Chương 136: Chapter 157: Fuming

"Of fucking course it's you," I snarled.

"C'mere." I grabbed Casser Swamman by the lapel and dragged him with me, away from prying ears.

"Did you seriously get that guy to come hassle me just so you could swoop in as a savior?" I demanded. He stumbled along with me, but his face was still schooled for maximum charm and composure.

"What? Of course not, my lady, I'm just-""Stop," I said, waving in front of him.

"It was a rhetorical question. Of course you did. Listen, here's the brief that you need to know, Casser. My name is Natalie Harigold. Violent temper. Very high strung. Keeps a grudge absolutely forever. And I am not even considering romance, to any degree, in any form, for years. And have you got that?"

"I believe you've misunderstood me entirely, milady," he said smoothly. He stepped in closer, tilting his chin down as his smile spread.

"We may have gotten off on the wrong-" He was brushing my forearm with one hand, the other reaching as if to cup my jaw.

"Nope," I said. I caught his wrists between my fingers and thumbs and shoved them down to his sides. He seemed very surprised at how easily I could move him with just a small touch, like he wasn't expecting superhuman strength from me.

"I'm a prophet. Secret knowledge granted by the gods. There is no amount of smooth-talking that will override the fact that I already know everything I need to know about you. And have you got that?" My tone was an iron rasp on stone, harsh enough to stop him in his tracks, if only for a moment. His smile grew deeper, more intimate.

"Well, if you already know all about me, then it's only fair-" His hand was brushing my hair back, tickling the back of my neck. This fucking guy and touching me.

"Consider carefully whether your next words are going to be worth it, if I snap your legs at the knees," I said. I felt myself bunching up, ready to bring him some of the violence I could feel gathering inside. I just dropped an explosion equivalent to a low-yield nuclear bomb, I just demonstrated jaw-dropping unfathomable power. The fact that I can get condescended to immediately after that is just sickening.

He's treating me like some damsel that is going to be swept away by a smile and a touch and not like the living cataclysm that I am. I don't even need to detonate him. I'm still channeling steel and I drain the peacock out to solidify my steel strength; if I swing a fist he might die. I kinda wanna find out. I saw a curious expression cross his face as he realized that I was not going to be charmed. Reality colliding with his ego, a rare occurrence.

We've seen a lot of unstoppable forces hitting immovable objects today.

"But-" Of course the first reaction is 'but'. Of course his immediate go-to is a rebuttal, a refutation, an attempt to assert his assumptions over my refusal. Fucking Casser Swamman. Of all the antagonists from Nathan's romance routes, this was the one I hoped to never interact with personally. If Nathan is not able to help Dizzy Capstan see through this asshole's lies, she ends up seduced, heartbroken, traumatized and it is implied in the game that things were even uglier off-screen.

Basically, a cheap molester that thinks he's the gods' gift to women, and poor Dizzy is starry-eyed and credulous enough to see the best in him, which is exactly what he preys on. And now for some fucking reason he thinks I'm the perfect mark. Gods know how he got that idea, it's sure as fuck not anything I've ever said or done.

"But," he said, in a different tone of voice entirely, "you are so very high strung. You do need help relaxing. If you just learned to live a little, and maybe got close to someone, you wouldn't feel the need to -" And while he was talking, I was wondering no really, how did he get that idea? And not liking the answers I was getting. He broke off, watching my face darken and harden. This had fingerprints on it. Not just some random douchebag hitting on me. He had a rationale.

He had some specific reasons for picking me specifically.

"Wouldn't feel the need to what?" I asked, biting each word off.

"Well, meddle with everything so much," he said.

"You're very angry and isolated, and maybe if you had someone close to you, then-" I've got twelve gods-damned love interests cluttering my plans, and this guy thinks I'm lonely and need distraction! Hah, what a crock of- Hang on. I have had a lot of people in my life worry about my anger. But nobody worries about whether or not I'm isolated.

"Who have you been talking to?" I asked. I don't think my tone was polite.

"Uh." He's not a spider, so it must have been a scumbag-sense warning him of danger. He shifted to give me space, absorbing the change in atmosphere.

"Who?!" He was backpedaling now.

"I... don't think I should say."

"I think you should tell me everything, or I'll break your right arm and right leg and drop you in the ocean to watch you swim in circles," I said. I imagined doing it. Gods that would feel so good. He'd try to swim for shore and just paddle around helplessly. I could almost see it already, and I smiled... Casser stared at me, at the undisguised enjoyment I took from that mental image. One of these occasions that my conspicuous transparency serves my purposes.

"Um, it's just someone who feels invested in your well-being," he said.

"Look, I might have had some misapprehensions about this whole-" I reached for him and he leaped back, casting a desperate look back at the rest of the gathering, which was not nearly close enough to save him. Only fifty feet away, might as well have been miles. He kept backing up, holding his hands out like he is trying to calm a feral animal.

"Lady Harigold, we should probably return, and I'm sure you've got plenty of-""You came at me on my big day," I snarled. I was advancing on him, refusing to give up space.

"When I've already got the fucking duke messing around with me and trying to cheat me and sabotage me. His manservant talking shit right to my face. And I'm already stressed out because people are making me change my plans at the last minute after months of planning. Do you know how much I hate changing my plans?! So I just exploded an entire mountain's worth of settled stone into molten shards and honestly I almost set this entire county on fire if this went bad.

And while I'm dealing with all this shit you sent this guy to sexually harass me so you could be the big suave hero, and then you need me to push you off five gods-damned times because you just don't get it, and now I find out that there's another layer to this because you've been sent by someone else. And I'm about ninety-percent sure I already fucking know who it is. But I want to hear you say it, Casser Swamman." Eyes darted to the sides.

"I think if I do it's just going to make you more angry," he said.

"I think you're right," I said. I was building heat and momentum, just thinking about it. Just letting this gross manipulative situation stew in my head, just festering my anger. This time I don't need to be the bigger person, I don't need to be forgiving and understanding.

"Casser Swamman, understand the situation you're in. I just blew up a million tons of stone and I'm going to do that several more times today. I am mad as hell. At you. And at the one that sent you after me. And when you tell me who it is, I'm just going to get madder. But if you try to lie to me, I'm going to lose my shit entirely. Got it? Now it is time to name names. Tell me who sent you here because they thought that everything that is wrong with me would get fixed if I was just getting laid?"

My hand gripped up on the collar of his shirt, twisted to draw it choking-tight and then lifted him off his feet, dangling him at full extension. And honestly it feels just as badass as it looks in the movies. He whimpered and clawed at my wrist and told me exactly what I expected to hear. I should have been disappointed but I just was not. For the Duke of House Eyellon, this day is about making a tidy profit and seeing a fun show. And maybe as a side benefit, embarrassing someone important to a rival faction.

That was his perspective here. For me, this is about getting the gods-damned roads established so that the royal armies north of the Fissuring can respond to military emergencies south of the Fissuring, and vice versa, because that is going to be key to saving millions of lives very soon. And now it's also about blowing off a truly incredible amount of anger. Because today I need that just as much as I need to save millions of people.

I'm at the eleventh site, and it is hard to concentrate to drill in precisely with the stone-curving spell, excavating a neat borehole to prime the demolition, even with all that recent practice. I want to just shred the goddamned thing, to just start throwing black holes and just... not stop. But it is so fucking important that I get this done right, that I leave this place in the right state. I've got so goddamned much future to take care of! The future is always going to be more important than my feelings.

With a gesture I channel void in. Not to consume my emotions and drain away my anger, but just to increase the connection to that element. I've got very little mana left, but this is important. I open the singularity inside the tunnel and this time I can feel it like it's a part of my hand, like some part of me is ravenously consuming the air, the gravel, dust, anything else. I feel linked to this endless appetite, and I force myself to count the seconds from the sigil.

The stone is crumbling where I concentrate, curving its matter to shape the destruction, building the weak points so the explosion will follow the right channels. The singularity packed all matter into a a powerful gravity bomb. And when the time was right, I released it. Thunder boomed, a dozen miles from any other witnesses, and the shattered stone blasted out in a spray of shrapnel. I relished it, I could feel it.

Like my own hands had struck it, like my fingernails had raked through it, I could feel the essence in me responding to the explosion. I was part of it, and it felt powerful. I threw three more singularities down the tunnel, and started flying about, shaping the next fracture. Long narrow slices in the stone, angled so that pressure would join them in long straight cracks, pushing at certain angles. Forcing the stress to certain directions, shaping the outcome. Have some fucking symbolism, I guess.

How fucking dare he. Seventy-one seconds. I dropped into a portal and emerged three miles away, then released the black holes. Their event horizons inverted, matter was forced back to its normal state, and I watched and felt as the timed bursts ripped a dozen miles of the world in half. I shivered in a private delight, it was as if some of the sins committed against me were expunged when I set off a big enough boom. Catharsis is hard to explain but easy to understand.

Nathan betrays me, I unleash hellish violence, and it all balances out. It's a hell of a rush. Gotta be careful not to get addicted to this kind of thing, because I probably won't be doing a lot of destruction at this scale after today. But for the rest of this Sixthday, I hit my marks, I bored out the primer, and in stages I exploded the cliff until its barrier no longer cut the kingdom in half so cleanly.

Each time I watched from a different angle, really taking the time to appreciate the process of doing controlled demolitions on literal mountains of solid stone. It was like every vista had new secrets to show me, megaton blasts shattering eons-old rock, flinging boulders through the air, shattering pediment and firmament alike. The way that the shock jolts through the stone and sunders it along the guiding lines I've provided, the way the impact crackles upward and throws the stones around like dice.

So hard to resist the urge to turn up the power as I go. Each time I set down at a new checkpoint, I've got the impulse to let it go. Seventy-eight seconds. Eighty? C'mon, let's really open it up and see what happens! Is that my curiosity? My temper? My sense of spite, or the essence of the void that I've infused myself with, or just a very normal human need to see things go boom in a really big way? I look to the west, at the big one. The mushroom cloud that was left over after the explosion for Quoissi's guests.

It towered tall, and I hungered to do that again. Each time I resist the urge. If I fuck one of these up I can't redo it. I've got a contract for a specific number of specific locations at a specific angle and grade with specific tolerances and timelines. I took the contract with a high degree of confidence and a high commitment of results. One of the reasons I was able to command such a high fee was that I agreed to such a harsh schedule of penalties for any shortfall.

And now the biggest threat of shortfall is not bad math or bad preparation or insufficient methodologies, it's my own impetuous urge to blow shit up even harder just because I can. Just because I need to. Just because this is probably one of my last chances. Just because Nathan sent fucking Casser Swamman to seduce me to get me out of his way. These months later, I am still not done being pissed at Nathan over that conversation behind the geography building, him telling Lachel that I would dance to his tune.

I've had her killed, and gotten away with it. But my gods-damned brother just keeps finding ways to piss me off until I can't even think straight! Fortunately one of my most reinforced mental exercises is restraining my impulses. I've managed to go fifteen years without quoting memes, or referencing TV shows like other people should know what I'm talking about. My friends all think I'm fully incapable of telling jokes because I'm so consistent about screening what I say.

The world of shit I say in my mind and the shit I say out loud is separated by an incredible gulf. I've held the most incredible secrets because I had to. After so much time spent reflexively stomping out my own stream of consciousness and first instincts. I have trained myself for years to never, ever, do anything without thinking about it consciously and verifying it. Sometimes an impulse slips by me, but for the most part my control is ironclad. And that includes keeping my demolitions very tightly controlled.

And if it looks like I'm habitually impetuous I would just like to highlight that you're only seeing a small percentage of the hotheaded ideas that fly into my mind. Does it hurt my very soul to use smaller explosions than I could? Yes. But there's lots of things that hurt my soul. It doesn't bleed, it'll be fine. I want to expunge my anger with detonations. I want to blast it all to hell. But there's a quiet fear that I've been keeping to myself for a long time.

When I generate the voids, they take matter and crush it down like a neutron star. The same material that real black holes are made of. If I make a black hole hard enough, long enough... how much matter would it need to absorb and accrete before the black hole became stable? Before the gravity well became something that I can't turn off with a flick of thought? How close am I coming to generating a singularity that is self-sufficient? Out of my control? Ninety seconds? Ninety minutes? Ninety days?

I have no frame of reference. It might take years. I might be cutting it close already. I know that if I push this too far it would destroy the whole world that I'm trying so damn hard to rescue. And I don't know how much is too much. It's a question I could answer if I had advanced knowledge that I did not bring with me, and if I could accurately calculate variables I currently have no way to measure. Some people don't understand why I don't use implosions and explosions to solve all my problems.

But this thought lives in my mind always. Is this the one we don't come back from? And that is the fear that holds back my temptation. I've taken so many chances today, and even though I've got this brand-new rage living in my chest I have to carefully measure out the cathartic catastrophes I'm unleashing. I did not kill Casser, or that beer-breathed count that he sent in ahead of him. It was a close thing, both times. And now I've got brand new murderous impulses towards my brother.

I was not even considering using Casser in any of my machinations. He's slimy. I felt like it would demean me to try to employ him as a tool. So the fact that Nathan sent him after me... It's more than insulting.