Chapter 38: Chapter 36

When Alice woke up, the first thing she noticed was that the pain in her arm and her stomach were gone. Clearly, someone had gone through the effort of fixing all of the problems with her body after the fight. The (presumably) [Organic Mage] that had saved her during the fight was gone, probably off running damage control elsewhere, but Alice still knew that there was no way she could have healed her injuries so cleanly and so well in such a short period of time without some sort of magical assistance.

However, her System notifications didn’t make her feel much better about the fact that she had survived and that her body was patched up. There were a barrage of notifications, but Alice stopped thinking almost the moment she saw the very first one.

You have gained an achievement!

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

You have slain another human being.

Effect of Strength, Dexterity, and Perception increased by 1%. Classes with some relationship to fighting other humans gain experience 15% faster.

Alice stared at the Perk for a long time, not processing the world around her. The title of the bloody Perk was literally murderer. Alice felt…

She felt…

She thought of the man’s head exploding during the fight, and suppressed the urge to vomit again. After that, she took a moment to calm down.

She finally took a look around, processing the fact that she was back in the wagon. They were moving again. Milo and the surviving guards were all sitting in the wagon with her, chatting and mostly leaving her in peace. When he saw that she was up and moving around, Milo gave her a friendly nod, before he turned back to conversing with the guards. Alice gave him a halfhearted nod back, before she sank back into her thoughts.

Did she regret what she had done?

Alice couldn’t honestly say that she did. She knew that the person she had killed had earnestly been trying to kill her. She didn’t know whether they had been motivated by greed or something else, but the fact remained that she had needed to defend herself. If she was put in the same situation, she would probably do it again. The image of people streaming out of the woods and surrounding her with the intention of killing her was one that she would never forget, and no matter how she played the memory back, she couldn’t find any other resolution to the conflict. The moment the attackers had come, someone was going to die.

That didn’t mean that she could wholeheartedly accept the fact that she had killed someone, though. When she thought about the fact that she had killed someone, however, more than the fact that she had done so, there was also a strangely… hollow feeling. The initial urge to vomit was still there, and an image of the man’s head exploding was branded into her mind. Apart from that, however, there was also an oddly hollow feeling. As if none of it was real. It was an… odd feeling. Her initial flinch reaction aside, she didn’t revel in the feeling of having taken another life, and she didn’t feel as much horror as she thought she would, either. Was something wrong with her? She remembered having read somewhere that humans were supposed to feel horrified, traumatized after killing someone. She felt the urge to throw up when she thought about the man’s head exploding, but the guilt she had assumed she would feel was… dulled.

Alice closed her eyes, trying to process her emotional nothingness in a way that made sense to her. Was she still in shock? She wasn’t sure. Was there something else in play here? She wasn’t sure. Alice’s thoughts kept running in circles for what felt like hours, even though it was probably only a couple minutes in reality. Finally, she tried her best to push forward despite her feelings, and began looking at the rest of her notifications.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 37 -> 38 Student of Kinetic Magic: 13->18 Explorer of Magic: 31 -> 34

Apart from that, most of her Attributes had increased quite substantially after the battle. The only one that was useful in combat but hadn’t improved at all was Strength, possibly because at this point Alice was already long used to using magic in place of her actual physical body for most things. A variety of skills had also progressed quite nicely, especially the ones related to Kinetic Magic.

After a minute or two, Alice frowned. Just looking over her System Notifications after killing somebody felt wrong. Then again, not doing so also felt wrong. More than anything else, Alice just didn’t know what to do right now. She really wished there was something she could know she was supposed to be doing besides stewing in her thoughts, over and over, as she played the entire battle back in her mind over and over again.

After an unknown amount of time, Illa flew herself over to the wagon. Milo and the guards gave Illa respectful nods and a chorus of ‘lady Illa’ sounded out before they returned to their conversation.

Illa turned towards Alice. Perhaps noticing the harrowed and hollow look in Alice’s eyes, Illa stopped for a moment, before she simply sat down next to Alice.

“How are you doing?” Illa asked, after a few moments of silence.

“I don’t know.” Said Alice. It might not have been the best thing to say, but it was the most truthful one right now.

“You don’t know?” Illa didn’t sound shocked, or as if she didn’t believe Alice. Instead, she sounded genuinely curious. She looked at Alice’s face for a while, as if she was thinking.

“I don’t know. I… back at home, we had a lot of studies about how people’s thoughts and ideas would change after they killed someone, even if it was in self defense. And right now, I just feel… nothing. I feel sick when I think about the way his head exploded, but otherwise, I just…” Alice shook her head. “I don’t know. I feel hollow somehow. Empty.”

“Is it your first time killing someone?” Illa looked at Alice a bit more closely. “I see. I wasn’t aware – no, I suppose it makes sense, given what you’ve described of your world so far. Lack of monsters and high resources in your home nation probably lowered the causes of humans attacking and killing each other quite significantly. Hmm.” Illa tapped her finger against her cheek absently, before she refocused on Alice again. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I killed someone?”

Alice shook her head. In her training sessions with Illa, she was usually more focused on dodging and not getting hit. After training, Illa often chatted with Alice about Alice’s home dimension, but she usually didn’t talk about her army days very often – more frequently, if Illa talked about herself, she would talk about her kids or her husband, or small details about problems in town like organizing ways to clean up a particularly tricky fungal infection in the river. She had assumed Illa didn’t want to talk about her time in the military, and had respected that.

“It was after I had just joined the army. You see, for the mages especially, a lot of people have flinch reactions towards killing somebody. After all, mages usually come from mage universities instead of directly from the lower levels of the military, which means that we usually tend to live in a very different environment than the average soldier. We tend to have a bigger focus on research and academia than most soldiers, and a lot less experience with actual combat and fighting. Most magic academies DO provide a lot of sparring and practice fighting, along with some specific [Teacher] Perks that can help simulate real fights more effectively if the [Teacher] is high level, but it never quite substitutes for the real thing.

“This can pose a problem for a military – after all, most experienced combat mages can fight a few dozen soldiers or serve as mobile siege weapons in a pinch if they know how to use all of their Perks and abilities. However, if we don’t know what to do and have no experience with real fighting, we can also seriously screw up at critical moments. The military obviously doesn’t want that. Therefore, they usually have several experienced soldiers babysit newly recruited mages while they hunt a few mid-power monsters to help them get used to combat, then hunt a stronger monster or an alpha monster that hasn’t formed a pack yet. Finally, after all of that is done and a team is used to working together, we usually go hunt down a group of bandits.” Illa’s voice became softer, as if she was lost in a memory.

“At the time, I didn’t think very much of it. I was already doing well for myself at that point – I had a good set of achievements boosting my levelling speed for my magic classes, I was a hard worker, and I was known for getting my job done competently and quickly. I had good reflexes and defensive abilities as well, which is the major weakness of most mages.

“So I was confident. Maybe too confident, but I thought it would be a breeze to get through the final test as an army mage, get through the final step of my recruitment process, and then finish paying off my debt to the academy.

“We… we charged into the group of bandits after we did some intelligence gathering. The army usually provided us with some amount of information before we went to hunt a monster, but they said that this time we should do so on our own. As a final test of sorts. We gathered information from the local villages. You should have seen them – they weren’t ravaged or burned to the ground, even though the bandits hit the area regularly. Instead, they were hungry. The bandits stole a good chunk of their grain, and without it, some of the villagers were obviously going to have a hard time making it through the winter. I felt so awful, looking at people who were thin as rails but couldn’t fight back against a group of people with armor and weapons, coming to steal their food every week. I was enraged.

“And after we attacked the bandits, I saw… more of the same thing. In a lot of the stories my father told me when I was a little girl, bandits were notoriously evil beings. They would kill and pillage without mercy, rob and steal, and sometimes they would do all sorts of other absurd things like kidnap women and torture them until they died, or act in some other way. Something that would let listeners know that the bandits were truly ‘evil.’

“The bandits we killed weren’t like that. They hadn’t ever actually killed anybody, at least not directly. And they were as skinny as the damn people they were robbing! When they saw the army insignia, half of them dropped their weapons and begged us to spare their lives.” Illa actually snorted, a laugh that sounded like a cough or a half-choked sob. “They weren’t some ruthless killers or the incarnates of evil. When we charged in, seeds blazing and ready to wipe out the ‘evil bandits,’ we found a bunch of half-starved farmers who had turned to banditry in desperation after a few years of bad harvests pushed them to the brink of starvation! Their armor was made of metal scraps and a few corpses they looted to cobble everything together! Every time they robbed a damn village they made sure to try to avoid hurting anyone! Even though a few of the people in the villages would starve to death as a result of their actions, if they took no actions they would have been just like the other damn villagers!” Illa’s gaze grew more distant by the second, before finally she sighed.

“The soldiers watching over the group of mages then dragged the farmers – no, the bandits away and separated them. And made every single mage execute one of them. I remember at the time I thought it was so absurd – we were going to need to kill these people that had fallen on hard times just to make sure that we were able to kill a person? I thought  it was so ridiculous – I was so angry I got into a shouting match with the soldier in charge of babysitting us for almost an hour before he finally said something that made me stop talking.

“He said “even the nomads from the north are like this, Illa. Don’t you understand? The land to the north is a tundra – while the free cities on the northern coast can get by because they act as the intermediary between the Corellion Empire’s enchanting materials and dyes and the Central continent’s shipping lanes back to the south, the land is cold and infertile. Most nomads will kill and burn Illvarian towns and kill the inhabitants, but a lot of them are also just desperate men and women trying to get grain for the year’s end when winter comes and their already infertile tundra stops producing even grass for their animals to eat for the year. And that regardless of the reason for their actions, we still need to protect the people behind us, as well.” “

Illa looked faintly sick now. Alice could feel something else herself – a twinge of both grief and emptiness as she thought about the person who had attacked her. Of his head exploding like a watermelon.

“And he said that regardless of the reasons for their actions, the farmers had still taken actions the resulted in men, women, and children starving to death. Fathers and mothers dying, children freezing or dying, even if the bandits had done their best to reduce the suffering caused by their actions, they had still harmed people that we were sworn to protect. I… I killed one of the bandits, and afterwards, the soldier in charge made me dip my hand in the blood from the bandit’s corpse. He said, “Even though the System makes it easy to sometimes forget the value of a human life, you cannot ever forget. You may kill people, and you may need to hurt people badly. Later, you may come to regret what you’ve done. But you also need to remember – the blood on your hands could have also come from people who didn’t make a bad decision and decide to hurt other people. If you do nothing and watch them die, is the blood not on your hands either way?” And he made me not wash the blood off of my hand for almost an hour afterwards.” Illa frowned.

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“It made me realize something – the people we fight, and even people who try to kill us, might not be wholly evil. In fact, maybe there’s no such thing as a ‘wholly evil’ person in this world. But regardless, if somebody is continuously hurting those around them, they still need to be weeded out. A weed in a garden isn’t necessarily malicious – it isn’t actively trying to kill everything around it. However, if it isn’t rooted out, it will still choke out the rest of the plants regardless. We don’t have to like killing people – in fact, we should never like killing people. We need to remember what we’ve done, so that we never cross the line and start to see people as a way to upgrade our Achievements. Sometimes, Achievements can makes it so… easy to see people as walking Stat points. Obviously, it’s because people misuse and misunderstand the true intentions and benevolence of the System, but it isn’t common to misinterpret its desires and begin to follow the wrong path. The way the soldier in charge of my exercise did my first killing mission was one of the most valuable lessons I had in my life.” Illa sighed. “So we need to kill people sometimes, but we can never lose sight of what it means to kill someone. Do you understand?”

Alice nodded, slowly.

“Good.”

The two sat in silence for a while longer. A few minutes later, Illa looked back to the other wagons.

“I have some final things to arrange and deal with, so I will speak with you more later. For your first fight, you did well. Remember that. You managed to survive even though you were surprised and surrounded, and even though you didn’t have time to put on armor. Granted, I haven’t taught you how to put on armor yet – your stats are still a little low to deal with metal armor if you want to move around comfortably. However, the fact that you survived and even managed to take down an enemy is a sign of your growth. Don’t forget that.” Illa gave Alice a small smile, before she turned around again. Before she could leave, however, Alice turned back to Illa.

“Who were they? The people who attacked us, I mean. Do we know who they were?”

Illa actually snorted.

“I have some guesses, even if I don’t know for sure yet. The fact that they mounted a fucking ballista in the middle of an untraveled stretch of countryside means one of two things – either they have a spy in the expedition that’s somehow feeding them information on what direction we’re travelling, and they set up well in advance, or they have a high-level engineer to let them set up siege equipment quickly. I strongly suspect it’s the latter, though – without a high level engineer, setting up a ballista with minimal fuss in the middle of a largely uninhabited region is a massive pain the ass. Heck, just one engineer would have a hard time doing it – which means that the Sigmusi are far more invested in messing with the southern recolonization effort than I expected.” Illa frowned, obviously unhappy. “It seems like this might not be the last problem we encounter, both during the expedition or back in town. My little present towards would-be troublemakers there may be insufficient. Hmmm…”

Illa sighed, and shook her head.

“My guess is that these are a bunch of ‘deserters’ from the Sigmusi empire. With the amount of troops Illvaria is already devoting to dealing with monsters in the regions surrounding newly founded settlements, and the need to maintain a presence on the northern border to keep away Rakari nomadic raiders, it’s a bit more difficult to police borders, especially the new border between the southern region of Illvaria and the Sigmusi colonia, since the border didn’t exist five years ago. Therefore, it’s not unlikely that the Sigmusi have been slipping in a few ‘bandits’ and ‘deserters’ across the border to lead attacks against more vulnerable targets.” Illa frowned. Alice also frowned, vaguely reminded of privateers from her previous life.

“My job is a lot riskier than I thought it would be, huh,” said Alice, sighing.

Illa actually jerked her head back towards Alice, surprised. “You’re right, actually. I might be underpaying you. I’ll think about upping your compensation if you’re still interested in working for me later on. We’ll talk more about it once some of the tension from the battle has bled off a bit, though, okay?”

Alice sighed, but nodded. Then she realized something. “Wait, if the Sigmusi Colonia is going as far as slipping troops across the border, is a war going to happen? I… I’m not really sure if…”

“If you want to stay in Illvaria if a war breaks out? I don’t really blame you, if that’s the case – as someone from another planet, you probably aren’t very invested in our nation’s struggle. That being said, I doubt it’ll go that far – the Sigmusi empire on the main continent can’t ship huge numbers of troops or Immortals to the Southern Continent or their neighbors will swoop in to make trouble for them while they’re undefended. They’re just doing this because they know they can get away with it without a war breaking out. Illvaria doesn’t have the military strength to contest them, after all – and the Shil Confederacy as a whole wouldn’t take this a direct threat from the Sigmusi, because they know the Sigmusi wouldn’t take it to a full-on war right now. Plenty of them are more than happy to see Illvaria knocked down a peg or two, as long as the Sigmusi aren’t able to threaten the Confederacy as a whole afterwards. So it ends up being kind of a mess of political interests, really.” Illa frowned. “I hate political interests.”

Alice sighed, then turned back to watching the scenery as it flashed by. The wagons continued on, seemingly in peace – for now. But while many of the attackers had fallen, now that the wagons had already been attacked once, her brain wouldn’t stop conjuring images of large groups of attackers lurking just out of sight, ready to pounce on the expedition the moment they let their guard down. She felt… afraid.

She turned back towards Illa, but Illa had already taken to the air again, flying herself towards one of the other wagons. Alice squirmed uncomfortably, before stroking the part of her stomach where she remembered an arrow punching through her. No matter how much she reassured herself that the damage was gone and she had been healed, her thoughts kept drifting towards what it felt like to get shot, and she kept wondering if it was really healed.

She didn’t think she could take her job of being the ‘face’ of Illa’s program in the south anywhere near as lightly as she originally had. She needed to think about a lot of things a bit more. Before that, however, she needed some armor. She had been made very aware of how vulnerable simple clothes left her body, and she wanted to shore that up a bit.

Before she set out, though, she took a look at the Perks she had gained from getting [Student of Kinetic Magic] to level 18.

Railgun Requirements: Kinetic Disciple level 15 or higher

When you are manipulating only one object, you may move it with far greater force.

Sticky Objects Requirements: Kinetic Disciple level 15 or higher, Mana Precision 5 or greater

You may spend a small amount of mana stored in your kinetic seed to temporarily make objects you are currently touching with your mana 'sticky,' allowing them to adhere to other surfaces or each other for brief periods of time. Note: This is a relatively light force, and will break apart if stronger forces pull the objects apart.

Extended Skin Requirements: Kinetic Disciple level 15 or higher, Endurance 100 or greater, Willpower 100 or greater

For the purposes of magic controlled by others, your 'skin' extends approximately 30 centimeters beyond your actual skin, making it far more difficult for others to initialize any magic in that region.

Folds of magic Requirements: Kinetic Disciple level 15 or higher

When you are attempting to control multiple objects at once with your mana, your control over the objects is improved by a moderate amount. It also becomes easier to focus on multiple objects at once, as well as create multiple mana tendrils at the same time.

 

Alice thought back to the fight that she had just been in. Sticky Objects was interesting, but simply wouldn’t have mattered in the fight – it was a neat trick, but tricks were hard to utilize when someone was stabbing you in the stomach. Railgun might have helped a lot in some parts of the fight – it would have allowed her to drag away the sword away from one of the attackers earlier and use it to defend herself. That would have helped a lot, but it also came with the hefty restriction of only working if she was manipulating exactly one object. Most [Kinetic Mages] went in a totally different direction, and instead focused on being able to manipulate dozens of objects at once. Alice had already started to level the skills she needed to do the same thing – being able to move multiple objects at once was the easiest way to stop something like a volley of arrows, after all.

Folds of Magic obviously helped plenty with that, and would have helped Alice quite a bit during the fight. If she had been able to multitask more effectively, she could have stopped both the swordsman from stabbing her and the archer from shooting her, which would have left her with far fewer injuries during the fight.

{Extended Skin} was an okay option for dealing with other mages, but right now Alice didn’t think that was her biggest problem. So she discarded the option for now – there were better things available, even if it didn’t seem like a bad pickup.

After some hesitation, she grabbed {Folds of Magic}. She wanted the multitasking options it would help provide, and it would be effective with far less work than it would take to level up her {Divided Attention} skill to the point where it would be useful. And it would synergize with {Divided Attention} as the skill reached higher levels, so it would be helpful both immediately and long-term.

Then, with a sigh, Alice turned back to the guards and Milo. She should at least talk with them about what had happened during the battle, so that she could get a better idea of what she had done wrong, and what else had happened during the fight. There was a lot to unpack, especially from an emotional perspective, but Alice felt that she had tried to deal with her messy emotions enough for right now. She had survival concerns to take care of.