My first Client as an Astral was female. She was 22 years of age. Her slender figure was slightly shorter than the average height for the female humanoids of Clay, roughly 5’2’’ to 5’1’’. The client had mousy, light-brown, hair that was worn long and loose, with bangs that obscured a portion of her face.

Her skin was a pale shade of brown due to a mixture of the lack of sunlight for the part of Clay’s version of Tesson’s Rott that she hailed from, and genes that also resulted in her ears having faint points, and her body had an unusual sensitivity to the phases of the moon. (Rott, by the way, was one of the five continents present in pretty much all versions of Tesson, though placement, size, and wholeness tended to vary. )

The client’s name was Charlotte Langdon, called Charlie by her friends, family, and close acquaintances. She was the last living blood descendant of Tucker Bright, one of the cleverest men to have ever been born within this particular universe. She was the one I was tasked with protecting for the next 20 to 50 years.

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Charlotte woke up after a rough night in the inn’s worst room. Part of it was the unfamiliar bed, a lot of it was the literal bed bugs crawling over the hay-stuffed mattress. She just left home last night. Her adoptive family the Shorts were decent enough people. Victoria Short was a distant cousin to Charlotte’s mother Erika, who looked much like her daughter with slightly more pronounced elvish features.

Charlotte’s father was a county-knight who died during some military skirmish between the kingdom and one of its many rivals. Then when her mother Ericka died of the blood-fever shortly afterward, the Shorts took her in. Not quite raising the girl as their own but at the least seeing to her basic necessities until both sides had reached the end of their ability to tolerate it.

That wasn’t to say that the Shorts had been abusive or cruel. On the contrary, they’d done a lot for Charlotte as she was growing up. It was simply the case that life in the continent of Rott was hard, and there wasn’t a lot of space for tenderness and feelings. Thus the girl grew up in a cold farmstead, raised by strangers who really didn’t know what to make of her. Especially, with it slowly becoming clear that she wasn’t entirely human. A thing that was somewhat taboo in that part of Rott.

Thus as soon as she was old enough, and had made the necessary preparations, Charlotte decided that it was best for her to head off to find her own fortunes. After all, the Shorts had seven other, actual, children of their own to worry about. Five that Victoria Short had born with her husband, Lincoln. Plus, two other kids that Lincoln Short had unexpectedly found himself saddled with, when a lady from town that he’d apparently been having an on and off thing with, died, and her two young children needed to be taken in by…somebody. With Lincoln their father being the most likely candidate.

Charlotte didn’t really have many prospects. Her education as a child from a well-off family would have given her an edge, but that had been cut short when her mother died. So, now her education was barely above the standard for the town that she was living in. In terms of skills, all she really knew was horses and fighting, and a little outdoor know-how, thanks to life on the Shorts’ horse-breeding farm, and the fighting arts she “thought” were passed down to her by her mother, from her father.

Alas, for the most part, the armies of Clay generally didn’t consider women for roles outside of nurse, washerwoman, or “camp-wife”, so Charlotte couldn’t really enlist as she would have if she were a young man. So, she decided to become an adventurer instead. Today was the second day of Charlotte’s independence. After roughly two years of dithering and waffling, Charlotte finally headed out when her Aunt Victoria started talking about maybe saddling her with a marriage to the Miller’s Son, or Old Hugo the Mayor’s secretary.

After washing her face with gelid water from the well behind the inn, Charlotte quickly dressed. Getting her clothes on was made even quicker, since she hadn’t felt comfortable enough in the room to take off much. Pulling her breeches up over her wool tights, and pulling on her boots. Then she left the inn after paying for her stay. Charlotte retrieved her horse “Buckett” from the public stables near the inn. Buckett was a tall, all-black, shire horse. A breed technically better suited for draft work, though it was probably best you didn’t say that within earshot of Buckett.

Back at the Short family’s homestead, the tall black mare had the temper of a stallion with its blood up, and had been something of a nightmare for anyone ‘but’ Charlotte to deal with. Which is why the family gifted Buckett to her when she announced that she’d be heading off. The near’s temper was so fierce that even trying to cull the horse to sell to the local butcher for meat would have been a dangerous chore. So, they’d figured they might as well, give the horse to the one person it seemed to tolerate.

Buckett was one of the measures that ‘I’ had set in place for the girl’s sake. The horse had originally been an ordinary horse, but I’d used my abilities, my tech, and a very small, very diluted, amount of my fractal blood, to quietly make some adjustments and changes. Modifying the horse while she was still going through her adolescence, to turn the horse into a suitable helper. I tried to make the horse far stronger, faster, and smarter that any other equine being on this planet. A small assortment of powers had been tossed in to aid the horse in fulfilling its core directive.

The horse could now be considered a spiritual beast, or magical beast, with the sapience often manifested by such creatures. After Buckett came to her full maturity she was indoctrinated with certain protocols and directives, the full gist of which being that she was meant to be Charlotte’s horse and protector. No one else's.

This is why, no one else on the Short’s farm could handle her, but no one had ever been seriously hurt by the horse, despite her apparent wildness. Had the Shorts not given her to Charlotte, Buckett had been instructed to escape the Short’s custody and reunite with Charlotte a certain amount of time later, when trying to return the horse would no longer be feasible.

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I flew high above the Client, having taken a form akin to that of a bird. I was flying high enough that most who looked up, and somehow caught sight of me despite the numerous stealth spells I’d activated, would mistake me for an ordinary raven. However, in truth, the form was fairly large.

I needed to be large enough to dissuade the numerous avian demon-beasts and airborne monsters that were present in Clay’s skies. My aura could do some of the heavy-lifting, but some of the beasts were, unfortunately, lacking in IQ enough that you needed something extra to keep them away. My current form was roughly the size of a juvenile dragon, a moderately compact private jet, or a particularly large member of the griffin and hippogriff species.

Charlotte rode Buckett down below me. The woman and horse traveled at an easy canter. I swept my senses over the area, and the portion of my Red-Cauldron that was present in Clay spoke up, feeding my mind with data captured from around the planet and in the countless galaxies beyond. Between my natural senses, and the red-cauldron perception of Clay extended to the outer-edges of the universe and into the nearest neighboring universes. Thus I was able to confirm that there were no cosmic threats approaching the client.

Shifting my focus to more mundane threats I spotted a few wild dogs that were prowling the road ahead, but that was fine.I was here to protect the client, not stifle her, and I’d watched her train for the last five years. Her skills had reached a level that made me confident that she could easily handle a few minor demon-beasts. Seeing no other immediate threats besides a dip in the road that Buckett and Charlie would easily be able to navigate, I moved my gaze forwards.

Looking far enough down the road, I noticed a group of ne’er-do-wells that were waiting around a boulder that they’d pushed into the road. Troublesomely enough, the bandits were all just a little higher level, and higher in numbers, than would be safe for Charlie to handle. I read their data, I sifted through their memories, and the memories the world had of them. I communed with the few spirits of the dead that were gathered near them. Then I made up my mind to kill them all.

These weren’t desperate farmers just trying to make ends meet. These weren’t revolutionaries eking out a living while fighting an oppressor. The men I’d stumbled upon were vermin. Criminals of the worst sort. With no real justification for their actions, no sign of any bottom line, or principle, in the way they operated. They were just murderers, rapists, and thieves. No more, no less. They were people who took, simply because they could and because it was easier than creating something, or working honestly.

Creatures like them needed no special consideration and could simply be removed. I started with the ones in the road using a discrete form of precision-pyrokinesis that reduced the five men, their clothing, and equipment, into nice clean hydrogen gas. Breaking down the bonds between their atoms, and the electron bonds within those atoms in a fission reaction that grounded a portion of the resulting energy into hiding heat and light that would have normally been released, and then fed me the excess that remained afterward.

Having read the men’s data, I was able to find their cohorts, a group of thirty or so, who were just as wretched as they were. I could have dealt with the rest of their gang by alchemically creating and dropping a simple orbital-javelin, but that would have been too flashy. Drawing unwanted attention from the mortal and immortal native powers.

Plus, they had captives, who I didn’t necessarily care about, but I still would have been unhappy about killing. I considered it a waste of resources to use precision-pyrokinesis on the group. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford it, but the inefficiency irked me greatly. This need to do things in a cost-effective manner, was something that had been ground into me over years of studying beneath the various tutors my original mother had prepared for me.

I eventually made up my mind, and found a simpler way to handle the group. I healed and pacified the innocents. Putting the bandit’s captives to sleep and then attacking all the remaining sapients with a mental attack. First, all thirty bandits suddenly fell unconscious. A third of the group never woke up again, their minds immediately shattering despite my intentions to the contrary. The remaining twenty bandits slowly woke up, and then they began to frenzy and attack one another.

The mental attack hit like a nuke. Creating even more devastating waves and eddies after a dramatic initial impact. Exponential increases in paranoia and aggression, and steep decreases in inhibition, mood-regulation, and critical thinking, were paired with a powerful, partially-hallucinatory, psychic-suggestion to attack all the “marked” individuals present within the bandits’ camp.

After ten minutes or so, the matter was finished, and the gang terminated. Just to be sure, I’d bundled a spell of enfeeblement into the marking spell, to ensure that there were no survivors. Any who’d managed to somehow escape the scene of the massacre would quickly succumb to their magically-exacerbated injuries. With the gang terminated, and all imminent threats to the client dealt with, I returned my attention to Charlie.

She stood in the road with her weapon in hand. To the average eye, her weapon looked like a simple spear, albeit one made of fairly high-grade materials, and made with a high level of skill. The spear was another one of my gifts to the client. This was a weapon I’d arranged for her to find, once it was clear that she was going down the path of an adventurer. The weapon was bound to her, and would adapt itself for her exclusive use.

She swung the spear now, and its length grew and shrank to reach her targets. Spitting a leaping wild-dog from maw to end, and then flinging its body into the fleeing back of one of the hound’s packmates. Then once she was down the spear shortened itself again and then vanished into thin air. I was pleased to see that the enchantments and treatments I’d given the spear to assure its adaptability, and lethality, seemed to be working. Only time would tell, if the efforts I’d made to make the spear durable, would work as planned.