Chapter 978 - Unsettling Whispers (Patreon)

”Assistance is not offered; it’s provided whether you want it or not. Your thoughts on the matter and your opinions are only factors that will lead to needless complications. So stand down and retain your lives,” the Fallen King said, frankly tired of dealing with all these so-called “enlightened” that kept creating problems whenever he and the Sylphian Hawk merely wanted to provide assistance in killing the Prima Guardian.

The Fallen King was currently floating in front of a party led by the World Leader of this particular planet. Around fifty of their “elites” were scattered all around him, knocked out with weak soul attacks, having utterly failed to put up any fight worth mentioning. The hawk hadn’t even needed to do anything but had instead decided to clear out every Prima in the vicinity of the Prima Vessel ahead of time.

“Replacing one calamity with another is not assistance,” the human woman who wielded the title of World Leader answered.

“Consider your options. Join me in freeing the Prima Guardian and trust us to slay it before leaving you in peace or oppose our will and know with certainty you face two entities more dangerous than the Guardian,” the Fallen King said in a harsh and very threatening tone.

“If… if you kill me, you have no way to free the Guardian,” the World Leader said, trying to look brave. Her belief that her words were true was what gave her any kind of courage to argue and stand up to the Unique Lifeform. She believed the King needed her…

“You do not know, do you?” the Fallen King said. “When the World Leader and a sufficient percentage of the enlightened population are all slain, the Prima Guardian will automatically be released. Perhaps designed as a kind of mercy-killing by the system? I do not know. All I know is that your continued existence is an act of mercy on my part, and you are testing the boundaries of my benevolence.”

To clarify, the Fallen King had no idea if what he said was true. What he did know was that negotiating as a monster was overly tiring, as enlightened simply never trusted him, at least not those in a newly integrated universe. There were naturally some exceptions and even a planet with beastfolk where Sylphie easily convinced them as they worshipped her almost like a deity due to the power of her variant race.

For this particular planet, the Fallen King had quickly gotten the understanding that they would not volunteer any help… so he had chosen the forceful approach. From the looks of how the World Leader wavered and the signs of telepathic communication between the party, it appeared to be working, as not long after, the human woman gritted her teeth.

“Fine… but swear upon your honor as a Unique Lifeform that you are not deceiving us,” she said, quite cleverly if the Fallen King had to say so.

“I will swear that my companion and I are only here with the objective of slaying the Prima Guardian and will leave afterward without killing any of your kin,” the Fallen King answered truthfully.

Perhaps most would write off something as feeble as a promise, but this woman did seem to have a basic grasp of what a Unique Lifeform was. They were all prideful and wouldn’t do something like swearing upon their honor just to trick someone so much weaker than themselves. The Fallen King wouldn’t do so either. Such things were simply beneath him, and she knew it.

“Alright… alright, we’ll trust you,” the World Leader finally fully agreed, a bit too slowly in the opinion of the King, but quickly enough that this wouldn’t cause a needless delay.

“Then let us delay no longer,” the King said, and with the World Leader and her party of weaklings in tow, headed toward the Prima Vessel to free and kill yet another Prima Guardian.

Once they arrived, Sylphie was already done cleaning up anything close to it and just waiting for them to get there. They had to fly a good deal of the way due to how weak this planet was and how they hadn’t even managed to get any kind of teleporter within three hours of travel time to the Vessel.

Having the World Leader enter the Prima Vessel went as always. She got in, they all waited a few minutes, and then she quickly flew out, a Prima Guardian hot on her heels. It was yet another weak one, and without the Fallen King having to do much, an excited Sylphie tore it apart, the Fallen King only doing a little to speed things up.

At this point, this all just felt like busy work. They had cleared about thirty planets this way, and it had been more than four months since the hunter decided to temporarily cripple himself due to his own stupidity, causing immense soul damage to himself. Even the King had taken some residual damage he needed to heal, and the entire experience had only made it clear he needed to work on separating himself from Jake.

Anyway, the opponents they faced at this point were all too weak to really bother with. The Guardians didn’t even have the Honored tag anymore, and if the Fallen King hadn’t seen how utterly useless the native populations were, he would have questioned how any planet could lose to this system event.

With the Guardian dead, Sylphie returned to the King and the cowering World Leader as they prepared for the final part.

“Will you hold true to your promise?” the World Leader asked, looking at the Vessel. The King also noticed the woman’s party had already taken off during the fighting but didn’t really care.

“Naturally. Now come, activate the Vessel, and we shall take our leave,” the Fallen King said. With Sylphie resting on the King’s shoulder, they entered the Prima Vessel with the usual design. A long hallway with a crossroad at the end, one leading into the control room, another into the teleportation room, and the final one with the rewards once all regular Primas were slain.

All were locked and needed the World Leader to unlock them, which was why they had to keep the annoying weaklings alive and somewhat healthy.

They first went to the control room, and the World Leader unlocked the barrier to enter and touched the metal orb that activated the Vessel. With it, the map also appeared as the World Leader stared at it with wide eyes.

“This is… wow,” she muttered, staring at the map. “So many planets cleared, so many lives saved… did you two help do that?”

The Fallen King found her shift in mood a bit odd but didn’t comment further. “Some. Once the entire galaxy is clear of Prima Guardians, the event shall conclude, and that is what we are working toward.”

“I see,” the World Leader said with a nod and a smile.

“Now, let us fulfill our promise and leave. Oh, and allow me to offer some free advice. Now that you are considered part of the Prima Guardian Alliance, you can also have people teleport to or from here to help you clean up the remaining regular Primas. Of course, you will need to establish the teleportation circle that should have been provided to you when you unlocked the Prima Vessel,” the Fallen King said, deciding to be a bit helpful, as the witch back in Haven had many times told him to at least not make other World Leaders too fearful.

The woman looked at him and kept smiling. “Hm, and to use this new teleporter that just became available, you needed to have claimed the Prima Vessel first, even if you had constructed one with knowledge provided by another planet beforehand. Assuming you hadn’t joined the Alliance during the World Congress.”

One didn’t need Jake’s intuition to know something was off as the Fallen King stared at the World Leader. “You seem oddly informed for-“

“Thank you for allowing me to realize my fate.”

Without any warning, the Fallen King was pushed back by an explosion and was covered in blood as the World Leader blew herself up, the Unique Lifeform just floating there undamaged, uncertain of what had just happened.

“Ree?” Sylphie, who had not been hit by the blood or explosion at all, asked.

“Nothing good,” the Fallen King responded, quickly floating out into the hallway and seeing the barrier still blocking the entrance to the teleportation room and their way home… now with no World Leader available to unlock it. “Nothing good at all.”

--

Jake was not to be disturbed while recovering and had primarily been left alone with Vesperia as he spent most of his days working with the Puzzle Box of the Seeker, the nifty mana-practice toy allowing him to put his mind off things while even improving a bit and helping speed up his recovery. He truly did try to make the best of this forced downtime.

However, that day, things felt off. Something wasn’t right, and Jake had informed Miranda of it immediately, as it was so bad Jake couldn’t even properly focus on things. As the hours passed, the feeling of wrongness only grew, and Jake couldn’t place his finger on what exactly was wrong.

Miranda quickly came back and had a hard time seeing where the issue could be. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Everything was standard as it had been for the last many months. Still, Jake couldn’t shake it and had even checked in with Sylphie real quick with their Union Oath contract and gotten back a feeling of her being bored, likely waiting for the Fallen King to do King stuff and negotiating, something the hawk wasn’t very good at as most World Leaders didn’t speak Sylphie.

He kept trying – and failing – to properly distract himself, even after he had Miranda check up on everyone he knew and cared about. Jake even began to fear something was happening or was going to happen to someone he couldn’t even get in contact with. Had what Villy did for Jake hurt him more badly than he let on? Was it someone else back in the Order who was in trouble?

Sometimes, he hated the inconsistency of his intuition. There were times it was very clear, while in other instances, it just gave him super vague feelings. On this day, all it told him was that something was wrong and that someone could potentially be in danger…

As the day progressed, Jake could only wait, hoping for this feeling to fade with time. It didn’t, but it only kept growing worse and worse until finally, Jake got word from Miranda.

“William and I are coming over. I know you don’t like him, but he was our best bet for finding out what was wrong… and he did find something suspicious enough that we need to meet,” she sent, Jake practically at the edge of his seat as the message arrived.

For Miranda to bring William over, this had to be very serious. The karmic mage hadn’t been one of the people who knew Jake was still suffering from a semi-permanent soul injury, and he was pretty much bound to find out if he met Jake in person. Still, Jake didn’t have time to worry about this, as he waited the five minutes it took for them to get there.

When they arrived, they brought a third person along. One that didn’t look like he wanted to be there, based on how half his body had turned into metal, and he was even tied up with a glowing sigil left by Miranda on his forehead, seemingly suppressing his energies. He was also unconscious, but Jake saw the grave looks on Miranda and William’s faces.

“What’s going on?” Jake asked, looking at the tied-up guy. “Who’s that?”

“I halfway hoped you’d know,” Willaim said, not even commenting on Jake’s current state. “He harbored intense hatred for you.”

Miranda chose to step in to elaborate as she motioned toward him. “We fully expected some spies to slip in over the last few months and naturally kept anyone new to the planet under observation in case they did something overly suspicious. I had William check out any people who I believed may have done something over the last day or so, specifically focusing on those who had communicated with anyone off-planet… and he found this guy, along with three other diplomats who killed themselves before we had a chance to stop them.”

Jake kept quiet as William took over.

“All of them were wearing items that had to have been at least high ancient rarity or even legendary rarity, capable of hiding their own karmic bonds quite well. Only when I was right in front of them could I see what was wrong and unravel the net. I used some of my less-than-pleasant abilities to get close and try to figure out what they were doing, and all I learned is that they want to give you a fate worse than death,” William sighed.

“That isn’t anything new, is it?” Jake questioned. A lot of people wanted him dead, right? Ell’Hakan and all his goons, other minor gods he had potentially pissed off in the early days of the integration, and probably a lot he didn’t even know about, including those who held some kind of resentment toward the Viper, his abilities to manipulate Primeval Origins, or just those envious of his Nevermore placement. So many damn suspects.

“Yes… but this guy was in communication with another planet not long ago,” William said in a serious tone. “One that hadn’t even been part of the Prima Guardian Alliance... and the one I also feel the presence of the Sylphian Hawk and Fallen King on.”

“Why woul-“

Just then, Jake also got a message from Sylphie, simply letting him know that they were trapped and needed help getting home… at which point Jake became certain, and his intuition had all feelings of vagueness leave it.

“They’re in danger,” Jake said with wide eyes, and William also seemed distressed as he got a message of his own.

“Remember the karmic tracker we spoke about implementing in the teleporter?” he asked, and before even elaborating, Jake knew as he clenched his fists.

--

The Fallen King floated in the sky outside the Prima Vessel, Sylphie next to him. They had tried to enter the teleportation chamber and failed, with their best theory now that should they kill every Prima on the planet, there was a good chance it would unlock. If not, they would have to wait for the scientist from back on Earth to send someone capable of teleporting back with them. Or, at the very least, someone who could open the gate, which they had discovered any World Leader who had successfully completed their planet’s own Prima event could.

This should be a mere annoyance, only slowing down their hunt of Guardians by a few days. Sylphie had also already sent a message to Jake through their Union Oath contract, only communicating that they needed extraction.

However, the message she got back was one of warning, and as they floated there, it became clear this was more than a mere annoyance. The Fallen King looked at the Sylphian Hawk and back to the horizon as he spoke.

“You feel it, too?”

“Ree…” the hawk gave off a small screech.

Something unsettling was coming. The Fallen King focused on improving his ability to view into the distance, which was when he saw it. Something was happening with the energy in the horizon. It was being disturbed somehow, and as the King threw a questioning mental probe at the hawk with actual eyes and way better vision, her answer was only more unsettling.

She saw a horizon slowly being drained of color and said the wind had nearly stopped blowing from that direction entirely… what faint whispers that did reach her speaking only of desolation.