Chapter 16: Book One – Chapter Two – Part Two – Two Battles And A New Start

She couldn’t believe it. One of the two sets of armor that Servi would never forget was right in front of her. It was the man who had stabbed that Singi boy in the foot. The scum who loved to bully and laugh at the pain he inflicted on those lower than him.

Servi didn’t think this plan would work at first. She couldn’t speak the same language as everyone else, or at least that was what she thought at first. When the group of three armored men came upon her, the very last thing she expected was to understand the words coming from them. And when he kneeled beside her and asked her a question, he was able to understand her. Servi didn’t know how it happened. She was more confused than ever before, but right now, she had one objective.

Take revenge for that boy who only wanted to help his sister.

Once the shit bag with the silver and gold armor turned around, Servi knew that this was her chance. She retrieved a sword-like antenna from her ring and held it out. The moment he turned back, she would stab him in the throat with every bit of her strength.   

Her body and hands trembled as she waited for the moment that seemed like it would never come, but it wasn't out of reluctance.  It was anger.  

The instant he turned around, Servi acted. With surprising speed, she thrusted her arm out, and the man didn’t have time to react. The blade found a home in his throat, scratching and cutting through his windpipe. The armored man brought a shaky hand to his wound. And then he stared. Stared hard and deep into the fierce red eyes of the woman who attacked him. In his mind, he didn’t know the reason why. Arnold was the type of man who believed he could do no wrong.

Using her ring, Servi brought out another sword-like antenna and stabbed the man again. This time, she skewered and thrusted again and again until he fell on his back. The flow of blood was so great it flooded down through his trachea, filling his lungs with crimson. His last action in life was grabbing his neck, doing what he could to hang onto life.

The red light that flowed up from his motionless body revealed he failed in that endeavor. A second later, it flew to Servi's ring, coming to a halt as it disappeared. The Human scum known as Arnold died. She turned around and stared at the man who collapsed behind her.  He had called her a demon, and as much as Servi wanted to argue back, she couldn’t refute his words.

Sorry to interrupt, but you should know this. The soul you absorbed had a few skills engraved into it. Might I ask that you try it out? 

“How do I do that?” Servi said to no one. To the man in front, it must have looked like she was talking to herself.  

Well, it’s a skill called Fire Wall. Just think of the name, and it’ll be activated. As to what it does, all I have is the name to go on.  

Servi thought of the name, and instantly, there was a wall of fire in front of her. Using her mind, Servi figured out that she could control the shape, size, and temperature of it to a certain degree. Servi didn’t know how or why. Just a few moments ago was the first time she’d ever seen or even heard of the word Fire Wall. It was as if the knowledge to use it was locked behind some metaphysical wall, and using it for the first time was the key to unlocking it.

But it had some limitations.  It was impossible to make as tiny as the point of a needle, nor could Servi make it as large as a building. Well, not yet, anyway.  

“Well, I guess I can’t complain. At this point, I’ll take any help or advantage I can get,” Servi spoke quietly to herself.  

The sudden appearance of a skill, which usually required a chant, further convinced Donny that the Human he saw wasn't Human at all. Instead, he thought she was a demon cloaked in Human skin. After all, not even the strongest adventurer in the world could use skills without speaking.  

“P-P-Please don’t kill me! Why are you doing this?!” Donny quietly screamed, barely above a whisper. He knew that he should yell and make noise in an attempt to lead his friends and fellow guards to his position, but he couldn't.  He truly believed, at that moment, that it didn't matter what they did. His mind told him that they would all be slaughtered.

He was right.  

Servi thought of the skill Fire Wall twice more until there were three walls of flaming fire floating in front of her. The three slowly morphed until they were in the shape of a circle, and then they combined. The light they gave off was immense. It was as if the sun had risen, and Servi took in the area around her. Everything was red from the vast amount of spilled blood and orange from the Fire Wall's glow.

Otherworldly and hellish. That was the only way to describe it. It was no small wonder Donny's clothes didn't immediately catch fire. The newly combined inferno slowly floated until it was just higher than the trembling man, who was frozen to the ground via shock. He couldn’t move his body.  

The ring of fire maneuvered over ahead until he was in the center, then it lowered and shrunk.  First, it was his hair and clothes that burned away. The hot air that Donny was forced to breathe in damaged him from the inside out. His mouth and throat burned, along with his vocal cords. When the air reached his lungs, he doubled over in pain and coughed, which only allowed more hot air to flow through his body. 

That was when he lost consciousness. Next, his armor melted and combined with his skin.  Soon after that, his body gave up and melted.

Bone, tendon, muscle, skin, all gone and burnt. The heat was so intense and violent that only a red soul remained. Servi promptly absorbed it, taking his strength for herself.

And thus, the man known as Donny died. His grave? A black spot scorched by flames. 

When his soul entered her ring, Servi didn't feel like she had increased in strength. Then again, she couldn't spare the time to focus on the semantics of her godly powers. A noise came from behind. Turning around, Servi saw three guards shaking nervously in their full armor. These three were the last of the men under the command of Arnold.  

Joqu, Ben, and Lafe were their names. Two had swords in their hand while the other had a bow.  Its string tensed up. The gleaming silver tip of an arrow shined in the light, and it was aimed directly at Servi.  

“YOU MONSTER! HOW DARE YOU KILL THE LIEUTENANT!!” Ben howled out in fury as he held his sword in front of him. In its reflection, the compressed Fire Wall looked like the eye of a demon.  

“I’m a monster?” Servi calmly asked, and she moved the blaze closer to herself. Holding an arm out, the scorching inferno, no bigger than half a meter, rested slightly above her hand. The flame had no intention of harming its creator since they were immune to the effects. The user could choose whether or not they wanted to be protected against their Fire Wall. Of course, the user would only be immune by the Fire Wall they summoned and not any other.  

A blistering wave of heat swarmed over the three, causing an unhealthy amount of sweat to pour down their faces. The two holding swords constantly readjusted their grip.

“Yes, you! You are a monster! A vile, horrendous monster, and to think, I risked my life to save you!” Joqu yelled.

“I’m not the one who pushed a boy down to the ground and stabbed him in the foot. He did that. He was the monster,” Servi pointed to Arnold's corpse.  His hands, stuck to his throat via rigor mortis, was his last action in this life.  "You are a guard of that city, correct? If so, then why haven’t you done anything?! You're supposed to protect the citizens of the city, right?” 

“That boy's a slave, and he has no rights. In fact, he isn’t even considered to be a person. That thing that looks like a Singi is no more than property. Tell me, would you cry and grieve for a piece of paper? How about a rock?” replied Joqu.

“In that case, I consider you three nothing more than trash, just waiting to get burned. If you’re lucky, you might end up like that,”  Servi smiled like a devil, and for a moment, the people she currently stared down truly believed she had no humanity left in her.

Servi turned and jerked her head behind her, pointing to the black spot, and that was when it happened. Lafe, the guard holding the bow, let loose his arrow. He aimed for Servi's head, and it connected, piercing right through and stopping once it was about three-quarters of the way in.

“Damn good shot, Lafe! Nice work!” Ben slapped Lafe on the back as a sign of friendship, and he went weak in the knees. He almost dropped his bow, and he fell to the ground. A single sentence from Joqu convinced the other two that they weren’t dealing with the average person.  

“That arrow should have destroyed your brain... HOW ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?!” 

What they saw shouldn’t have been possible. It went against the very law that defined the world. Those who die should stay dead.  

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But simple concepts such as death had no place in Servi's heart because it wasn't like she could die. Therefore, it wasn't possible for her to stay dead because she couldn't perish in the first place.

“You know,” Servi said as she grabbed the projectile and pulled it from her head, gross bits of pink meat stuck to the metallic tip of the arrow, giving it a vile appearance.  The dripping blood sizzled out of existence before touching the ground.  She threw the bloodied object into the fire resting above her hand, and it instantly melted into nothingness. “That should have hurt way more than it did, but perhaps this seething anger welling up inside me is dulling the pain,” Servi held her arm out and was about to make the fire larger, but a word from Itarr stopped her.  

This is just a thought, but try taking the armor and weapons those three have before burning them. Even if you don’t use them, they might be helpful in the future.

“You’re right,” by focusing, Servi managed to absorb her foes' equipment. Coincidentally, they were about three meters away.

Ah, so it seems that your range with Absorption is around three meters. I’m sure that will increase with time.  

Their heavy armor, along with their helmets, suddenly disappeared from each of them. The sudden difference in weight was enough to knock them to the ground. Their weapons and sheaths, all forged from a valuable piece of metal, were gone. The bow, carved from a 200-year-old tree, vanished along with the quiver full of metal-tipped arrows. 

It all happened too fast for them to realize what was going on. 

“Consider this revenge,” with those words, Servi manipulated the fire resting above her hand until it was long and thick like a blanket for a bed of death. She maneuvered it over the screaming guards and forced it down. The flame, a tiny bit colder, took a fraction of a second longer to kill.

And just like that, three more souls were available for Servi to absorb.  

"Killing them with that attack was probably a mistake,” when Servi killed Donny, the wall was compressing, so the chance of it running wild and out of control was close to zero. However, when she formed the fire into a blanket, it was able to spread out. The flames were currently engulfing everything insight with a voracious desire for destruction.  Everything burned to ash before her incredible power.

What are you going to do? One of their souls contained a skill called Create Water. However, I don't know how effective it will be. That fire is too hot and spread out. If you wish to ignore it, that's fine.

“Is it possible to absorb fire with my ring?” Servi asked. In theory, if she could absorb the prison cell, which was a seal, then why couldn’t she do the same for fire? 

I don’t see why not. Give it a try. 

Servi held out her hand and focused. To store something in the ring, she had to imagine it shrinking. The seal they escaped from was simple. She only imagined it being crushed until it almost faded out of existence.  It was the same thing with objects like swords and corpses.  But fire? Yes, it was a physical object, meaning that it existed physically, and while she did compress the Fire Wall into a ball, this was different.  She had lost control of it, and this fire was no more than a brainless beast, spreading out according to its instinct.  

The fire raged out of control. It had long consumed the corpses of the guards and the bees. The short death cries of many animals sounded pathetically over the infernal heat.  

With the Fire Wall, it was like she had the knowledge and knew the limitations of the skill the moment she used it. Like a tutor lived in her mind, and it told her everything she needed to know. And this? There was no teacher available. She did have Itarr, but the Goddess only taught Servi the basics.  In a comedic sense, her attempt at absorbing the fire was a trial-by-fire situation.

Closing her eyes, Servi imagined the fire as a solid object, like wood, but it kept growing.  

Smaller.  

She imagined that two rocks were pushing in on each side of the wood-like fire.

Smaller.

Next, she imagined two giants pushing with all their might as they forced the wood together.  

Smaller. Smaller. Smaller. 

Servi then imagined that the ever-growing wood turned and grew backwards into each other. Growing and shrinking in two directions at once? It was an impossible paradox, but if she imagined that there was more strength in shrinking than expanding, it would work.   

“AHHHHHH!!!” Servi screamed out. Her vocal cords pushed and strained to their limits. The fire, a raging inferno, started to glow a deep red that was unlike the vibrant orange glow. Smaller and smaller, it was shrinking, retreading the path it once took. The fire flowed over areas that had already burned, but unlike the fire that seemed to be going back in time, the animals that perished would never come back to life. 

Then, after what seemed like a lifetime to Servi, the ring glowed the brightest red and became incredibly hot as the fire disappeared without a trace. In its wake, 70 red souls littered the damaged area in front of her and fluttered over to her ring.

Those were the souls of the animals that perished in the raging fire. 

Servi blinked and took a look around her. Now that the massive light source that was the fire disappeared, only the white glow from the moon illuminated the area.   

Servi saw the damage that she had caused. Since she was near the center of the flames, she didn’t realize just how large the fire had been. For hundreds of meters around her, there was nothing but black ash. The trees and grass and the rocks and nearly everything else around her was reduced to black ash by her hellfire bent on revenge. A burnt smell clouded over the area and would likely remain for a while until it rained.  Even then, Servi didn't know if this area would ever thrive again.

Servi muttered to herself quietly and closed her eyes.  “….I actually took the life of a person. Am I one of them now? A murderer who would kill? Probably. But it was in self-defense, wasn’t it? No, I shouldn’t fool myself. I had the chance to be carried back to the city and be healed. Since I somehow speak the same language, I should've been able to find work or something. What compelled me to attack? Was it just out of revenge? Yes, that was probably it. If those men had lived, then they might have eventually killed those twins. I did the right thing. I know I did. I know I was angry enough to kill earlier, but I never thought I would actually do it... I will bear the sins of my action.  I have to face the damages of what I caused.” 

She opened her eyes after convincing herself she needed to be responsible for her actions. 

Servi, still covered in blood and surrounded by ash, didn't resemble a Human. Her actions for the night made it look like her only motives were to kill and destroy. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, she did annihilate a large area around her, but it wasn’t by choice. Revenge took hold of her, and she had to kill those responsible.  

Servi contemplated using Absorption to store the ashes in her ring but ultimately decided against that. Besides, Absorption didn’t have the necessary range to pick up every bit of ash.  

Itarr stayed quiet.  

“I probably did, well no, I know I did. But I don’t have regrets. The ashes that remain here will be my reminder. The innocent animal lives I took will always be with me. Their strength will be my strength. My passion will be their passion. They are a part of me,” Servi silently looked up at the night sky as she wondered where she would go from here.  She was a murderer, plain and simple.  Was there even a life for her to live?

 

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