Chapter 23: The One Standing Beside Him

Chapter 23: Chapter 23: The One Standing Beside Him

Allan trudged back to Oakwood Manor. The candles in the main hall had almost burned out. He flung open the doors expecting silence as usual late at night.

Instead, he got chaos.

Servants scurried here and there, putting away crates, while two men, exhausted, leaned under the weight of bound ledgers, bowed in respect, and then hastened off in another direction as if their lives depended on it.

Allan blinked. Then his eyes locked on the long table in the center of the hall.

It looked like a war room had exploded.

Maps covered almost the entire floor. Colored strings crisscrossed a model of several villages, roads, warehouses, farms, and the houses of merchants. Supplies, the itineraries of the caravans, the rosters of the guards, and the contracts all were carefully listed and stacked up in rows.

He frowned hard.

"This isn’t mine."

The map he picked up showed the Muddy Road sectioned and marked in black for safe stops along the way. The other papers seemed to be a rating of the merchants he worked with: Reliable. Uncertain. Too expensive. Potential partner. A ranking of sorts.

The last pile of papers were labeled with locations of emergency supplies of food and other necessities.

"What the hell is all this?"

The servant standing closest to Allan jumped to attention like he had been given a rude shock. "Lady Seris," he said to Allan, "ordered all of this to be done, my lord."

Allan lowered the paper slowly. "Seris?"

The servant nodded frantically. "Yes, my lord."

Allan’s eyes returned to the table. He had been running to lock down the landholders, the transporters, the blacksmiths, the food suppliers, and the adventurers.

He had been running for what seemed like days to secure the merchants to build this network, and he had never even stopped to think about how he was going to maintain it.

Seris had noticed.

"Where is she?"

"Outside the eastern warehouse."

Allan left the papers where they were and strode out.

He found her standing outside the eastern warehouse, talking to three men in hired swordsman’s gear. They looked like the sort of rough, no-nonsense men who would follow Lady Seris anywhere, hanging on her every word as though she were Allan.

They wore simple traveling clothes with no elegance to speak of. The sword at her hip was serviceable, not showy, but then Lady Seris didn’t need to make an impression to get what she wanted.

Her eyes met his. She flicked her fingers. The three guards scattered off, still talking among themselves.

"Check the horses again before dawn. Anything limping gets replaced. No excuses."

The guards nodded and scrambled off.

Allan stopped a few steps away, arms crossed. "You’ve been busy."

Seris folded her arms. "Someone had to be. Don’t want to let your hard work crumble."

No heat was added to that declaration.

He glanced at the wagons. "How long?"

"Three days."

"Three days?"

"Started the moment you got back from the guild." She walked to the nearest wagon and yanked the rear fastening. It held. She yanked it again for good measure.

"You were off charming western landholders, paving the Muddy Road, wrangling merchants, dealing with Emberwind, then staring at ledgers until the sun came up. You were building so fast nobody had time to ask the ugly question: what happens when a piece of it snaps?"

She yanked the fastening again. It still held.

"Now I know."

Allan followed. "Know what?"

"Every soft spot." She swung the wagon door open, and the sudden light of the warehouse spilled into the dark corridor behind her. In the dim light, crates of jugs of potions and tins of preserved food seemed to grow out of the shadows of the wagon.

"One caravan disappears and a merchant loses some money, you lose some time. Three caravans disappear and all the contracts start to bleed.

The Muddy Road gets hot and the western landholders start to look for someone else to do business with. Someone hears that Oakwood can’t protect its partners and all the half-committed merchants start to bolt before their first wagon even departs."

Allan just stared.

Seris shut the door to the wagon with a soft click. "So I split the routes, set up emergency caches of goods. I talked to a bunch of adventurers you had contracted to babysit the smaller runs of goods and made sure that no one single merchant knows enough about the whole web to set it all on fire."

His eyes returned to the maps still laid out in the warehouse doorway. "All in three days," he said.

"Well, I had help."

"From who?"

"People who got tired of watching you work yourself into an early grave, Master."

Allan almost smiled.

Then his expression changed once again.

Whatever that was, it wasn’t anger. It wasn’t even admiration. It was almost resolution.

"That’s not the only reason I did it."

Allan stayed quiet.

For a moment, Seris looked down at her hands. Then she continued. "I don’t want to spend the rest of my life standing behind you, collecting stronger, richer, more talented, more important people like trading cards."

Her fingers tightened on the wagon’s edge.

"Bela and her very unique alchemy. Amelia and her complex web of family members and powerful connections. Diva, the actual A-rank walking disaster. And then there’s Kael, the big event in a long string of legends that you seem to find from time to time.

Every single one of them draws you in deeper until you are simply too busy to think about anything but the next adventure, the next big score."

She finally met his eyes again.

"Somehow I managed to make myself useful before you would have forgotten that I am here."

Those words seemed to be hanging between them like a drawn sword.

Allan’s expression shifted as he realized he had been preparing for a fight, for Seris to stand before him and shout out her accusations. Instead, he was left to stare at the maps spread before him. Seris stood tall behind him, her quiet days spent turning her into the backbone of his operation.

He looked at the maps. Then at her.

"You weren’t going to tell me."

"No, I was going to show you."

"You know you could have told me, right?"

"Again, Master, I know you. You listen with your eyes better than your ears."

Allan stared at her for several long seconds. Then the System flickered into existence.

Investment Opportunity Detected.

His face went still.

A translucent window unfolded.

Target: Seris

Current Contribution: Operational Management, Security Coordination, Strategic Planning

Hidden Potential: ???

Development Status: Suppressed

Potential Return: Uncalculable

Allan’s breathing slowed.

He had never seen that before. She should have been just another villainess. That’s why he had connected with her, but it seemed that route was no more.

Seris narrowed her eyes. "What?"

"Hmm, nothing."

The System kept going.

Investment Network Evaluation Required.

He closed the window quickly before she could see it.

For what felt like an eternity, Allan had been searching for hidden potential in people he recognized from his time in the game world. And right there in front of him, hiding in plain sight, was Seris.

Seris wasn’t just loyal.

She had been studying. Watching. Adapting.

Maybe potential isn’t linked to some mythical bloodline or forbidden class, and maybe all the time he had spent hunting for hidden potential in people he remembered from the game to bring to the Investment Network to make money off of, he had almost missed the one who had been standing right beside him from day one.

He looked at her, truly looked at her.

"You did well," Allan said.

Seris blinked in surprise at such simple words. Such simple words, and just his eyes on her, with that simple gaze of attention. It eased her heart or made it beat harder, she didn’t know.

What she knew was that it was worth it. All that hard work, it was all worth it.

Allan reached for one of the route maps and held it out.

"Tomorrow," he said finally, handing her a section of the map that he had been tracing with his finger. "No. From today, you’re taking full control of the western logistics network."

Her eyes went wide.

"You mean?"

"Meaning, when you go out there today to take full control of the western logistics network, it’s going to be your baby. Make it profitable. Make it ironclad, Seris."

Seris stared at Allan as if he were handing her the keys to the kingdom.

Then slowly a genuine smile broke out over her face.

"I’ll do more than that."

"I’m sure you will."

Seris, holding the map, came closer. Then a bit closer, then even closer, before she quickly kissed his cheek and walked away just as fast.

Allan was surprised but didn’t say anything, watching her giddy away with her face completely red.

For the first time in days, something in the house had finally clicked into place.

Then a messenger skidded into the courtyard.

"My lord!"

Allan turned.

A young man ran into the courtyard, bowed low, and threw a sealed letter at Allan’s feet. It was stamped with the crest of House Arclight.

"From Lady Amelia. She requests your presence. Tonight."

Allan’s eyes narrowed. "Tonight?"

"Immediately, my lord."

From far away, Seris’s smile disappeared as if someone had just snuffed out the candles.

Allan took the letter and cracked the seal.

Only a few words waited inside.

Come alone. Do not bring the guild. Do not bring your girls.

He read it twice. Then looked at Seris.

"I’ll be back. Take care of things here."

"Master!" she called.

He raised an eyebrow. Seris came closer as she looked down at the letter. "She said come alone, my lord."

"Yes."

"And you’re still going."

"Why not?"

She let out a hard breath of air.

"Men," she whispered to herself, her smile now non-existent. "Then at least try not to die," she said.

"You know me. I’ll do my best."

"Doing something spectacularly stupid," she added.

Allan tucked the letter into his coat. "This time I’m just being invited to dinner," he said, walking away.

"That makes it worse!"

He left before she could argue further.

***

The meeting place wasn’t the Arclight estate.

Amelia had chosen an abandoned chapel on the city’s edge. Most of the roof was gone. Weeds punched up through cracks in the stone floor. Moonlight spilled through the broken ceiling and painted the old altar silver.

Allan stepped inside.

"Amelia?" he called out, not Lady Amelia, not Lady Arclight, but simply Amelia.

Silence answered.

He moved deeper. Then he saw the blood.

A pattern of thin red lines stretched across the floor of the old chapel in a wide circle around the central pedestal of the old altar. Around the edge of the circle, a row of black candles cast long thin shadows on the ground.

Allan came to his knees, watching it all.

She knows that I know, he thought, as something inside him felt cold.

In the center of the circle, a silver bowl stood on the stone floor. It contained a thick, dark liquid which looked nothing like water.

Allan froze.

His eyes fixed on the stones scattered around the perimeter of the ritual circle.

Blood stones.

Just like Kael had shown him in that document.

His hand drifted toward his weapon. A voice slid out of the darkness behind him.

"Unless you’re here to die, you should be happy to have come this far," said the voice.

He turned.

Finally, Amelia stepped into the light.

As Allan turned, he saw that the polished noble heiress from the various banquets was gone, replaced by a young woman dressed in a simple dark dress with her sleeves rolled up to her wrists. There were faint red stains on one of her sleeves.

Allan looked at the ritual circle. Then at her. Silence stretched between them for a couple of seconds. What he had feared had come true eventually.

"You’re practicing blood magic."

Amelia’s face didn’t even twitch.

"Yes."

The bluntness almost made him wish she had lied.

"You sent blood stones to Emberwind."

"I did."

"And all the ritual scrolls."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Amelia didn’t mind his rudeness. She almost welcomed it.

She walked over to the ritual circle, her normal vibrancy gone. She looked tired for the first time since he had met her. It wasn’t from lack of sleep, though.

She stopped beside the silver bowl and touched the rim.

"My brother is dying."

Allan said nothing.

"Six months ago, he was poisoned. Every single healer failed to cure him. Since then, Divine magic has slowed his descent into death while Alchemy has stalled him, but in the end, nothing can remove the poison. And three weeks ago, it got worse."

Allan watched her carefully, as he didn’t know this part of her plot. "And so you started blood magic?"

"It can transfer certain curses."

"At a price, of course. Amelia, what you are doing—"

"Everything has a price. Of course I know."

There was no arrogance in her words, just cold hard acceptance of a terrible fact. And that in itself was terrible.

He remembered the game after all: the Dark Saint and the Crimson Empress’ downfall. No one had anticipated Amelia’s fall, writing it off as just another boss fight waiting at the end of a quest chain.

But the game had never shown this part.

Villains didn’t wake up monsters.

They simply chose.

One little compromise at a time. A forbidden spell that seemed so necessary at the time, a little sacrifice here and there until one day you looked down and saw the monster you had become.

Amelia looked at him.

"I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering how far I’ve already gone."

Allan didn’t answer.

She smiled, small and sharp. "Don’t worry. Not far enough."

She pulled a small vial from her sleeve. Inside it, a single crimson stone lay at the bottom.

"The materials Emberwind received were mine. I needed someone to take the blame."

Allan’s eyes sharpened. "Then why let Kael find them?"

"I didn’t."

That one landed.

Amelia set the vial on the stone in the center of the large, dark, and ruined chapel. "Someone stole them. I don’t know who. You should have never known."

Silence filled the ruined chapel.

"Then why call me? Why show me all of this?"

"Because you’re the only person I know who understands what happened at Emberwind without immediately trying to turn it into a knife against my throat. You already knew everything, but you still withheld."

Allan almost laughed. "That’s..."

"You burned the document." Her eyes locked on his. "You didn’t have to."

He stayed quiet, not knowing how she knew.

Amelia stepped closer to Allan. "My father told me that Kael showed you the document," she said.

"How?"

"My father told me."

"Your father knows?"

"He knows enough to be worried. Why do you think he was so eager to join hands with you and push Emberwind into the corner?"

Her eyes flicked to the ritual circle being completed in the center of the room and then returned to his.

"To push this matter to the grave," Allan said. "Are you going to kill Emberwind so that the name of the Arclight house would be safe?"

"Don’t treat me like that!" she shouted.

That sentence hit harder than it should have. The System flared again.

Investment Opportunity Detected.

Target: Amelia von Arclight

Current Fate Deviation: 4.1%

Corruption Route Detected.

Projected Future: Crimson Empress

Potential Intervention Available.

Allan stared at the numbers.

The future wasn’t locked. He knew it because her fate had changed, Seris’s fate had changed.

It could still be fixed, but...

Amelia watched him carefully. "Allan."

He looked up. Allan stepped back for a bit as a sudden thought came to him.

Should he fix it?

In the game, they were just characters. He said things, manipulated words, gaslighted the characters to oblivion, pushing them further in their path to villainy and took advantage of it all.

But now, as he faced the same conundrum again, they were all real this time. The woman before him was utterly real.

The warmth she emanated, her gaze full of life, her worried look, her lips, which called his name.

"I didn’t know being a scoundrel was this hard," he whispered.

Allan looked at the blood circle before them. He looked at the stone, crimson and polished, on the altar before him. He looked at the woman standing between him and the stone.

He had two options: save her, help her find another safe route where she wouldn’t walk to her eventual fate.

Or

Let her proceed, like in the game. And pave his path to becoming the seventh god.

He huffed and puffed, feeling like a cigarette would be very helpful at this time.

Nope, I can’t do this. She deserves—

[Title: Scoundrel of Yggdrasil, activated]

The thoughts vanished as a small smile appeared. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

He stepped toward the ritual circle.

"Show me exactly what you’re trying to do."

Amelia’s eyes widened in surprise. "You’re not going to stop me?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

Allan looked at the crimson stone. "Because if you’re going to become a monster, I would rather you become one while I’m right there to put you down should I determine that to be necessary."

For several seconds, Amelia said nothing. Then she smiled. A genuine smile.

Not the polished noble smile she used in her everyday meetings. Something quieter and honest.

Something far more dangerous.

"Then stay close, Allan."

She reached toward the ritual circle.

"Because tonight, I’m going to show you exactly how close I already am."