The Palark Kingdom fell like an old, crumbling skeleton, torn apart by hands secretly chipping away at the archaic mechanisms that had long lost their efficiency. Authority was restored shortly by able minds, commanded by Marcus, who had already prepared a series of plans to deploy after the takeover.

  There was chaos and confusion, of course, but they were silenced by the sudden pouring of resources that saw every villager and slave being bombarded by things they had never seen before. Mountains of food, and water, and booze. Clothes that weren’t necessarily made out of wool. Permits and grants that allowed them to enter any city without a complete search-through. Protection, beyond all, against adversaries they once thought nobody could get the better of.

  I watched these changes occur with no small degree of amazement, and saw in the public’s apparent ignorance a giant crack that slowly took over their confusion. They didn’t seem to care much about the new ruler’s origins anymore. It appeared they rather preferred to question which perk or package of goods they might get delivered after the first round of care they were shown.

  Belfray and Radek were both right, it turned out. Desperate people didn’t have the luxury to manage a comprehensive opinion about things that were marginally bigger than them.

  Only I knew, however, that I was just a fraud. I was no child King meant to rule across a fairly backward kingdom. This was just a basic necessity for my future, and I still had too much to learn.

  “The first Outbreak killed a billion people in just short of six months,” Belfray said, one hand resting on the thick tome, gray beard trimmed neatly and fixed with two braids. He seemed, today, a younger man than he ever was, and a patient one at that, seeing that he didn’t mind me blanking off now and then. “It wasn’t until later that it was revealed this was one of the many haunting tests the Demon Cultists have deployed across the Planar System.”

  I nodded slightly, flexing my right palm to see if I got the feeling back. For some time, the fingers with which I handled Beatrice on that day remained numb. There was some sensation, a sinister cold creeping ever so slowly across my wrist, but never quite reaching my arm. It remained there, right around my palm, refusing to go away.

  “They picked remote worlds to carry out their first steps so as not to poke the giants and give them notice. They started small, as they’ve done for many years,” Belfray continued. “The first Outbreak, however, was too much of a success even for them. They expected the Chaos Plague to take root in the world of Larawor, but not to this degree. In just six months, a tenth of the population gave in against this harrowing sickness.”

  I would’ve been horrified, if not outright stricken with fear, had I not been too lost in my own mind at this sudden revelation. Demon Cultists were a new topic for me, and they were quite different from everything I’d ever learned from Belfray. They were a sick bunch of humans that seemed to worship a fabled entity, one that they called Garhus, the Harbinger of Chaos. Their sole agenda seemed to be carrying out a galaxy-wide slaughter to appease their master.

  It didn’t make much sense, but then again, nothing did lately.

  “It fell under the Lord Commander’s authority of the Malarus Empire to respond to this fast-growing uncertainty. He called his Tenth Division, namely the Blackblood Knights, to duty and sent them to Larawor, a total of a hundred men, all bearing the gifts of their unique division.”

  “You never told me about the Blackblood Knights,” I muttered, mostly to show I was paying attention to his words rather than being actually interested in them. “Are they strong?”

  “From a strictly military point, yes, they are strong,” Belfray answered. “It takes an average of fifty years to become a true Knight of Worth in the Malarus Empire, after which one is given to a particular division to be a part of their integral military system, depending on their personality, unique gifts, and general demeanor. For Blackblood Knights, duty comes far beyond everything else. They were often orphans born and raised by the Empire with a kind of loyalty hardly seen in an average person.”

  “Seems like every single power has a thing for orphans,” I said, shaking my head. “They can’t just leave them alone, can they?”

  I looked into his eyes as I said that, knowing that both he, Radek, and Mother had been orphans back in the day. The fact that they’d been molded through whatever horrors they had faced in the Empire was fresh in my mind, even though they were stingy with information. For one, I still didn’t know to which Empire they had belonged in the past, but seeing Belfray’s expression, it was clear that it wasn’t Malarus.

  “This is a system that breeds orphans. Someone has to make use of them lest they live a life without direction,” Belfray said coldly. “Blackblood Knights are that. Men of dedication bound solely to their Emperor, indoctrinated to follow his orders without question. Their interference was direct and to the point. They aimed to purge the plague with efficient brutality, yet they underestimated the rate at which it spread.”

  Belfray drew in a long breath, then glanced down at me. “A year down the line, they lost control of the situation. The Outbreak had claimed half of the world, and turned those innocent people into monsters. It now posed the risk of being spread across the Malarus Empire. Hundreds of worlds in close proximity, ripe with population, unguarded against a threat of such immensity. What would you do if you were in their place, Leo?”

  That was a hard question to answer right away. We had a plague that turned people into monsters, concocted and purposefully spread by the Demon Cultists. This meant that beyond the sickness itself, some shadowy figures were involved in the process, not to mention the whole threat that this thing could infect the nearby worlds.

  “I would scorch the whole planet and ensure the plague ended there and then,” I said, and gawked shortly at the ease with which the words poured out of my mouth. That meant killing billions of people. Bringing death upon a whole world and leaving it a dark, lifeless hell. “After making sure there’s no remedy and the threat is of immediate urgency, of course,” I added hurriedly.

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  Belfray nodded.

  There, the numbness around my fingers grew yet again.

  I could almost hear the sound of blood dripping from their tips. That was how I found myself at the giant square, right after I killed one of the heirs of the Lord Master, my sword clasped tightly in my hand, the severed neck of a young man thudding a long way down the stairs, the headless body falling like a lifeless husk to the ground. Under the urging gaze of my Mother, I’d clasped the sword and swept the rest in mere moments.

  It would be fair to say that I hadn’t felt like a conqueror at that moment, nor did I feel a deep distaste or any sickness in my stomach. I had seen blood aplenty in this second life, witnessed the many corpses scattered about the forests that belonged to poor villagers and slaves being forced into the dangerous lands by their betters.

  No. All I felt was a sudden emptiness that passed shortly when Radek raised my hand and turned me toward the crowded square. I was met with a momentary silence, followed by the thunderous roar of the poor folk thinking they had finally laid their eyes upon a savior.

  Not very Knightly of me, I’d thought, being this sentimental and all that. Then again, against the overbearing education I’d gone through in this second life, there still remained in me some parts of Earth’s common sense. It was fleeting, though, I could tell. I was growing more and more adjusted to this place and its morals.

  “A fair assessment of the situation, much similar to how the Blackblood Knights responded after having seen the state of the world,” Belfray said. “Thus they called for aid from the Fire Pillars, a much-feared division of mages serving under the Malarus Empire. They laid waste to the whole world and ensured nothing remained alive in their siege of fire.”

  “What happened to the Demon Cultists?” I asked.

  “They were caught and brought before the Lord Commander. They all died with a smile on their lips,” Belfray said, shaking his head. “Sacrifice in the name of their mission is a sort of accomplishment widely sought after in their ranks. They believe dying in service of their God is an unrivaled feat of faith and worship.”

  “And why are you telling me all this?” I muttered. “You’ve never mentioned them before.”

  Belfray shuffled uneasily on his chair, looking greatly distressed for a second before he managed a warm, somewhat unstable expression.

  “You have killed now,” he said after a beat.

  “I did kill beasts before—“

  “This is different.” He sighed out a long breath. “To a Knight, killing beasts is second nature. We do it to progress through the Path of Glory. We search for prey to get stronger and become a better version of ourselves. This may affect our minds and the way we see the world, but ultimately, there’s an ample amount of excuses one could find to justify this particular act of killing. After all, leave a beast wounded and it would come searching for blood once it’s healed. There’s an inevitability to it.”

  “Killing a man, however, is different,” Belfray continued. “To feel the soft skin being torn under a blade, flesh and blood pouring, a smile turning into a wicked grimace of pure pain and torture, the life being sipped slowly away from those eyes, the body growing cold and colder still with each passing second… That changes a man, through and through. Messes with his mind lest he’s not careful. Tell me, Leo, have you enjoyed killing those men?”

  “I— What?” I bawled, blinking up at Belfray’s face, repeating that question in my mind in an effort to try and understand if he really asked me that.

  The hell did that mean, anyway?

  Have I enjoyed killing men?

  Those defenseless, kneeling men who were brought before me?

  Sure, they did horrible things, but I was a ten-year-old child! Was there ever a world in which a child of similar age might enjoy butchering men senselessly in cold blood?

  I paused, lowering my head and glancing at my numb fingers. I’d scrubbed the bloodstains clean for hours after that sickening ceremony, yet somehow, I could feel their presence in that moment.

  “No,” I managed to say after a long pause. “I haven’t.”

  I heard a sigh of relief from Belfray, as though a mountain had just been lifted off his shoulders, which made me look up.

  He was smiling.

  Why was he smiling?

  “Good,” he said. “I’m relieved.”

  “Why?” I asked. “You thought I’d enjoy it? I mean, who could possibly like killing people even if it’s out of necessity? It’s a heavy thing, isn’t it? To bear this burden…”

  “What is necessary is rarely merciful to the one who bears it,” Belfray agreed, then looked uncomfortable for a moment. “There are those who relish the act itself, though. That’s why I had to ask.”

  “You have your answer,” I said, my back stiff as a stick.

  “Back to the Demon Cultists, then,” Belfray muttered, pulling one thick tome from the score of others, opening a page in the middle and glancing down at the archaic words. As always, I was amazed at how easy it was for him to find the exact page he wanted in one smooth motion. To think Radek thought him a brute and a barbarian… I wondered if he knew this side of Belfray at all.

  “The main reason why I chose this particular lesson to tell you about Demon Cultists is that they play a prevalent role across many a conflict still ripe in the Planar System. Our campaign moves fast and smooth, and at this rate, we are confident that we can make the deadline of the Creator’s Academy this year.”

  “So you’re saying that there are Demon Cultists in the Creator’s Academy?” I asked. “Surely not, right?”

  “Not in the way you’d think, no,” Belfray said. “You will not come across that group of maniacs roaming the lengths of the academy like a pack of rabid dogs. It will, however, serve you well to learn that the Creator’s Academy is definitely the biggest thorn in any Demon Cultist’s eye.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Since they worship the so-called Harbinger of Chaos, they must hate the Creator’s guts.”

  It was a tale as old as time itself. The Creator, who presumably created the Planar System and everything that had ever existed, was one of the widely worshipped Gods in this place. It had temples in nearly every major world across the galaxy, and billions of followers, according to Belfray. It was inevitable, then, that this particular religion had many enemies.

  What was strange, however, was that even though the place I was about to enroll was called the Creator’s Academy, it wasn’t necessarily a religious school. As in, I wasn’t going there to be a part of their cult, nor was there any expectation for me to become highly accomplished in their belief.

  What was the connection, then?

  “Demon Cultists like to sow chaos by planting seeds of conflict in every possible way, including spreading plane-wide plagues and developing insidious sicknesses,” Belfray said. “Their years of research, however, showed them that nothing breeds more chaos than leaving a house barren and broken. They like to target heirs of predominant forces of the Planar System.”

  “You think they’re going to come after me?” I asked.

  “I believe there’s really no other way around it,” Belfray said. “You will become the pupil of one of the most dangerous men in existence. Knowing him, I’m afraid he’s not going to give you a chance to stay away from attention. People will learn your name. Most importantly, they will learn of your talents.”

  “Doesn’t sound that bad—“

  “It’s not. You will get recognition and fame. There’s little doubt about it,” Belfray cut me off. “It’s just that there’s nothing quite like getting rid of a future Runemaster for Demon Cultists than pretty much anything, meaning that they will want to take a piece of you if the opportunity presents itself. Which is why I’m going to teach you how to deal with them.”

  “You will?”

  “Don’t worry. I know my way around them.” Belfray nodded. “You see, back in the day, I was a bit of a Demon Killer myself.”

  Of course he was.

  ………..