Ruthless: Path of Conquest

“Mina?” James asked.

She realized she’d been staring at him, zoned out, for a few seconds as she focused.

“Oh, of course,” she said. “They were our neighbors.” The whole situation felt so strange that she could barely force the words out. “I hope they would’ve done the same for us.”

“Okay. Good, then,” he said, looking at her with slight concern.

“I’m okay,” she whispered, smiling slightly. “We should talk to Yulia a bit. See what she thinks. She’d be doing a lot of babysitting, I think, with all these children around.”

James nodded. “That makes sense.”

Mina turned to where Yulia was sitting, playing patty cake with the toddler. She called to her, “Yulia, could you come here for a moment!”

Yulia excused herself with a few words to the little girl, who nodded and waved goodbye to her as she walked forward. She’s so good with little ones, Mina thought proudly.

“We’re thinking about letting the kids live with us,” James explained quietly once Yulia was close.

She bobbed her head up and down energetically. “Of course! We can’t just leave them outside.”

Mina couldn’t help smiling. She said it like it was so obvious. Put like that, it was obvious. There were no foster homes anymore, no government institutions or private charities of any kind to take care of children. They weren’t doing something crazy. They were doing something human.

Caring for other humans.

“You know you’re probably going to be doing a lot of babysitting?” Mina said. “All of us are probably going to be overwhelmed taking care of all these children.”

Yulia was nodding.

“Soon, we’ll organize, and it won’t be just the three of us,” James said. “I mean, we’ll figure out how to make it work, but I’m certain there must be other children in the area missing their families.”

So this isn’t just a one-time act of charity, Mina thought. He’s thinking about plans for the future. Major plans.

She nodded, and James said, “Let’s let them know what we’re doing, then.”

They walked over to the children. James turned his attention to the older boy specifically. “You don’t see your Mom or Dad anywhere around at all, do you, Abhi?”

Of course James already asked the little boy for his name, Mina thought. She imagined a brief conversation inside of the ruined dwelling before James emerged with them, when he was trying to reassure the children that they were safe.

The little boy looked around at all the people walking in the former apartment area for a few seconds, his expression hopeful, before he shook his head. “That’s right, sir,” he said meekly.

“Okay. Do you know if you have any family around here besides your parents?”

“No, sir,” Abhi replied.

So well mannered, Mina thought. Of course. Kids take after their parents.

“The parents mostly kept to themselves,” Mina added. And I would’ve noticed if they had family coming around, went unspoken.

Abhi looked sad, as if he was thinking about what might have happened to their parents.

“Well, if you’ll have us, we’d like to watch out for you guys for a while,” James said.

The little boy looked uncertain for a long moment.

Then Yulia spoke up. “I volunteer to babysit!” she said. She looked at Abhi. “We can play together.”

Mina didn’t need to look at Yulia to visualize her face as she spoke. She could hear the smile in Yulia’s voice. Mina herself couldn’t help thinking of those poor dead parents, but it was nice to imagine that the three of them might keep these children from any future harm.

Yulia’s words seemed to make Abhi’s mind up. He nodded, tentatively and then with a shy smile. Mina felt proud of her husband and her sister. In just the brief interactions they’d had, James and Yulia seemed to have won the little boy’s confidence.

“Alright then,” James said, nodding to himself. As he spoke, the first droplets of water began to fall onto Mina’s arms.

“Um, I think we need to do something about shelter right now,” Mina said.

“Right you are,” James said almost absently. He put the children down gently on the ground. Then Mina saw a brown aura gathering around him.

Wait, did he become a Mage? That wasn’t what we discussed.

Her next observation was that he clearly had a huge amount of Mana. It took a few minutes for him to gather what he needed from his core—perhaps she could help him learn Quickened Spellcasting—but the amount that he charged was very large, and he didn’t look fatigued from the process of gathering it. Mina had occasionally experienced headaches from Mana overuse, so she knew running low came with some side effects.

Then he unleashed his power.

The ground in a large, open area in front of them rose in a single, sudden movement. A huge rectangle of dense soil, roughly the size of a medium-sized whale. She noticed he seemed to be guiding it with hand movements as well as thought—he tightened his fist, and the outer layer of soil visibly hardened into rock. Then he made some orchestra conductor hand gestures, and window and door outlines appeared on the sides of the structure.

James’s mental image of the building grew clearer as he continued guiding his Mana. It was clearly intended to constitute multiple separate dwellings.

As James was doing this, Mina and Yulia were just standing and staring, mouths slightly agape. Mina had used magic many times now. She’d practiced with it daily and honed her control of it until it was finely tuned. But neither sister had seen magic used this way before. The scale of it.

Yulia caught her eye, and they both shook their heads and smiled.

Mina recognized the inspiration for the building immediately once the shape was more defined. James had constructed a slightly smaller model of the apartment block they’d lived in.

Finally, he seemed to be finished. Yulia and the little boy started clapping, and Mina joined in after a moment. It seemed appropriate after the performance they’d just witnessed.

James beamed and took a little bow. He let out a long breath, as if he’d forgotten to breathe while he was working on the building. Then he walked up to one of the doors. He pulled on the handle. It opened, and Mina’s jaw dropped slightly. Inside, there was a staircase, and she could see that it led up to a wide living room.

He even structured it like our old apartment…

His technique was unrefined, in her judgment—or at least inefficient. If she had his Mana reserves, she probably could have accomplished something similar with around half of the Mana she judged he’d used. But his earth magic was also incredibly powerful. If she had attempted to do what he’d done with her own power, she’d have run out of Mana early on and perhaps collapsed.

Quantity has a quality all its own. If he could do this much without running out of Mana, then with more precise control, he would be able to reshape the landscape around them. She resolved to show him what she’d learned as soon as she could.

“You guys should get out of the rain,” James said. She saw that while she was thinking, he’d picked the smaller children back up and entered the new apartment. The biggest one, standing behind James, whistled.

“Wow,” Abhi said, looking up and down the building. “Magic is amazing.”

Yes, but no, not really, she thought. James is amazing. I was blessed by a goddess of magic, and I know I couldn’t do that. How had he become so powerful? She couldn’t imagine how hard he must have pushed himself.

But Mina just nodded, walked over to the little boy, and with the arm she wasn’t using to hold her baby, she took his hand. Then they walked up the stairs.

Yulia ascended in front of them. Mina was numb, a thousand thoughts running through her mind. How is he so powerful? What was his Orientation like? Is this building even stable?

That last thought seemed especially pressing when it occurred to her, but it wasn’t a deep enough doubt to make her run back outside into the rain that was rapidly turning into a signature Florida thunderstorm. And if her husband had screwed up the structural integrity of the apartment building, she was certain he’d sacrifice life and limb, if necessary, to keep their family safe. He’d already chopped off a whole hand and thrown it after their baby without hesitation.

The building didn’t shake as they strode up the stairs, which did as much as anything could to convince her that it wasn’t going to fall down. So she refocused on the less urgent questions. What happened to James? How did he become this way?

“I’m going to go outside for a few minutes,” James said. He had placed the little kids on a sort of stone couch and was looking past Mina at the stairs.

“Sure,” she said. I need a minute anyway.

He bustled out the front door.

For a long time, Mina just sat, tired, on the couch next to the children. She exerted a little bit of energy to introduce herself to Abhi and ask him the names of his younger siblings, and she introduced baby James, but it had been a long day, and her sleep had been interrupted the previous night. She found she wasn’t up to much conversation.

“Sis,” Yulia said quietly, coming back after looking around a bit.

“Yes?” Mina asked. She turned and saw her little sister smiling softly.

“We have a third bedroom now.”

Mina snorted with a brief, choked laugh, then glanced at the children surrounding them. Then her lips curled in a small smile. “Well, I’m glad he didn’t forget about our new guests.”

Then she heard her husband’s voice from outside. It was louder than he’d ever spoken before, and she wondered if it was some sort of magic, or just a voice that employed super-Strength to increase its volume. It didn’t matter either way. He must be standing on the rooftop, she thought.

“Former residents of Palm Breeze Apartments,” he was proclaiming, “you can take shelter here. Some of you, I’ve spoken with already. Others, I will speak with tomorrow. When the storm is over, we can discuss how best to rebuild our community. This land is ours now, unless we let the monsters that live around here take it from us…”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Mina said quietly, almost to herself. “We’ll need a community to get through the days and weeks to come.”

It was silly, she realized, that she’d even had a thought that things might return to normal.

“Mm hm,” Yulia said. She was distracted, playing with the neighbor’s baby, Mina realized. She had hardly noticed her older sister talking.

Mina got up and carried baby James to the master bedroom, closer to where James was talking. She wanted to hear him better.

James was delivering a bit of a speech, Mina observed. She had heard some people opening and closing apartment doors, but he continued on, for the benefit of those still skeptical, standing out there in the pouring rain. Or maybe more for the benefit of the people who had already accepted his gracious offer of free housing. Letting them know what they were in for.

When she sat down on the stone simulacrum of a bed, James was talking about taking more of the land back from the monsters. Arguing that they needed to stand together and look out for each other. Promising to defend people.

Could he really deliver on that? The rest of the little speech had just been common sense, really. But was James strong enough to protect a community of people now?

Mina went back over her experiences of the new and improved James thus far.

Yes, she thought. He probably could. She faintly recognized along with that thought that her husband’s ambitions would expand to match his capabilities, but that was something they would address later. For now, she focused back in on what he was saying.

The flow of words had changed. His impromptu speech had continued, but he was clearly taking questions now.

There was a loud comment from one of the few people who were still outside. Mina distantly heard the word “rent” uttered in a disrespectful tone of voice.

“Rent?” James responded. “Don’t worry about rent! We’re living after the fall of our civilization. We should be glad we’re alive. We don’t need to talk about rent tonight. Just get out of the rain!”

There was a little mocking laughter, clearly at the rude commenter’s expense.

Then the outside went quiet. A few more doors opened and shut.

Mina thought about going back into the common room. She still wanted to process everything that was happening. She’d spent hardly any time with her husband, and she mostly wanted to get his take on things.

He’d been busy performing small miracles since she first saw him, so she certainly didn’t blame him for being occupied. But she felt very tired. Almost as tired as she’d been in the days just after she gave birth. If only this bed wasn’t stone, she would sleep.

Suddenly, the window on the outside wall side of the room turned on an axis that Mina hadn’t seen before. She braced herself for some sort of enemy, clutching her baby to her chest and backing toward the room’s closet. Then James appeared, and the window swiveled shut again behind him. A cloak of brown Mana faded from around his body.

Oh, he modified the window so he could open and close it, she thought dully. She let out a long sigh. Then a yawn. So sleepy.

“Hey, sorry to keep you waiting here,” he said. “Is everyone alright?” He looked at the baby as he spoke. He stepped down from the window sill, dripping water all over the floor as he moved. He was soaking wet, she realized.

“No big deal, skapi,” she said almost automatically. “I’m just really, ah, tired. Everyone was okay last I checked. No screaming since I came in here to listen to your, ah, speech.” She yawned again.

“You’ll need to invest some more points in Stamina when you get a few more levels,” James said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, but Earth’s gravity has increased. I think that’s probably why you’re feeling tired so soon.”

Her eyes widened and she stared, open-mouthed, at James. That’s impossible, she wanted to say. But they’d seen more impossible things than that, she was sure. All that was required was an increase in the Earth’s mass. Could that be what explains the buildings being further apart? There was an asteroid crash or something, and that increased gravity and caused massive earthquakes?

“You should probably just sleep for now,” James said. “I’ll try and make this more comfortable.” He gestured at the bed. “Tomorrow I’ll get you something decent to sleep on, if I can. Usually the rain helps with sleep.” He smiled. “And I have something else that might help.”

James pulled his Small Bag of Deceptive Dimensions out and opened it. A heap of furs fell onto the bed. She laid down, still holding the baby beside her, and arranged some of the furs until she was tolerably comfortable.

“That ought to do it,” Mina said sleepily.

“I’ll be right back,” James said.

She wanted to tell him not to leave, but he was gone before she could get the words out. Her only consolation was that he returned with almost the same inhuman speed.

“Yulia and I put the others to bed and gave her some of my other furs to use,” he said. “I think the kids are starting to be really comfortable here. Meaning more comfortable with us in general. Which is good. We’ll have to figure out more permanent stuff later.”

“That’s great,” Mina said a little impatiently, “and yes, we will. Tomorrow. Now lay down and go to sleep. You know I don’t sleep as well without you.”

Finally, he lay on the bed beside her, and she was able to go to sleep.