NOVEL NEXT Chapter 54: Bavarian Fire Drill
Mila
Congratulations!
You have merged your peak grade Law Egg of The Healer and peak grade Law Egg of Bonds into the Law Larva of The Healer.
Your soul is affected by your understanding of Laws.
Base Stats +8, Soul +24
Congratulations!
You have merged two Law Eggs into a Law Larva.
Your soul is affected by your upgrading of Law.
All Stats +3
Mila was taking a break after finishing the process of healing her last patient when something in her mind just clicked. The act of saving someone’s life formed a strong karmic connection. Save a hero and all her good acts would reflect back on you. Save a villain and you yourself might be damned. Through the act of healing, the creation of one bond, karma is formed.
By that same logic, kill a hero and the potential of her good acts is lost. Kill a villain and weak positive bonds will be created with the future victims he would have otherwise oppressed. Through the act of killing, the ending of a life, karma is formed.
But how could you hide your act of killing in a world where powers can track karmic bonds. You’d have to sever the bond between you and your victim as you took his life.
Congratulations!
You have merged your peak grade Law Egg of The Reaper and peak grade Law Egg of Severing into the Law Larva of The Reaper.
Your soul is affected by your understanding of Laws.
Base Stats +8, Soul +24
Congratulations!
You have merged two Law Eggs into a Law Larva.
Your soul is affected by your upgrading of Law.
All Stats +3
Mila took a deep breath, in and out, as she felt the changes. The world looked different to her senses. It wasn’t exactly visible, as she was processing the information through her third eye’s connection to her aura rather than her eyes, but she could see the karmic bonds she had with her last patient who was slowly walking out of the room. She could see the thick and complicated bond she had with Aalam heading to where he was sleeping. And she could see the master apprentice bond she had with Nana Xara, reaching off into the void.
She followed the patient out and realized she couldn’t see any of his bonds other than the one he had with her, but she was quickly able to find Roland by finding the right bond in her senses and following it to where he and his party were hunting in the jungle.
Given her status as Aalam’s chamberlain, she’d always been able to do this, but with her new senses it was far easier and she could have found any of his party members as well, which was kind of awesome.
She watched for several seconds as the four of them took down a lizard bear thing she hadn’t yet learned the name of. Then she walked out of the jungle in an obvious way so their senses would pick her up before they could see her. “Good luck, everyone. I’m leaving now. The general’s head will be gone from his shoulders by nightfall.”
“Good luck to you as well, Ms. Shadow.” Roland bowed and the others followed his lead.
Mila then activated Blur along with her Law Egg of obfuscation and disappeared, heading west. “Alright, Nana Xara, time to teach me how to make you unable to spy on me.”
“So, you gain new abilities with immense possibilities and the first thing you want to do with them is deny the fun of the one person who can teach you how to use them to their fullest potential?”
Mila started to smile as she ran through the jungle. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“What a terrible apprentice I have.” Nana Xara muttered a few other things Mila couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded like she was complaining about not getting to see Mila and Aalam finally talk. “It’s not fair.”
“And having someone watch me sleep is?”
“Come on. I’m trapped in a spiritual void with nothing else to do. What do you want from me?”
“To teach me how to limit your ability to have fun.” Mila’s smile grew a bit wider. “We’ve already established this.”
Nana Xara snorted. “Alright then. Your Law Larva of The Healer now holds all the abilities of your previous Law Egg of Bonds, only slightly more advanced. Use it to empower the bond between us until you can identify individual components of the bond.”
Mila kept one of her main minds focused on her body and one of the dumb minds focused on her other senses, but concentrated on the bond between her and Nana Xara with the other three, using one of her minds to empower the bond with her Law Larva.
It took a few minutes, but Mila was soon able to sense more than just the bond, as if the bond was actually more than a dozen bonds connecting her with Nana Xara all entangled with each other, not just a single link.
It made sense. She’d interacted with Nana Xara quite a bit, so they had more than one connection. They were master and apprentice, a type of magical bond, but Nana Xara was also someone she joked around with, another type of karmic connection, someone who’d comforted her when she was sad, and a biological ancestor of her original body. They had multiple connections and, by empowering their bond with her Law Larva of The Healer, Mila could see those multiple connections.
“I can see it,” she sent over to Nana Xara.
“Alright. Then you just need to find the component of our bond which links your sensory information to me here in my personal spirit realm. If you use your Law Egg of Obfuscation to—” Mila found the correct component of her magical bond with Nana Xara as master and apprentice and used her peak grade Law Egg of Obfuscation to block that one part of their connection, causing Nana Xara’s words to break off in the middle.
“Ah, finally alone.”
For a couple hours, as Mila ran through the jungle toward her destination, not using the winding road so as to save time and have better stealth, she continued practicing with her three new illusion skills, one of her dumb minds keeping up the blocking of Nana Xara’s monitoring.
Then, when she arrived at the city in question, she used Trickster’s guise to take on the form of a Hiran noble and walked in like she owned the place.
“Where is General Morice?” she asked one of the guards at the gate, flaring the full strength of her aura to subdue the man.
“H-he should be in the mayor’s mansion,” the guard, a young commoner maybe 18-19, said quickly.
“Guide me.” Then, channeling the true spirit of a con artist, Mila walked past him and didn’t wait for him to come to his senses. And, as she’d hoped, he left the other guards at the gate and ran after her to guide her way.
Mila normally wasn’t a big fan of this type of con. Just one skeptic and everything would fall apart. But, as she was fast enough to slip away and had a disguise skill which would allow her to change her appearance, it wasn’t much of a risk and would get her to the general faster.
If anything truly went wrong, she’d also be able to functionally turn invisible if she allowed Nana Xara to start watching her again, freeing up her Law Egg of Obfuscation for use with her Blur skill.
The guard guided her all the way to a mansion in the center of the city where there were two more guards at the entrance, these two slightly higher in level.
“Bring me to General Morice. I have a message for him.” Mila spoke as if she had authority, but it was really her aura which brought the intimidation factor, not her acting. She had an effective Aura stat of above 400 while Roland, the native with the highest Aura stat, was only at 28.
Most Hirans had an Aura less than 6, so her aura, when she didn’t control it, made her seem far more powerful than she actually was.
“Yes, ma’am.” One of the guards quickly guided her and the guard she’d brought with her into the mansion, up a flight of stairs, and then into an office. There they found the general, a man in his mid forties, behind the desk working on some papers. And, in the corner by the door was a young noble woman, maybe his secretary.
From the general’s aura, he was F rank, and, as Mila contemplated how best to kill him, she discovered two new senses.
One, probably from her evolved Law Larva of The Healer, allowed her to sense his health, which was redundant at the moment given her Life Death Detection skill. Comparing what she felt from him with the others in the room, he seemed healthy, as like everyone else he was F rank, but he was also tired and overworked. This correlated well with his emotions, which were strained, likely from his position becoming less stable after the integration, and matched with the information from the Life Death Detection skill, so Mila felt she could trust her new sense.
The second allowed her to feel his weaknesses, the same as all humans, the heart and the brain, though it also highlighted the major places to attack to make these stop functioning, such as the lungs, liver, and major blood vessels. It wasn’t that useful against humans, as she already knew all those weaknesses, but it would be a godsend if it worked on creatures she wasn’t familiar with.
From her sense of him, he wasn’t a strong cultivator, and neither were the two guards in the room.
The only real danger was the young woman. Though, from her attire and the staff on the ground near her, Mila was pretty sure she was a mage and not a melee fighter.
“What do you—” the general began. But Mila didn’t let him finish.
She moved as fast as she could and drew the swords hanging from each guard’s waist. Then she used Artifact Enhancement on one of them, which enhanced the enchantment making the blade sharp, and threw it at the general as hard as she could, the blade spinning and cutting off the man’s head.
Then she moved quickly and had the other blade next to the young woman’s throat before she could get up from her chair. “You aren’t unhappy he’s dead. Why?” From the young woman’s aura, she felt shock, fear, and annoyance, but no sense of loss.
“One of his partners had my father executed.” The young woman glared at her. “But you killed him, so it will be harder to find the bastard.”
From the woman’s aura, she was pretty sure the words were true, so Mila lowered her blade, mostly ignoring the stunned guards, neither of whom had yet figured out how they should react. “What’s your view on the royal family?”
“The former emperor, the prince, or the princess?” The woman’s aura when asking the question was all Mila needed. She wasn’t a fan of the emperor, was indifferent to Roland, and felt sorry for Uliana.
“If you want your revenge, I would suggest partnering with the prince and princess.” Mila walked over to one of the room’s windows, opened it, and then jumped down, leaving the sword she’d stolen from one of the guards at the bottom. Then she quickly moved through the streets, changed her appearance to that of a plain former slave with Trickster’s Guise, and headed out of the city.
