Chapter 98: Chapter 95: The Last of the Leaders

The next few days were something of a blur for Lilith. She fell into a pattern, one of raiding bases, dressing down governmental information agencies, and generally cleaning up the mess that was the Society.

But, finally, her work seemed to be drawing to a close. She had gone through all the information agencies involved, raided all the Society strongholds, and captured the majority of the Society’s leadership. The only remaining loose ends were two of the ringleaders, a man by the name of Friede, and the big one: the Society’s public face, and first among equals, Inanna.

Friede was sequestering himself in a bunker he thought was hidden from even his closest contacts, deep in the untamed wilds of Haven, so he wasn’t an issue. Picking him up would be no more difficult than teleporting to him and grabbing him.

The bunker was almost suspiciously light on magical defenses, presumably so someone scanning Haven from the sky wouldn’t see large amounts of magic concentrated in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of land.

Truth be told, Lilith had half a mind to just leave him there and have that be its own punishment. A life spent in isolation, living every day in fear of being found…it didn’t sound pleasant. The only issue with it was that, eventually, he would get comfortable. If Lilith just left him there in perpetuity, he would stop fearing her, and the punishment would lose its edge.

It might take years, decades, or even centuries, but that was time Friede had. Still, it was a rather attractive option, and needed no effort on Lilith’s part. Perhaps…yes, if she just slightly modified the Watch she had set on him, she could just leave him there, and when he inevitably got comfortable, visit him and revisit the punishment then.

As a bonus, it would make this tactic even more effective in the future. If, once his isolation had ended, she spread word of his punishment around, those who chose to hide from her would know that this was on the table, making them less likely to get comfortable early on in their isolation.

With that decided, she only had Inanna left to deal with. Unfortunately, that was a bit trickier than Friede; Inanna had chosen to hole up in an apartment building in one of the most populated areas of Tokyo, maximizing any collateral damage that would occur if Lilith were to engage her in a fight.

But Lilith didn’t need to engage her in a fight. Inanna was presumably under the assumption that Lilith wouldn’t be able to interact with her from the other plane that was her dungeon, but she was dead wrong.

Yes, she hadn’t picked up the other Society leaders that way, but they had chosen to stay in Society bunkers, which had been heavily fortified against magic. She was able to tear through those wards, yes, but not from her dungeon; being on another plane made the Mana cost for doing so prohibitively expensive, even to Lilith. And since she had to make sure that those bases were ready for the Adjudicators to come in and look through all the evidence, it had been much easier to go in person.

This, however, was a different case. While the apartment Inanna was in had wards, they were residential grade, and a far cry from the industrial grade ones used in Society bases. This made removing those wards and teleporting Inanna into the dungeon a snap.

And, with a couple pushes of her will, it was done, and Inanna was in the jail cell across from Lilith. “Well, do you care to explain yourself?” She said, giving Inanna an unimpressed glare. “We have plenty of time for it, after all.”

“W-what?” Inanna said, eyes wide. “How did you –”

“I stripped the building’s wards and teleported you here?” Lilith replied. “That should be fairly obvious.”

“But you’re –”

“On another plane entirely? And? It should have already been obvious that I’m a step above anything you can handle.”

Inanna began patting herself down, face growing increasingly worried as she wasn’t able to find anything.

“Your possessions have already been confiscated, don’t bother.” Lilith said. “Including that little dagger of yours. I believe it should be…” Lilith paused for effect, then held out a palm, into which a dagger made of anti-Perfect Chimera material fell. “Here.”

Inanna wilted, but said nothing.

“So, are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way?” Lilith asked.

“And those are?” Inanna asked guardedly.

“The easy way is having you be helpful and answer my questions truthfully while I do a surface reading of your mind, and the hard way is me doing a deep read of your mind and taking everything I need by force.”

Lilith took a deep breath before continuing. “No, you aren’t going to be able to deflect me, everyone tries, and everyone fails. No, your contacts will not be able to help you, I have already suitably punished every agency who formerly backed you, and no, striking any sort of plea deal is not possible. You will be punished according to the full extent of your crimes, and I will be getting what information you could offer by any means I deem necessary.”

Lilith paused, thinking that over. “Those should be all the common thoughts and questions people have, so, again, are we doing this the easy way or the hard way?

Inanna grimaced. “I know when I’m beat. The easy way it is.”

Lilith immediately assumed that meant Inanna was hoping to mislead Lilith with vague, technically true, statements. She wouldn’t be the first to try it, and most of the time, Lilith ended up just doing deep readings of their mind anyway, but she felt it was good to give them the option.

“Very well then.” She said. “What was your goal in annexing one of the frontier towns?”

Inanna shrugged. “We wanted to expand into being a country, and this seemed like the easiest way.”

Lilith raised an eyebrow. She was being quite a bit more candid than any of the other Society leaders had been, and what she said had matched up with the others’ stories. “And why did you think you could get away with it?”

“We thought that if we framed it in such a way that it seemed that it was the will of the people, then you would think twice about interfering. We were, obviously, wrong, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“And what was your plan if I did ‘interfere’? Did you seriously think you could defeat me?”

Inanna gave another shrug. “We thought we had roughly even odds, and that was a chance we were willing to take. We had enough chimerum to outfit most of our elites, and all we needed was one or two lucky hits.”

It took Lilith a moment of digging to find that “chimerum” referred to anti-Perfect Chimera material, but there were no other hiccups. Inanna believed everything she was saying, and her story corroborated those of her conspirators, so it seemed like everything was going smoothly.

Perhaps too smoothly. Lilith couldn’t bring herself to believe that someone in charge of an organization like the Society would give up so easily. “Fifty-fifty odds of your organization being destroyed, and your personal life being ruined doesn’t sound very good to me.” Lilith said. “Not when you were operating as smoothly as you seemed to be.”

“Then you clearly didn’t look close enough.” Inanna said, almost condescendingly. “Things weren’t going smoothly. We were bleeding power at a massive rate.”

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“Oh.” Lilith said. “I see how it is. I believe, in that case, we run into a difference of opinion.” Inanna was likely referring to the fact that many of the Society’s “loyal” members, the ones that had been around before the Shift, had taken the opportunities provided by the massive restructuring of the world to get out of the situation they found themselves in.

However, Lilith didn’t see the Society as losing power. While, yes, those personnel were more likely to be stronger than the people who joined the public front of the Society, that was a temporary thing. Lilith was sure that, given another decade or two, the power disparity between the average citizen of Haven and the average citizen of Earth would shrink to nothing, and the Society would find themselves flush with manpower.

The only things they would really be losing were the immediate force and the people who were less able to leave at a moment’s notice. Still, if their aim was to create a country and consolidate power, Lilith thought they would be far better served by letting that process play out; it would naturally thin out those with weaker loyalties, and when the Society did make their move, they would be in a much stronger position.

“I fail to see what our opinions could differ on. My life’s work was on the verge of destruction, something had to be done.” Inanna said.

“By what?” Lilith asked. “As far as I’ve been able to uncover, you had no evidence that anyone was targeting you, and your financial problems were created because of your heavy research into chimerum. Had you chosen to wait five or ten years, then constructed your own town, I see no reason why you wouldn’t be able to establish your own country.”

Inanna chuckled darkly. “Then you’re naïve. The only reasons we weren’t annexed by our backers was your decree that preexisting bodies should not come into conflict, and our status as bait. Once your decree ran out, we would have immediately been consumed by some larger agency.”

“Believe it or not, but no agency I reprimanded had any intentions of “consuming” you. As long as you proved to be no threat, you would have been safe.”

“I’m pretty sure forming a new nation counts as being a threat.” Inanna said bitterly. “We were stuck, and with only a few years to work with, we couldn’t afford to wait while our strength dwindled. I wouldn’t expect you to understand, you’ve been handed everything on a silver platter. You’ve never had to deal with true desperation in your life. Why I –”

“That’s enough.” Lilith said flatly. “As you have chosen to get vitriolic, I deem any further conversation unnecessary. I’ll be looking through your mind, and your final punishment will be decided before tomorrow is over.”

Mae, please use the spare avatar and take care of that. Lilith said. I’m going to reconvene with the others and get their ideas for punishments.

Understood. Mae replied, leaving their shared body and inhabiting the spare avatar. It will be done.

Lilith switched places with the spare avatar, Mae having carefully posed it so the transition was as seamless as possible. When that was done, she made her way back to the nearest occupied living room, where her children and parents were watching some show on the television.

“Mom, did you forget something?” Mai asked. “That was really fast.”

“No, I just didn’t need to raid a base this time.” Lilith said. “Mae is finishing the interrogation, and I came to ask your opinions on what proper punishments would be.”

“Is stripping their levels not enough?” Jessica asked.

Lilith shook her head. “No. Given time, they’ll just get them back. I want something more lasting.”

“You could ask Kali to give you the ability to permanently lock someone out of the system.” Mike suggested. “That would certainly be lasting.”

“Not really an option, sorry.” Kali said, walking into the room. “As much as I would like that, the whole idea of the system is that everyone on a plane has access to it. Excluding even a few people is nearly as difficult as making things as separated as they were before the Shift.”

Lilith frowned. “Really? That seems kind of counterintuitive.”

“It’s not really the number of people that makes this sort of thing difficult. It’s opening up a hole in the system in the first place.” Kali explained. “Once that hole is open, it’s easy to keep it open, and if someone is born to someone in that hole, then they’re sort of…automatically added, but other than that, it’s hard to make someone cross the boundary, so to speak. This sort of thing is how Administrators like Jerry have planes with different systems, but that’s a story for another time. So…yeah, long story short, that’s not happening.”

“You could make them our younger siblings!” Mai volunteered. “I’ve been wanting a younger brother lately!”

“No.” Lilith said quickly. “I’m not making you any more siblings unless it’s the normal way.”

“Aww.” Mai pouted. “That’s no fun.”

“It’s not about fun.” Aria said gently. “It’s about not changing people’s minds and personalities against their will, that’s basically killing them.”

“But we –”

“That was very different.” Aria said. “That was mom’s only option. And she tried to put Errus back after, since he did nothing wrong and didn’t need reeducation.”

“Yeah, but I bet at least one of them needs reeducation!” Mai argued. “What harm could it do?”

“They’re not capable of leveling a country by themselves.” Lilith said. “We won’t be doing that.”

“You could always just drop them off in the wilderness to fend for themselves.” Siph suggested. “Let them know that if they ever come back to society, they’ll be stripped of their abilities and then dropped right back.”

Lilith winced. “Isn’t that kind of brutal? That’s effectively just leaving them to die. If we’re doing that, I might as well just kill them myself, and I’d rather not do that unless we really can’t think of any other options.”

Siph shrugged. “Maybe drop them off in pairs, then? They’ll have companionship that way, and they’ll be less likely to die.”

Lilith mulled that over for a few moments. “That’ll do, for now.” She said. “But in the future, I’m going to need to think up some more punishments.”

She grabbed Kali’s hand and towed her over to the couch. “We’ll deal with that tomorrow, though. For now, let’s enjoy some family time. What are you guys watching?”