Chapter 642 (2/2)

That was what scared her so much that Lucretia couldn’t sit still for a second. That some instinctive part of her wanted to capitulate to this instinct. To let go and allow herself to be driven by this strange impulse.

Lucretia was standing in a cave, tapping her fingers against a rock along the wall. But at that moment, she couldn’t stand it anymore and lashed out with her nails. Her strike ripped a huge amount of rock off of the wall like it was a styrofoam. But even that wasn’t enough. She hissed at the debris, her hands tightening into fists.

“Still tense?”

Lucretia looked up sharply, then forced herself to relax. “Marco… I didn’t expect you would be the first to return.

Marco Polo flashed his teeth and winked at Lucretia. With a deft mental twitch, she ripped at the threads binding his soul together. Instantly, his smug cheer disappeared as Marco went pale.

Still, Lucretia let up quickly, studying Marco Polo. Her interaction was actually not with him directly, but with Marco’s son. Young Holland Polo had allegedly assaulted a daughter of a very prominent Style head. As justice gathered around to punish them, a desperate Holland had encountered Lucretia and made a deal with him.

She would make sure he escaped from this retribution, but he needed to work in her debt for 10 years. It brought Lucretia a great deal of glee to approach Marco while impersonating a member of the slighted Style, and explain what his son had done. There was only one way to protect his son; Marco needed to take the blame.

He was sentenced to 70 years within a prison. On a whim, Lucretia had Holland serve as a guard in that prison. Karma moved in mysterious ways. Originally, she thought they would find each other and a delightful amount of misery would result. At the time, Lucretia was so twisted by her fear of death that she delighted in causing others to share her hopelessness.

What Lucretia didn’t expect was for Shal to turn up after so many years of being somehow beyond her abilities to detect, had arrived at the prison, unbidden. Imagine her surprise when Shal’s young apprentice, a then volatile Randidly, became acquaintances with Marco Polo and killed Holland Polo while escaping.

Even now, Lucretia occasionally considered telling Marco. But that was a soft part of herself she had learned while watching so many people struggle in Randidly’s Soul Skill. There were so many times while watching that world that she had dearly wished for the power to assist the people growing up inside of Randidly. Not that he could be blamed, but he was juggling so many plates it was inevitable some fell by the wayside.

The people of his Soul Skill were one of those plates.

“Like what you see,” Marco said lightly, regaining some of his attitude. But this time, Lucretia did nothing, nodding to the next chamber. Both of them walked away from the entrance to the cave and scratched wall and went into the room that truly mattered.

It was an altar of sorts. Several flat stones had been rolled and stacked to form a stone surface about waist height. Several complicated runes were carved into the top stone, which was wide and completely smooth aside from the scratches. But they didn’t glow with power, because these runes were based upon the workings of Aether, not Mana.

Right now they were cold, but Lucretia believed she would soon have the necessary pieces to activate them.

There were three circular spaces in the runes on the stone altar. The leftmost one was occupied with the head of a yeti. As soon as she entered the room, it glared up at her, rolling back and forth. The rather typical Mana Engraving that covered the face silenced the yeti and kept it from regenerating, but Lucretia hadn’t found a way to prevent it from being able to witness their actions.

Not that it mattered. It was clearly a lifeform from a higher Cohort, one of the few times the System permitted the higher tiered forms to descend to lower Cohorts. But besides being a Judgement, it didn’t have much ability to inform the System of the transgressors. That was reserved for higher Leveled Heretic Paths.

With a flourish, Marco Polo produced rusted, ancient chains. “Your son is incredibly capable, by the way. To think he was already at the Pontiff level of strength… it is not easy to touch upon the truths of the Spear-source.”

Lucretia grunted noncommittally. Her time with Randidly had informed much of her understandings of things; in this case, she understood what the spear source was, and why it was so important to this world. The spear source was a series of images that had been separated and now formed the basis of power in this world. It likely had something to do with the person who had defeated the first Calamity, the Spearman.

Once the concentrated images were formed and affected the world, it made sense why spears would become so dominant. Anything that was similar to those images from the original person would have a slight, passive boost. What Lucretia didn’t understand was how the images could be so perfectly and completely cut away like that. Had the System done it after the first Calamity was defeated?

Or…

Lucretia looked up abruptly as another person walked into the cave. Then she smiled.