Chương 65: The Blightwar

Benedict's face was filled with pain and fear.

"Please," he whispered, one hand outstretched in a useless protective gesture, "please have mercy." Evan blinked. Did he… did Benedict expect Evan to kill him? He swallowed hard when he realized what his enemy expected of him. What he saw in him. Yes, he'd killed the Beasts, but that had been different. That had been a fight, and if Evan hadn't dealt with them in the most decisive way possible, they surely would've killed him. Benedict had all but surrendered. He was helpless and injured, on the ground.

Evan had no reason to kill him. He wasn't the kind of guy to murder a defenseless person out of revenge or to fuel a power trip.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Evan said. Oliver looked at him with furrowed brows.

"You're not? That guy nearly killed you with that curse."

"We were fighting," Evan said with a shrug.

"We won, he got defeated, end of story." Luca joined their group, and he looked as miffed about Evan's idea of mercy as Oliver.

"He's an enemy, Evan. What keeps him from stabbing us in the back as soon as we walk out of this room?"

"His injuries, for one," Evan said.

"Look at him. He can't even stand up."

"He might have a healing potion on him," Catriona said, "or a healing skill, although I'm not sure how that would work with his Plague affinity." Benedict smiled sadly.

"Funny you say that. You know, my dream was to become a healer, but no matter which skill gem I tried, it would only ever give me these terrible curses and afflictions." Luca scoffed.

"Cry me a river. Maybe you shouldn't have picked the Plague affinity then."

"I didn't pick. It was picked for me when I was eleven years old."

"I had no idea you could bind a crystal that early," Evan said.

"You can't," Oliver muttered.

"That guy is talking bullshit. He's trying to make you feel pity for him."

"It's not unheard of," Catriona chimed in.

"In the Whisperleaf Clan we get our crystal at thirteen, but I've heard it's possible even younger with the right preparation." Oliver shrugged.

"Whatever. I'm not all that interested in his biography. We need to deal with him and then continue our search for the Professor." Something in Benedict's body language shifted. His gaze wandered away from Evan and his friends and focused on a certain spot on the ceiling. He stared at that spot so intently, Evan got intrigued enough to follow his gaze. At first, he didn't see anything of note, but then he spotted a barely visible glare. Light catching on a glass surface.

It looked like a smaller version of his glow orb, but the glass was clear instead of milky. Benedict searched for his eyes, looked at him silently but intently for a long moment, and then stared at that glass ball attached to the ceiling again. It took Evan a moment, but then the penny dropped. He leaned over to Catriona to whisper in her ear.

"There's a glass ball above our heads. Can you see it?" She looked up for a moment before silently nodding.

"Can you hit it with an arrow?"

"Absolutely." In one fluid motion, Catriona aimed her bow upward and sent the arrow flying. The shot hit right on target, smashing the glass ball into pieces. Benedict breathed a sigh of relief and visibly relaxed.

"We can talk privately now, although we have to hurry. Destroying the watcher orb will alert Victor. He will come down here."

"Victor?" Evan asked.

"Is that your cousin?"

"Yes. He's the head of my family. A family of two—just me and him are left—but that doesn't change the fact that he's the head of the family, and I owe him loyalty and need to obey him." Oliver and Luca hadn't lost their hostility, but Catriona's interest seemed piqued.

"So you only attacked us because Victor told you to?" Benedict let out a long sigh.

"I wouldn't even be here if Victor hadn't decided that. This place does not hold many pleasant memories for me. And I would certainly never have let the Professor into our family's home. Or helped him with the terrible things he's doing to those poor people in the dungeon." Oliver did not move his sword an inch. The tip of the blade was still resting against Benedict's throat.

"And yet you did nothing to stop him."

"Like I said, I can't. He's the head of the family and I have to—""You have to do shit!" Oliver spat.

"Don't act like he has any binding power over you." Evan listened with interest. The certainty of how Benedict had insisted he needed to follow his cousin's commands had made him wonder if there was some kind of magic involved, but going by Oliver's words, that wasn't the case. Just good old-fashioned toxic dependency. Benedict seemed to shrink a few inches in front of the angered Oliver.

"He would kill me," he whispered.

"And believe me, Victor knows how to make death hurt."

"Now we're getting closer to the truth," Oliver said.

"You're just trying to save your own hide. You don't want to die a painful death, but you're perfectly fine letting innocent people abducted from their homes be tortured and mutilated and—" Evan put a hand on Oliver's shoulder to stop his tirade.

"I get your anger, but we're not here to discuss his moral failures." Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Why are we still here then?" Oliver asked sharply.

"You heard him. His cousin will be here soon. We should go and meet him head-on."

"No, I want to know more first," Evan said, turning back toward Benedict.

"Are you willing to share information in exchange for sparing your life?" Benedict nodded eagerly.

"I'll tell you everything, as long as it helps to stop Victor and the Professor." Catriona tilted her head.

"You want your cousin gone?"

"Yes! Yes, I want him gone. I want to be free of him and live my own life. I don't want to have anything to do with what they're doing here anymore."

"So you're aware what they are doing here?" Evan asked.

"What's the point of these experiments?" Benedict's face darkened.

"They didn't share any details with me, but I pieced together bits and pieces. At first, I thought their experiments were just supposed to give Victor new creatures to control. That's his specialization, you know—summoning and controlling monsters. I thought it was about that until Victor hired Erlo, Semetris, and Tameryo." Evan recognized the names.

"The Beasts."

"That's what they call themselves, yes. They delivered human corpses at first, and that was already worrying enough, but then they started bringing in living humans. Just ordinary people for the Professor to experiment on."

"Get to the point," Luca said impatiently.

"What is the Professor trying to do?"

"He's… I think… I believe he's trying to recreate the Blight." His friends collectively gasped.

"On humans?" Luca asked, eyes widening in shock.

"That's impossible," Catriona said sternly.

"No human could ever recreate the Blight." Evan looked from one to the other. All of them, including Benedict himself, seemed absolutely horrified.

"Hey, I'm the world-traveling guy, remember? Can someone bring me up to date on this while Blight business?" Catriona took a deep breath. van, do you know what the Blight is?"

"Sure. That's what happens to nature when monsters draw environmental mana for too long, right?"

"Yes, but also no," Lamont said.

"Where do monsters come from?" Evan was taken aback by the question. He'd never thought about the origin of monsters. He'd just accepted them as something inherent to this fantastical world. Magic, swords, monsters. The classic fantasy setting.

"Uh… I don't know. I thought they just… belong to this world."

"They do now, but that wasn't always the case. A millennium ago, before the Blightwar, no monsters existed." Evan frowned.

"The Blightwar?" Catriona looked at him like he'd just asked something incredibly stupid.

"You don't know about the Blightwar?" Evan raised his hands in defense.

"I just got here a few weeks ago and, to be honest, I kinda had my hands full. No time for history lessons." Let's fill in that gap in your knowledge then," Catriona said, "Before the Blightwar, the Celestials walked among ordinary humans. Not only on this world, but on many, many worlds. We don't know why, but a war broke out among the Celestials and, as you can imagine, a war between beings as powerful as the Celestials was devastating. Whole worlds turned into war-ravaged battlefields.

And then it went from bad to worse when one of the warring factions created the Blight. It was developed as a weapon, meant to destroy the enemy, corrupting the very fabric of life, mana itself, into something horribly twisted. All living matter affected by the Blight turned into monstrous abominations. Something we now call monsters." Her words brought back a memory Evan had paid very little attention to until now. He remembered the affinity shard they had looted from the dead Scrapmaw Queen. Rat Affinity.

He also remembered how his first thought upon seeing Scrapmaws for the first time was that they looked like a very gruesome rat. Puzzle pieces clicked into place. Scrapmaws didn't just look like rats. They used to be rats before this Blight mutated them into monsters. And the Professor was trying to repeat the process, but with humans? That did not seem like something anyone would want to recreate.

The human soul had much more inherent magic than an animal's, so a Blight-infected human would probably be a lot stronger than any ordinary monsters. Surely that would make the Deadland problem ten times worse? Then he remembered what Benedict had said about his cousin's specialization. He controlled monsters. That made his reason for working with the professor obvious. He wanted an army of human-monsters to control.

Evan thought about the severely disfigured corpses the Beasts had tried to bury in the backyard and shuddered at the thought of fighting an army of such beings. Their quest had just gone beyond saving the abducted villagers. They'd have to stop Victor Vason and the Professor, no doubt about that. Just as the thought passed through his head, a chime alerted him to a new quest.

[Quest: Stop the Blight] Victor Vason and a man who calls himself the Professor are attempting to bring back the Blight and turn it against humans. Stop them. Rewards: Experience (unknown), mana stones (10, 000), item (unknown) By the look on his friends' faces, he could tell the quest wasn't personal, but a quest for their entire party.

"As if we needed to be told," Oliver muttered.

"Of course we're going to stop them."

"Benedict, how does the Blight work? How did the Professor turn those people into monsters?"

"I'm not entirely sure. This is very advanced magical theory, and the Professor is very cagey with his science, but I think it has something to do with ambient mana. He does something to the ambient mana, and anyone exposed to it long enough will absorb it and start… changing. The Professor has built these glass chambers he locks the people into, and then he floods the chamber with his corrupted mana and watches what happens."

"How long is long enough?" Evan asked.

"How long does it take?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure even the Professor knows for certain. He's still experimenting, but I don't think it takes very long. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen? It seems to vary from person to person."

"None of this matters, Evan, we need to get going," Oliver said, with clear irritation in his voice.

"It does matter," Catriona said.

"If we accidentally get exposed to this corrupted mana, we need to know how long we have to get away before…"

"We end up like the people in the backyard," Luca finished her sentence.

"Is there a way to reverse the effects?"

"Not to my knowledge," Benedict said.

"Has it ever worked successfully?" Evan asked.

"Not on humans, no. When he was still experimenting with animals, he created a few completely new monster types. They're being held down in the laboratory. But all the human subjects died." As terrible as that was, Evan felt almost relief at Benedict's words. He would rather be dead than live some kind of twisted half-life as a monster.

"Oliver is right, we should go down to this laboratory before Victor gets up here and surprises us. You said your cousin uses summoned and controlled beasts to fight for him, Benedict. What about the Professor? What skills does he have?"

"He's not a fighter. All his abilities are study- and research-focused. I wouldn't worry about him. Worry about Victor. He's dangerous. Really dangerous." Oliver rolled his shoulders like a prize boxer before a fight.

"I'm so damn ready to wipe the floor with that guy, but before we get rid of your cousin for you, you have to free the prisoners."

"I can't," Benedict said, nervously looking at Oliver's sword.

"I swear I can't. Everyone can control the basic functions like light or plumbing or temperature from the control room, but only Victor can control the defenses."

"How? Does he have some kind of key?" Evan asked.

"Not a physical key, no. He himself is the key. You could say the house is bound to him in a way."

"What happens when we kill him? Does the house pass on to you?"

"Maybe," Benedict said, "but I doubt it. He would've had to officially designate me as his successor, and I doubt he did that. He would be afraid I would dispose of him to gain the estate."

"What then?"

"Best-case scenario, the defenses just turn off."

"And worst case?" Benedict shrugged.

"I have no idea. I'm not an expert on magical inheritance laws."

"We'll figure it out once we've killed him," Oliver said.

"Any tips for dealing with him? What are his weaknesses?" Evan asked. Benedict went quiet for a moment, brows furrowed as if he was weighing his next words carefully.

"He's a coward. He puts on a threatening performance, but deep down he's afraid of fighting. That's why he uses monsters to fight for him." Evan gave Benedict a half-smile.

"We can deal with monsters." Oliver finally removed his sword from Benedict's throat and nodded.

"And with cowards."