“Really? You don’t hate those you fight against? Or is that what you tell yourself once the heads have rolled and the corpses stopped twitching?”

Disgust filled her and bile rose into her throat. Even as he put on that exaggerated tone and tried to tug at the strings of remorse, the Emperor’s eyes stayed dead and empty. The only emotion he broadcast was this unsettling sense of amusement. Zel spat off to the side, noticing that the others had gathered near the hoard-chamber’s doorway to listen in.

“You don’t get to moralize at me,” she spat with a mocking laugh that came out on its own. “There’s nothing behind your eyes. No moral compass, no empathy. You know less than nothing of guilt or remorse. The dead drones that litter this chamber are more human than you.”

“I could say the same about you. The drones were children to a still human mother, no matter how animalistic their behavior. Looking at you, on the other hand, shows me a stained-glass mosaic made from hundreds of pieces, yet I don’t go bringing it up every other sentence, do I? You would do well to consider that the time I was thirty years old, I had surpassed the limits of my humanity thirty times over. I had ransacked every single dungeon on the continent, toppled the reign of the Three Kings, and with the spoils founded the very nation that blossomed into my empire, in the very mountains atop whose peaks my palace is built. You’ve paid an arm to destroy a liability, to clean up my trash. What makes you think you could ever so much as lay a finger on my great work?”

“So what? I’ll just reattach it, “ she scoffed. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I’ll get dismembered a hundred times and take a hundred lightning strikes, but I’ll still keep pushing back. You and yours have chosen to go after me and mine, so the only way I can ever be safe is to make sure you don’t have the means to do that. The fact that I take great personal satisfaction in spitting into a face as insufferable as yours is irrelevant.”

A furious countenance flashed across his visage, so subtle and slight that it was only noticeable thanks to the absence of other expressions to hide it. It was there one moment, then gone in a split-second. He blinked a few times, took a deep breath, and shifted in his seat before he next spoke.

“Let us stop exchanging threats and insults for a moment,” he said. “Humor an old god-king for a moment, and answer me a question. In exchange, I will answer one of your own to the best of my ability. Is that fair?”

On one hand, every fiber of her being wanted to say no just to spite him.

On the other, she was curious enough to agree to it.

“Sure,” she chuckled with a dismissive tone.

“Tell me and be truthful, as I will know if you lie: Do you hear voices telling you what to do? Or perhaps see projected boxes in your field of vision marking things in the same way the dungeon’s utility glyphs do? Maybe feel a particular drive to act maliciously towards some people but benevolently to others? In other words, is there an ephemeral other that guides you?”

“No, there are no strings on me,” Zelsys said, truthfully. “I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Those who serve you and their actions are entirely to blame for my opposition to your country and to you in particular for having made them the way they are. Know that there is nothing you can do to undermine my convictions or sway my moral compass. Now, answer me this in return: Why target Willowdale?”

There was not a single moment of hesitation, not a second of consideration or forethought before the man-god answered.

“It’s the most likely source of a second unification, even with someone like you out of the picture,” he explained. “The city was built on open resistance against aristocratic rule and its population maintains an insufferably strong cultural identity of ah… What was the phrase again?”

A voice came from out of view. His eyes flicked towards it and he gave a nod of acknowledgment, “‘Step on me and lose your leg,’ that was the one. Such sentiments are virulent when presented to a demoralized populace without propaganda to demonize those who hold them, and unfortunately the blackwall prevents large-scale propaganda operations. The Sage really got me good with that one.”

Zel opened her mouth to question why he was being so suspiciously generous in his answer. Before she could so much as make a noise he interrupted, “Before you ask, I am only telling you this because if I didn’t, your counter-propagandist friend that’s recording our conversation on a Type-17 Phonograph would tell you the same thing tinted with his own narrative.”

Her gaze instinctively turned towards the hoard-chamber’s entryway, and sure enough, Strolvath was holding a strange foldout device with a three-piece reception pan and a wax cylinder that was being carved by a needle as it spun round and round. She saw tension fill his gaze and his Hellfire Mantle flare, but he remained steadfast in his operation of the recording device.

“It doesn’t matter after all,” the Emperor broke the tense silence. “You’ve amused me more than I had expected, and that’s as good a reason as any to give you another hint. When next a blue moon rises, the thunderstruck beast-mountain roars again. Soon enough we’ll find out if that ego of yours is justified.”

The Emperor touched the middle joint of his middle finger with his thumb, pointing this strange gesture at something just under the projection’s field of view, likely his own aether wave communication machine.

“I would step back from the machine if I were you,” he said. “There are other nosy little birdies on the telephone line, so I’ve no choice but to cut it.”