Unruly Summon Chapter 17: Contingency (Patreon)

What were the options? Mary had mistaken what she saw? The castle guards were mistaken about the location of the assassin? The weapon wasn't a simple missile, but was capable of controlled flight? Magic was used to launch it through the wall?

Or, of course, the big one: people were lying to me.

I didn't want to believe it. Yes, they'd lied to me before, but trying to kill someone in order to frame the demons was a whole new level. They obviously expected her to die; Christine's shock at my healing made that abundantly clear. In fact, she'd tried to discourage me from the beginning.

And now she was trying to get Mary alone, despite losing her original justification of Mary being too weak to move. And Wendy was being weird about it. Christine seemed stressed, which was understandable given the attack, but she'd been cool as a cucumber back with that Dennis guy. She hadn't even batted an eyelid when talking about devil-fire. It had only been since I refused to give up on Mary that her facade had cracked.

It didn't seem to be the assassins she was stressed about.

"Fine, we'll all go," said Christine, and I noticed her fists were clenched. "Since Mary seems to have completely recovered, I suppose I can question her elsewhere."

"I don't think we really need to," I shrugged, determined not to risk letting Mary out of my sight, even if only for a second. "I'm sure your talented agents outside have apprehended any would-be assassins already."

Christine stared at me, but I wordlessly held her gaze.

"Oh, I stole one of your uniforms..." said Wendy, either trying to break the tension or finally noticing what she'd done now that she'd received some information about the spell and had some attention to spare the rest of the world. "And I ran through the castle naked. Oops."

She gave a petite giggle, apparently not actually all that embarrassed.

"It's okay. Just please give it a wash before you return it," responded Mary.

"Hey, I just got out of the bath! I'm clean!"

"You're also not wearing any underwear."

"Ah..." said Wendy.

"Wendy!" growled Christine, but it was obviously not the lack of underwear the knight was annoyed at.

"Give it up already. He already knows, so no point pretending. Yes, the castle still has baths. I said it was a pointless idea to hide that fact in the first place; what sort of unbelievable story were you trying to spin in which we could afford to give him the services of a personal slave but couldn't let him wash himself properly?"

"That... err, that was pretty believable, actually," I commented. "It's not like I have any idea of your local economy or logistics."

"Really? I'd quite like to hear about your world some day."

"I hope we get that chance..."

"Me too..."

The pair of us turned to Christine, whose lip was bleeding again.

"Mistress?" asked Mary. "What's wrong?"

I had a strong suspicion—and given Christine's reactions, it was only getting stronger—that the answer to that question was 'Mary is still alive to answer questions'.

"Just to double check, where exactly did that black sphere hit the floor?" I asked.

"By the..." started Mary, before Christine blurred.

One moment she was standing there staring, wringing her hands, and the next she had crossed half the room, a hand on the hilt of her blade. Once again, a reflex I shouldn't have had reared its head, and I instinctively started drawing on the local mana, pouring it into my body. For a brief moment, Christine's movements seemed to slow.

Then the moment shattered. I'd already overdrawn on mana casting Miraculum, and there was no way I had the capacity left for body strengthening. The contents of my stomach forced their way up as my legs buckled. She was going to cut Mary down and I couldn't do a thing about it.

And then the next moment came, and she was stood in front of me, sword drawn.

And then the next next moment, and she was staggering backwards, impacting a transparent barrier that had sprung up between the pair of us, spun intricately out of mana faster than my mana sight could process.

As Christine stumbled, the three guards in the room drew swords and closed in.

"Lady Christine? What is the meaning of this?" asked one. "Did you just try to kill the hero?"

Even the span of a single sentence was sufficient for me to process events a little. If the purpose of killing Mary was to silence her—and hence stop me learning the attack was a set-up—now that she knew I knew, killing Mary lost its purpose.

The span of a single sentence was also enough for me to finish collapsing to the floor, and for my vomit to finish climbing my throat. Poor Mary. At least this time it was only over her room, instead of over her.

"Of course not! He's vital to our kingdom's survival."

"Could have fooled me!" snapped Wendy. "If I'd been a split second slower with that shield..."

The next couple of sentences were enough for me to process the way Christine had been holding her sword, hilt raised. It hadn't been at the correct angle to swing the blade.

"She wanted to knock me out," I explained, trying to blink away the dancing lights swimming across my vision. Overuse of mana was not fun.

"We have to get him out of the castle while he's weakened," said Christine, seemingly calm now that she'd made her decision. "Get out of my way."

The other knights hesitated, but Wendy did not. "No," she snapped, stepping forward between me and Christine. "This has gone far too far. I refuse to be a part of it any longer."

"I... I don't know what's going on," said Mary, planting herself next to Christine, "but Master is kind. You don't need to be so afraid of him."

"This is not the time!" exclaimed Christine. "Now that he knows the attack was staged, he's a threat to the royal family."

"Then perhaps the royal family should apologise!" Wendy snapped back.

"Staged...?" muttered Mary. I could see the moment realisation dawned, her eyes opening wide and jaw falling slack. "You tried to kill me!"

"You three, get Thomas to the western ritual chamber. A teleport circle has already been prepared to deal with this contingency. You may knock him out if he resists."

The knights hesitated, but only briefly, before all three started moving towards me.

"Don't you dare!" exclaimed Wendy, starting to turn, but Christine blurred once more. Another shield flashed into existence between the pair of them, Christine rebounding, but her goal was obviously simply to hold Wendy's attention.

It didn't twig the first time, mostly on account of the way I thought I'd been about to die, but Wendy had cast both shields with no spoken incantation. There was a way.

Not that I had the leeway to dwell on that fact, with three knights mere paces away from me, while mana overuse had left me too dizzy to even stand.

"Don't hurt him!" exclaimed Mary, trying to get in the way, but she was only one person against three.

"We don't intend to, miss," said one of the knights, almost gently.

Unless I resisted, I added in the privacy of my head. Not that I could resist right now.

They had their orders, and they obviously intended to obey. Christine had outright admitted she would follow an order to kill me, and they'd merely been told to teleport me out of the castle, so why would they not? Especially since they had enough context from the conversation to know why.

"Mary, you may go with him," allowed Christine. "I suspect he no longer desires any training from me, but perhaps Wendy will follow later."

"You screwed up, and now you just want to send your problems away for someone else to deal with?" snapped Wendy, unable to take her attention off Christine as two of the knights hooked themselves under my arms and lifted me back to my feet. I resisted in the only way I could, given my situation, which was to throw up over one of them. Alas, he remained stoic under my less-than-devastating assault.

"What I think is immaterial," answered Christine.

Of course, just like the other knights, she was doubtless just following orders too. She'd answered that would-you-kill-me question while already in the middle of a plot to deceive me and kill Mary. No wonder her answer had come so readily; she'd long since faced such questions and made her choice.

The only question I had was who was giving her those orders? Who was the one that decided to trade Mary's life merely for the chance to leave me with a grudge against demons? Given where I was, and that I'd dined with royalty who gave every appearance of not being used to the food, it was a decent guess that they'd come from the top.

"What do you hope to accomplish?" I shouted back as the knights dragged me through the door. "Do you think I'll still cooperate after this?"

No-one in the room answered.

If they had teleportation magic prepared to get me out of Odimere, they'd obviously done some amount of contingency planning, but did they really think I'd just forgive them and go hunt some demons? If I'd fallen for it, perhaps they would have convinced me that demons were an evil they needed protecting from, but now? I couldn't believe anything I'd been told. For all I knew, the humans had started this war. No way could I take sides in it without hearing the demons' side of the story.

These people weren't stupid. They knew that.

My last hope—that the guards outside the room would question why the hero was being dragged out—was dashed when they simply stood aside, leaving the trio to carry me up the corridor. They'd probably heard everything that was said in there. The one in fancy armour peered at me hanging limply in my captors' arms, then turned around and left in the opposite direction without so much as a word.

Mary pottered along behind us like a little duckling, obviously at a loss as to what she should do. Even if I'd broken her free of whatever mind control she was under, that didn't magically mean she could fight against a single trained knight, let alone three.

And speaking of Mary, that was an obvious answer as to what their backup plan might be. No-one had denied magic existed that could override someone's free will. If I didn't want to fight for them, all they needed to do was make me.

The only comfort was that they hadn't done so the day I arrived. Instead, they'd constructed this elaborate ruse, despite being obviously willing to sink to horrific depths to con me into fighting for them. That implied there was some reason why they didn't want to. The only question was how much the equation had changed now that the ruse had fallen apart. Was mind control now their best option, or was there still some reason why they wouldn't? Or, if I was really lucky, couldn't.

"This would go a lot more easily if you would walk," said one of the knights as we reached a staircase.

"I can't," I pointed out. "I can't even stand upright on my own, let alone walk. If you want to give me half an hour to recover, then sure."

After all, given half an hour to recover, I'd bet I could hit this castle with a pretty good Conflagratio. Which presumably was the reason Christine was in such a rush to get rid of me.

The ritual chamber Christine had mentioned turned out to be the room I was first summoned in, and manhandling me up five flights of stairs while wearing plate armour was sufficiently logistically difficult, even with the three of them, that by the time they reached the top I had recovered enough to walk. Not that I intended to make their lives easier by admitting it.

The question that remained was whether I'd recovered enough to fight back.

Through my mana sight, I could see five people in the room, carrying a number of magical items and vials, along with a complex circular pattern occupying a large section of the floor. No way could I fight against that many in my current state. But perhaps I didn't need to.

One of my escort trio pushed open the door while the other two carried me through. Once again I was caught out by the way mana sight didn't show clothing; of the five waiting in the room, only one was a knight. The other four were mages, dressed in robes of blue, green, red and brown, standing in a square outside of the floor's magic circle.

"Damn," said one of them. "Lady Christine really screwed up, then?"

"Bah, you felt that magic as strongly as the rest of us. What would you have her do? It was foolish to push a hero like that. Just be glad casting it seems to have left him wiped."

"Quiet, you two. Let's get him out of here before he recovers enough that revenge starts looking like an option."

"Too late for that," I answered. "Parvus Ventus Ferrum."