There was more ‘research’ after that. All of it really amounted to him pointing out various artifacts, before having me fill them with mana. He would often explain their specific function, but it never went any further than that. I ended up using everything from a tiara that greatly reduced the wearer's weight to pieces of armor that massively boosted the wearer’s recovery speed from injury. The last one I only had to take Indri’s word for, though I didn’t think he was lying.

  “Finally, why don’t you try this?” Duke Indri pointed to one of the walls, at a scabbard mounted on it. He moved forward, pulled it off, and extended it towards me.

  I took it, pulled a small shortsword out. It was a fine blade, with the same color scheme as the warhammer. It had its own set of etchings along the scabbard. Those looked familiar, too. I closed my eyes, channeled mana. I only had to start channeling it before there was a pull, something wanting to drag in more mana in than I was willing to feed it.

  That pull ended soon after, though it left me tired all the same. There was also that feeling again. That anger. It was a subtle thing, one I might not have even noticed if I wasn’t getting used to feelings that weren’t my own. It was so much like the Godblade, and yet much fainter at the same time.

  None of the research so far was insidious. It also wasn’t actually ‘research’. I got the impression that he was looking for something, though he certainly didn't share what he was looking for with me. It was hard not to wonder what the point of it all was.

  By now, I’d poured so much mana that even I felt tired. It was getting harder and harder to tamp down on my rage. Not because the rage was too much -though that had certainly grown- but because the mana fueling my Gift was growing too thin. A unique experience for me, that.

  I didn’t even dare use my Gift to check if my silent observer was here with us. I suspected they weren’t.

  “That should do for one day. I must say, you truly do have quite a bit of mana.” Duke Indri said approvingly. “You have been a great help.”

  “I must confess I don’t know what I’ve helped with. To me, it just feels like I’m using mana for no reason.”

  “Even using one of these Artifacts would be quite tiring. That is the one disadvantage Artifacts have over Magical Implements. I’m afraid I would have to hire a high-ranked adventurer, and even then, I doubt they could have helped me measure all of these.”

  It made sense, I suppose. There was sweat on my brow, and I wiped it away as I sat in one corner of the room, right next to his desk. “You said that hammer was…in between being an Artifact and a Magical Implement.” I pointed. “What did you mean?”

  Duke Indri nodded, following my gaze. “Ah, . Sometimes, very rarely, truly powerful Gift users end up imbuing some of their Intent into their most precious affects. Not intentionally, mind you. That’s the realm of the Gods. Still, it does sometimes happen. It's one of the few signs we know of that one is on the path to reaching Godhood themselves.”

  I paused for a moment. Stared at the hammer. Recalled all of the Artifacts I had been made to use so far. All of them were items that a person could use and accidentally imbue. They’d all come with that same strange feeling. What if these all belonged to the same person?

  “Sounds like they must be quite powerful.” I mused idly. “I do wonder who that hammer belongs to. They must have been someone rather famous.”

  A shadow passed over his face. For a second, I didn’t think he was going to answer me at all. “Aye, she was at that.” He said into the stillness. “That was hardly all she was, but her strength was the one thing most people cared for.”

  “You sound like you knew her well.”

  He smiled forlornly, looked at his outstretched palms. “I would like to think so. She was my wife, after all.”

  I’d known the answer. It had merely been a matter of confirming it. I didn’t ask about the other Artifacts. I . This was an important puzzle piece, and I thought I was finally starting to grasp the greater picture here. Or at the very least, I was finally starting to see its outline. This next question had no point to it at all, and yet I asked anyway. “How did she die, if I may ask? You mentioned she died in the…Sword God War, right?”

  He looked at me, and more shadows seemed to settle over his expression. I’d thought of Duke Indri as a young man, despite his age. He looked his age now. “She died fighting the Sword God himself.” He murmured. “A duty she took, despite my pleading.” Each word sounded like it was being pulled out of him.

  “You…didn’t want her to fight this Sword God?” I tilted my head. “It sounds to me like she was quite the fighter. It seems absurd to fight a man called a God in the first place, but surely you couldn’t have been too surprised if she was called upon for that.” It was blunt and insensitive, and probably not what I should have said.

  The Duke frowned. I saw anger in his face then. It really had been the wrong thing to say. “They hardly even waited for her to give birth before they sent her off to die.” He snapped. “She might have had a chance if there had been time. If your had actually been there. If things had been different. Lots of ifs.” The man seemed to collect himself a moment later and shook his head. “I…apologize. Talking about my wife brings back bad memories. Come.” He rose from his desk. “It’s quite late. We should have dinner together.”

  I had more questions. My father? There had been genuine in his voice when he'd mentioned him, quickly suppressed or not. Duke Indri didn't seem like he was going to explain himself. All I could do was follow.

  We sat in Lord Indri’s personal solar, at a large dining table that looked more equipped to seat a party of twelve than it did three.

  “Violet, mind at least some of your table manners.” Duke Indri said, not for the first time.

  To my right, Violet Indri sat as she attacked the plate in front of her. It was an attack. Violent and messy. It was rather plain food compared to what I’d eaten yesterday: rice, veal, and stew. Not that I was complaining, of course. I was fairly certain I hadn’t seen Violet touch a fork once. Even for the stew, she opted to drain the bowl by raising it to her lips.

  As someone who had wasted a lot of time learning proper table manners and noble etiquette, it was at least mildly annoying. Annoyance and anger weren’t the same thing, according to my Gift. Damn it.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Nah,” Violet said, barely even finishing her chewing. “You know I like it better this way. Not about to change that for one brat.”

  It was hard to be offended, considering she had called me quite a bit worse than ‘brat’ so far. For her, that might even be her version of being pleasant. Duke Indri just looked at me apologetically.

  “I do not mind,” I said, very much minding. “I believe I said this last time, but she is a very spirited young Lady.”

  Violet snorted next to me and set her bowl down. “You’d smile and nod if I threw this whole thing at you, wouldn’t ya?”

  It would have been a meaningless insult from someone else. From her, it was probably an actual threat. “Why don’t you try it and find out?” I said helpfully. “My bowl is a lot more full than yours is.”

  She stared at me, smirked, and went right back to eating. I noticed Duke Indri staring at me with an unreadable expression on his face. It was gone as soon as I looked, so fast I almost would have believed I’d imagined it.

  “Violet.” He sighed deeply. “Stop picking fights. I had hoped the two of you might get along.”

  What a silly hope that had been, assuming he wasn’t lying.

  “I’m not.” The girl said casually. “She’s terrible at fights anyway.”

  Well, ouch.

  After that, I focused only on my own food. Back at the manor, I preferred to either eat alone or, at best, in Damian and Sere’s company. They were both relatively quiet, which I preferred. This….this was going to take some getting used to. At least it was only for a week.

  When we were done, Duke Indri personally led me back to my room, instead of sending for a maid. “Is your room acceptable? Your father always liked it, so I’d hoped it might bring you some…comfort?”

  “It’s quite lovely,” I said honestly. “It might be better than my actual room.”

  He laughed at that. Servants were a lot more amenable in greeting us now that Duke Indri walked with me. They bowed and scraped just like they did in Veyne Manor, but there was a difference. Here, all of the servants looked…happy. A maid was supposed to bow and smile, but that didn’t mean the smile had to be real. Here, they all were. It was such a strange contrast that I couldn’t help but notice it each time it happened. He had said he only kept the staff he trusted fully, though I didn’t think that was quite enough to explain this.

  “I do hope you will recover soon.” Duke Indri said as we stopped in front of my room. Mana quantity and mana recovery rate often go hand in hand, but it’s not a sure thing. You used quite a lot of it today.”

  “I feel a little better already,” I said. “A good night’s sleep should be more than sufficient.”

  He beamed then and patted me on the shoulder. “You really are remarkable. Your father would have been proud.” It was hard not to shiver at that. Not for a moment had I forgotten just what this monster did. My Gift might have suppressed the feeling of anger, but that didn’t mean it suddenly improved my opinion of him, too.

  “Thank you. You have been most generous.” I curtsied as was expected, before stepping into the blessed privacy of my own room.

  There was one thing I wanted to check. Even if I didn’t have mana to spare.

  I sharpened my hearing until my own breathing and heartbeat were uncomfortably loud. Combined with driving mana directly into the ears themselves. There were maids somewhere outside my window, arguing about the distribution of their chores. I ignored them. I heard the sound of retreating footsteps, presumably from Duke Indri himself, and I ignored them too.

  Then, heartbeat. Another heartbeat, somewhere outside the door. My silent watcher, surely. It was a little hard to place them exactly, but this was a better method than relying on sight, at least sometimes. She'd actually given me a good idea. How annoying.

  I turned my hearing back down. Stopped tamping down on my anger.

  Rage started to flow into me again. I took a deep breath and slowly sank to the ground. My whole body felt exhausted, but the anger was compensating for that, at least a little.

  How dare that bastard play at being the absent-minded researcher, knowing what he was doing?! The worst part was that I didn’t think it was an act. He really was so devoted to what he was doing that he didn’t think about anything else. It was infuriating.

  Perhaps that’s why the bastard had looked so shocked back in the Council Chambers. He might have given the orders well enough, but maybe he’d never stopped to think about what those orders actually resulted in.

  “Fucking bastard.” I hissed and brought my fist down on my thigh. It got some of the anger out, though not nearly enough of it. “Calm down. I have…to think.”

  The sword had been surprisingly silent. If I felt this angry, then the blade must have been feeding on at least some of it.

  Those two words echoed inside my head. I stared at the ground, and a small smile broke across my face. “Good. Maybe you’re learning.”

  Today had been…a day.

  Duke Indri had given me clues, whether he knew it or not. It was all about putting everything together into something that made sense.

  I crawled over until I could put my back against the foot of the bed. From here, the portrait stared down at me. Duke Indri, his wife. My father and the woman who was supposed to be my mother. There were so many questions, and hardly enough time to answer any of them.

  “Focus. Think.” I mumbled. The mana exhaustion was starting to get to me more than I expected. It was an aching, as if I’d worked out every muscle all at once and now the broken muscle fibers had come to collect on that debt. How did other people live with this?

  The first clue, of course, was the nature of his work itself. It wasn’t just studying Artifacts as pieces of ancient history as I had assumed. It was wanting to truly understand them. Duke Indri perhaps knew more about Artifacts than anyone in the entire world, and he had shared at least some of those workings with me. It was about Intent, the same as my Godblade.

  I absently stretched out my hand. Mentally tugged. The sword appeared in my hand. One moment, my palm was empty, and the next, the sword settled into it. How eerie. It came out rusted, as I’d expected. Being angry and being ready to act on said anger were different things.

  “I knew you had an Intent,” I whispered. “And now I know that an Intent is a part of someone’s…soul. A piece of them. I’d thought it was a metaphor, but you really are a piece of a God, aren’t you?”

  The sword seemed to thrum in my hand. It gave off the impression of a proud animal flexing for its partner. It might have made me smile if I weren’t so tired.

  It was hard not to draw a connection to the pseudo Artifacts of Scarlet he had lying around. Did all of them then contain some fragment of his late wife’s soul, too? I had to assume that they did.

  “And then he’d lied to me. Not very subtly either.” I had asked him if he knew a way to still create Artifacts, and he had lied. That meant he knew how, either directly or he knew of a process. He didn’t trust me nearly enough to share the details.

  Duke Wardell had been struggling with new Artifacts in the black market, had he not? An odd coincidence to have new Artifacts pop up, right as someone discovers the truth behind how to make them.

  Unless it wasn’t a coincidence after all. Yet, even if Duke Indri was behind them, I doubted making Artifacts was the point, no matter how interested in them he claimed to be. What if instead of putting pieces of someone's soul into objects...you might be able to do the opposite? Perhaps gather them into one vessel?

  “What does a man who has lost something precious want more than anything else in the world?” I murmured to myself. Put like that, the answer was obvious: he wanted to get that thing back. That felt like the right answer, as mad as it sounded. Whether or not it was actually possible was irrelevant. He seemed to think it was.

  Why me, then? Why was I pouring my mana through items that Scarlet had once used? The amount of my mana might have been high for this world, but surely you could gather the equivalent given time. With all those children that bastard had used, surely he must have by now. Yet, he wanted me specifically.

  “I’m still missing something,” I muttered to myself as I paced around the room. “But I don’t think it really matters. I’ve confirmed enough.” Right, I didn’t need to understand Indri’s entire scheme to put an end to it.

  Now, all I needed was to find evidence, and this could all finally end.

  It wasn’t like a small part of me didn’t have sympathy for the man. From the sounds of it, a great injustice had been done to him. The kind that could create a monster out of anyone.

  That didn’t mean I wouldn’t put the monster down all the same.

  The steel in my hand thrummed again. The rust flaked off almost instantly, and the blade glowed white in my hand.

  CAN A HEALER SURVIVE THE APOCALYPSE... ALONE?

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  THE RELUCTANT HEALER

  Fantasy

  LitRPG

  Adventure

  Psychological

  Progression

  The system took everyone from Earth. Except for Matt.

  Earth's integration into the system has started, plunging it into a multiverse where conflict is law. To prepare, humanity was sent to distant planets to participate in a 'tutorial'. All except one.

  Rejected and abandoned on a new Earth where mana has turned beasts into monsters, Matt must find a way out of the harsh Egyptian desert, all while being a class that has long been deemed redundant: Healer.

  A mysterious interim leader, a strange dungeon placed in the middle of nowhere, and a class ridiculed by everyone. Will Matt be able to overcome these difficulties and reunite with his friends, or will the hardships of the system break him first?

  Alone, under-equipped, and written off, he will either reinvent the rules of the system... or become Earth's first casualty.

  ?

  Begin the Journey

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  * A Tale of Survival & Revenge *