Ruthless: Path of Conquest

One moment, Mina was saying surprisingly warm farewells to the people from her Orientation, Yulia by her side, and exchanging contact details with people who wanted to try and find their way to her back on Earth.

The next moment, she was in the white room where the System Homunculus had instructed her on how magic in the System worked. She was pleased enough with her rewards, although she couldn’t help but think they would have been greater if she had managed to stop the Wendigos from carrying off or devouring a huge share of the population.

Two thousand System Credits. It sounded like it could be a lot at first, but it did not seem as if it would actually go very far. She looked through items in the System Store and finally bought an Alder Wood Wand for twelve hundred Credits.

A few minutes later, she found herself hovering ten feet in the air, staring James in the face. She could sense Yulia by her side, but for a moment, she only had eyes for her husband.

Time seemed to stop for a moment.

“James.” The wind seemed to suck the syllable right out of her mouth as she began to fall. “James! No, the baby!” she screamed.

Baby James had been floating right alongside them, she realized as she dropped through the air. Then he was falling right with them. She clawed furiously at the air. But somehow, the System had transported him to a spot just out of her reach. Just out of her husband’s reach. And out of Yulia’s reach too.

So little James just fell.

Mina saw everything in a panicked haze. Yulia, trying to grab the baby who was simply too far away. James, who Mina could tell was trying to activate multiple Skills at once. But he didn’t seem to have anything that would let him freely move through the air.

He wasn’t going to manage whatever he was trying in time, she realized.

She activated Quickened Spellcasting and Silent Spellcasting. A surge of power rose from her core and manifested in a small gust of wind. The wind pulled at the blanket the baby was wrapped in and began slowing his fall.

Mina let out a sigh of relief. She was still falling, but the wind she’d conjured would cushion all of their falls, the baby’s especially.

And then the blanket began to unwrap.

She watched in stunned horror as the blanket that her wind was pulling at slowly unlooped from around baby James. No, please! Don’t let my baby fall! She tried desperately to guide and reshape the wind’s movements, but they were falling so quickly, and it felt like the blanket, the baby, and the wind were moving too fast for her to adjust.

She heard a strange, fleshy sound from where her husband was.

Then a dark shape flew by Mina’s head in a flash. What on Earth is that?

She got a better look at the shape when it enveloped the baby.

It was an incredibly inflated, disembodied human hand. The same skin tone as her husband. It was longer than little James, and as it landed on him, it latched onto the baby with two fingers wrapped around his waist. It pinched the unwrapping blanket with two others. With the wind still slowing the descent of the blanket, it turned into a sort of miniature parachute.

Oh, thank goodness. She turned and looked at adult James. His eyes were focused on the baby. His left hand ended in a stump now, though it wasn’t bleeding as much as she would expect from such a recent and severe wound. He had a small black blade in his right hand. Did he have to sacrifice his hand, to make that thing?

But even though there was a slight expression of pain on his face, his eyes were relieved.

Apparently he doesn’t feel pain the way he used to, she thought. She took her first really good look at her husband, and noticed that he had grown bigger and taller than he had been. He was wearing some almost black armor that reminded her of an insect exoskeleton, and a helmet that looked like it had definitely once been an insect’s head. His face was much as it had been, but better defined. She realized that if she hadn’t experienced him almost every day for over ten years, she might not have recognized him. He was barely the same person, physically.

This will take some getting used to. He was still very handsome, certainly, but quite different. There was a dangerous edge to his looks. An almost predatory cast to his features.

Then they landed. It felt like their time in the air had been extended somehow, but gravity was still functioning well enough.

Mina grabbed their baby out of the air, her whole body shaking. The severed hand creature leaped off of baby James and rushed back over to his father, scuttling across the grass beneath their feet.

“It’s so good to see you guys again,” James said. He yanked off his helmet, stepped closer to them, and pulled Mina and Yulia into his embrace. Mina closed her eyes and inhaled the smell of James’s skin. That, at least, hadn’t changed. She felt safer than she had since they’d been separated.

They stayed like that for a minute or two, until Mina noticed droplets of water hitting the top of her head. She smiled. In the few seconds since they’d arrived, she hadn’t consciously observed the weather, but the sky was clear and brilliantly blue .

When she pulled away, she caught James quickly wiping at his eyes with his remaining hand.

“Oh, um, my eyes are leaking a little,” he said. “I think it might have drizzled a little, and um, my severed hand was quite painful…”

“It’s good to see you, too,” she said, and kissed him quickly on the lips.

Mina pressed close to him again, and James stopped talking and held her close for another few seconds.

When they separated this time, all three were crying and laughing.

“I was worried about you guys,” James said, wiping away tears again with what Mina now noticed was a slowly regrowing hand. “Silly me, though. You both look great!”

“I am glad we all made it back alive,” Yulia said with a small smile.

Mina noticed a flicker of concern on James’s expression, and she frowned slightly. This was a discussion she wanted to have with James, but later.

“You look great, too,” she said, chuckling. “Although you’re dressed like a cosplayer or something. Um, there is someone you should meet. Someone you’ve already sort of met.” She looked down at the severed hand which stood on all five digits on the ground, looking like something from “The Addams Family.” “At least, part of you already met him.” She held out the baby to him. “James, Junior!”

James smiled, and the tears welled up in his eyes again. Then he took the baby in his hand-and-a-half and stared him in the eyes for a long few seconds. Baby James was very quiet as he and his father met for the first time. Then James gave the baby a kiss on the forehead and pulled him into his arms, tight against his chest.

“I’m your Daddy, little guy,” he said quietly, whispering in his ear. Then he looked back up at Mina. “Sorry to have to tell you this, but he definitely takes after me. Looks just like his Daddy.”

“Well, like you used to, anyway,” Mina said, raising an eyebrow. The words came out more pointed than she’d intended, but James just smiled.

“We’ve all been through a lot, haven’t we?” he said, smiling down at Yulia.

Yulia smiled back. “I’m glad we all made it back home,” she said softly. “I hardly believe it.”

“Yeah,” James said. “If your experience was anything like mine…”

He began to tell them the broad outline of what had happened to him, but Mina quickly interrupted.

“We should find some shelter before we start swapping stories,” she said. “It’s nice out now, but I think it’s going to rain in an hour or so.”

James and Yulia both looked at her strangely but said nothing.

Right, she thought. Of course I’m the only one who knows that.

“My new Class lets me predict the future in limited ways,” she said quietly.

“Well, predicting the weather will be very useful in Florida,” James said.

Yulia snorted quietly, and Mina smiled too. We really are back, she thought. Everything’s going to go back to normal. Thank the gods, everything’s going to go back to normal. Then she gave her head a little shake. What am I saying, back to normal? Nothing is going back. There are gods now, for a start…

“Let’s look around, then,” James said.

Mina turned away from her family and began taking in where they’d landed.

They had supposedly been transported back to the same spot they’d left from, but it was quickly obvious that either the System was inaccurate in its transportation methods, or the place they had left from had changed quite drastically in the weeks they’d been gone.

There were buildings around them, and they appeared to be the same in style as the blandly constructed apartment complex buildings they knew. But the structures were inexplicably further apart. Many of them had been destroyed. Some had collapsed completely or toppled onto their sides. The pavement between buildings, as well as the parking lot, had been mostly destroyed.

The ground everywhere they walked was spits of grass and large stretches of mud, with a lot more moisture than Mina remembered.

It was as if some monumental continental shift had occurred. Perhaps it had.

There were other people walking around in the strange landscape as well, but not nearly as many of them as Mina would have expected.

Some of their Orientations went very poorly, she thought. A cold chill went through her stomach. That could have been any of us… The System had claimed many victims since it initiated Earth.

In the midst of searching visually for their old apartment, Mina couldn’t help but look for the Indian family that had lived in the apartment beneath them. She hadn’t known them, not really. Knowing your neighbors, or even talking to them at all, didn’t seem to be fashionable or culturally accepted in America, as it had been in Bulgaria during her childhood.

But the mother seemed so nice, she thought. Mina had wanted to know her. She simply hadn’t worked up the courage and energy to cross that intangible social boundary. So their main interaction was smiling and waving when they passed each other. But when Mina saw the other woman playing with her young children, or watched the way she fussed over the little one, or heard her and her family’s happy chatter through the thin apartment window when she passed outside, she would think, When the baby’s born, then I’ll get to know them!

Now, that promise she’d made to herself might never be fulfilled. The apartment complex had lost many of its residents, if the meager number walking around the courtyard was any indication.

Mina didn’t talk to the wanderers. Some of them walked around purposefully as if they knew where they were going or what they were trying to do. A few looked traumatized and psychologically broken, as if what they had been through in recent weeks had been too much for their sanity.

Regardless, none of them approached Mina. For the moment, she decided she liked it that way. She was still processing the way the Earth had changed. She didn’t need new social demands right now. They would probably need to make new connections later. It wasn’t a necessity that she particularly relished.

James, Mina noticed, seemed very interested in observing everyone around them. He wasn’t looking around so much to find their apartment as to take in the people who were wandering the grassy area. It wasn’t any particular neighbor he was looking for, Mina felt certain. He’d shown even less interest in meeting them than she had, back in the pre-System days.

Yulia was more focused than either of them, and it was she who finally found the building they used to live in. The second floor was mostly lying on its side, broken off from the top part of the building. The first floor, where their neighbors had lived, was exposed to the elements.

There was a sound of rustling in the wreckage. Mina realized that, given how long they’d been gone, it was possible that any number of wild animals might have settled in the ruins of their building. She instinctively stepped behind James.

“It’s children,” James said quietly.

She looked up at him questioningly for a moment.

How does he know? she wondered.

Then she heard one of them.

“Mama, is that you?” a little boy called. Mina couldn’t see him, but now she understood how James must have known who was in the building. His senses were superhuman now. It wasn’t just his appearance that had changed.

James turned to Mina and gently placed the baby, who seemed very comfortable and relaxed, in her arms. Then he took a couple of steps forward and leaped lightly over the half-demolished wall into the first floor kitchen. Mina heard James walking around inside the apartment, then the distant sound of him speaking quietly, though she couldn't make the words out.

More rustling, as of movement. Then the front door unlocked and opened. It was James.

He had a child in each arm, which prompted a realization in the back of Mina’s mind. Oh. He regrew the hand he chopped off. In a matter of minutes. Without using any healing magic that I noticed. This was her first indicator of how much more powerful than a normal mortal man James had become.

But the front of her mind focused on the children around him. All three of their neighbor’s young ones.

Of the two cradled in his arms, one was a baby, a year or two old. The other was a couple of years older. And the oldest child, the six year old, stood behind him. James’s expression was troubled.

“These kids managed to find their way back to their apartment,” he said. As he stepped forward, Mina saw that the backdoor to the lower floor apartment, which had been a sliding glass door, was completely gone now. Just like the ceiling.

That explained how the children got back into their apartment. One fewer question that needed answering.

“I see,” Mina said, not yet fully comprehending.

We must not be expecting them to come back, she realized after a moment. Otherwise James would never pick up someone else’s children. He set them down outside as she had that thought.

“I’ll be right back,” he said to the biggest one. “Don’t go anywhere, okay? Especially not back inside the apartment right now. I’m not sure if the building is going to fall down.”

The boy nodded solemnly.

James stepped in closer to Mina and Yulia.

“Sweet, could you watch the little ones for a moment?” Mina asked.

Yulia nodded and smiled brightly, then walked over to the children.

James waited a few seconds before he spoke. “What do you think about taking care of them?” he asked, his voice low. “Just until we figure out what we’re going to do about all the orphans who are going to be running around. I don’t think their parents are coming back if they aren’t here already.”

An open-ended commitment, Mina recognized. She was surprised. James had very easily accepted taking Yulia in when Mina and Yulia’s mother got sick, but that was because, as he often put it, “Family is everything.”

When it came to most other people outside that circle, though, James had only ever shown selective empathy. Back when he was a prosecutor, if someone was a victim of crime, he would seem to genuinely grieve their losses. Conversely, if the person in question was a criminal, James would usually tar them as “the scum of the Earth” in his mind, try to get them prison time unless there were obvious mitigating factors, and lose no sleep over it. Even though James had been a criminal himself in the past.

Mina was never bothered by this contradiction, because James had always followed a simple pattern. If you were inside of his circle of love and trust, he was unfailingly good and kind to you. More than fair to people he cared about, he was generous.

He would never hurt her, but almost the whole rest of the world was fair game.

So what was this? Volunteering to take care of a stranger’s children, instead of trying to pawn them off on someone else? Was his circle expanding?

It seemed to her as if James’s whole outlook on other people had changed.