With a flick of Winter, I sliced through the bubble of Mana that Lord Wei had surrounded me with and allowed my cloak to billow outwards. That would buy me an extra half second before hitting the ground, meaning I had three seconds to think about my plan of action.

That was plenty of time with the Wit I had at my disposal. It might as well have been three minutes to my past self.

I thought about throwing Sam as far to the side out of harm's way as I could manage, but a glance at their eyes told me that would do no good right now. Their mental state wasn't in a place for fighting right now. They would just get trampled in the crowd, assuming they weren't cut to pieces the moment they landed.

The mages were in the midst of casting. They hadn't started until I jumped and wouldn't be finished for another few seconds at minimum. The archers, however, were already firing at me. Not that they could hit a target as small as I was without a healthy dose of luck, only a minuscule amount of Winter was used to stop a couple of arrows.

I assessed my current arsenal of weapons. I couldn't access the Inventory with this body, but that didn't mean I wasn't storing tricks on me. Only the Primary Core could handle the computational load for that at the moment. Which meant I'd had to get creative and pack this body with tricks to supplement my small stature and lack of access to a storage with near limitless size constraints, but limited slots.

I moved counselling Ellie on how to use it properly up on the priority list. She had grown too accustomed to running from disaster to disaster and had never taken the time to explore how her Profession could benefit her. Once she found Autumn, I was going to have to insist we take a moment to breathe and figure things out.

That was for later, though. I had more pressing matters at hand.

Sam was a liability, and I needed to make hard decisions. So I threw them into the air as hard as possible, freeing my hands to go to my knives packed with Winter. After one worked so well against the Void Drone, I decided I needed more of them. I had six, so I'd call that two guaranteed killing strikes. The rest we'd have to see.

I also had a ritual array installed in my frame, but that was a last resort. The test I'd done in the simulator had only a ten percent survival rate for the body that activated it.

Just as I was about to land, I launched needles of ice in every direction. No longer under the effect of the bubble, those needles actually hit something. A dozen people went down clutching wounds.

These were regular people only a couple of days ago. No matter the training they'd gone through, there was no way they could acclimate to a combat environment that fast, which meant chaos tactics and distractions were my best option here.

The same moment I hit the ground, Lord Wei barked an order, and at least thirty spells came to life around me, aimed to crush me, shred my body to pieces, and burn it into ash, and several other effects I could only guess at.

They really aren't holding back, are they? That's odd.

Normal humans had difficulty overcoming an aversion to killing. A study I'd read said that something like fifteen to twenty-five percent of soldiers who hadn't had it conditioned out of the behaviour would hesitate to fire upon an enemy. I'd always found the notion silly, I mean, everyone should look forward to the first person they kill. It was a new, exciting experience, wasn't it? That's all life was for: finding interesting things to do until you die. Or until you don't, in Ellie's case, gods willing. But I was going on a tangent.

What this meant was either that my non-human status helped them overcome that fact incredibly easily, or something more was going on here.

With a wave of Winter, I froze the spells in place and jumped, loosening my hold on them as I crested over the top. The array of spells was sprayed past where I stood into the crowd. I noted that nobody had died, but many were injured. Interesting.

I landed back on the ground. Rain clattered on the cobblestones of the courtyard, and for that moment, it felt like the world was holding its breath.

Unsheathing two knives, I lunged at Lord Wei and swung both, unloading the Mana within in a cross that should be impossible to dodge.

Except he did dodge perfectly, sliding directly underneath the cross, which didn't make any sense given the time he had to react. Was the plate mail he was wearing a distraction, and his build was actually incredibly Wit heavy?

No, that didn't make sense for the movement he made. He needed a lot of Grace and Might to be able to drop from a standing position to lying down, then back up to standing in a single motion while wearing plate armour. He also needed Arcana for all the Mana he was using, which meant he was an all-rounder.

Testing him a little more, I flung needles at him and retreated, dodging an incredibly accurate swipe of his sword. The needles plinked off his plate, leaving him unharmed. He didn't even bother trying to dodge.

Why would he trust his plate armour to hold against the needles but not my kill shot?

Incredible predictive ability? Future sight? I couldn't say. But it had to have been some kind of Skill.

With him using something like that, engaging was useless. He would just bait out all of my trump cards, then go for the kill.

Sam landed perfectly in my arms at that moment. I spun up a simulation of the entire area around us using Ellie's Mana. She was nearly out after what she had just gone through, so I could only run one attempt.

Simulating the movement of every human nearby, I attempted to predict possible patterns, assuming Wei would react to my intentions perfectly.

I jumped forward towards Wei, and he moved backwards to avoid the knife that I would have pulled had he not. Then at the last moment, I switched my momentum on a dime using [White Steps] to fling myself backwards.

Wei immediately reversed the direction he was moving, hopping slightly to dodge the ice I would have manifested under his feet had he not done so. Then, he leaned back to dodge the knife I would have thrown at him.

I smirked. He was leaking Mana like a sieve, dodging ghosts of my actions that never necessarily needed to happen. Future sight it was then. He hadn't learned to fight without it and had picked up bad habits along the way.

I was reaching the edge of the encirclement, but the Lord of Fateswatch was rapidly gaining on me. I had slowed him for a moment but those damn tricky humans and their long legs. It wasn't fair.

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Blades came down from behind me, but a flex of Winter stilled them in the air for the moment I needed.

Using only my aura to sense out where to step, I bounded backwards underfoot through the crowd. Or at least I tried to.

A flash of Mana came from Wei's hand that flew faster than I could react. The moment it touched me, the world blurred around me, and suddenly I was being held by the neck by the Lord of Fateswatch. I tried to reach for a knife, but he suddenly grabbed my arm and ripped it off.

Time magic, which explains why he moved when I planned to swing at him. Was he allowing me to think I was winning just to test me?

I didn't start regrowing my arm immediately because giving him any more information felt like a bad idea.

"Are you done?" he asked.

"Not quite. Why do you need Ellie dead?" I asked in response, taking advantage of the Title she had just obtained.

"My Patron—God," he was fighting having to answer the question, but didn't realize he could just lie. "He gave me a Quest: if I don't kill her, all of humanity dies. You aren't her?"

"No, I'm not. How do you plan on killing her?" I continued. If he was willing to trade question for question, then I was happy to continue.

"I don't know yet," he replied.

My eyes narrowed. That didn't seem quite right. Did he figure out that he could lie? It didn't seem like it. Oh well, it doesn't matter anyway.

Not when he was about to die.

I activated the ritual inside me.

Then the world blurred again, and I found myself flying through the air. An arm still wrapped around Sam.

He threw me to avoid the blast. What a shame, I'd nearly dealt with a potential threat to Ellie.

I disabled the ritual's activation before I blew us up pointlessly.

He was going to be a tricky opponent in the future. Since he was the one given the Divine Quest, I needed to get rid of him at some point before he figured out how to get to Ellie. He was a near absolute counter to her current aggressive fighting style.

We could fix that flaw, but it would take some time playing around with her Profession.

"Slow fall," I ordered. Now that I didn't have to conserve Mana for a fight, I was happy to use expensive commands. Despite still flying in an arc, I was dropping much slower.

"Hey, you okay, bud?" I asked Sam.

"Did you have to throw me?" they griped.

"I don't know how you expect me to have fought with my hands full," I replied.

"That's… fair," Sam said, drooping in my arms.

Geez, people living in Fateswatch must be coddled if they turned out like this. All I did was throw them as hard as I could into the sky.

"So, you have the memories of an imp now. Any revelations that would help us?" I asked as my feet touched down on a rooftop and I took off running.

"Uhh, hmm. That's not good," Sam mumbled to themselves.

"What? Anything about Ellie?"

"No, they had never heard your name. The problem is that they're raising us to be slaughtered or sold off!" they said, seeming a little distressed at that fact.

I didn't really understand why they would expect anything different from our new overlords. So, I decided to stop running and set Sam down so we could have a chat.

"Oh, yeah, I already knew about that. Also, I'm not Ellie, by the way, I'm Novi. A near-exact memory clone of Ellie from… I guess it would be yesterday now."

"You have a very interesting species if you're able to self-replicate," Sam said.

"Thank you! Ellie picked it, and she's just the best!" I replied, my thoughts drifted to her. I'd need to check in with her at some point soon. Not that I wasn't listening to her thought processes at the moment.

At this moment, she was incredibly annoyed with Autumn for some reason. I wondered what that was about. Not angry, though, neither of us had the capability to become angry.

Sam coughed, interrupting my line of thought, "So you don't really care about what the gods are doing with us?"

Oh, right, I forgot I set them down for a reason.

"What are you trying to get out of your afterlife?" I asked.

Sam shrugged, "I'm just trying to live from one day to another. I don't really have any sort of plan."

"So, if that's the case, why do you care what the people up top are doing with us? You already knew we would be sent to a far worse hell if we died again. Now you know the reason for it. Either you die and turn into a Mana generator, or live long enough to be sold into slavery." I replied, parroting Ellie's line because I had no idea what Sam actually wanted.

Sure, I could devote half my attention to carrying Sam to immortality through whatever means possible. But why would I do that if they didn't care?

Ellie didn't count in that regard. She wasn't allowed to live in any way except her best. I would ensure that, whatever it took.

"Because it doesn't feel right. You can't just do that to people."

"That's where you're looking at this wrong. We're not people to them, we're cattle… It's not like it was all that different back on Earth," I said, sitting down on the rooftop overlooking the city. "The people at the top are parasites who use those at the bottom. Sure, the method is a little worse, but fundamentally, nothing has changed since we died. We're just under new management."

Watching the streets, I was fairly certain we weren't being chased, not yet, at least. We probably had a night to get out of town at most before they started sweeping the city. Because if Lord Wei were smart, he wouldn't have his people try to catch us directly. He would devise a plan to corral us into a corner, forcing an engagement that I couldn't win, no matter what move I made.

I was willing to bet the bubble was his Class Capstone, and I had no idea the range on it. I couldn't even sense it until he had used the isolated time reset twice, which meant he could reposition the whole city in an instant for all I knew.

"I still don't like it…" Sam grumbled.

"I never said you had to. Would you like to change it? Kill the gods and remake the system?" I genuinely asked.

Sam took a moment to consider, which was good. If they had immediately answered 'yes,' I wouldn't have trusted them to follow through. They weren't a little fucked up in the head like me and Ellie.

"Before I answer. Can you say what you're trying to get out of your afterlife?" Sam asked.

That was a fair question, but also not the one they should be asking.

"I want Ellie to be happy, and I will do anything to achieve that," I replied. The world around us trembled slightly as I spoke. I hadn't even intended to lace the word with Authority. It was as if it manifested through will alone.

Sam flinched back at the pressure I had accidentally exerted. I pulled my Authority in, wrapping it in over itself so it wouldn't leak out.

Ignoring that oddity, I continued, "But then that's not what you care about. If my goal is to make Ellie happy, then her goal is what matters to you. As for her…

"Ellie would probably tell you something like 'I want to find the easiest and most pleasurable way to live the rest of my afterlife' or some other variation of 'absolute hedonism,' which isn't strictly untrue, but it also misses some nuance. Because she will never find that state, and she knows it. Have you ever heard of the hedonic treadmill?"

Sam shook their head, "I have no idea what you said, but the translator explained it to me, I think. It told me the hedonic treadmill means you'll adapt to whatever happens to you, good or bad. You could have something amazing happen, and at first you're happier, but after a while you settle back to a baseline level that you started with. And if something awful happens, it hurts, but eventually you adapt to it, too. So no matter what, you end up back at your baseline."

"At Ellie's baseline, she threw herself in front of a truck. That's how we ended up here," I replied.

Sam was quiet for a moment, then blinked a few times and just nodded.

"Yeah, I'd like to kill some gods."

I smiled, "Let's see if we can arrange that, shall we?"

I had no idea how opening up about Ellie influenced their decision at all.

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