(Oct 22)

According to my wife, Gin, the man who killed a dragon and saved my life… is the same person who turned my wife into The Grinch.

At such a bizarre story, William spoke up doubting my wife.

“Anthony, do you think what she says is true?”

“Honestly, I am a bit bias, but I do believe what she says. I’ve been her husband for a while now, I know she’s genuine.” I responded.

I didn’t just blindly believe my wife though, sure I was more obligated to trust her due to our relationship, but there were a couple factors that convinced me that this was the truth.

Like when I went home, it was a mess. My wife is usually neat, and it’s unusual for her to leave the house in such a state, but if she was under stress, it could be possible.

I also vaguely recall my wife writing a letter before moving out of the house which was probably sent to Gin…

These could all just be minor coincidences; however, they do make her claims sound more plausible.

Even though I believe her, I wasn’t sure if William was convinced or not.

“If you don’t believe her, we can try getting a mind reader or a telepathic user to see if she’s telling the truth or not.”

I suggested this to William because even though I do believe my wife, there is no real evidence to back it up.

“No… if we did that, then we’d need to explain the situation to them and that’d get messy. If we want to keep this a secret, we need to tell as little people as possible.”

“Oh, I see. That’s makes sense…”

Despite things being harder this way, William still rejected my idea. This just goes to show how dedicated he was to keep this a secret… it makes me feel even worse about myself for doubting him.

“I’ll trust your judgement for now Anthony. This does complicate things by a LOT though… if what she says is true… that means Gin could very likely be involved with the Kenava… or worse yet, he could be reason why you gained your dragon powers in the first place…”

“He… gave me my dragon powers?”

The chances of me gaining dragon essence were astronomically low, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say its basically impossible… and yet I managed to do it.

Up till now though, we assumed it was due to some absurd godly luck because there wasn’t any other explanation.

But now, there’s a better explanation.

“Gin turned your wife into The Grinch, what if he did the same with you? He gave you your dragon powers? He was involved on that day after all, and he saved you when you lost consciousness. He could easily have done anything to you.”

Although it seems farfetched, it sounds much more reasonable than the chances of me magically absorbing a dragon’s blood, surviving, and then gaining its powers.

“That means I didn’t get this by pure luck, it was intentional…”

“Keep in mind we still have no proof he gave you your powers, but it is the best explanation we have. We don’t have any idea what his motives are. At this point, we don’t even know if he’s a threat to us. There’s a good chance he’s related to the conflict between the Kenava and us.

If we think about it, the time frame between when the dragon attacked you Anthony, and the wyvern attack to our city, is very small. A while back, I sent troops to check out the destroyed city where you were attacked by the dragon, and we found nothing except rubble. I think this Gin fellow, must’ve taken the dragon corpse to the Kenava, allowing them to advance their research.”

“So you think Gin is working with Kenava? Then why would he give me this dragon power? That would make our kingdom stronger.”

“Hmmmm…. I don’t know… maybe he’s not working with Kenava… but a third party? If he is as strong as you say he is, then he’s capable of taking on an entire kingdom by himself, so he wouldn’t need to take a particular side. He acts as a middle ground and plays both sides, so that no matter who loses, he will always come out on top.

This is all theoretic though. There is a chance that he has nothing to do with this and everything I said was false. Regardless, Gin is a bigger threat than we assumed. I honestly think we should be more afraid of Gin then the Kenava…”

Indeed. Gin is a man capable of killing a dragon and can turn an ordinary person into an A ranked beast.

There’s no doubt that he’s extremely dangerous.

Especially since we lack information on who he is and his motives. At least with the Kenava, we are aware of their presence, but we didn’t even know about the threat Gin posed until today.

In fact, we don’t even know if Gin is his real name or if it’s an alias he created to fool us.

Man, things are started to become really complicated. I thought it was already confusing with all the politics between our kingdom and the Kenava, but nope, things just keep spiraling out of control.

I miss the simpler days… whatever, that’s the past, I should focus on the present and future.

“I don’t think there’s much we can do about Gin with the limited knowledge we have. So what are we going to do now?”

“Well, we need to decide on how to deal with your wife first.”

William replied while gesturing his head towards my wife, who flinched upon hearing this.

“Let’s ask your wife. Ma’am, what do you think we should do to you? Do you think we should imprison you? Lock you up? Or maybe do you think you should be let off scot-free because your Anthony’s wife?”

As expected, my wife froze up at William’s question.

This was an extremely difficult question to answer, I don’t even know how I would answer if I were in the situation.

Since my wife didn’t say anything, William continued speaking.

“Yes, it’s true that you were not doing this by choice, you were turning into a mindless Grinch beast which caused you to rampage. This does not change the fact that you still murdered and slaughtered dozens.

The worst part is that this could’ve been avoided. If you had told your husband about this sooner, we could’ve helped. Instead, you tried to hide it, which resulted in the deaths of many. What do you say of this?”

God damn, William is laying the hammer. He is not holding back at all.

Everything he says is true though, so his words just hit even harder.

“I… was planning to tell Anthony. I was going to… I just… was waiting for the right moment.” As my wife said this, she realized how dumb it sounded.

We all knew that petty excuses like that weren’t going to solve anything here.

“I lacked the courage. I really did want to tell him. I wanted to tell him everything. You think I wanted to keep this a secret? I just didn’t have the courage to. I kept telling myself, I’m going to tell Anthony the truth at the right moment… soon… But the right moment never came.

I mean, what is the right moment to tell your spouse that you’re a disgusting murdering monster? There is no right moment. I just kept pushing it back. And eventually, Anthony started to develop a hatred for The Grinch… this just… made me hesitate even more. How would he react if I told him I was the target of his hatred? I just didn’t want him, of all people, to see me like this…

I did everything I could to contact Gin, anything it took to keep me from changing. In the end, as you can see, it was futile… I got very to telling him one time… Anthony noticed I was acting weird, and tried talking to me… I wanted to spill everything then, I just couldn’t though. Every time I wanted to; I would just choke up. And you’re right, this all happened because I couldn’t just tell him…”

It hurts to hear this.

I just sat there, holding myself back as I listened to my wife’s story.

I could tell that she just wanted to cry, to burst out screaming and let out all her emotions… but she knew… she knew that she had no right to cry or complain.

She was the one who caused the death of dozens. She has no right to cry… and yet, I just wanted her to cry, to let it all out. I know how it feels to hold your emotions and it sucks.

If this were any other person, I would not be sympathetic and would probably even blame them, but she’s my wife and as her husband, I am willing to be become a hypocrite.

I just didn’t know what to do to make her feel better.

All I did was pathetically put my hand on her shoulder, as if that would make her feel better.

Upon hearing my wife’s story, William started thinking as he usually does, and after a brief moment, he started speaking.

“I see… I understand. It’s obvious you’ve done some bad things, but the issue is what you’re going to do from now on. Normally there would be a punishment decided by the king, however we are trying to keep this a secret… so I’ve come to the decision to let you off the hook for now…

But don’t misunderstand, I’m not doing this for you ma’am, I am doing this for our kingdom. Anthony is an important man to our kingdom and holds high value, and we need him happy for him to continue working for us. Since you are his wife, there is no proper punishment that I can give you without upsetting him.

Plus, punishment is meant to discipline someone or to punish someone, but in this case, it was out of your control so there is no point in punishment.”

“Wait, are you letting my wife go? I’m not complaining… but isn’t that a little dangerous? Ya know, because she might transform and all…”

“I never said she was going to be able to just go free though. From now on, she’s going to be under restrains. She’s going to have to wear this from now on.”

As he said that, William grabbed a weird looking collar from his desk and handed it to my wife.

According to William, it’s a magic restraining collar.

It’s pretty self explanatory, it’s a collar that restrains the user and in this case, my wife.

“I made this specially for your wife, when it detects that her magic starts to grow out of control, it should restrict her magic and calm her down. She’s going to need to wear this from now.”

This was incredible, my wife had struggled this entire time to control The Grinch inside of her, yet with this new device, she’ll be able to.

It’s not perfect, so that’s why my wife and I are now required to visit William’s lab every 3 or 4 days to get her checked up but it’s still a massive help.

“So my wife has to wear this all the time? 24/7? Even when she sleeps or leaves the house?”

“Yes. All the time. Especially when she’s asleep or leaving the house because that’s when she’s most vulnerable to The Grinch’s influence. That’s also why she should avoid leaving the house as much as possible.”

“That’s fair… but it’s kind of weird to wear a collar all the time. Can’t you, like… turn it into a bracelet instead?”

“A bracelet would not be as effective. The Grinch is powerful, very powerful. A bracelet could work, but it’s effects would not be as effective as around the neck, a vital part of the body. Even then it won’t be able to fully contain The Grinch’s power. And don’t be ungrateful, I spent all night making this! It took me over 6 hours to design something that would be able to hold The Grinch’s magic.

Plus, she’s your wife. It won’t really matter if she wears a collar or not. I’m sure you guys do this kind of stuff in bed all the time. If anybody askes, just tell them that it’s her kink or something. You guys are married, work something out.”

Me and my wife got a little bit embarrassed when he said that.

“Ahem… Yeah, thanks. I didn’t mean to be ungrateful, making something like this from scratch must’ve been insanely difficult.”

William awkwardly scratched his head.

“Well… technically I didn’t make it from scratch?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

William cleared his throat and confessed that this collar was originally meant to be for me.

“When I first met you, I didn’t know if you were going to be able to control your powers, so I started making the collar but after realizing you didn’t need it, I scratched that idea. I still had the partially built collar, so I had just need to finish it with some extra adjustments for your wife…”

Damn.

This dude wanted to put a collar on me.

I am so glad that didn’t happen.

“Well, that’s that. Anything else you want to tell me? Any questions?” William asked the both of us.

Me and my wife shook our heads.

“Alrighty, that’s it then. You’re free to go. I’ll continue researching, and you guys remember to visit in a couple days.”

And with that, we were done.

We were free to go.