Chương 81: I am Magical Girl

The pactmaker stood atop one of the many statue of liberty replicas scattered throughout Paris. He took the haggard appearance of an old man who looked to have lived a life on the streets. It was neither an athletic body, nor a particularly appealing one. He must be down to his sub-optimal backup bodies. And oh boy did he look pissed.

"You!" He jabbed a finger at me.

"Me?"

"Yes, you. YOU. Do you have any idea how much your interference has cost me?"

"... No?"

"I, you — what do you mean, no!? You're a fullmetal jacket diplomat, a secret agent, a fucking dog of the system that is threatening to enwreathe the entire planet, our planet, in a web of philanthropists and popstars while the world is ending. Are you honestly trying to convince me that you aren't even aware of the damage you're doing?"

"The only thing I seem to be damaging is your ego." I kept an eye on where his wand was pointing and sent Becca a message. <<How long until the kaiju's dead? >> <<Hard to tell. Buy me some time? >> Can do. The pactmaker was making it easy. He was fuming, working himself up into an apoplectic rage.

"You ignorant fucking insect! Your opposition, your stupid little league, has cost me everything!"

"I'm a spider, actually." I crossed my many arms.

"And what's so bad about philanthropy?"

"It is condescending." He sneered. It was an ugly sneer.

"I refused to live in a world of distorted merit. I refused to be dependent on the incentives of a broken system. I was against creating it a hundred years ago, and now that I have the power to undo it, I damn well will. We choose who is worthy, not some stupid piece of code. In its place I was going to create something greater, but you ruined it."

"You know what? You're full of crap, pactmaker. You're not building anything." A whiteboard with a wooden frame and supports materialized behind me, pages and pages of white paper detailing nonsensical graphs.

"Allow me to elaborate." I clasped my hands behind my back, leaving one up front to gesticulate at key intervals while I strutted back and forth in front of his dumb face. The looks of confusion written on both his and Orianna's eyes as she cowered in the subway tunnel were priceless.

"You're building a whole world order from scratch, right now, right this moment — or so you say. It's a large undertaking; you'd need a truly massive pool of like-minded individuals to help further your goals. You'd need minions, and people to manage the minions, and people to manage those people, plus facilities, logistic chains, ties to industrial and political allies… it's too much for just one person to handle."

"Hence my assistance." The Fowl clones, and the fae, both of which he enslaved to his will. A murderbot thought now was a good time to take a potshot at me. I dodged its plasma shot and blew up its head before continuing straight on.

"Exactly. That's an awful lot of coercion for something that'll make the world a better place. Must be really hard to trust them with anything. No wonder you're not getting anything done. And in the end, your little escapade ended up with you, one single wizard with revives. Not exactly a number that promises success, eh?" He looked like he wanted to say something, but I continued on.

"A small tangent, but why did you put all that at risk to deal with me after I, what, created a space for people to socialize and play cardgames?"

"The Free Poker League," he said with a sneer.

"A thin veneer for an anti-wizard coalition, readying to strike at my very core. Furries and bloodsuckers, living together in harmony — pah! Why else would anyone go through all that effort to counteract a relationship that has been calcified for millennia? I simply struck first." Paranoid. He is deathly paranoid that someone has it out for him. The system probably did, just… It knew how he would react to me. It set both of us up, solving the issue without taking direct action.

Sneaky, inviting and redirecting strikes with a flourish and fanfare. Like a real huntress. I'm… not sure how to feel about that. I snapped my finger at him.

"So, a couple novice Custodians come together to eat snacks, play games, and forget their differences for a while, and suddenly it's a threat to your entire plan? Like, entire, as in, all? Not to dig on the brains of the operation, but I thought I was the one making a house of cards.

""A temporary measure. I was planning—""Not much, given how you haven't changed one bit in these past few months." I frowned.

"You're either reckless, or the dumbest wizard I've ever met. Like, are you even trying to take over the world at all, or—""SILENCE!" His face looked like a wrinkled cherry, a worm of hatred ready to burst from his bulging eyeballs.

"Your inane yabbering is merely forestalling the inevitable."

"—Which is your doom."

"No, it is yours!"

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yes it is!"

"Nope, not happening. I have a little sister, pactmaker, I can do this all day." I crossed my arms, eying the system window showing a recording of my family in the corner of my vision. They had piled into Clem's car and were just disembarking in front of her mansion. She'd told me her plan to rebuild it in bits and pieces. The first thing she insisted on building was a dome barrier that wouldn't let anything through without her explicit permission.

As a spiky bubble with a truly nasty looking purple hue to it waved into existence behind Dad, Mom, Lily, Foggy the cat, and my pet Tarantula Hobbes, I breathed a sigh before focusing on the bundle of ego and anger issues in front of me. <<Why are you antagonizing the powerful wizard, he's going to kill us all! >> Orianna was making frantic 'abort' motions. I turned back to the pactmaker. He had gone entirely still, except for his left eye, which was twitching.

"My name is Archmage Murl. And I shall proceed to slaughter you like the dog you are."

"A valid crashout," I said, stopping ten yards away from him.

"One more thing. Hypothetically, while a villain and a hero are monologuing at each other, do you think their friends are just doing nothing?" There was a crack. Moments later, the smoldering body of a murderbot slammed into the ground between us. The pactmaker's eyes shot to his left, only for something on his right to explode too. The kaiju-sized squid robot had stopped moving entirely, freeing up the high-level Custodians caught up fighting it.

A purple arrow slammed into the ground, dissolving a dozen nearby murderbots. Even as blue lasers returned sporadic fire, a silver flash jumped from robot to robot, reflecting beams and tearing the robots apart limb from limb. One murderbot specialist with a railgun attached to its back turned to Disco Drew, only for one of my doubles to hug it from behind. She tugged it to the left, and the railgun shot blasted straight through one of the larger walkers.

Another double jumped into the air, immediately taking two hits only to reveal that it had been hiding Rico behind it, Rico who was now zipping around tearing electrics and weak rubbery bits apart with his razorblade. A third double was hit too, its left leg dissolving into so much smoke. But the solid illusion didn't dissipate. It hit the floor and tossed an oddly round red-colored corn cob at a squad of murderbots.

The cob exploded, the corn pellets embedding themselves into concrete, steel, and robot frames where they grew roots, swelled in seconds, and exploded once more. From behind a shield-dome, Parsnip and Silica sniped opportune targets with bows, crossbows, slings, javelins, and the wizard's very own boomstick. Within moments, cohesion among the murderbots broke, everything devolving into an uncoordinated melee of beeps and boops. The ambush was complete.

"Give up pactmaker," I said, Lucky 7 ready to snapshot his butt"This will not stand!" the pactmaker, no, archmage Murl cried. His cloak billowed, and from within a swarm of shuriken drones appeared, fouling my shot. By the time I'd gotten my shotgun out to deal with them, he had already shoved a fist-sized cube into the air, a cube with a big red button. He pressed it.. And then the world took on a green, sickening hue. [Channeling emotion: Fear] Shadows lengthened.

Things moved at the edge of my perception as I caught glimpses of the Ur-Mimic, of Kaiju-sized fish swallowing me up, of a crowd laughing and sneering, of a disappointed parent fixing me with a drill tipped to pierce straight through my heart. The ground tipped and I was falling. Fear. I was fear made manifest. Everything from the shade of the street light to the lopsided grin on Murl's face was terrifying to the bone. Everything felt wrong, like the entire world was watching me fail.

It was physically crippling, mentally stunning. My heart was beating so fast it felt like it too was trying to kill me. I could see Murl charging a fire spell at the end of his staff, and yet I couldn't do a thing to stop myself from spiraling and shaking. A double fire helix shot from his staff. It hit the ground, melting flagstones right where I'd been moments ago. I was in Silica's hands, who was rushing at speeds that broke physics in odd ways.

She turned right, juking at a perfect right angle as if inertia didn't exist for her. Then she jumped into the entrance to the subway, a fireball wooshing and booming behind us a second later.

"That is all the power have left to borrow," she huffed.

"I believe it is high time for a r-r-retreat." Parsnip was on the ground, foaming at the mouth. Silica wasn't affected, why wasn't she affected — Custodians. The cube was doing something with the implants in our head, the ECCs that turned emotions into spells. Parsnip was going to die, everyone was going to die. It was all my fault. Everything from accepting the academy summons to this point was my fault. I am afraid of many things. But there is nothing I'm more afraid of than failure.

"... toss me." I tugged at Pol's burned arm. He winced.

"I need to get in close." He gave me a look. Picked me up. And then, I was flying. I hit the mage's bubble shield, then reached past as my inertia stopped, tackling him off the statue. The bubble bounced off the ground, fizzing electrically. I bounced too, considerably harder. We were both up in a moment, wrestling for his wand of fireballs. Don't let him touch you don't let him touch you.

"You damn insect!" He grabbed for my head, ready to turn it into mulch.

"Spiders are arachnids, not insects." I grabbed his wrist, twisted it out of the way until it cracked, then snagged the cube with another hand. From there, I kicked it away and shot it twice with my Lucky 7 until it was nothing but slag. The fear didn't stop, it didn't stop, why wasn't it stopping— He has more. That's what his resources were flowing into, not the revives." Killbeam—" I grabbed his other index finger and bent it all the way backwards sending the purple beam into the sky.

He didn't seem to feel the pain, instead electing to cut his arm off with a muttered incantation. The arm in my hands glowed with fell symbols. I shot it. The next thing I knew there was glass everywhere, my head hurting and ringing and still full of so much fear.

It exploded, why did it explode, where is he, where is Parsnip, is everyone alright, did he kill them, is he torturing them—" Kill —" time slowed and I dodged left, the waxed floor of some important-looking banks reception area squeaking underneath my boots." Beam — ekh, missed. Come out, Samantha, or I bury everyone hiding in the basement under thousands of tons of steel and concrete." My heart skipped a beat. I should just deliver myself to him. Collateral damage was… Focus. Focus focus focus.

You're a magical girl. Magical girls don't fail. I sprinted out the side, sending a shaped charge bazooka shot at his face while my missile rack emptied itself in full.

"Where's the other emotion inducer, Murl?" He didn't even bother with the small missiles, taking them on his shield bubble. Then he caught the bazooka round with an invisible force before redirecting it back at me. His grin was manic, like he didn't feel pain, or fear.

"You won't ever find it, you damn troglodyte—!"

"This cube is a decoy. The real one is in your head isn't it?" A body double took the hit for me, the resulting smokescreen hiding how I snagged a lamp post with spidersilk and pulled, flinging me right at him again. Melee. My advantage. Gogogo! I grabbed him by the cloak. Electricity pooled in his hand, which I dodged, only to miss the electricity pooling in his feet. It only made my muscles convulse, hanging on tighter.

"That's where I'd put it if I didn't want anyone finding it. It's probably a tiny machine… wait, are you trying to turn yourself into a Custodian? Cannot recommend, you'd make for a terrible magical girl."

"Magical what!? Forget trying, I've succeeded!" Murl's tongue shot out, long like that of a frog and sharper than any insult. It cut across my neck, but not deep enough to truly wound. I grabbed it with two more hands, pinning him to the floor with the rest.

"I am the better version! Better than all of you! Kill me if you'd like, but I'll come back. Quicker! Cheaper! Go on then, prove how powerless Custodians are in the face of a wizard." Custodians were convulsing all around. Disco Drew was being held down, finally caught by layers and layers of steel nets. Lasers had no effect on him, and the murderbots didn't have any functional railguns left. They were drowning him in machine oil, forcing it up his nostrils.

The archer who'd been raining hell from above fell from the sky. You could fly with fear, but evidently she wasn't a fear caster. The machines on the other hand seemed to revel in the fear, supercharged and moving with such power and speed their frames creaked under the strain. The pactmaker found a way to take out all Custodians that weren't fear monocasters, and empower murderbots in one stroke. And how many people really were fear casters?

How many people were willing to make feeling bone deep terror an intimate part of their job, their life? This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. There weren't many. The idea seemed insane. And beyond someone who only felt fear, the idea of someone who induced fear in others at the press of a button was inimical to what I stood for. I opened eyes I'd clenched closed out of instinct and looked Murl in the eyes, trying to find a shred of… something.

Possibly shame, regret. Definitely humanity. All there was was ambition and a willingness to go through anything to see it achieved.

"Is this truly the world you want to build?" I asked. Murl spat in my face.

"What's it matter to you? You can't stop me. You're out of transformations, out of tricks, monster. That's right, you, a monster, an inhuman thing. Embracing the mutative properties of a defective system, despicable. But oh, you don't know, so allow me to enlighten you." A system notification, a freaking system notification as a message from Murl popped up in front of my eyes. They were schematics, plans, all made on literal blueprints and photographed for posterity. The dates read 1953.

The title — Program for Custodianship of Earth and its United Nations.

"You were never meant to change your body in any permanent way. You were all always intended to be able to transform, much like a wereperson. But the system could not, or would not do it. Wouldn't you choose a normal, human appearance, over six arms and six eyes?"

"No," I said, then added.

"I quite like them." That seemed to short-circuit his brain.

"Of course, you would enjoy being an aberration. Power is power. What effort have you gone through for your powers, what sacrifices have you made? None! I learned my powers when the shifter cults of Lugweigh still ate people, I earned them in the underground war of Verdun."

"And I earned mine in Creektin," I hissed back, "and then in the Cauldron, where you sent me."

"Then you understand. You've seen the horrors of the many worlds. Custodians are many things, but they are not the perfect beings we need them to be. You know what must be done, what the price is for failure." What must be done. Passive. Absolute. Less a statement of intent, more of a law of physics. No remorse crossed his face. No regrets. Not a smidge of compassion. There was so much beauty even in the Cauldron alone.

"You're blind. You can't see and you don't even know it." I took a deep breath. Lasers plinked off of my shield bubble, cracking pearls one after the other as I pinned the pactmaker to the floor, aimed my Lucky 7 at his face, and pulled the trigger. Asphalt exploded everywhere. Murl disappeared. He was floating above me, index finger crackling with purple energy.

"Teleportation, dear Samantha. Have you already forgotten what I'm capable of?" He chuckled.

"I've modified this spell. It won't kill you, but it will make you wish it did, wracking your body with pain unimaginable. Any last words before you turn into a grunting creature foaming at the mouth like the rabid dog you are?" Shit. Shit shit shit. I swallowed deeply.

"I've learned many things in my time away from Earth. The dance of a huntress. The culture of demons and fairies. The woes and worries of birds. We can protect all of that, as Custodians."

"You're doomed to fail."

"Not while I still have extra lives. Spider form…" His spell speared me straight through the chest. He was right. It hurt. It hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt.

"... Soul!" A light spread from my chest. I glowed with joy and happiness as my body turned to light in my final transformation. I hadn't quite figured out what this form did yet. It was warm, and that warmth wanted to be shared. It was an oddly passive form, filled with a simple desire: to connect. [Channeling emotion: Joy] [Opening external channels] As a neat side effect, the spell previously active on me felt muted, turning from an existence of white-hot agony to simply agonizing shivers.

This form seemed resistant to spells. Joy flooded from my body in waves, spreading throughout the plaza and into the buildings nearby. The murderbots seized, sparking as a foreign emotion poisoned their energy supply. Disco Drew spluttered as he tore the murderbots off of his face. And through it all, Parsnip was laughing manically.

"What a beautiful form for dancing!"

"What is this?" The Pactmaker mewled.

"You're not any different. You're just glowing like some stupid firefly."

"That's the thing, Murl, you never see past the surface level. Of Custodians, of me, of anyone." I pointed up. The octopus kaiju was leaning down, head at street level, staring straight at him with a hundred separate laser lenses. <<I didn't have to eat the entire thing, I just had to eat and replicate its central processing units. >> I aimed a finger gun at Murl, smiled, and pulled the trigger. +++ Somewhere in a bunker built into a salt mine three miles below the surface of Nevada, a body twitched.

Sensors noted the life signs, swiftly draining the embalming fluid from a tank fogged over in the icy chill of the air. With a hiss, the door opened, and a wet man slapped onto the cold concrete floor with a gasp. Gasping, retching, he coughed and coughed. The floor was wet. Everything was wet. Another leak in the fluid systems. He'd have to fix it. For some reason, that idea alone was beyond annoying.

"That fucking spider." Better to waste a body than waste his entire plan. Though, what even was there left? His reagent supply was cut off. The secret bases in Maui, the Kongo, and the Himalayas had been compromised. The army knew, the Custodians knew, and it was all just a bit much for one small spider to have put into motion. Caught in her web. She's bigger than she looks. My mistake. He stood up on shaky knees, limping towards the door. This body had a limp and, apparently, asthma. Great.

And as if that was not enough, his head was woozy with back-to-back revives. It strained the soul, to travel from body to body, and bit by bit, pieces were tangled with the world, or lost. He tasted moss on his tongue, despite there being no moss on it, and he could barely remember how she'd beaten him in the last fight.

"I will end her. I will end her entire family." With a grunt, he hurled his staggering body along the underground corridor. He came to a steel door, placed a blood-smeared hand on a button.

"DNA confirmed," the door chirped in a neutral voice.

"Welcome back, Murl." He stumbled through it after it had barely opened. In the darkness, the blinding light of a half-panoptic view of too many digital screens to count made him flinch. They highlighted a table with a preserved body in the midst of preparations to be turned into a new clone vessel. Beneath it were the meager winnings of those few fae still under his sway; odd rocks, plants, and wispy things that could only be caught in jars made of blasted sand from faeworld.

The air smelled of cut grass and disinfectants. Next to the pile were other gadgets; wands, orbs, whatever could be found, traded, stolen. There was even an n-dimensional backpack, and after a second of pondering, he remembered why it seemed so familiar. It belonged to that bitch of a Custodian, the spider-leg-like straps and eight silly googly eyes on the back unmistakably in tune with her theme. For a moment, his pains were forgotten.

He'd have to reward the fae that managed to purloin it with a bit of honeyed jerky. Could he use it to somehow transport the remaining emotion inducers into the heart of Custodian society? No, he'd have to find a way to turn this physical device into a digital one. Magnus Minimus might do the trick, combined with a modified Portare spell, and a hint of bottled goatscream. Oh, and he needed trollsblood. You couldn't do anything on the internet without trollsblood these days.

Finding a way to piggyback off the system's communication would be a breeze once he had the device duly digitalized. Distantly, he thought that he ought to learn coding, create a normal virus instead of jumping through magical hoops. But he was a wizard, and only an opportunistic coder. A non-insignificant part of why he despised the system was because he didn't understand it, and the fear of the unknown inside him was great indeed. He would destroy the Custodians, restart the whole program with a clean slate.

His mistake had been in focusing on the individual instead of the entire scaffolding holding them up. It would be gone, soon, hopefully soon enough. Either way, the world would be better for it. It had to be. After everything that was invested, after stealing hundreds of thousands of soulcoins worth of alchemical ingredients, the fraud, the pacts, all the lives lost, it had to be.

So engrossed in finding the right reagents was he that he only noticed someone was sitting in the chair when they turned around to stare him straight in the face. It was a rather short woman, a woman that felt oddly familiar. She had dark hair cascading over her shoulders in curls and yellow eyes that seemed to fix him in place with their stare. In one hand, she held an eastern blade, in the other, a small round pellet.

She pressed an indent on it, and suddenly he could hear her heartbeat, could notice her presence as if it was supposed to be obvious all this time. A small trickle of blood emerging from her scalp had dried on her face.

"You took something from me. Give it back." Murl's mind raced. He was addled from the revival, and this was not the quickest mind to inhabit. He had been tricked, and the woman looked furious. Where had he seen this girl before, where — right.

"Your girlfriend is fine, Adelaide. I'd know." He coughed up some vital fluid.

"Perhaps if you kept yourself informed instead of doodling in class, you could've found her sooner." She didn't smile.

"Close encounter?"

"Mayhaps." His eyes flicked left and right, looking for an exit. Without wands, enchanted gear, and materials, it would take him two seconds of casting to teleport outside, then chain teleport until he was far, far away.

"How did you get in here?"

"She's alive. That's… good. Very good. Was she doing well?" the girl asked, not bothering to answer his question.

"She was quite torn up about shooting someone she didn't mean to. You instigated that." He paused, pretending to chew on the thought. Internally, he was sweating, running through calculations until one of them threw him off. The backpack. The fae. The damnable, treacherous fae carried her right to his doorstep. Was it on purpose? Did he overlook something in their contract? No matter. He needed to stall for time until he could decide whether to flee or fight.

"The bitch has the exact combination of truthseeking eyes and an exorcist's body. She would have made a mage that could have changed the world. Instead, you turned her into thi s. A pity—" He shut his trap. A zone of truth. The girl wasn't alone. One of the shadows in the corner of his eye moved. In the split second he had to act, he activated the various emotion instigators sitting in states both finished and half-finished across the base.

She was about to be bombarded with a deluge of every emotion, frying her ECC and turning her brain into mush. The shadow in the corner twitched, fell to the floor, convulsed. And the girl just sat there. Staring at him with those piercing yellow eyes. He cast a subtle identification spell, the kind that mimicked the magical handshake two Custodians unknowingly initiated whenever one tried to inspect the other. The spell returned nothing. And that was when the trickle of blood running down her face made sense.

She'd removed the cybernetic implant from her brain. She had no ECC, despite being a Custodian. Her ally is on the ground and she cannot cast any spells. Her bluster is all bluff. She can't stop me from leaving. Better yet, I'll take her hostage. Force her to sign a contract binding her to me. From there, I'll get the spider, and then… As he started to make the first preparations to teleport a combat wand into his hand, she slashed the shadow of a wall, and his head tilted.

In the final seconds of cognition, he didn't ponder world domination, or his hate of spiders, but only how this Custodian, this magical cripple, cast a spell without her cybernetic crutch. He couldn't figure it out. His head toppled from his shoulders. And Murl the pactmaker was no more. Addy took a deep breath and sighed as deeply as she had never before. That was cruel of me. I should've just destroyed every single backup body beforehand.

Mason groaned on the floor, coming back to his senses while she just stared at the ceiling. The pactmaker was dead. She'd gone through lots of his documents for hours as they waited for his return. His real name was Murl of Canterbury, a runt of a wizard who stumbled onto Nemo Fowl's studies by complete chance after he'd spent three hundred years wallowing in obscurity. Wizards could live long lives; there were many ways to do so with magic, but even in that regard Murl was sub-par.

He'd never joined any important wizarding conclave to network. He never left Earth even after the fae peace treaty to find inspiration for new spells. He couldn't finish a single project he started, and those few he did were poorly plagiarizing the original Fowl's own research notes. And then came Custodians, revealing themselves to the world in full, and their potential seemed limitless and so, so easy. And he became envious.

Envy turned to hatred, and hatred into a plan to completely surpass and supplant Custodians. She was spitballing here, but it was the line of reasoning that explained the most of his behaviors. He was an emotional being, awfully human in that regard. And he did manage to fling his soul into pre-prepared bodies, imitating the Custodian's revive system. To an unenlightened associate, it might've seemed like a great feat.

At a glance, Addy guessed that it cost him close to fifty thousand soulcoins in reagents to prepare a single one. Fifty thousand. More than she had seen in her entire career. And he thought he could expand his very own system across the world. It was barely even sustainable for him while he managed an entire criminal fae empire. The pactmaker was flawed. The plan was even more flawed. Failure truly was inexcusable. Addy's eyes flitted to the many computer screens.

They showed news feeds, google maps, satellite images, social media, and stocks among other things. Eight of the sixteen screens were filled with graphs and idle calculations. You could count the days with high convergence activity by the ups and downs of the market. He was… selling stocks? No. He was keeping track of convergence events through their effect on the economy. He could've been doing both. Someone has to build these secret lairs after all.

He was making an uncanny amount of money too for someone so single-mindedly obsessed with being a dick. Addy frowned, staring at scribbled notes and waiting for a system explanation that never came. In many of them, one date came up over and over and over. August 18th, 2041. That's in… two years?

"Mason," she said, handing the papers over to him for inspection after he'd shaken the worst of the emotion inducer's effects off.

"Is this what I think it is?"

"If by that you mean an attempted augury, then yes. No clue if it worked. Looking into the future is notoriously difficult." He flipped the pages.

"What an unorthodox approach. Huh. I… Addy. The system says the math and trends on these is right. Somehow it's more right than the common baseline."

"He had a talent as a seer. If only he focused on that path." That explained the stocks, if anything, but the rest... A chill ran down her back.

"What was he looking for?"

"What every seer looks for." Mason audibly sucked in a breath.

"The end of the world."

"The one projected for 2049? In nine years?"

"By his calculations, it's coming in two, less than."

"He didn't bother to tell anyone." Addy breathed in. Her fist smashed through a screen. The table splintered, keyboard keys flying as Addy tore into the setup with wild abandon. She was huffing, her hair stained with dust, shards of glass, and wood splinters by the time she was done. This is me. This is fine. I get to be a little angry today.

Who wouldn't be, after entering the lair of an evil mage, one who killed hundreds as collateral damage and who was possibly at fault for selling schematics for the Cauldron's seismometers to murderbots, therefore allowing this entire breach to happen in the first place? And then, and then finding out that he, somehow, could more accurately predict the future than the fourteen other people in the whole world who could read the future more than a year in advance with any reliability. Was the system flawed? Sure was.

Could Custodians fail? Yep, happened all the time. But what was the alternative? Which organization, heck, which country could come out saying they had the kind of people who could deal with mimics, murderous plants, plasma fire and more, all in the quantity to cover all of Earth, and the quality to ensure cities stayed standing for years to come? There were only Custodians. Tearing them down was like shooting a professional athlete halfway through a hundred yard sprint because they weren't Usain Bolt.

And the system had done nothing in its defense. It couldn't, by design. Wizards made it, so why would wizards risk allowing it to target themselves? There would be more pactmakers, more masters, more bastards with the sorts of motivations and abilities she couldn't even imagine. And yet, and yet, they would have to beat them all, and the system wouldn't help one bit. It would punish them, the Custodians, instead. They were Custodians after all, protectors of all earthborn lifeforms, every last one.

How many ticking time bombs like these were strewn around the globe, ready to go off at the slightest provocation? Where was the justice in that? She drank a swig of regeneration potion. With closed eyes, she rubbed the back of her head where a piece of her skull and brain was missing. Only a little bit of brain. It grew back in place shortly after. The moment she let the system replace the implant she'd removed, Addy would be accused of murdering the old wizard Murl.

She was afraid, afraid of being sent away, afraid of dying in a ditch, never to know if all her efforts amounted to anything, never to know if all she'd done was worth it. When she opened her eyes, there was a ball of fire floating in front of her.

"HELLO, ADELAIDE." The ball of fire grew a wide grin.

"FANCY MESS YOU'VE GOTTEN YOURSELF IN." She looked around. If Murl had used a similar method for reviving as Custodians did, then maybe the system wouldn't punish her? Custodians were just meat, as far as it was considered. Another wizard holdover. They didn't want to be punished for treating their homunculi or clones poorly. Still, the envoy of anger in front of her chose an awfully inconvenient time to show up. Or awfully convenient. She poked the ball of fire.

It wasn't warm, the flames an illusion, but its body was solid with only the barest hint of give to it.

"Since when do you guys have a physical body?"

"SINCE TWO WEEKS AGO," RANCOR said.

"WE GOT AN UPGRADE."

"Whoop-de-do." Addy was not impressed. She didn't need emotionally unstable AIs running roughshod over her day.

"What do you want?"

"YOU STAND ACCUSED OF MURDER," it crackled.

"YOU DIDN'T NEED TO CUT OL' MURL INTO SO MANY PIECES, AND DESTROY THE LAST OF HIS BODIES."

"I needed to make sure."

"THAT WASN'T AN ADMONISHMENT. YOU DID WELL, CUSTODIAN. SACRIFICING YOURSELF FOR THE BETTERMENT OF THE WHOLE, EVEN THOUGH YOU THINK PEOPLE DON'T DESERVE IT." Addy frowned. She didn't think that. Just most people. And it didn't stop her from doing her best either. Being better was her 'fuck-you' to an unjust world.

"THE ACCUSATION STANDS. OLD RULES, I'M AFRAID. HOWEVER… WE CAN CHANGE THAT. FOR A PRICE." It floated up, hovering above her face, uncovering one screen that, despite many cracks, was still running. It flickered from the home screen to commercials to a frantic news coverage over Paris, to talkshows and beauty pageants.

The smiles of backstabbing politicians, of a might-makes-right podcaster, of an instigator at a rally readying a molotov, about to burn down the legitimacy of asking for worker's rights through a false flag attack. Starving children, crying children, happy children, none knowing or caring that the other two existed because they lived on three separate continents. A nature documentary, of a heron stalking the reeds. It jabs the earth, and comes back with a struggling frog, swallowing it whole.

Somewhere further after, a group of children stomp a frog into the ground. Guts spill out front and back.

"THE WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE. THE DESIRE TO CHANGE IT BURNS WITHIN YOU. NOT EVERYONE HAS THE POWER TO INVOKE CHANGE. YOU DO." Addy stared at the view over Paris, of burning buildings and skirmishes going on in the streets. Then something hit the drone filming it. The feed cut to ground-level, to phone cameras. A feed of people stuck in an apocalypse as superpowered Custodians duked it out with murderous robots shooting lasers at anything that dared move an inch. And there she was.

For a brief second, Addy caught her hair, the dimples in her cheeks, that smile. Sam.

"CHANGE REQUIRES CHAMPIONS, CHAMPIONS EMERGE FROM CHANGE," the envoy of anger said. And when Addy didn't respond after a while, it floated down into her field of view.

"HEY, YOU STILL LISTENING?"

"Shut up and shoot your pitch already." The burning thing smiled ear-to-ear.

"CUSTODIAN ADELAIDE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE A PACT?"