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Chapter 53 - The play is on

In the woods, Merlin looked at the two sisters. The oldest one had features similar to Camille’s, however the youngest of the two was useless to him. He took out a dagger to get rid of her on the spot, but he found himself trembling, having second thoughts and unable to kill her in cold blood.

*What the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I do it?* thought Merlin, frustrated.

[*Good. You had scared me for a second there!*] said Lokiseth.

*Master! What do you mean, master?* asked Merlin.

[*Your plan is good on paper, but to kill innocent people in cold blood… you don’t have it in you!*] answered Lokiseth.

*Which means I’m weak! I made the plan, but I lack the strength to carry it out!* said Merlin.

[*That means that despite the strength you have acquired, you still retain your humanity. You have no hesitation whatsoever when killing an enemy, but you can’t kill innocents. That’s not a weakness, Merlin, that’s a virtue!*] corrected him Lokiseth.

*But it also means I won’t be able to carry out the plan!* objected Merlin.

Merlin was at a loss of what to do. He realized Lokiseth was right: morally, it was a good thing he was unable to sacrifice innocents in order to achieve his goals, but it was impractical and it hindered his plans.

[*Merlin, that you are an upright moral character is a good thing on its own, but as a warrior, and given the role you will have to play in the war against the ancient devils and the hexad, you can’t afford to be soft!*] warned Lokiseth.

Then, he gave Merlin a difficult order, [*Kill her mortal vessel now!*]

*No! She has suffered enough already!* retorted Merlin.

[*Don’t worry, as long as her soul hasn’t been tainted with malice, I’ll pull it into my pseudo-realm, and the same goes for the other two. So don’t hesitate and do it! You are losing too much time here!*] replied Lokiseth, impatiently.

*I currently don’t have any soul stone in my possession! Don’t you need one to do that?* asked Merlin in a doubtful tone.

[*A soul stone would damage their souls like it did to Jasmine’s. Back then, the soul stone was necessary because I still hadn’t created my pseudo-realm. However, now that I have it, I can pull in departed souls whenever I need to, as long as they haven’t been tainted!*] declared Lokiseth.

Lokiseth’s main objective in telling Merlin that information was to give him some peace of mind, as well as to have him carry out the plan. He was afraid that if Merlin didn’t learn to make some sacrifices in favor of the greater picture earlier on, when the time came that he had to make them in the war against the hexad and their minions, Merlin might discard the plan with the highest odds of success due to his inability to sacrifice a few for the sake of the majority.

He didn’t lie to Merlin, though, it was true that he now had the ability to pull any recently departed soul into his pseudo-realm, as long as it hadn’t been tainted with malice and it was within a certain range.

Moreover, pulling the souls of those three poor slaves would have an additional benefit for them, because Lokiseth might even be able to reset their minds to the way they were before being broken due to the traumatic events they had gone through.

It was impossible to cure their minds inside their mortal vessels, which were the physical embodiment of those traumas, but in their soul form, freed from their mortal carcasses and the evidence of the events that broke them, Lokiseth believed it was possible for them to make a full recovery… over time.

Merlin finally took the life of the youngest female slave, with two streams of tears on his face. He tried to do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. As soon as her soul left the body, Lokiseth collected it into his pseudo-realm, and froze it in space and time, waiting for the moment he had collected the souls of the other two slaves.

Lokiseth planned on working simultaneously on the recovery of the minds of the three, that way, he had two other souls as reference, in case an anomaly happened to one of them during the recovery process.

Had the minds of the three slaves been broken by a curse or mind magic, Lokiseth would only need to snap his fingers and they would have been cured. Unfortunately, their minds had been broken due to the traumatic events their fellow humans had made them go through, therefore, their recovery process would be long, and full of restrictions, like the need of losing their physical body before starting the process.

After storing the body in his ring, Merlin closed the distance with the two remaining slaves and activated the teleportation orb. Back in Daferma, Merlin had to rack his brain to find a way to get the slaves into the city without the guards seeing them.

He had completely forgotten about that problem until that moment, and he couldn’t store the slaves inside his ring because they were alive, so he had no choice but to figure out by himself a way to get them inside the city.

As if the heavens themselves were providing their help to Merlin, a suspicious looking mercenary group tried to enter the city without presenting their identification, and caused a ruckus, temporarily leaving the gates unguarded when all the guards went to stop the mercenaries.

Merlin didn’t miss that chance and entered the city with the two slaves. However, they didn’t go unnoticed, one of the guards happened to see them going into the city, and when he informed his superior about that, he gave the order of finding the three intruders to all the guards in the city.

On his way to the viscount’s manor, Merlin stopped at the inn and brought the spy with him. He knew that doing things in a hurry and without a solid plan, would inevitably lead to sloppiness, but he barely had an hour before the viscount came looking for him at dawn, so he had to move fast on the things he needed done before then.

Pondering for a second which one of the siblings should go first, he decided on Camille’s brother, after all, his room was next to Camille’s, so it didn’t actually make that much of a difference.

*The security here is a real joke! Maybe I should give the viscount some tips on how to improve it, like having guards make rounds inside the hallways of the manor… but I’ll do so later, now I have other things to do!* thought Merlin.

The lack of difficulty when infiltrating the manor along with two slaves and the captured spy, had shocked him. He had mentally prepared himself to take some detours, or give plausible excuses if he ever got caught, but it turned out that none of them were necessary in the end. Merlin didn’t know whether to be happy or sad about it.

They silently entered the room, and Merlin threw sleeping powder to Camille’s brother’s face. Making sure he would be unconscious for a good while, Merlin ordered the male slave to undress Camille’s brother, take his clothes and wear them. Then, the male slave switched places in the bed with Camille’s brother, and Merlin ordered the spy to kill him.

Spy: “No, I won’t do your bidding!”

Merlin: “You mean that you won’t do it unless the pay is enough, isn’t that correct?”

Spy: “Wh-that… I don’t know what you are talking about!”

Merlin: “Oh, really? Well, let’s make things shiny clear: You are going to die tonight, independently of whether you do as I say or not. You have innocent blood in your hands, so don’t expect me to show any mercy. However, although your death has already been decided, that doesn’t have to be the case with your friends and family…”

Spy: “My friends and family? Hahaha, good luck with that! You don’t even know my name!”

Merlin: “I don’t need your name. I’m aware that you are a former adventurer, I just need to collect your head and bring it back to the Adventurers Guild. How much time do you think I’ll need to collect every bit of information the guild has about you?”

Hearing Merlin’s words the spy’s face visibly paled. He had been shunned by his family and most of his friends after being expulsed from the Adventurers Guild, but he didn’t blame them for having done so, he was a disgrace as a man, his actions had earned their distrust, and he was aware of it.

However, he didn’t want them to bear the consequences of his own selfish actions. He took the sword Merlin was offering to him, and cleaved with it at the head of the male slave on the bed. Little did he know that Merlin’s earlier words were just a bluff and he would have never taken the lives of innocent people not involved in the incident.

Nevertheless, Merlin’s bluff worked and he took the male slave’s life. After Lokiseth took the male slave’s soul into his pseudo-realm, Merlin took Camille’s unconscious brother with him, and the four of them went into her room.

Although Merlin used the sleeping powder on Camille, and the female slave switched places with her, he didn’t order the spy to kill her right away. Instead, Merlin used a paralyzing poison on the spy, and took the unconscious siblings with him to bring them back to his room in the inn. They couldn’t be seen around the manor anymore or it would crumb the play.

There wasn’t any incident in the trip to the inn, however, when he was on his way back to the viscount’s manor, he discovered that most of the guards in the city were looking for three intruders. Merlin disguised himself and tried to avoid the guards, but to no avail, less than two minutes later a patrol had caught sight of him and called out to him.

Needless to say, Merlin run away like a bat out of hell the second he heard the guards call out to him. Noticing that he was unable to shake them off by normal means, after several turns, he took out the corpse of the female slave who died in the woods outside the commercial town of Katra, and left it on the ground, next to the door of a house.

Merlin then used his “ki strengthening technique” on his legs, and jumped on the roof of the nearest house. He had originally planned to bury the body of the dead female slave together with her sister’s, but he unexpectedly had to use it in such a fashion and change his plans.

Luckily for him, he had stored rhe body in his ring intead of burying it in the woods near Katra, he would have currently been in big trouble if he had done so. While he was having those thoughts, the guards, misled by the body, had stopped trying to find him, and were convinced he was in that house.

Guard J: “You! Go back to the guard post and bring reinforcements, these houses only have one door, so he is trapped inside now! Go, hurry!”

Smiling inwardly when he heard the words of the guard, Merlin started crawling his way up on the roof and he then jumped to the roof of a different house. Repeating the process several times, Merlin steadily made his way away from the location at which the guards were quickly gathering.

When he was at a safe distance, and several houses blocked the line of sight of the guards, keeping them from seeing his actions, he finally stood up on a roof and looked in the direction of the viscount’s manor. Running and jumping around on the roofs like a parkour expert, Merlin arrived to the manor and went back to Camille’s room.

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