, he found the culprit right here, lying in front of him. “Fucking murderer! Did you ever meet the family members of the people you killed? Did you look your victims in the eyes? Or were you too much of a fucking coward to even do that?”

He drew his foot back, then kicked it into Garon’s body, sending him rolling across the floor, trailing blood behind him. He whimpered in fear and pain.

Zeth walked over to him. “You kill people by underpaying them. You kill them by refusing to follow safety protocols. And now, apparently, you kill them by just fucking killing them! Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just fucking maybe, you should try to be functioning member of society?! To try and make the people around you happier? To use your life, and the abundant resources provided to you, to improve society, rather than draining it for everything it fucking has?”

He kicked Garon again, sending him slamming into the wall, where he bounced off and rolled to lay flat on his face, totally motionless.

“You’re not worthless. You’re less than it. If you hadn’t been born, the world around us would be a genuinely better place. Are you even fucking ashamed of yourself for that? Do you even realize how much of a colossal failure you are as a human being that I can say that about you?”

He stomped the heel of his boot into Garon’s unprotected head. His body spasmed under the impact.

“So don’t you fucking dare feel sorry for yourself when I kill you! All I’m doing is fixing the mistake you made every goddamn morning when you woke up, got out of bed, and decided to live another day. If you’d just lay down and fucking died a decade ago, a whole lot of people would’ve been alive right now. My coworkers—my own goddamn dad—would’ve been alive right now. So what I’m doing is too little, too late. You had the ability to do better by the world. But if I can at least correct that mistake now, you better fucking know I will.”

He stomped down once again, this time feeling a wet crunch coming from Garon’s skull. He lifted his boot up once more.

“So just. Fucking. Die!”

He slammed his boot into his head one final time, and it sank into Garon’s cracked-open head. A bit of pink goo squirted from the man’s skull.

Garon was dead.

He’d probably died a couple kicks ago.

Zeth stumbled backward from the corpse, breathing heavy from the exertion—both physical and emotional. Instantly, reality crashed back in around him. Fire roared from behind him in the hallway, boots and shouts came from ahead, and his body was in agonizing pain. The stab wound in his gut, the laceration across his arm—they were both bleeding profusely, even with his Endurance doing what it could to keep him safe from death.

“Astrys!” he shouted. “We need to get out of here!”

There was a moment of silence. A part of Zeth wondered if she’d been lying this whole time, and simply unsummoned herself at some point during that fight, leaving him stranded down here in this complex.

But after a moment, her figure came bursting through the wall of fire, with her head swiveling around to look for him. Her eyes eventually landed where he stood, darting from the corpses around him back up to his own eyes. She almost looked taken aback, like she hadn’t expected him to be surrounded by all the destruction. But she simply asked, “How are we leaving?”

“Can you get me back through that fire without me burning to death?”

“Are humans susceptible to heat?”

“Very.”

She nodded. “Give me a moment.”

After rushing over to the side of the hallway, where the fire was at its thinnest, she bent down, stuck her hands into the burning planks making up the floor, and ripped them off the ground, tossing them aside. She continued doing so, throwing away anything that caught fire, until a clear pathway of the stone foundation beneath the wooden planks had been made.

She looked at him. “Will this suffice?”

Zeth nodded, and they hurriedly made their way through, Zeth ducking down to avoid the smoke as he walked along the stone walkway, flames to his either side. As they emerged, he glanced around to find her demon opponents nowhere to be seen. Looked like she’d killed them. Or, rather, unsummoned them.

Once they were on the other side of the fiery barrier, Astrys looked over. “Will we be leaving the same way we came? If you are too injured to make the walk, I can carry you.”

He took a deep breath. “We’re not leaving yet.”

“We aren’t? But I thought—”

“I’ve got one more thing to do.”

Zeth looked over at the still-open door that led into the room with the three gigantic Empowerment Rituals, all waiting to be claimed.

He’d started this entire journey with three goals—kill Garon, kill the people that’d murdered his dad, and kill the Blood Mage who conducted that ritual.

Garon was dead. And apparently, so was the person responsible for his father’s murder. But the one goal that was left was a much, much larger goal than he’d first realized. He had to take down Otis, of Otis and Roul’s. Which meant he’d have to find the co-owner of the wide-spanning guild, get to him, kill him, and get away unharmed. And not only that, it seemed like, even after killing him, Zeth would be leaving behind this whole cabal of Blood Mages. That, too, would be something he’d need to clean up.

He needed power. Lots of it. That would take a while. No longer would he be thinking short-term. He needed to work on growing himself before he’d be able to take down an entire organization of Blood Mages and their leader on-high.

And so if there was a free boost of three free Levels sitting right in front of him, he was certainly gonna take it.

He turned and began walking over to a door on the opposite side. Once he reached it, he threw it open, finding the room lined with jars of blood on all sides.

The sound of boots on wood drew closer by the second, and so did another sound—not leather boots from down the main hallway, but another sound that he could just barely make out. Metal boots, and the clanking of steel against steel, just barely sounding out from the opposite direction. Like someone in full plate armor was running down the hallway he and Astrys had come from.

So he hurried in, grabbing as many jars as could fit in his arms. Then, he marched into the ritual room and went to the center, where the three ritual circles surrounded him.

From there, he was standing right by the edges of each one.

And so, he simply tossed the glass jars, two at a time, in the direction of each circle, allowing them to shatter on the ground and their contents to flow into the ground.

Three simultaneous System messages informed him of the rituals progressing as the blood from the jars seeped into the stone. Eventually, all at once, the three rituals completed, and the Level-up notifications began rolling in. One, two, and three.

Zeth grinned. Holy shit, that was a lot of progress made in a single second.

Then, the Skill notifications popped up, and Zeth’s smile grew even wider as he read through each one. Eventually, his eyes landed on the last one as it came into his mind.

Now that was interesting.