ROTLE- Chapter 179- Or Worse

King Oyedi was dead.

Telma still couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make much in the way of sense to her. Yes, there had been information of the Immortal approaching the captured city of Dentis when she had been leaving, but while the Immortal was an impossibility to kill, it didn’t mean that he could not be defeated. No one alive that knew half of anything thought that the knight’s feats were exaggerated, but he wasn’t impossible to defeat.

Telma stood where she was, not ready to move forward.

Oyedi is dead, she thought to herself. She didn’t want to believe it, but if a god had said so then it had to be true. The gods had no reason to offer lies to mere mortals such as herself.

I should’ve been there.

Oyedi had told her that she had nothing to worry about, and she had believed him. Her knees trembled beneath her.

“Lady Telma.”

Telma turned her head to her companion. The woman was a member of the gatherers, praised for their tracking abilities, she had taken the lady with her on this journey. She wouldn’t have gotten this far without her.

Looking at her, Telma couldn’t help but settle on her grey eyes. They were a sharp contrast to her brown skin. In Mba-chukwu, brown eyes were the common colors. Maybe it was why she had chosen her specifically. Perhaps she had been drawn to the beauty of her eyes.

“Yes, Chinyere,” she answered.

Chinyere moved a little closer, stopped halfway through the distance between them. “Are you alright?” she asked, touching her own cheek with her hand.

“I am fine. Why?”

Chinyere tapped her cheek once more, emphasizing the very action. Telma focused on it, then touched her own cheek. It was wet. She had been crying.

Chinyere looked at her with worry in her eyes. “Are you sure you’re fine?” she asked. “We can take some time to rest, if you wish it.”

Telma did not wish to be seen as weak, not by anyone. However, she was not ashamed of having moments of weakness. Oyedi had always taught her that being weak was not a sin, choosing to remain weak was the sin. As such, moments of weakness were never things to be ashamed of as long as they were warranted.

This was her moment of weakness—a discovery of the death of an important man in her life.

“We continue forward,” she said. “I do not like this forest, and I do not like my new task.”

With that, she pushed forward.

Chinyere gave her a skeptical look. “A new task? Do we no longer hunt the man we have been tracking?”

It was nice of her to use the word we. Telma knew just as well as Chinyere did that they were not the ones tracking Aiden Lacheart. Telma was looking for the man but Chinyere was the one doing the tracking.

But I will be the one doing the killing, she thought, with determination turned habit.

She faltered, her steps coming to a halt at the thought.

Will I be the one doing the killing?

Alobam had shook her resolve with his words. Even now, she possessed a gift from the god, saved in her storage space. He had granted it to her to aid her original mission. Still, it was difficult to focus given the fact that he had no faith in her success. Her own god did not believe that she would win in a fight against Aiden Lacheart.

Her own god knew Aiden Lacheart by name. What was worse was that he had only seemed to appear to her because of Aiden Lacheart and not because of her.

Slight pain pricked her palm as she balled her hands into tight fists, fingernails biting into flesh. What was she to do when her gods valued her target more than her.

“When you fail to kill him,” Alobam had said, “then will you be willing to carry out the task I offer you?”

She had told her god that she was merely a mortal, a servant to be used. All he had to do was instruct and she would follow. One did not disobey the gods. But Alobam had wanted things to work out differently. He wanted her to be a willing participant in the task that he had given her.

When I fail, she thought. Not if.

The gods knew more than mortals, this was known. But they were not beyond time. There were no teachings that spoke of the gods knowing the future, only of them having an idea of it. Time was not the domain of all gods, only a specific few. Alobam was not one of them.

But he was a god, and he knew things that she couldn’t even begin to fathom. He was also said to be the one from whom Nosrath continued to spawn, but that was a different thought for a different day.

“Lady Telma,” Chinyere said once more.

Telma, realizing that she had stopped moving again, waved the concern in the woman’s voice aside. “I simply have too many things on my mind.”

She could not possibly begin to tell the girl that she had met the god Alobam with nothing to show for it. The gods did not simply appear in front of mortals, not even if they were the merchant of Nosrath.

“Lead the way, Chinyere,” she said. “Find me my quarry.”

With a worried expression on her face, Chinyere obeyed. When they’d entered the forest, she had asked Chinyere how she wished to track Aiden Lacheart, and the gatherer had said that she would start by first tracking humans instead of monsters. It turned out, that for starters, she had no way to track Aiden directly. Telma didn’t like it, but she could not complain about it. Why? Because things would be far more difficult without Chinyere.

Today, she was a woman without a king, hunting down a man who carried with him the favor of her god.

Fully aware of where she was, Telma had never felt so lost in her life.

…

“I worry about him.”

“Me, too. But we have our boy back. Believe me, it is a better outcome than having Elaswit live with the burden of having killed her brother.”

King Brandis rubbed her forehead between thumb and forefinger. He was currently in his room, lying in bed with his beloved wife. The room was the same as it had always been. Different from the throne room that held some level of extravagance, it had a simple bed large enough to hold a couple but not decorated enough that you would think it was expensive. There was a reading table to the side of the room that Rue used more than he did. All his thinking was done in his study, after all.

Rue, ever the thinker, was giving him reasons why he didn’t have to worry too much about Derenet. Since getting their first son back from what should have been certain death, Derenet had been acting oddly. There was the case of fragmented memories that he suffered, remembering a few things from his childhood but forgetting some. The [Healer]s said that it was not completely unnatural for a man to forget some aspects of his childhood.

Still, Brandis was worried.

“Would you like your advisor to take a look at him?” she asked, her head comfortable on his chest.

He looked down at her and found her looking up at him. She adjusted so that she rested her jaw on his chest to get a better look at him. Their eyes met and, not for the first time, he wondered if she knew exactly what the [Sage] was.

“Wouldn’t that be an unnecessary use of his… abilities?” he said.

Rue shrugged. “You can at least ask.”

“I can, can’t I?” he mused. “I should.”

“You should.”

With that, Rue placed her face back on his chest, taking in a calming breath. She liked it here and he knew it. He liked it here, too. He wasn’t really a fan of being king but it wasn’t all bad.

The question was if he could really ask the [Sage]. For a while now he had not even seen the man, when in the past the man liked to pop up unannounced every time. These days he was a rarity, and on the few occasions where Brandis saw him, he always looked busy, mind filled with thoughts that Brandis could not even begin to fathom.

Once, he had asked what had the [Sage] so bothered. Even now, he could still remember what the man had said very clearly.

Matters beyond you.

Brandis had not asked again. Then yesterday he saw the man walking around with a new staff. How? He didn’t know. Where had he gotten it? Brandis didn’t know. It was a stark reminder that even as a king, there were many things beyond his mortal ken.

“Yesterday he went down to the dungeon,” Rue said, voice gentle.

Brandis didn’t know when he let out a sigh. This was another thing that Derenet never did. He was not a fan of the dungeons because he simply did not like the dungeons.

“What did he go for?” he asked.

“I am not sure. I was informed that he seemed to be looking for someone.”

“Did he find them?”

“I believe he did.” Rue sighed, then adjusted in his arms. “Information reaching me is that he settled at the cell of the one called Sam.”

“The summoned,” Brandis muttered, gaining a bad feeling. He should’ve sentenced Sam to death long ago, but he was nothing, but a child drawn from his world into a world he did not know. For all his evil, Brandis held partial responsibility for it for the simple fact that he had dragged him into this world.

There was also the evil he had done to them by way of the sacrifices that had been made to bring them here. He had been a good king, even by his own standards. That had been until he had summoned the children. For the safety of Nastild, he done something terrible… for the greater good.

However, now, no matter how hard he tried, he could not see himself as a good king. He could not become a good king once more, not in his eyes.

“What did he want with him?” Brandis asked.

Rue shook her head. “We don’t know yet. So far, all he did was ask for Sam’s opinion of what got him there.”

“Why?”

“Maybe to understand the mind of an outsider?”

Brandis raised a brow at this. “When has Derenet been known for trying to understand others?”

“Near death experiences can change a man.” Rue stiffened a little. “Especially at the hands of a family member who is supposed to love you.”

Brandis thought about it for a moment. “Do you really believe that, hatchling? Not the change of near-death experience,” he added when she seemed to stop herself from recoiling from him. He knew her experiences in life, not all but enough. “Do you believe that it has changed our son so deeply?”

Rue took a moment before she shook her head. “I do not. Derenet is up to something, and we do not know what it is.”

“I say that we have to find out.”

“I agree, but we cannot have him knowing. We do not know what he will do.” Brandis sighed. “Perhaps his near-death experience has changed him. He asked me what happened to him and I told him. He’d just seemed thoughtful before moving on from the matter.”

“He has been cautiously affectionate with me these days,” Rue mused. “As if he is not sure how affectionate he is supposed to be with his mother. He’s been too affectionate. He lacks the fear of me that he used to have, only the caution.”

“He wasn’t bothered that Elly had almost killed him.”

Pieces were falling together, confirming that Derenet was different.

“Maybe almost dying has changed him in its own way.”

The question was if it had changed him for the better.

Brandis didn’t think that it had.

Rue ended the conversation with a frown. “You should have had Sam executed.”

Perhaps, Brandis couldn’t help but agree. Perhaps.

After all, of all their worries, the deepest was in whatever it was that Derenet wanted with Sam.

…

“Prince Derenet.”

Joleleh did his best to conceal his groan. He hated the beginning part of his tasks, the parts where he had to get accustomed to being called by another name. The parts where he had to go around people carefully as if stepping on eggshells.

Stopping he turned around.

He was met by a maid. She was young and pretty with copper wire hair and blue eyes. He had no idea what her name was and didn’t think he was supposed to.

“I’m listening,” he said.

The maid paused, seemingly taken aback before answering. “The king and queen require your presence for dinner.

Derenet nodded. “Let them know that I will be there on time.”

Not waiting for a response, he turned around and resumed his stroll through the palace gardens. He wondered if the maid had been running around looking for him. Ultimately, it did not matter. What mattered were the things he had learnt from the prisoner.

In truth, gathering information for this task had been one of the easiest processes in all his years of possession missions. He had learnt the systems of power that ruled Nastild and how they worked.

So this time I’m in a world of levels, he mused, his hand running gently along the top of a bed of roses.

A world of levels where you gained a new skill every ten levels was good. Although such worlds tended to have draw backs. One instance was that his interface was going to always be crowded, which he tended to find annoying. The second draw back, and most important one were the skills. If they gained a skill every ten levels then they were going to gain simple skills. Skills that had no depth. So where one skill is supposed to be capable of multiple diverse uses, here one skill would do only one thing.

Joleleh pursed his lips in annoyance. On the bright side there were skills that combined to declutter his stats, so there was that.

Quietly, he took a sit on a wooden bench, breathing in the smell of the garden and looking up at the dying evening sky.

The lesser gods, as they liked to call themselves, had really given him a boring one this time. They had sent him to a world where dimensional mana was on the rise and they had summoned heroes from another world to save them at a substantial cost that their own world did not have to pay.

He was sure they told themselves that it was for the greater good. The very thought almost made him scoff in derision.

The greater good.

He hated the concept. The greater good was always the excuse that the powerful used to sacrifice those weaker than themselves for themselves and others. They called it the greater good so that they would not have to think about the fact that they had done bad. It kept them on their moral high horse.

Shaking his head, Joleleh pulled himself from that line of musing and back to what was important. The one called Sam was one of the summoned from a world called Earth. He had heard of it but had never been. If he remembered correctly, there were at least eight known worlds inhabited by the human species called Earth. Out of those eight, four had only humans and six were predominantly humans, ruled by them.

From Sam, who had been more than happy to run his gutter of a mouth, he had learned of the other summoned and the kingdom’s desire for a [Hero]. It was the same old cliché story that some of the underdeveloped worlds ran. The [Hero] rises up to save the world from the [Demon King]. The same old insignificant loop. But he couldn’t be bothered to care. The [Demon King] and [Hero] were not his problem. In fact, they were not problems at all.

But Aiden Lacheart might be.

Summoned from a world that had nothing to do with magic, he had adapted very quickly, gaining special tutelage. He was a protégé, a genius. He took to Nastild like Void-drac to space. It was interesting. Too interesting.

He got an interesting class, fought a knight. Out paced them all in leveling up, fought as if he had been fighting all his life when he had not.

Joleleh rested his back against the backrest of the chair and folded his arms over his chest. A smile touched his lips.

Aiden Lacheart.

Nobody in Nastild would’ve suspected a thing. And why would they, they did not know enough to suspect a thing. In a world without magic, when magic happened, nobody would ask if it was magic. They would only accept that whatever happened was unique. Summoning people from another world was practically the pinnacle of magic on Nastild.

Quick growth, keeping to himself, displaying abilities that seem natural to him when they are not.

Sam had had much more to say about this Aiden Lacheart but Joleleh had known the boy spoke more from a place of hate. So he had done his best to separate facts from emotions. What he had come away with was truly interesting.

In the end, he got up from the bench and stretched, hands raised high over his head. For a little extra pleasure, he bent his waist from side to side.

So what is it, Aiden Lacheart? What are you? He started on his way to dinner. An unlicensed possessor? A reincarnator? A regressor?

He plucked a flower that looked like a black rose as he walked and smelled it.

Or worse, a Time-Looper?