Chapter 14: Chapter 14: Cool Old Lady

Mila

Mila couldn’t control her expression what with her surprise at the question and the state of her body, which was of course the sage’s plan, so, as the hovering robots stopped shooting her and she again stood up, instead of answering she said, in a calm controlled voice, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Technically, you never actually broke up.” The sage smiled at her and, taking a step forward to appear right in front of her, reached up to push Mila’s hair out of her eyes in a grandmotherly way. “You ran away and then you never actually talked about it.

“Granted, you tried to do the nerdy flirting thing he likes and he punched you in the face, so a breakup seems likely, but neither of you have actually said the words yet.”

The little old woman beamed at her and Mila felt uncomfortable, as it was pretty obvious the sage had been watching their every move since the start of the tutorial and possibly before. The sage had switched to Mandarin when saying ‘nerdy flirting thing’ and that was a term Mila had made up for one of her first reports about Aalam.

“You have me at a disadvantage, ma'am.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.” The sage’s grin grew wider and Mila allowed herself to sigh.

“What do you want?” That was always the question, the key to knowing how to manipulate anyone, and Mila felt like a failure for having to ask it out loud, as she knew the sage would only give her a half answer at best.

“To figure you out.” The sage took a step back, appearing a few meters away, and, when she raised one of her hands, the hovering robots started to attack again. “As part of being the benefactor for Earth’s trials, I get to take in two formal apprentices. I’ve already chosen one and, given what I suspect about you, you’re on the shortlist for the other spot.”

Mila just continued trying to dodge, loosening active control over her movements and letting her instincts take more control. She’d been trained to always focus when in combat, plan at least three moves in advance at all times, but this was training and that active control was getting in the way of her energy flow, blocking her ability to feed power to the artifacts she was wearing.

About a minute later, she got hit again, but the enchantment on her dress was active and the arm where she was hit barely twitched, so she managed to recover almost instantly.

“Good.” The sage nodded in approval. “You’ve improved already. I told you this type of training was suited for you.” The sage tapped her cane on the ground again and the robots stopped. “Do you want to make a deal, Ms. Li? I’ll make a detailed training plan for you and, in return, all you have to do is play one round of Five Questions.”

Mila kept her expression blank, but she was internally extremely frustrated as the sage had spoken ‘Five Questions’ in Mandarin, meaning she knew something about her which wasn’t written down. Five Questions was a game she’d played with her grandfather since she was little. It consisted of taking turns asking questions and the person answering had to either be truthful, say the answer was classified, or, for only two questions, choose not to answer. Questions the other party chose not to answer could not be asked again in a different form and, for every question with a classified answer, the questioner got to ask an extra question. The trick to the game was to fully answer questions in such a way as to prompt the other party to ask a different question than they’d originally intended.

Mila took a deep breath, deciding to no longer hide her annoyance, just the full extent of it. “Sure.”

“Alright then.” The sage tapped her cane to the ground again and two chairs rose up, one for each of them, and they both sat down. “I’ll go first then. Why did you choose not to tell me your uniqueness?”

Mila was slightly surprised by the question but didn’t let it show on her face. “The very fact you asked made me think it was something you couldn’t know and, in a strange environment, it felt wise to keep such information private until I could understand the value.”

“Fair enough.” The sage nodded at her and looked a bit more serious. “Given what I now suspect, such an action probably saved your life and, thankfully, my first apprentice made the same decision. If your uniqueness is of the line I suspect, I almost got you killed by asking during a time the System was recording.

“Had you answered then, the nature of your uniqueness you see in your status screen would no longer come from your understanding of your own soul, but from the System’s records. And, while no one with the level of authority to access that part of the System would ever do so while you’re weak, if you grew into a powerhouse any god you met would have likely killed you on sight.”

Well, that was horrifying. The sage was either trying to gaslight her or, more likely, something about her would make gods want her dead. The extra information was an obvious distraction, however, and Mila was sure the sage would continue the topic on her own, so she didn’t need to waste one of her limited questions.

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“How do you know about Five Questions? That should be something between only me and my grandfather.”

The sage smiled at her again. “You know the tutorial on earth is happening at the same time as this one, but you probably don’t know the nature of tutorial challenges. For challenges, all trial takers are brought into a dream realm and, in the dream realm, the challenge can last for months yet no longer than a day will pass in the tutorial.

“Your grandfather is in a longer challenge which, like yours did, promotes team building and, as no one still alive on earth knows about the monster tutorial, he thinks you’re dead.”

There were two rather nice pieces of information Mila got from that answer. One, the sage likely couldn’t read minds, though she could seemingly watch everyone in the tutorial at once, and, two, her grandfather had possibly made a friend or two. That old man had been pretty much alone since her grandmother had died.

“Why did you want Aalam Alvaro as your assignment?”

Mila allowed herself to frown at that. As far as she was aware, the fact she’d requested to honey trap Aalam was not documented, and only five people should know. She thought about it for a few seconds and, upon realizing the likely reason, she probably would have started to cry if she wasn’t trying to control her facial expressions.

The sage hadn’t said who her grandfather had told about Five Questions. From her answer, assuming it was true, all Mila could determine was he was talking to someone about her and, with that old man, it was far more likely he’d talk about Five Questions with someone he was torturing than someone he was trying to form a bond with, and that was the only time the topic of her choosing to date Aalam would have come up. Her grandfather most likely knew  how she’d died.

“As you undoubtedly know, I tested out of most of high school and then spent a good chunk of my teenage years as a honey trap assassin helping set up coups in Africa. My grandfather, an ex agent for the Ministry of State Security, didn’t like how I was being used and pulled some strings, so my real identity was padded with fake schooling records and I was sent to Harvard in the United States. The assignment was to get a masters in teaching within five years, so I could then do the same type of job, though with more spying than killing, in the US.

“I made a lot of useful contacts while at school, just as instructed, and, through some of those contacts, I learned about Aalam.”

Were she not controlling her face, Mila realized she would have started smiling at that moment, even given how sad she was, and that pretty much answered her questions to herself about her choices at that time.

“He was a couple years ahead of me, despite being a year younger, and he had an in school nickname, the Curve-breaker of the Sciences.

“I liked how pissed off he made all the entitled brats at that school, but, more importantly, at the age of nineteen he already had three patents with the US Government with four more filed. I did a bit more research and realized he was someone my government would want to spy on for the long term, then I studied him for a bit, decided there were far worse people I could be forced to couple with, and spent a year slowly attracting him.”

She hadn’t actually meant things to go so slow, but she’d never met someone quite as dense. Her mind flashed back to those many, many times she’d caught him staring at her chest and ass and acted oblivious, even though they were alone, and she silently cursed herself for not earlier doing what she eventually did and just taking off her clothes and pulling down his pants.

“We were college sweethearts and I enjoyed myself. He was super, super introverted, so he was very low maintenance, allowing me to keep an entire separate group of friends for my job. I liked his sister, who was studying in the law school. And, probably most important, I didn’t really have to pretend much with either of them, other than hiding the fact I was a spy. They liked how I was smarter than them in some ways and that’s hard to find, especially when you’re honey trapping someone.

“So, when I graduated and the Ministry tried to assign me to honey trap an old US senator, I passed my handler twenty three different patent applications and he quickly made it his idea to honey trap Aalam instead.”

Mila calmly looked at the sage and then smiled slightly. “You asked why I wanted Aalam to be my assignment. Mainly, I was tired of old man dick.”

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