Chapter 29: Chapter 29: Devil

Mila

According to the dossier, the city had a total of 15 individuals above F rank, made up of two D ranks and thirteen E ranks. One of the D ranks was the city lord, his wife one of the more powerful E ranks, and the other D rank was a man called Corith, a mercenary who’d retired to the settlement about a year before the challenge’s start time.

Corith was a warrior while the city lord was a mage, and both had Laws more powerful than Mila’s. Trying to fight either would be instant death, and trying to fight any of the E ranks would be as well. So, she’d have to be smart.

She had two main advantages she could make use of. One, unlike all the humans, she didn’t need to eat or sleep. Two, with her powers she could enforce contracts on E ranks.

She’d learned quite a bit about contracts through reading ‘A Devil’s Guide to Nefarious Deals’, though, and contracts weren’t quite as easy to use as she’d thought. First, it wasn’t possible to hide a contract was a contract. She couldn’t get someone to make a vow and apply the effects of Devil’s contract to it, and all contracts required the other person to purposefully agree. This meant people had to know she had a contract skill, limiting her choice of fake identity.

Second, contracts had no true enforcing function. They had punishments, and those punishments could even be the death of someone who agreed to the contract, but there was no way to stop someone from taking the punishment, so the terms and punishments in a contract had to be considered carefully to make sure the other party did what you wanted. Also, punishments could only affect those who signed onto the contracts, not third parties. A punishment where someone else died if the contract signer failed to honor the terms, for example, couldn’t work unless that someone else signed onto the contract as well.

Third, while Devil’s contract could enforce contracts made with E ranks, its extra effect, creating hidden terms, was weaker the stronger the other party. When dealing with another G rank, almost any contract she made could have almost any hidden terms added to it, but, when making a contract with an E rank, the types of hidden terms she could add were very limited, and she couldn’t add hidden punishments at all.

Finally, an individual had to be in their right mind to enter into a contract, at least magically speaking. The person could be tired, or even drunk so long as the alcohol that made them that way was in no way magical, but they couldn’t be charmed and they couldn’t be magically compelled. At least this would be the case until Mila got her F rank class.

Still, her contracts and lack of need to eat and sleep at least gave her the chance to kill everyone in the city while surviving herself. She just needed to gather a bit more information first.

To that end, in the afternoon on the second day, she headed to the wealthier of the city’s two school complexes, watched as a particular child—a twelve-year-old girl with pale skin, yellow hair, and blue eyes—left and started walking home. Then, when no one was around, she dragged the girl into an alley, held a knife she’d stolen up to the girl’s throat, and said, “Will you agree to make a contract with me?”

While asking the question, she deliberately blinked in a pattern that meant there were hidden clauses in the contract in a language Nana Xara had started teaching her for just such a purpose, and that was enough. When the girl agreed with a trembling voice, the hidden clauses of their contract were set.

“Go run to your father now, girl,” Mila told the child. Then she vanished from the girl’s sight and followed as she ran home.

The girl’s father, a widower, was a well off information broker in the city. He had a large house, with multiple servants, but the girl knew exactly where he would be and ran into his study upon returning home. As soon as she ran into his surprised arms, however, the door she’d entered through closed and Mila appeared out of the shadows, scaring her badly.

Mila then sat down in the room’s other chair, across a wooden desk from the man and his daughter, and activated Devil’s Contract. “Let’s make a deal, Mr. Geralva. You tell me everything I want to know with no lies, and your daughter doesn’t die at sundown from the soulbinding contract she’s already agreed to.”

“Who are you?” The man’s body was slightly trembling.

“You don’t need to worry about that, Mr. Geralva.” Mila smiled in a way she knew would be unnerving. “You just need to accept the contract I initiated with you. Should you refuse, the contract your daughter agreed to will kill her. Should you delay, the contract will kill her. Should you accept yet not follow through on your end, the contract will kill her.

“So, what will you do?”

The F rank man agreed to the contract and, again using the blinking pattern he wouldn’t understand, she added quite a few extra terms and an extremely strict punishment of death to both him and his daughter for breaking any of them.

Like his daughter, he could immediately feel the extra clauses were there, and, unlike her, he actually focused on reading the System message explaining what they were. “If I don’t speak to you honestly, we die. If anyone else notices your presence in this house, we die. If either of us try to tell anyone about you or warn about your potential presence, we die. If you get hurt within the next two days, we die.”

He took a deep breath and held his daughter close, patting her back as a comforting gesture. “What would you like to know?”

You are reading story Shadow of the Soul King at novel35.com

“Tell me everything you know about Corith.” Mila almost growled the name and the man, who was not on pleasant terms with the D rank, caught the implications of her faked anger combined with her not being a native of their Zoridon Kingdom. Mila wasn’t yet good with the language, and she’d decided to use that as a strength.

“Not much is known about the warrior, other than that he’s stronger than the city lord. All I know for certain is he is not from the Zoridon Kingdom, that he knows how to fight, and that he seems to have decided to retire here.

“He brought four subordinates with him, all E rank, three other warriors and a smith, but they mostly seem retired as well. Nordal, one of the warriors, is the only one who hasn’t mostly kept to himself. He’s taken over most of the slums and likes to consider himself a bit of a lord, getting in the way of my business, which you probably know. I’m guessing that’s why you targeted me.”

“What about their relationships in the city? What is the city lord’s position?”

“Corith, though that might not be his real name, fought with the city lord once when he first arrived and won. He’s been living on a mountain in the city’s outskirts ever since. By all accounts, they don’t have much of a relationship, just city lord and citizen.

“Nordal has some business dealings with the city lord’s wife, but not very strong ones. He’s mainly protected by his own power and his relationship with Corith.

“The other three mostly keep to themselves. Like Nordal, they’ll often be found in the city’s two main whorehouses, but they mostly just drink and keep to themselves. They don’t seem to have much in the way of relationships with anyone. If you want my guess, they seem to be drowning their sorrows about something.

“Tell me more about the city lord and the other E ranks. Their connections. Their business dealings. Everything.”

* * *

Mila left the house a couple hours later, not killing anyone, and she started on the next part of her plan.

Having a couple hours before sundown, she went to the homes of two of the city’s E ranks and knocked on the front door of both. Both times she was met by a servant and both times she gave the same information to send to the house’s master, that she was a representative of a conglomerate called the Tower of Baharun there to discuss future trade with the settlement. Both times she was let in to meet with the E rank and both times she made the same basic contract, a promise of safety and confidentiality before she left the settlement.

The Tower of Baharun was a powerful company spanning across multiple kingdoms—and kingdoms in this case were made up of multiple inhabited planets. It was also known for making backroom deals and Mila had learned both E ranks would be susceptible to negotiation with the Tower.

They both thought the agreement made with her was the start of a potential trade contract and that she’d guide them to a true representative of the Tower after the teleportation platform reopened, as she’d agreed to do such so long as they were both alive and well at that time, a standard clause. More important to Mila, however, were two other standard clauses. They couldn’t do anything they knew could lead to her getting hurt nor could they tell anyone anything about her. If they did, the penalty was the standard halving of their power for fourteen days.

Feeling relatively good about her progress so far, Mila then headed toward the whorehouse and telepathically checked in with Aalam. He hadn’t been disturbed in his instance, spending the entire day meditating, but his plague was starting to take effect.

If everything in his instance was going as planned, everyone in the city was already dead, they just didn’t know it yet.

His new plague was extremely transmissible, able to travel through the air, and there were no airlocked rooms in the city as far as they knew. Most importantly, however, the bacteria only activated after the human had fallen asleep, the best defense against the city’s more powerful individuals. Then it released more hormones and chemicals to keep them that way while it killed them in four different ways at once.

There were probably some citizens of the city who hadn’t been infected yet, but almost everyone who went to bed that night wouldn’t be waking up.

---

Please only read at  and . It is free and anywhere else this story has been stolen.

You can find story with these keywords: Shadow of the Soul King, Read Shadow of the Soul King, Shadow of the Soul King novel, Shadow of the Soul King book, Shadow of the Soul King story, Shadow of the Soul King full, Shadow of the Soul King Latest Chapter