The Values That Lead Us Down Dark Paths

Before flying off to monitor E.T., I turned to Pestilence. Her look stunned me for a good second. The Hand of Glory sprawled on top of her, fixed in place with duct tape wrapping around her head, looking little like a twisted aviator cap.

I didn’t comment on it, nor did Pestilence. She dove straight into her report. “I took all of them from the temple, and I wiped his accounts. Did I do a good job, my mistress?”

“It would be better if you dropped the kinky roleplay.”

Pestilence giggled, communicating that she had no intention of changing. “Oh, and one more thing, I found a wooden box hidden in the corner.”

“And what? There are ero-mags in it?” If only a man’s desires were all that Pestilence found, not anything worse.

“Only if you find pieces of the sessho-seki erotic. You’re so dirty, Dede-chan.” Pestilence winked at me. Why did she say it as if I were the owner of the box? But I wasn’t in the mood for a snarky comeback.

“The killing stone? Are you sure?”

“I ate a piece. The stone tried to kill every one of my cells it touched. My regeneration was faster though. But a normal person wouldn’t survive.” She seemed to forget that a normal person wouldn’t eat mysterious pebbles from a random box.

“If a person dies from this, what will the forensics report find?”

“Natural causes,” Pestilence answered with a smirk, even though there wasn’t anything to be smug about.

E.T. killed those rich people. I was almost certain of that. But what then? What could I do with this information?

“My mistress, what do you want to do next?”

The choice wasn’t difficult, but the outcome would leave a bitter taste in my mouth. “I will separate E.T. from Raven as planned.”

“Why do you need such a roundabout method?”

Another question I didn’t want her to ask. The best course of action would be to arrest E.T., break his limbs, or even kill him. But that had to come after I tainted his image in Raven’s mind. Or else, she would fall in love with him even more. I could give Pestilence all this reasoning, but I wasn’t obligated to. “Because I can.”

“The natural order isn’t so forgiving to picky eaters.” Pestilence reached out her finger at a fairy guide.

“Humans have picked their meals for centuries.”

“And many starved.”

I drifted in front of Pestilence, forcing the magical spark out of the way. “Because they don’t have quasi-omniscience and the preparation to do whatever it takes. As you said, the world is unforgiving.”

As I spoke, the fairy guide before us, by association, prompted our minds to think about the servers that sustained the magic, alerting us to a fact we didn’t ask for.

The servers had been reprogrammed; the fairies would soon seek the rich and kill them.

It wasn’t as disastrous as it sounded, yet. The information flowing inside the servers needed time to merge with the new set of commands. I could still stop it, but my estimate placed me on a thirty-minute timer. “What did you bring?” I asked right after my new goal became clear.

“Only these." Pestilence patted the hilt of Cloudie in its sheath and Junk-o’s grass-shooting belt. I didn’t know what magical artifacts E.T. had on him, but Pestilence’s gear clearly wasn’t strong enough to beat him. Also…

“You do realize that Cloudie is less useful indoors.” Evidently, an oversight on her part, because if she had wanted to handicap herself, she literally would have handcuffed herself.

“Cloudie? You mean the grass-cutting sword?” Yep, but that name was boring.

“We’ll meet in the server room. Oh, and move Raven into a janitor’s closet or something.” I skipped waiting for Pestilence’s reply and sped through the walls, this time remembering to turn invisible.

A long staircase reached from the security office to the server room buried deep underground. The guards were knocked out on the floor, and the office computers were so thoroughly soaked that the few hotel cameras no longer had a place to send their recordings to. Sporadic patches of toilet water pieced together a trail. It pierced through the office, carrying on past the broken steel door and down the steps.

The staircase and the server room were consumed by darkness; even if the world’s brightest flashlight were brought here, its light wouldn’t even leave the bulb. Only specialized magical goggles given to the programmers could allow for sight under the shadow magic.

Besides the blackout, once a person entered the basement, the shadows would keep them trapped, allowing exit only for a select few listed in the files stored inside the Seireiji Corporation safe. Sure, the intruder was welcome to try to disable the shadow magic. But unless they knew the ins and outs of the codes, one wrong move would suck the consciousness out of the brain.

These measures sounded perfect to the corporate suits, who vastly underestimated the threat of unemployed people with too much free time and resentment. I wasn’t just referring to E.T., but also to the hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet who did nothing except create memes. The spread of the ‘Robin Hood, expert hacker’ meme must have empowered E.T. to reprogram the servers.

Whether E.T. could escape the clutches of shadow magic was a separate issue. The interior was too dark for me to verify. But since he didn’t disable the shadow magic, he must have found a way out.

Finding a single blind spot inside this enormous structure was harder than asking Raven to say ‘thank you’ to me. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to. I only had to follow the toilet water leading out of the security office.

My search lasted for less than a minute. Not because the trail was cut off, but because my quasi-omniscience detected people running away from something. Something I couldn’t see. A blind spot.