My spell continued to press down on hers, and I felt the power flowing from the assassin’s spirit gutter, then completely cut off. I wished that I’d had access to Analyze Mana-Garden, because the basic impression that I got from her was… deeply unusual. Solid, but in a damaging way, like the excess growths caused by imperfectly casting a spell.

  Her lightning bolt vanished, and my own beam of dragon’s breath shot across the space, and I had to choose.

  I couldn’t do it.

  Even if it might have solved two of my problems at once, even if it would have been the logical thing to do, it wasn’t something I was capable of doing.

  I released my spell and let it dissolve into nothing, fizzling out before it struck her.

  She toppled over, falling to her knees as if her own body couldn’t sustain its own weight. Judging by the incredibly overrun and strange sense coming from her mana, and the fact her life energy had gone from incredibly well developed and powerful to the level of a normal person, she might not have the strength to hold herself up after all.

  But she sat there in the ashes, staring at the ground, waiting.

  “You said that showing mercy to an enemy is an ego trip and delusions. Look at me.”

  She didn’t, and I let steel enter my voice.

  “Look.”

  She looked at me as we landed, and despite our roughly equal height, she seemed to be looking upwards.

  “Just… Kill me,” she finally said. “I deserve it.”

  I felt my heart break.

  “Killing you won’t heal the land you blasted apart. It won’t fix my arm. It won’t

  “It stops me from hurting people. I’ve done bad things. You could save lives.”

  “You really think so?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re an idiot.”

  She blinked, and I moved.

  I was exhausted, my mana dry of everything but a bit of third gate life, and my body’s energy sapped further than it had been in a long time, but I didn’t need mana or much strength for this.

  I tore open a portal to Dusk’s realm and shoved her inside, stepped in, then shut it behind me. She let out a puff of air as she lost her balance and slowly stood back up to look at me, before glancing around at the stone box she was in. It was covered in lines and spell arrays of all sorts, and it really did look like a prison. It wasn’t – I didn’t have access to a prison.

  But the sealed stone room, accessible only through the application of her innate power over her realm?

  It might as well have been.

  The spell arrays that had served to contain and intensify the heat in the room weren’t actually any kind of magical containment, but unless the assassin was a good enchanter or wardbreaker, she probably wouldn’t know that. And Ed had told me that she’d used a wardbreaking device for entry in our home, so I doubted she did.

  “You came after my family,” I said. “You came after me. You tried to kill me for money and the thrice-cursed stupidity that you’re normal. I should hate you.”

  Her eyebrows knitted together, and I plowed on before she could get the opportunity to speak again.

  “But if you think that the only way to stop someone from killing is to kill them? Then yes. You’re an idiot. Sit down.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “I told you: Sit. Down.”

  She sat, and I sat across from her.

  “A hag is devouring my partner’s soul from the inside out,” I said. “And I’m not going to kill the hag. Nor am I going to let the hag kill you and use your legacy as a bridge to devour your soul and escape.”

  The assassin stared at me.

  “You’re a madman. The world is cruel, and you’re… pathetically soft.”

  “The world isn’t kind. But I can be.”

  “Oh, tha–”

  “I don’t control the world. But I do control myself, and so I choose to be kind. Is that an ego trip? Or are you just weak?”

  She flinched.

  “It’s easy to kill. Anything can kill. A batch of bad milk can kill. It’s easy to be cruel. Cold. Spite. Hate. Those are easy emotions. I should hate you, and you know? Even though I don’t want you dead, there is a part of me that wants to see you hurt. That wants to see you feel the fear I did, that someone is going to come after the people you care about, if you have any, that someone is going to come after your life.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  I held up my hand.

  “But I won’t, because I’m not a coward. It takes work to be kind. It takes work to look in the eye of someone who came for my family and tell her that she needs help. To sit across from someone who tried to kill me and tell her that I pity her. It takes… So much work.”

  My voice warbled some on the last bit, and I felt tears sting my voice.

  “I’m not going to try and tell you that defending your life is wrong, but you should know I wasn’t going to kill you, because if I wanted to do that, I would have put my first Mantle Dragonfyre between your eyes, and your head would have gone the same way as your hammer. I wouldn’t have stopped my blademoss when I unleashed my plant arsenal against you, and you would have been cut to ribbons before you could take a healing potion.

  I looked at her, and I felt my eyes blaze with rainbow light. The winds of fortune spooles out of me and whipped through the room, kicking up first and dust in a way that I’d never experienced before, physically moving around the room.

  “I am going to stop you from killing again, but I am not going to kill you. You are going to go to a psychiatric hospital, and probably prison, but you will get the help you need. And you will give it your every effort, or the Primes themselves won’t be able to stop me from keeping you bound in mycelium day and night, even if it takes a century, until you accept that life has value. Both others and your own.”

  “I understand,” the assassin said quietly.

  A second wind rose in the room, joining into the swirling of the first wind. I’d touched on this wind before, a few times.

  When I’d rejected killing and first touched on the nascent truth of mercy, which I later evolved into benevolence.

  Then I’d heard it again, a snatch of laughter on it, when I’d nearly broken my spirit apart to bond to the full power of the beastmark.

  The winds ran across the room for a long moment, before finally fading back into my spirit, and when they did, I noticed that the winds of resolve didn’t leave. They remained, gently rushing around my spirit, just like the winds of fortune had been before.

  And I thought I understood a little more of resolve. Some parts were obvious – when you pushed yourself to your breaking point and dug deep, you could draw out that little bit of extra power.

  But there was more than that.

  Resolve wasn’t just taking the path that was the darkest, grittiest, most aggressive and power-filled way.

  It was about enforcing your will onto the world. That could be done for bad, yes, but connections could also be used to manipulate and control people.

  Making the world bow to your whims could also be done for good.

  It can be looking at a world of violence and hate, meeting it head on, and refusing to allow that to win. To refuse to let yourself slip and fall, and to do everything within your power to live. To keep living. To keep spreading kindness and passion and hope, because those were ideals worth spreading.

  Resolve was about sticking to yourself, and doing what you want.

  Both of the winds in my spirit curled around lazily, and I dismissed thoughts of power and deep mana and other such things from my mind.

  “By the way, before I go,” I said. “Are you… Okay? Going to live and now fall over and have a heart attack or something, I mean. Your mana feels… weird.”

  “It’s a natural treasure, lightning-vines,” she said, seemingly relieved to have changed the subject. “It can produce endless mana to draw on, but the more mana you draw out of it, the faster it starts to grow in your spirit, and it keeps growing. If it encounters a spell, it will grow on it and choke it out, like kudzu. At the end there, I drew on so much power that it took… Everything. And it still wasn’t enough. If you used Burn Future to channel so much power at once, I hope it was worth it.”

  She let out a dry, humorless laugh.

  “I don’t even have ungated mana anymore. My entire garden is nothing but a solid block of kudzu that’s eaten everything, even my full-gate spell. Once I can kill some life and tempest elementals, I can replace my gardens with theirs, and then set about rebuilding my power.”

  I raised an eyebrow. She could do that? That was a pretty absurd legacy.

  “Well, you’re under citizen’s arrest for right now,” I told her. “Here.”

  I thrust a couple of pillows and blankets out at her, calling them from the house.

  “May as well be comfortable. I’ll let you out when we’re at a lightwatch station.”

  I sighed and stepped back into reality, ready to do what I could to help put out the fires. Compared to the water magic that the naiads held, and Dusk’s channeling of that same power in tandem with her dominion and lake’s worth of water, I didn’t think I could do much, but ma–

  “Your arm!” Kene shouted, the moment I appeared, cutting off my train of thought.

  I glanced down and winced. With the pain-blocking spell and Starfish Regeneration running together, I’d somehow forgotten about it.

  “What did you do?” Kene asked as they rushed over, green light spiraling out of their hands and sinking into my arm, joining my own power.

  The difference between a simple regeneration spell and a true healer was quickly made apparent within my lifesense. While Starfish Regeneration was a little more complex and capable than the standard spell, it was still ultimately a regenerative ability.

  Regeneration was wonderful, but it could only really speed up the body’s own natural recovery rate. Kene’s healing spells sunk into my arm and started reconstructing it entirely. Muscles that were no longer connected shifted and connected to one another. New skin was forged from life mana and layered atop the dead skin.

  Interestingly, this compounded especially well with the starfish spell. Since it broke down useless bits for more power, it was able to dissolve and destroy the dead skin, then send that to help speed up the integration with the rest of my body. Kene noticed it as well, giving a nod of approval.

  “Alright, this is… not great. I need to get you in, and we can do some more serious control.”

  I tilted my head and opened a portal to the alchemy room. Kene entered and I took a seat in the chair. They puttered about, putting burn creams on my arm, making me drink various solutions that were more specialized than general healing potions, and waving their hands about in the air. I felt lines of life mana beginning to form in the air, then expand outward, connecting to life all around us.

  “I don’t have the ability, resources, or build type to be a traditional doctor,” Kene explained.

  “Build type?”

  “Most doctors keep their mana-gardens completely empty, and regularly purge it of any buildup,” Kene explained. “They need every drop of mana they can, so they cycle through hundreds of incredibly specific spells, built to fix specific things. I don’t have the training to know all of those spells and every edge case they run into, nor can I totally dedicate my power to that style or take specific treasures to assist in it. So I’m going an older way. I’m using healing rituals. Most ritual magic is too large and complex to manage until third gate, but I’ve started working on a few.”

  Even with all of Kene’s ability, and the use of a ritual to channel far more complex instructions on healing the body, with far more power, my arm was still in pretty bad shape. It was covered in long, thin, branching scars from the lightning. Kene wasn’t sure when or if they’d fade or go away, with my full-gate spells making it hard to make definitive statements about such things.

  The muscles were severely damaged, and would need time and regular treatments to recover from, but the damage had been mostly contained to that one arm.

  Which left me in a sling. Again.

  At least this time, I’d be able to fight if I needed to. I just had to avoid the use of that one arm.

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