Chapter 151: Planning

"So, we will kill the mighty Emperor Scharlott?" I asked.

I said it quietly, in the voice you use to ask someone to pass the salt. It was a strange thing to say out loud. We were four people sitting on a flat rock in the grey light, and I had just proposed killing the ruler of a mountain.

Khan smirked.

It was not a kind smirk. It was the one he wore before a fight, thin and tight, with all the anger from the gate packed down underneath it. It meant he had made up his mind.

"Of course."

"Got it."

That was all. No speeches, no vote. Eva only tightened her grip on her sword. Petra let out a slow breath beside me, and I felt her shoulder settle against mine.

It was easy to say. It was not easy to do.

A ruler who eats his people has to be strong, and a ruler who has been eating his people for years has had a long time to get stronger. I turned the thought over once and put it away. We were G-Agents. We had walked into worse, and we had walked out.

"Do we need a plan?" I asked.

I knew the answer. I just wanted someone to say it aloud, so I could stop hearing it in my head.

"Do you have a summon?" Khan asked.

"Yes. I have two, actually."

It was not a boast. It was a fact, like my height. But I saw Eva’s eyebrow twitch, and I understood that two was not a small number.

"What can they do? Attack, Defense, Heal, Support?" Khan asked in a curious voice.

I sat there for a moment and went through them in my head, the way I would go through a list before a mission. I did it slowly. A summon is not a tool you pick up and put down. You live next to it. You learn its habits. It was always worth thinking before I answered.

The first one was a two-headed dog.

It stood at least twenty feet tall, with a thick grey coat and two heavy heads that never quite agreed on a direction.

I liked to call it Ferebrute.

It had brute strength and nothing else. No fire, no shadow, no trick hidden in its throat. If you needed something broken, it broke it. If you needed something subtle, you looked elsewhere. But brute strength was good.

In a fight, brute strength was very good. It was a Beast Fiend.

The second was a fox.

It had four tails, and it was not longer than my arm. When I called it, it usually sat on my shoulder and cleaned its paws, as if the whole battlefield was beneath its notice.

I liked to call it Sphink.

It could produce Tears, clear and warm, that healed injuries. And that was not even the best part. It could also gather a small ball made entirely of unorthodoxity, the raw stuff of the Realm itself, and throw it so that it blasted an area of ten meters. It was a Devil Horror.

I had a whole list of other things to say about those two, small stories and bad habits. But Khan had asked a short question, and I gave a short answer.

"One of mine can be considered in the attack category and the other one can be considered in the healing and supporting category."

Khan nodded slowly. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man checking a number against another number.

"I only have one. And you know about it," Petra said.

I did. The crab was still fresh.

She had not even had it for an hour, and she was already holding herself like someone who had walked a long way with a heavy pack. I looked at her. She noticed.

Eva said, "I only have one too, but it is a Devil Fiend. It can be used as defence."

She said it as flat as ever.

Khan said, "I have one as well. It is a Beast Monarch. You have seen it already."

I had. The bull the size of a house, with the slate hide and the horns like scythes. It had smashed a staircase to splinters without slowing down. It had given us two boats.

"It is for attack."

So that was our whole group. One attacker and one defender from the other two, plus my brute and my healer, plus the crab, which nobody had tested yet. Five summons across four people. It was a solid hand. It was also, I thought, the kind of hand that looks great right up until it meets something that has never lost.

I should explain why I had two and they had one.

It came down to two things: luck and talent.

The luck was simple. Summons are made from the leftovers of the dead, and the dead do not leave leftovers often. I had been in the right place twice, and the others had been in the right place once. That was all.

The talent was harder to say out loud. I had an A-Rank talent. The others had C and B. I never brought it up and none of them ever held it against me, but we all knew it was there, like a quiet wall in the middle of the room.

And talent mattered because of the second problem.

Keeping a summon required a lot of Spiritual Power.

Every one you carried was a weight on your Core, humming quietly, taking its share every hour of every day.

A person with a lesser talent could hold one without strain. Two, and the strain started to show. I could hold two and still stand upright. That was the difference.

I pushed that thought aside, because Khan was talking again.

"So let me clarify on one thing," he said. "Some of the people there are going to be somewhat loyal to this Scharlott. So there is going to be collateral damage."

He said the word the way you pick up a hot coal, quickly and without looking at it.

"And he looks like he is at least a Superior Awakened. And it’s not like we have any other choice. So we can squeeze out information from him about a portal that can take us back to earth and about the Abyss. Because I am sure it exists somewhere here."

That last sentence landed hard. The portal. The Abyss. The things we had come into the Realm to find. Khan was not just talking about killing a monster. He was talking about the way home with benefits.

I did not know yet that I should have been afraid of that sentence. I only knew that something small and cold turned over in my stomach, and then lay still.

We nodded.

All of us, one after another. Petra first, then Eva. I was last. There was no ceremony. It was the kind of agreement you make with your whole body, and it only takes a second.

"Well, what is there to wait for? Let’s go!" Khan said.

He stood up. The rest of us stood with him.