Chương 100: To Kill a Custodian

It happened without slow-motion and without a warning. [One Moment] only triggered a good second-and-a-half after Trust's brain had already been splattered liberally over Addy and I. She blinked some hippocampus out of her eye and in the next moment, tackled me through her shadow.

"Addy, w—" There was a popping sound, of flesh expanding outwards, of something wet splattering over my side. I hit the ground butt-first, eyes straining painfully to see and find out what the heck had happened. We were in a cellar. The only source of light came through a small egress window set underneath an iron grid. [Congratulations! Due to your opponent's demise, you have completed the quest: Duel of the Fates. Yippie!] [Soulcoins: 3510->4510] [Ivory Soulcoins: 0->1] I barely took note of the system window.

There was a fist-sized hole in Addy's chest, as if something had just taken a bite out of her. Some of her ribs were missing. I could see her beating heart.

"Addy, here, time-bandaid—" She stopped me with a raised hand." Sense… Trade …" she wheezed, her body losing some of those supernatural contours, but the emotion passively emitted by her body increasing in density and depth." I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'll be fine." Her body knit itself together, connective tissue and bone first, then muscle and ligaments, sealed by fat and skin. I couldn't help but stare, even while my rearward eyes looked around desperately for any possible threat.

"We just survived an assassination attempt," I noted.

"Not my first time," Addy muttered.

"How many extra lives you got?"

"Three. You?"

"One. The Cauldron giveth and the Cauldron taketh away." The trust-green light outside seemed to flicker and wane. As if flicking a switch, it turned red. Red, like blood from a deep organ wound. Red, like anger beyond anger, a rankling, hate-filled rage. Red like the underworld, and red like death. [Heya, uh, quick heads up. Trust just told me Trust doesn't have any extra lives left, sooo you might wanna lay low until he's vented his anger. Cheerio!] Addy covered her ears.

There were screams outside, unholy and tortured. They rose and rose to a fever pitch to the sound of tearing, ripping, like a storm come alive with the voices of hell. Even though the quest was over, I could see Trust's kill count, and it kept on rising higher and higher. [Trust: 1948] [Trust: 1989] [Trust: 2004]"Addy." She couldn't hear me. I was hugging her, yelling in her ears, and she couldn't hear me. She was shivering.

"Addy!" She muttered something that I couldn't understand. I hugged her tighter. Slowly, with great reluctance, the storm ebbed away. [Convergence event cleared. All participants gain 250 extra Soulcoins.] That was more power than any level 100 could reasonably have. It was ten times as much, a hundred times. Using the energy of the afterlives directly was such a huge power multiplier, it could make one emotional person seem like an old-testament god for a moment.

"Addy." She looked up at me.

"You okay?"

"Did you hear that?"

"I saw that. I… I don't think I've ever seen that much emotion in a single place." I wagered a peek outside, which is to say, I kicked the metal grate open, and poked a finger with [More Spider Eyes] past it like a periscope. The city looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. The warehouse above us was gone. Just… gone. Of the nearby houses, not one window was left intact. Trash was strewn everywhere, trees uprooted, and down the road, an upturned car was belching black smoke.

Something had clawed at the grate above, rending it in multiple places. Addis Ababa was not a poor place the way some people liked to generalize all of Africa, but after today, a part of it would forever be scarred like a warzone. Trust had been so careful, so deliberate with his storm before, plucking only his foes from their hiding places. Evidently, he hadn't taken kindly to being shot after reviving, and decided that millions in collateral damage was a worthy price to pay to shred his assailant.

Is this the kind of power he wants to see in the hands of everyone? Every customer at a mom and pop shop, every security guard at a fair, every frustrated wageslave, every extremist of all types, every kind person you've ever met, every kid and every adult? I was wrong. His solution was going to cause disaster. Trust is proficient in this, and look at what that brought us. Cotton filling and faux-leather strips that were vaguely bear-like hung from a tilted trees in a clump.

I flinched as to the front and left, a two-story car dealership folded in on itself.

"So, is it just me or did he briefly summon the afterlife of anger down to Earth?"

"Seems reasonable. Your conclusion, I mean. Imagine an afterlife of people that felt anger for most of their life, all stuffed into a room. The anger multiplies, and they can't escape in an endless loop. That's more hell than heaven. Maybe sticking souls in limbo in low earth orbit was a mistake." I followed Addy's gaze to where a sedan was parked inside someone's roof.

"Maybe in some not so far-off parallel universe, I would've been one of those too."

"I…" What could I possibly say to that?

"I'm sure, I… they just…"

"We're not just looking at the recently deceased either.," Addy noted.

"Hundreds of thousands of years of humans living and dying, ten thousand years of vampires and werewolves, all souls dissolved into the ground beneath us until they were called forth to fuel the creation the system." I didn't like the path Addy was implying. Ever since the dawn of humanity, there have been around 120 billion humans, of which ten billion were alive today.

Some part of those must have still been bound into the soil of Earth, else there would've been no way for any even slightly magical herb or material to grow on its own. But it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the system scraped a considerable portion up into the afterlives circling Earth to fuel its own continued existence. In the future Trust sought for us, it wouldn't matter that most people didn't reach a 10% ECC-efficiency for channeling emotions.

They could simply borrow the emotions of a thousand-thousand people and brute-force any spell they knew how to cast. Which meant that instead of reagents and magical potential, knowledge would become the crux of our magic. Knowledge would become dangerous. No nation wanted to entrust each of their citizens with a pocket nuclear bomb. Heck, I wouldn't trust myself with one, considering the last time I had one I immediately triggered it. And yet, we all had phones. We all had the internet.

One leak would be all it would take and then spells capable of causing natural disasters would be available to everyone. It was eldritch in a way, how just the knowledge of said spells would inevitably cause worse devastation than Alfred Nobel feared when he made this quaint little invention called 'dynamite'. We found his body — Trust's, not Alfred Nobel's — in gentle repose in a garden of flowers.

The part above the neck was covered in so many daffodils one could've easily overlooked how the head was missing entirely. A slew of ghosts were lingering around him, some floating, some praying, some gathering flowers torn from planterbeds.

"So. About this assassination attempt," I started. Addy cut me off with a low voice.

"Can you really call it an attempt if it succeeded?"

"Can you really call it a success if the Custodian is alive again?" He was out of extra lives, but he just needed one. And yet, I couldn't help but think how knowing he had no extra tries left would change him for the worse. I was the prime suspect; my handshake timing couldn't have been worse. There was no way Trust would be amenable to any sort of talks after that. The future of Earth could only be decided through the champion competition now. Who would do such a thing, and why?

"We need to find out who did this." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Addy was already taking a blood sample from Trust's body while completely ignoring the angry ghost looming over her.

"Easy. Assuming I don't run out of. powdered boar truffle. Which I won't. I stocked up on it before the latest price rise. Give me some space?" I shooed the ghosts away. Maybe a side effect of using the afterlife for casting would be a sharp uptick of ghosts living on Earth. Eventually, that might lead to the emotional battery of the afterlife losing max charge, the same way an old lead-acid battery might once have. And that was ignoring the issues that so many unguided souls would likely cause.

This 'afterlife anarchy soul-battery' casting model morphed in my imagination, less an elegant solution and more a last-ditch effort." Find that which slew Trust." Addy tossed the powder into the air, after which it zipped here and there before zooming straight down the road. We followed after. A short while later, we came to a flat roof with a perfect view of the road Trust and I had been talking on moments before he'd been shot.

Searching around, I found the lower body of some sort of robot-thing, while Addy found a weird-looking gun. It sort-of looked like a futuristic sniper rifle, except considerable parts of its frame had been replaced with yellowed bone.

"Trade?" I asked.

"Sure. You know more about guns than I do."

"And you've been mulching murderbots on the Cauldron front for the past year-and-a-half." Addy caught the pair of robotic legs and gave them a look over.

"Which tells me that this is a commander unit, an Mk9410 or Mk9401B."

"Must be a leftover from the previous convergence event. Also, that's a lot of variants for a single unit type."

"The murderbot planet has been crapping out new models every year for decades." Addy squinted at the thing.

"But I'm pretty sure that this commander comes with built-in weaponry. And not the kind that explodes people's heads without a very obvious sign of plasma damage." Which implied that this weapon and that robot were unrelated. Except, we found them right next to each other.

"Any chance he died in the last convergence event here a few weeks ago?"

"Nope. No sign of rusting. And people would've salvaged and sold this one already. Murderbot bodies are in high demand with roboticists and physicists worldwide." Addy clicked her tongue.

"Any luck identifying the weapon?" I activated [Arms & Arms Proficiency], knowledge on how to use and care for this weapon flooding my mind.

"It's a weird weapon for sure. Eight shots in a magazine, no way to reload it. It apparently works by generating and then teleporting microwaves inside an organism, boiling the cellular liquids in an instant, which is what causes the explosions. The system isn't giving me any ID for it." I turned it this way and that.

"Which is odd, since it means the system has never seen this before." Addy opened and closed her mouth several times before daring to utter her next thought.

"This sounds stupid because it's such an obvious answer but… what are the chances someone tried to kill Trust and blame it on the murderbots?" That seems the likeliest explanation. The air boomed, and an almost entirely unrecognizable Trust appeared straight above us. His previously fluffy dress was all metal. He wore a tiara and a face mask covering his cheeks and forehead, his rather large gemstone inlaid at the top.

Orbiting him were a round and spiky star, each burning so hot with magic I could see the colors wafting off of them. The previous, pretty uniform was for the benefit of his stream alone. This getup was Trust's war gear. His glare was like a chill under my clothes.

"You have ten seconds to explain why I shouldn't tear you into a million pieces. Why did you think it was a smart idea to kill me?" He thinks it was me.

"First off, thank you for not telling your ghost army to tear us apart." I held up all my hands defensively.

"To answer your question: Addy and I were also shot at. Addy was even hit." I pointed at the hole in Addy's shirt. He looked less than convinced.

"To cover your tracks. You knew exactly where I would be, Trigger Happy, fixing me in place, making me lower my shield to win this duel."

"I didn't—""Maybe you didn't. But I watched some of your streams the other day, out of curiosity. You have a lot of doubles. Some of them stand out as rather… individualistic." I held Addy back, taking a step towards the level 104 Custodian kitted out head-to-toe.

"I would never betray a friend. And while I sometimes disagree with Smoothy and Smiles, they are me and I am them. Look me in the eyes, and tell me, tell me that I would blow someone's head, anyone's head off just to increment the number on my envoy's portfolio." Losing the ensuing staring contest would've meant losing my head. So I stared at Trust, who never seemed to blink even once, until my eyes were red and watery.

"I wouldn't do that." I sniffled.

"I'm not that kind of Custodian. I'm a magical girl. Magical girls don't murder people." If that had any effect on Trust, it was impossible to tell.

"That's the problem," he said, not lowering his guard.

"I can't say for sure if they don't."

"It was a setup," Addy noted with gnashing teeth.

"Don't start a chase unless you know have the right target cornered. I'm speaking from experience. I wasted two years like that. You don't have that time."

"None of us have time." His chin inclined ever so slightly.

"I… will consider what you've said. But I won't be joining your champion roundtable discussion… whatever you've planned. I will not let anything stop me. And if I happen to find the person, creature, or phenomenon responsible, I will tear it apart limb from limb. Even if it turns out you lied to me." He turned his eyes on me.

"'No sacrifice too great, no path too arduous', am I right?"

"Right…" Pointedly, he didn't tear us apart limb from limb, which I took as a good sign. His spiky and round star returned to him, attaching to his head like two mismatched pom poms.

"You may go," he said, nodding first to Addy and then to me.

"For what it's worth… I don't think you're a bad person, Trigger Happy. Just naive."

"I could say the same about you, in some ways. Good hunting."

"And a good hunting to you, as I have no doubt that you are of the meddling kind." He curtsied.

"My envoy says we could make it a bet. Whoever catches the killer first has to do one thing the other person says." A bet, without wagering percentages or the fate of the world? It's not full-blown friendship yet, but it's getting closer. I wiped my face.

"I… sure. Sure, I'd love that."

"Good. Oh, also, you should get a better catchphrase.

'Seven stars and seven suns' is thematically incongruent with the image of a rather grounded girl who just happens to be part spider.

'Evil Doers' is a nothing burger. Calling saving the world a 'job' might be a good start if you're going for an everyday superhero approach. I expect you'll have a better catchphrase by the time we next meet." We watched him shoot away like a shooting spar, until even the reflection of his armor disappeared with a twinkle on the horizon.

"Trust is weird," Addy muttered.

"Trust is weird, Genny is weird, I'm weird." I threw up my hands.

"At this point, weird is the new normal."

"Maybe that could be your catchphrase."

"Ngh. Definitely not." It hit too close to home.

"You're hot when you're embarrassed, y'know." Addy bumped me with her hip. I buried my face in my hands.

"Addy, not now."

"Just pointing it out. He's right though. I could come up with a better catchphrase right now."

"I dare you.""'Blam blam, watch out, I'm spider Sam-Sam'?" I groaned.

"Happy to come, sad to see you go, looking forward to make you blow (up)?"

"This is getting worse.""'Grab your hips and tilt your chin, on spidersilk I reel you in'?"

"Addy, stooop!" +++ The sniper rifle that killed Trust was weird as hell. It had no trigger and only the barest hint of a stock. It looked organic, though not in the slightest similar to my old Goop Gun. Where that one was black with jagged chitinous edges, this one was bony, metallic in parts, yet squishy in others. The grip had an ever so thin layer of velvety fur. If I had to wager a guess, this belonged to someone with a fucked-up sense of aesthetics, or an equally fucked-up kind of magic.

We were back in the League HQ, where business was humming its usual busy tune. A DNA test revealed no traces on the gun, and neither did a fingerprint scan. One point towards the theory that a robot really was the one using this. Or whoever ordered the hit was smart enough not to leave any traceable evidence. We could use Addy's spell to sniff out who this belonged to, but at this point, they could be anywhere on Earth. She'd run out of reagents long before we found them.

We had to narrow it down to within a couple miles, and the gun was the best chance at it. I was getting increasingly frustrated at just how impenetrable this damn thing was to any means or method I could cook up, even with a mixture of the system and ridiculous stats. Staring at the damn thing from every angle with my Sense-form only revealed how little we knew about it.

"Any luck?" Addy asked.

"Stare at it any more and you'll definitely make it talk."

"That would be helpful, yes. All I can tell is that if this thing ever did have a serial number, it was methodically sanded off." I sighed.

"But who am I kidding? It's an alien rifle with an alien design made of alien materials."

"Aasvex?"

"I am not about to assume they murdered one of ours on a wild freaking guess. Heck, maybe the murderbots did do it, just in such a specific way as to make us suspicious of our new friends."

"Allies," Addy corrected me.

"You've only made friends with one of them so far."

"I'm sure the rest will follow easily enough. Though I am a bit worried by how literal Friendzone takes everything. The other day, I asked him to project more professional confidence, and he showed up to the HQ with a suit and tie."

"Whack." The front door of the HQ dinged open and a thoroughly goop-covered Becca strutted inside.

"Mimic factory worm?" I hedged.

"Mimic factory worm." She let out a robotic sigh.

"It's like we're starting to find every tiny mimic that ever escaped containment and was just slowly growing to massive sizes in some cave or at the bottom of some lake."

"Good soulcoins at least. Also, don't drip all over the foyer, we've got showers and high-pressure cleaners outside."

"This is what I look like after a shower," Becca grumped." I am not eating alien innards for breakfast, but getting rid of this with Tidyblank will nearly bankrupt me. That shit is almost forty soulcoins a bottle now." Yikes, inflation. I cleared my throat.

"Since you're already here, Becca, d'you think our resident object-expert can help us out with this?" After explaining what I wanted of her, Becca hummed, taking the gun in her hands.

"Hm." She held it this way and that.

"Hm. Hmmm?"

"She's turning into a hummingbird," Addy whispered, to which I could only giggle. Becca rolled her eyes, two round yellow lights set in her face of metal and screws.

"So, cheeky comments aside, you were right. There is something missing at the bottom of the hilt." I perked up.

"An insignia? A serial number? Maybe a name and home address with the added subscript 'I did it'?"

"More importantly, can you restore it?" Addy asked.

"First off, this thing is magical as heck. Damaging it, much as restoring anything on it, is hella difficult, which is why there is exactly one essence in the entire world with a quick and easy spell that can do just that." Becca materialized two eyebrows just to raise them.

"You two should go buy some lottery tickets. Because as far as I know, there's only one Custodian with a mimic queen essence on the entire planet."

"Yes!" I grabbed Becca, and tried to lift her in a hug. And… I failed. She weighed at least several metric tons. Maybe that was why I never saw her walking up stairs much these days.

"Thank you, thank you, you're the best!"

"Let me actually do the thing first, friendo." She pried me off of her before her left hand went completely mimic, turning all pink and putty-like. It slithered around the weapon, engulfing the grip entirely while Becca's face went blank." Restore!" A visible purple light engulfed the weapon front to back. Becca was a Disgust-Anger dualcaster. Which brought up the question: How does one repair a weapon by using disgust? I suppose she's appalled at its current broken state. Disgust at imperfection? Huh.

"It just shivered," she said in a deadpan tone.

"What?" Addy asked.

"The weapon just shivered! What the fuck!?"

"Weapons don't shiver—""I saw it too." I crept closer as Becca's arm retreated, picking the weapon up.

"Not like a vibrating… object, but more like it's alive." Addy blinked.

"Try petting it?" I did, whispering sweet encouragement into its… side.

"Shhh, it's okay." The shivering stopped. Just like that.

"What the hell kind of weapon is this?"

"A weird one." I inspected the part Becca had repaired.

"We've got a lead." I flipped the gun, showing Addy and Becca the large embossed D on the bottom.

"That's a sign of D. Weapon tinkerer extraordinaire." I gave everyone present a knowing look.

"This weapon came from Earth."