Law of Blood- Chapter 2 (Patreon)

Chapter 2- The Happiness Trap

I didn’t let the wall stop me either but sent a quick mental command for Denne to commandeer the nearest horse he could find. It never occurred me to ask if that was a thing here. In a place where the first rule was the Law of Strength, it had to be. Besides, we’d get the horse back to its owner or compensate them for it.

Despite having been in Olimero for months now, other than my first day I hadn’t spent much time at all outside of the city. That is if Yonderton could be called a city. I guess it was more of a large town, but the population and construction had been growing. My move to widen the streets caused an initial uproar but people soon began to love it.

At least that was my take on it. I expect that the city manager, Roz got a never ending list of complaints, but that was part of her job. Whether Yonderton was a city or a town or what, it was now behind me. The terrain outside the city was what one might expect in the old west of the US. There were patches of grass, plenty of rock, and lots of dirt.

The lectures I had gotten from my city manager and others, I had been learning about the farms of Yonderton. As barren as the ground looked in certain place, it really was fertile soil. Between plenty of underground water supplied, good soil, and magic, my district grew everything from tobacco and sugar to wheat, barley, and corn, and then on to potatoes and a variety of vegetables in smaller quantities. Then there were the hog, sheep, bison, and chicken farms.

None of the farms were set up within a couple miles of the city, as no one wanted to have their farm taken when the city expanded. That meant there was a great deal of open land and that was bad for my prey. She had been more agile than I inside the city. Keeping up with her there had a challenge, but out here in the open, the advantage was mine.

Moment my moment, I was gaining on her as my great bounding strides ate up the distance. Her backside was soon only a couple hundred feet in front of me and thanks to my enhanced vision, I could tell just what a lovely backside it was, although I did try to keep from sharing that thought through my bond. The last thing Lina neeed while delivering my child was my impressions about some other girl’s ass. Actually, scratch that. Lina would probably like it. It was Josie, who I needed to be more concerned about.

Then she dropped down into a ravine and was out of my sight for a second. Not wanting to lose her I extend my sense of touch to the max, which was about one hundred feet now, maybe more if I refined it to a narrow arc. The world around me took on so much more detail. They say seeing is believing but feeling makes everything so much more real. When I did this was always a shock to my system as the amount of input I received was staggering.

Then I pulled another one of the aces I kept up my sleeve. I made sure that at anytime I always had at least a small amount of mana byproduct from each of the girls. So far, I was only doing it with Josie, Lina, Daria, and Mursha, but that was enough for me to juggle. It tended to fade so I had to top it up daily, but in a pinch it would give me two minutes of extra abilities.

The effects varied based upon the type of mana I had converted. With healing mana it would boost my regeneration and general biological processes. After playing around with fire mana byproduct, I found that I could either be protected from flame with it, or for a few seconds, I could create an aura of intense heat around myself. Gravity was immensely useful as it allowed me to slow my perception of time around myself and thus respond far faster than any enemy could react.

As useful as the byproduct from gravity mana was Daria’s contribution was becoming my favorite. Man has always had a love affair with the idea of flying and I was no different. It certainly didn’t allow me to fly, but it allowed me to effectively alter my body to lighten it, and thus it would help keep me up in the air when I leapt or it would allow me to have sudden bursts of ridiculous speed.

In this case I used it with a combination of both those effects. As my body became lighter, the air around me seemed to become a stream that I could control. Body cultivation meant that I was best at controlling things that were inside my body or as close to it as possible. Then I was streaking forward faster than any arrow as the combination of my freakish strength and new compatibility with the air around me sent me flying forward.

I timed it so that I with my last step before I hit the ravine, I soared upward. That gave me a bird’s eye view of the terrain below me. The ravine widened out and looked like it ran into a small stream before opening into a value which fed into a farm in the distance.

At first, I didn’t see the catgirl but then I felt her as much as seeing her. She had stopped and was pressing herself up against the side of the ravine. I laughed as I realized that she had expected me to overshoot her position. I would have but for my ability to hang ten, literally. My few extra second in the air gave me all the time that I needed to see her.

Unfortunately, it also gave her the opportunity to fling a trio of blades at me. I knocked one aside, but due to my lightened form was sent spinning backwards. It was clearly going to take some time to get used to this form, so I stopped burning the effect and felt myself become heavier again as I plummeted to the earth.

It was only thirty feet down which was no problem for my form, but the bigger problem was making sure I didn’t lose her. At least I’d seen her face and confirmed it was the Nimeera. I still had a bit of trouble thinking of the street waif that we had taken in with the vivacious woman before me, but life was what it was, not what we thought it was.

She was up and running again, before I even hit the ground. As I fell I could see Denne was closing on us with his horse. That was when it hit me. A feeling of joy and peace. Everything was going so great. I was about to become a father and despite how nervous I was about that, I honestly was so thrilled. I had beautiful women who loved me, a job that I was growing into, and in general a new lease on life.

Why did it matter if Nimeera was stealing a peep at us. She was probably just jealous because I couldn’t imagine that anyone in the history of the world had ever been as happy as I was right now. In fact, I would have felt sad for her, if I could have. The problem was that I was simply too happy. There was no room for sadness in me.

I watched her run and then turned away to see Denne riding up. It didn’t matter. Heck, I even had a good friend now. As much as I loved my women, it was nice having a guy around. Maybe he and I should go drinking like he had suggested. That sure seemed like a better idea than chasing after Nimeera. She was harmless. Heck, as I thought about it, I realized even the knives she had thrown at me were just a tactic to force me back. They hadn’t been thrown to actually try and hurt me.

Then Denne rode up. He looked at me funny for a second before asking, “Something wrong boss?”

“Nah, everything’s perfect. Maybe we should go get that drink you were talking about.”

Now he looked really confused. Enough so that it was threatening to affect my happiness. Then he asked me, “Did she get away?”

“Who? Oh, you mean Nimeera. I just stopped chasing her. I have too much good stuff going on in my life. No reason to worry about her. She’s harmless.”

“Uh, sheriff, I think she may have used her magic on you.”

I began to protest but somewhere in the back of my mind his words tickled something. There was an imbalance in my body. I was happy, like really happy, but this was too happy. I should never have been so happy that I stopped pursuing a criminal. Then it down on me. I began to spin my core and suck the Emotion Mana into my core. As I turned it into ki, I felt my mind clear.

“Dammit.”

Denne started to laugh silently, but I could see his shoulders shaking.

“That’s enough of that. Oh, and not a word about this to the girls.”

He looked at me with a big grin. “I take it you aren’t so happy anymore.” When I glared at him, he wiped the smile off his face and added, “Don’t worry your honor is safe with me. Emotion mages are very rare, even more so than mind mages. Normally, they hit you with despair or hopelessness. I was once in a battle where the enemy had a mage like that. It cost us half or forces. The enemy was able to chop a bunch of us down without a fight.”

I thought about that for a second. It sounded grim. For the most part I had written Nimeera’s power off as more of a seduction tool, but what Denne said convinced me I had been underestimating her. The truth was I still had a soft spot for the homeless girl I thought I had been rescuing.

“Despair wouldn’t have worked on me now. I have too much to live for. She must have been watching us enough to realize that and figured out that an excess of happiness would do the same thing.”

Denne scratched his chin. “No orc would think like that.”

“Her creativity is what makes her so dangerous. It is also why I wish we could have turned her into an ally rather than her being an enemy,” I said with a sigh. The euphoria I had felt a moment before was fading and I truly regretted the lost opportunity, but I couldn’t see a way back from what she had done.

Denne grinned and elbowed me. “I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with those pouty lips of hers or the way her hips sway when she walks. I’m still settling in with Milessa and Nunani but I noticed her even when she was just the cleaning girl at the office.”

I looked at him as my eyebrows came together. I didn’t even want to consider that, partially because I didn’t want to convey that emotion to my wives. But, I wondered if there was any truth to it. No, I shook my head. Definitely not. I wasn’t going to be that cliché guy who forgives a girl for anything she does, just because she is hot.

“Let’s just look around and see if she left any evidence about where she is going or what she was up to,” I said. Yeah definitely better to stay busy and not let my mind dwell on certain things. Maybe I was partially on edge because even at this distance I could feel a tiny fraction of the contractions Lina was experiencing.

What was that saying from back home? Something like, only a woman who has experienced twelve hours of labor could understand a man with a cold. I laughed to myself but kept it inside. I didn’t think jokes like that would have a very big audience in Olimero.

“Uh, boss, you need to see this.”

I turned to Denne. He wasn’t scanning the ground for anything left behind by Nimeera. I almost made a sarcastic comment about that but caught myself. It was just me being pissed at myself for letting her escape. Then I looked to where he was pointing in the distance. There was a dust cloud which seemed to be headed in our distance. As far as I could tell it was headed in this direction but was miles away. I sent more ki to my eyes and then sucked in my breath.