Chapter 169: Babysitting a calamity
Ren watched as the undead took apart the mercenary group, killing them with their own hands.
The boss of the mercenary group looked in horror. He looked up at the edge of the mountain and saw her there, the necromancer, his friend.
"What have you done?" he asked in pure rage. He rushed toward the mountain, planted his foot, and shot up the side of the mountain fast, eager to stop her for what she had done, but as he made it halfway, she reacted.
She moved her hand in one motion, and a magical circle appeared on the mountain, one five meters wide. And from it came a skeletal hand. It was extremely massive, too massive to be anything that was normal. It was giant.
The hand moved fast. The boss could not fully react to it before it grabbed him. The grip of the hand was far too great to break out of. He struggled and fought against it, but it squeezed harder until the sound of bones popping could be heard, and he coughed up blood.
He looked up at his friend in disbelief, eyes wide. "W... why?" he stuttered, more blood gushing from his mouth.
She looked at him and then tilted her head to the side. She let out a small smile.
"Lord Crimson wills it so," she said, and that was all the reason she needed. The hand squeezed one last final time and snapped her friend. She allowed his body to drop from there. It hit the floor hard into a splatter, no longer moving, no longer breathing.
Ren watched in shock. The sheer brutality of her actions managed to stun him. But he did not have time to focus on her. He turned to his subordinates and rushed over to them. But before getting to them, the undead had already dealt with all of the mercenaries.
[Quest Completed]
The system said that and said nothing more, no rewards and no change. The only reward was the fact that all of them were alive.
After getting rid of all the mercenaries, the skeletons all sank into the ground as magical formations formed under them. The necromancer landed on the ground behind Ren. He turned around and saw her standing there, a soft smile plastered on her face.
’She came out of nowhere and saved us. She was meant to be working for them, and then she somehow turned to start working against them.’
"Why?" Ren asked and said nothing else.
"Lord Crimson willed it," she replied.
"Are you some of those cultish followers of the god of chaos?" Ren asked.
She frowned slightly when he asked that. She seemed to not like that.
"No, I am not. Do not lump me in with those heathens that blaspheme the name of my lord and use his name to cover their evil," she spoke clearly. Then her smile widened until it looked crazy, her eyes widening madly.
"I am the humble servant of Lord Crimson, and I am his tool."
’Yeahhhh, she is crazy,’ Ren thought.
"Normally, I would have helped my friend kill you and have you as my summon, a dragon, finally." She said as she bit one of her fingers in a seductive way. "But Lord Crimson spoke to me. He said I would find you, the carrier of his will, his avatar." She said and stepped in closer to Ren.
’Did that dude really call me an avatar?’
"Yes, I did," Crimson suddenly spoke to Ren. "Come in for a second." He immediately pulled Ren right into his space like before to speak.
The space formed around him the way it always did, the black and white tiles appearing beneath his feet, the warm incense smell settling in before anything else.
Vel was seated on the couch.
He was eating something.
Ren looked at the bowl in his hands. The long, thin strands inside it. The particular way the steam rose from it.
"Is that ramen?" Ren asked.
Vel shrugged without looking up. "I get food from everywhere. Every world, every era. This one is good." He slurped a mouthful. "But that is not why you are here."
"The lady," Ren said.
"Yes." Vel set the bowl down on his knee and looked at him properly. "She is special. Not in the way that people use that word when they mean nothing by it. Actually special." He leaned back. "Since she was born, she has been able to tap into divine spaces. Death, the beyond, places that require specific bloodlines or decades of training for anyone else to even brush against. She just walked into them naturally." He paused. "That was how she first contacted me. A child, reaching into a divine space and finding me there.
I thought it was interesting, so I spoke to her. I have been speaking to her from time to time since. Short words. Guidance when she needed it. She has been loyal to me in return for as long as she has been capable of loyalty."
"So she is yours," Ren said.
"She is her own," Vel replied. "But she listens to me. The reason I brought her to you is different from all of that." He looked at the bowl for a moment. "She is an unstable factor. A chaos. I know chaos well. It is essentially what I am, and she carries it in a way that, if left unchecked, could become genuinely catastrophic for this world." He met Ren’s eyes. "She does not even know her own origins. She was born from the blood of a primordial demon and an Ancient."
"An Ancient," Ren repeated. "What is that?"
Vel shook his head. "Not yet. You will understand what the Ancients are when it is time. What you need to know for now is that they sit above what you have encountered so far. And she carries their blood somehow." He picked up the bowl again. "It is a long story. Even I am still piecing parts of it together."
"So what do you want from me?" Ren asked.
"Watch her," Vel said simply. "Guide her. She has been running free her entire life with only my voice to check her, and my influence has limits. Her power has been growing fast." He slurped another mouthful. "I need someone in the physical world to keep her from becoming something that the wrong gods decide to collect."
"The wrong gods," Ren said.
"Not every god in this world wants peace," Vel said. "Some hate humans. Some hate the world entirely. Some would burn everything down given the opportunity and a sufficient reason." He looked at Ren with an expression that for once carried no humor underneath it. "If any of them get their hands on her, it becomes a problem that goes well beyond what you are currently dealing with."
Ren looked at him.
"You are the god of chaos," he said, "and you are the one asking me to keep the peace."
Vel pointed at him with a chopstick.
"When you have spent your entire existence being chaos," he said, "peace starts to sound like the most interesting thing in the room." He went back to the bowl. "Take her. Watch her. If she tries to harm you or anyone around you, handle it however you need to. I trust your judgment."
"Fine," Ren said. "But if she becomes a problem I cannot manage, that is on you."
"Yeah, yeah," Vel said, already focused back on the noodles.
The space dissolved.
Ren was back in his own body, standing in the mountain pass with the necromancer smiling at him from two feet away.
He looked at her.
She looked back with those wide, slightly unhinged eyes.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
’Babysitting,’ he thought. ’He has me doing babysitting.’