Broken Soul Part 6 (Patreon)

"You'd think they'd use more durable material or set up wards," Selena mused as they walked past a partially demolished shop that looked like someone had hit the side of it with a wrecking ball.

"I'm guessing it's a combination of price and the fact that the sect doesn't seem to care about their outer sect members," Myst replied thoughtfully as he continued walking towards the water tower he could see in the distance.

"Or they don't consider it worth the expense," Akari suggested as she watched a group of five young men change direction to head their way. "Incoming smirking assholes."

"Do we want to try to avoid them?" Gwen asked, not particularly happy the way they were looking at the group or their smirks.

"They're locals, I doubt we can avoid them," Myst argued, trying to come up with a solution to dealing with a group of idiots that didn't involve murder, getting robbed, or dying in the street.

Ron scanned the surrounding structures and businesses for places they could ditch the people before coming to the conclusion that the group of assholes looked important enough that most of the shopkeepers probably wouldn't help them and the twisting alley probably had their own dangers. "We could try, but you're probably right."

"You look wealthy, are you going to donate to our master's protection fund?" one of the five asked with a smirk as they stopped in front of Myst's group.

"It would be unfortunate if you refused, accidents happen and all that," one of the other cultivators offered with a smirk.

'Wealthy? Lying shit, we're wearing cloaks,' Myst thought as he looked at their expensive looking silk robes and the jade talismans hanging around their necks. 'You literally can't see our gear and you're still trying to shake us down, why the hell couldn't we have ended up in a reasonable sect?' He glanced at Akari. "Can you translate something?"

"Sure," Akari replied. "Translation issues," she told the locals in their language.

"Just tell them that we buried the stones in the old training area and that they have the luck of the heavens for finding us before a gang did," Myst said, wondering if they were greedy or arrogant enough to follow them to the training area where he could afford to summon the goblins on them and blast the shit out of them without causing a scene.

'They can't be that thick,' Akari thought as she relayed the information.

"Excellent, we'll follow you to make sure no one else gets the bounty that was ours by divine right," the teenager in the middle of the group stated with assurance, looking for all the world like this sort of luck was completely normal.

'Let's hope he's not as important as he thinks he is,' Myst mused as they continued walking toward the training area. 'Not my fault that no one objected when the guy's minions pointed out that accidents happen.'

"Do we have a plan?" Taylor asked nervously as they made their way through the streets that were more deserted than they'd been before the rich assholes had shown up, making her wonder how often they showed up to accept 'donations'.

"Of course, we head to the training area and I'll summon the guardians to the sacred vault and let the cultivators destroy them so we can get into the vault," Myst explained.

The young master glanced at Myst suspiciously then focused on Akari. "What did he say?"

"He was just explaining about the guardians and how you might have to fight them, they're a bit unstable," Akari replied, curious what Myst was planning and hoping he wasn't about to get them killed.

'Sorry, but I'm going to need the lightning resistance,' Myst thought as he had his avatar use one of the cursed upgrade tiles on it, causing the scroll to glow and change. 'Cursed Dragon Blood Scroll of Heaven's Thunder? This cursed technique transmutes the blood in your veins into the blood of a dragon. Unfortunately, the technique does nothing to make you resistant or immune to acid or fire which means the blood will eat you from the inside out if the fires don't consume you first. The longer you survive, the more your resistances to lightning and poison will increase. This resistance will carry over into your next life.'

Myst's avatar flicked his ear to make sure that the tiara was working then used the cursed scroll before he could talk himself into cursing it and making things worse. 'At least this is just a projection.' He picked up the potion that should double his vitality at the cost of doing a decent amount of damage when the potion wore off and drank it. 'Glad the goblin mages are good for interesting loot.'

He grabbed the staff that he'd retrieved from Taylor's minions and made sure it wasn't in the way of grabbing the potions and activated the cursed technique, hoping that he wasn't making a mistake he couldn't walk away from. He blinked a couple of times when he almost instantly lost the ability to see, as the blood in his eyes consumed everything around it. He grabbed one of the potions by feel, popped the cork without letting go of his staff and drank it, giving him a couple of seconds of sight before his vision faded out again.

'At least I'm not in pain,' Myst mused as he grabbed the next potion and downed it, glad that the staff's regeneration seemed to be keeping his muscles working well enough to grab the potions.

Myst pulled his attention away from this avatar and focused on the cultivators, slightly annoyed that he couldn't tell how powerful they were. 'Hopefully the goblins can kill them or at least distract them while we finish them off. I'd feel better if I had Charles here, he wouldn't hesitate to shoot them in the back of the head.'

Amy sighed as she read the captions floating over one of the thugs' heads, 'Let's have some fun with the girls, Lee can have the girl with freckles.'

"What's up?" Akari asked when she noticed Amy's scowl.

"I'm starting to wonder how their society hasn't ripped itself apart," Amy complained, a touch surprised that none of the thugs had any decency or even common sense.

"You'd need someone with the power and knowledge to stop the assholes and by the time someone gets enough power to make a difference, they've probably already stopped thinking like a mortal," Akari explained.

"Doesn't make it right," Amy complained.

"Never said it did," Akari replied, wishing she'd been able to find a bit more information on the actual power that the various cultivation ranks gave the assholes, rather than flowery tales of ancient lunatics destroying cities and reshaping the land around them.

The next couple of minutes of walking passed quietly enough. He did his best to not act surprised by the sad state of the training area as he opened the dusty black metal doors and saw a couple of dozen rusty bits of metal poking up from the sand that made up the training area's floor. He glanced over at the bedraggled training dummies that had seen better days then walked over to a square section of stone.

"Now what?" one of the thugs asked.

"Now we set up a ward so that the guardians don't kill us and you challenge the monsters for access to the vault," Myst explained. "Selena, can you set up a couple of wards to keep the vault's defenders from attacking us?"

"Sure!" Selena replied cheerfully then ran over the square section of stone, touched her wrist and summoned four of her mother's ward cards from her emergency kit.

"We're setting up some wards then you'll have to fight the guardians if you want the stones," Akari explained, hoping Myst knew what he was doing since the thugs had almost as much ki as some of the junior instructors she'd run into.

"If the guardians are this dangerous, why would you use them?" the young master asked.

"Because we know a guy that can rip them apart and he likes the exercise," Akari replied with a shrug. "You take what you can get when you're weak."

"Bring on the challenge," the man replied, not particularly worried about any sort of guardians a mortal could deal with.

"Okay, the wards should keep us safe as long as we don't attack anyone," Selena explained as her friends walked over to the stone platform.

'Hopefully we can scare them off,' Peter thought, figuring they'd leave once they realized the wards would protect them.

"You should probably warn them that I'll be starting," Myst told Akari, figuring it was better to pretend that the goblins were part of the plan in case they were completely useless in killing any of the cultivators.

"He's summoning the guardians," Akari warned them, hoping the goblins could kill them or at least distract them.

'If I drop the goblins behind them, that should give me enough time to cast my chicken of doom spell and it's a summon rather than a direct combat spell so it shouldn't trigger the wards.' Myst waited until his new friends were inside the wards then cast his goblin warlock summoning spell, dropping them behind the cultivators. He cast his chicken of doom spell as the cultivators turned to face the goblins then recast the spell and pulled his wand out of his sleeve, in case he had to step out of the wards to finish one of them off.

"Shit," Akari complained as the cultivators started ripping through the goblins like a weed whacker through a field of wheat, barely hesitating as they dodged every spell the goblins cast.

'Shit!' Myst cursed in his head as he drained another spirit stone. He cast his goblin horde spell again, dropping the goblins behind the cultivators, hoping one of the goblins got lucky. He smiled when his chicken of doom exploded, managing to send one of the cultivators into one of the goblin's spells which caused painful looking boils to erupt on his face before the cultivator started screaming and clawing at his face.

"Shit!" Peter sputtered as he watched the second group of goblins start cursing the thugs and burying them under a volley of spells that made dodging nearly impossible.

Myst conjured another chicken of doom when his second chicken exploded, taking out one of the cultivators and four goblins.

"You court death!" the young master shouted as he unleashed his ki and burned all of the goblins to death in a storm of fire.

"Fuck!" Gwen cursed when the enraged young master almost casually torched the goblin horde with streams of fire.

"Die!" the young master shouted as he unleashed his power on the backstabbing bastards that had gotten his minions killed, confident that he could break their wards since they were weak enough that he could barely sense them.

Selena grabbed Taylor's arm before the other girl could dodge the stream of fire rushing toward them, wanting to make sure she didn't leave the wards and get roasted.

Gwen shivered as the stream of fire hit the wards and a pulse of blue plasma lashed out and obliterated the young master's head, causing his body to stand there for a second before collapsing to its knees and then slowly falling over onto the sand. "What the fuck was that?!"

"That's why I said you weren't supposed to attack through the wards," Selena replied as she glanced around to make sure everything else was dead. "My mother is prone to excess when it comes to my safety."

"Makes sense," Myst agreed, extremely happy that his summoning spells hadn't tripped the ward as it was a hell of a lot nastier than he'd been expecting.

"Dibs on their loot," Selena said cheerfully as she reached down and disabled the ward cards.

"Could we use the wards to farm the goblins?" Ron asked thoughtfully as Selena picked up her cards.

"I'd rather not, intent matters," Selena replied as she put the cards back in her emergency kit. "Using the wards as a shield when you're responsible for the fight would drain them within a couple of minutes. I'd rather have a few hours of protection if things go sideways."

"Makes sense," Myst agreed. "Can you make sure he isn't wearing anything that will bring him back from the dead?"

"Seems unlikely, considering he's missing his head, but I'll check," Selena replied as she pulled her magnifying glass out of her pocket and went to check the loot.

"You could have just bribed them to leave then turned them in later," Peter argued, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that they'd just murdered five people.

Akari shook her head. "I asked around, the sect doesn't care as long as you're not murdering your fellow disciples and even then it's just an inquiry, which means they'd have gotten away with a slap on the wrist if they'd killed us."

"Shouldn't the sect care about their reputation?" Peter asked.

"Power is the only reputation they care about," Akari explained.

"Bribing them wouldn't have worked, they were joking about raping us while we were walking over here," Amy complained.

"What?" Peter asked in confusion. "I didn't hear anything."

"My translation ability involves subtitles so I could understand them despite whatever they were using to keep the sound from reaching us. I doubt they'd have left you alive to testify or maybe they would have since I doubt anyone would believe us or care," Amy complained.

"Welcome to my life," Taylor muttered, thinking about the trio and her trouble with the administration.

"Now what?" Ron asked as he glanced around the training area, eager to get started with his training.

Myst glanced over at the rusty rakes that were leaned up against a wall. "Take a seat or do some stretching and try to calm down, I'm going to grab a rake and try to clean up some of the blades."

"Does it even bother you that you killed them?" Peter asked Myst.

"No, it doesn't bother me that a group of rapists and thieves are dead, especially when none of the authority figures would have stopped them or even cared beyond the fact that they got caught," Myst explained as he headed over to grab the rake.

"Huh," Selena muttered when she checked the young master's necklace. "I found a necklace of regeneration."

"Is it powerful enough to bring him back from the dead?" Taylor asked.

"Technically," Selena replied as she took the necklace off the corpse, making sure he didn't wake up in a couple of days.

"Technically?" Taylor asked.

"You'd have to leave it on the corpse for a couple of days and I'm not sure how much of their personality or memories would be left, since their head was destroyed by cursed fire," Selena explained as she put the necklace in her bag and went back to checking the rest of his gear.

"Do we have a plan for training?" Taylor asked, trying to change the subject.

"We should probably start with stances," Ron suggested as he shifted through a couple different stances that he used in his Monkey Kung Fu.

"Sounds good," Myst agreed as he walked back over with the rake, happy to leave the teaching to Ron as he was a bit distracted by his avatar's 'training'.

0o0o0

"Just think of them like video game characters," Ron suggested when he noticed that Peter was having a hard time dealing with the idiots' deaths.

"That's worse," Peter complained, "it’s denying their basic humanity. Why aren't you taking this seriously? They're dead."

"We're in a land of myth and legends, reincarnation is a proven fact of this world, at least for the locals. The assholes were basically there to get killed by some hero and they'll be reincarnated without their memories to try again until they manage to live better lives," Ron explained with a shrug.

"So that makes it better?" Peter asked, still not sure of the morality of the situation.

"It certainly makes it easier for everyone they would have stolen from or raped and killed," Ron pointed out. "Sometimes karma happens to you and sometimes you're someone else's karma. I spent most of high school stopping villains, some of them were decent people, some of them would have been better off dead, you get used to it. Life is not the end all be all of existence."

"I'm not sure that helps," Peter admitted, not wanting to get into the philosophical implications as he had enough trouble just sticking with the moral ones.

"Shit," Myst cursed as his avatar reached for the last healing potion on the table and he realized that it was empty.

Selena glanced at the door to the training area then turned to look at Myst. "What's the matter?"

"My avatar used the resistance training technique and I ran out of healing potions before my technique's duration," Myst admitted as he stopped raking the sand.

"You should have mentioned you were testing things," Selena told him as she walked over and slipped the regeneration necklace over his head. "This should help."

"Thanks," Myst replied, “hopefully this will negate enough damage that I’ll survive the testing. I’m not sure what happens if my avatar dies.”

"I'd rather not lose access to the treasure realm because you let your avatar die," Selena said, “it’s really increased our odds of survival.”

"Point," Myst admitted. "Hopefully the effect wears off before too long."

"Do you have a way to break the technique?" Selena asked.

"I have a remedy but it's a physical change, not an affliction, it's like those annoying story curses that the princess or king ends up picking up that you need to go on a long and stupid quest to fix because you can't just hit the item shop for a remedy," Myst complained.

"I hate that," Akari piped up.

"You're insane," Amy complained as she walked over. "Permission to check your health?"

"Go for it," Myst replied, curious if anything was bleeding over.

"Let me check…" Amy trailed off as she poked Myst's arm and checked his biology, finding changes to his biology that shouldn't be there. "What the hell was the technique supposed to do?"

"Issues?" Myst asked, hoping she could fix anything that crossed over if it ended up being a problem.

"I was expecting to find an increased resistance to electricity, but you could probably walk off a lightning bolt and your liver would probably be able to process things that would kill a brute, so yeah, what did you do? Where did the poison resistance come from?"

"I used a cursed tile to upgrade the technique that set people on fire to boost their lightning resistance and got a better and more dangerous technique. The Cursed Dragon Blood technique of Heaven's Thunder transmutes your blood into the blood of a dragon, which causes you to basically burn from the inside out because it doesn't come with any resistances to acid or fire," Myst explained.

"Are you fucking insane?!" Amy demanded.

"Probably," Myst admitted. "I had a remedy to break the technique and I had a bunch of healing potions. Unfortunately the remedy didn't work and I ran out of potions. It was a risk, but I felt like I needed an ace in the hole if the cultivator's survived the goblins and I needed enough resistance built up that I could use the lightning technique, which meant I needed to test things before we got to the training area."

"You could have said something," Amy pointed out.

"I wasn't sure if the assholes had any translation talents or items," Myst argued.

Amy glared at Myst for a couple of seconds then sighed. "Is the necklace helping?"

Myst checked his avatar's arms and legs. "The blisters are healing faster than they're accumulating, so I'm going to call that a win."

"Cool, can I get a copy of the technique?" Ron asked hopefully.

"No," Amy snapped. "Not until I've had a chance to run some more tests on the necklace."

"That's fair," Ron agreed.