***

"Please, Jason! I won't go against your wishes ever again, just please spare her life!"

Jason reined in the rampant desire to refine the last of the disciples that he’d just encountered, the big-breasted, round-nosed girl that Brud seemed so fixated on. She was currently bound to a tall tree stump by a smaller snake of scarlet energy, which wound around her body like a living rope. Only her dangling feet and the area above her shoulders were in view, showcasing her agonized expression as she panted in pain from where she was suspended.

"What, is she your girlfriend or something?"

"Yes, she is my friend! My closest friend! Please, Jason." Brud dropped to the ground and began to grovel at his feet like a starving peasant in search of a nobleman's scraps. “Please…”

An odd look fought its way into the girl's eyes, as if she were unsure how to feel about the other boy's desperate pleas.

"And why should I let her live?" A bit of venom crept into Jason's voice. "How many 'Angelicas' have you killed before, while their loved ones begged you to spare their lives?"

"T—that's different! Those were lesser peoples. It didn't matter.”

Jason walked over to Angelica and pricked her cheek with one of his fingernails, drawing a light line of blood. "Look here, you moron. See that? What colour is her blood?"

Confused, the boy said, "Red."

"And what colour was the blood of the people you've refined in the past?"

“Red.”

He walked over to Brud and grabbed him by the collar, both of them having changed into clothes worn by disciples of the sect in order to throw off their enemies. "Exactly! We all bleed the same colour, Brud. We're all human, regardless of what the twisted elders of your sect taught you."

"But they—"

"Listen. There's such a thing as good and evil, and you can program people to be one or the other as long as you control what they’re exposed to. Especially if you start when they’re young." When he was met with nothing but a blank stare, he said, "If you were taught to treasure life instead of disregard it, you think you'd still find no problems with killing people?"

"Of course. Death is part of life."

"Then why don't you want her to die? What makes you value her life over all of the people you've killed? Over all of the disciples you've killed at my order?"

"She's my friend."

"What, you think only the people from your sect can have friends? You've been brainwashed into doing whatever your superiors wanted you to, whatever they said was right. If you just believe whatever your superiors want you to without looking into it for yourself, then you might as well be bound by one of these.”

He pulled out a master-slave contract, one of the ones that Brud had possessed before he'd been enslaved in an unsuspecting reversal of his intentions to capture Jason. Using the blood from the girl's cheek along with some of his own, Jason activated the contract on the spot. Angelica’s shrill screams faded within a handful of moments. The first thing she did was glare at Brud.

"You should have let him kill me!"

"I…I couldn't."

"I told you long ago, Brud. We might have survived through the resource dungeons together, but that doesn't mean that I'll share my bed with you."

"No, that's not what I…"

As the boy fell silent, Jason ordered them both to listen to his words without interruption. "Listen. You've been mislead since birth, and taught all the wrong things so that you wouldn't know the difference even if the facts were staring you right in the face. Do you really think that 99 percent of all people are living life wrong, and that only your side knows how things should be? That only you guys are doing things right?"

Frustration seeped into Jason's voice for the first time in a long while, as it had been quite some time since he had lost control over his emotions. "There's a reason why everyone hates you guys. On this massive continent, there's a reason why you're not welcome anywhere outside your territories. Because you've been taught to think that doing bad things is okay, and that doing good things is a sign of weakness. But that's not true! It's the opposite."

"What about you?" spat Angelica, though she quickly lost her breath to the effects of the master-slave contract. Even so, her eyes trailed over the desiccated corpses of her fallen companions, withered faces twisted in torment.

"And how many people did they do the same thing to? If I slapped you and then you slapped me back, would it make sense for me to be offended by your reaction? How can you complain about being treated the same way you treat others? I've saved thousands of lives by killing them, thousands of innocent lives."

Jason dismissed the energy that bound Angelica and then ordered her and Brud into silence. Releasing enough spiritual energy to carry them all up into the sky, he told them to think about all that he'd just said, to actually try to understand why he thought the way he did rather than just dismissing his opinions because the two of them had been raised to think a certain way. If his constant run-ins with the Bloodhand Sect had taught him anything, it was that evil often manifested itself in those that simply assumed that anybody that didn't agree with them were wrong by default. Whether it was the residents of Redfox Village that had hassled him and Nolan nearly to death because of their prejudice, or the disciples that had hunted them down simply for not allowing themselves to be murdered, such had always been the case.

He kept his gaze locked straight ahead, already thinking of the next thing on his to-do list. Whether or not his unwilling companions had taken his words to heart, he had no way of knowing.

As he soared through the sky with the others in tow, his thoughts settled on the person that he was currently on the way to meet. Sersa…just how did you wind up different than the rest? They had met several times since their initial encounter, and he had gradually come to see that she was fully in control of her faculties, with a mind of her own and a will to act upon her personal beliefs.

***

"It's about time," said the tawny-haired girl, who wore an ordinary set of robes that was unique to the outer court disciples of her sect. "I was starting to think that you'd finally been killed."

Hearing the nonchalance in her voice, Jason scoffed. He'd left Brud and Angelica encamped in the forest a few kilometres away before he had rushed off to the arranged meeting place, an uninhabited glade filled with thorny shrubs and red wildflowers. He was about twenty kilometres west of the massacre that he’d just left behind, and about a kilometre farther into the forest.

"Is that relief I hear?" he joked, though he frowned when she rolled her eyes and indicated for him to have a seat on one of the wooden chairs that she'd set up beneath a pole-suspended canopy of thick, creamy fabric. He sat down with a scoff. "You must be a lot of fun at a party."

"Parties, festivals, celebrations—only the elders get to enjoy such things." She shifted her legs so that one was folded over the other. "I don't have much time, so I'll get straight to the point. Something big happened, something involving the entire sect. Apparently, Great Elder Marcus has been removed from his post, and another elder of equal station will soon come to relieve him."

"Does that mean you won't be a deacon anymore?"

If that were true, then he would lose his inside informant. With Sersa's help, he'd been able to target smaller groups of disciples while avoiding their larger war bands, which continued to ravage the countryside, though on a far lesser scale than in previous weeks.

"Most likely, yes." For all her stoicism and bravado, Sersa seemed anxious. "Whoever they put in charge will probably make it a point to come after you as soon as they arrive, to prove that they aren't as incompetent as Lord Marcus.”

"Do you have any idea who's replacing him?"

She shook her head, long hair shivering as if from a crisp breeze. For some reason, Jason's eyes lingered on the sight, taking strange note of her feminine features. "They haven't been telling me anything since Lord—since Marcus disappeared. I only know that he has been ousted from the sect following the failure of his mission."

"You don't have it easy either, huh?"

"Nothing in life is easy, least of all in mine."

"You know what happened on his mission?"

She nodded, slow and solemn. "Two great elders were killed in the west. What I know is only from the rumours that the newest wave of members have brought with them, but apparently the group had split into two, with the deceased pair going off in Marcus's company. None were heard from again, though my master's life signal is supposedly still detectable to the sect."