Royal Blood : Chapter 23 (Patreon)

Chapter 23: Heavy Weighs the Knife

I stretched, just happy to get out of the sewers. We were in some storage area, not unlike the room that I’d first met the Boss in more than a year ago.

I cracked my neck as Nezza slinked around the room, idly brushing her fingers over stacks of cloth and other piles of junk. I had to use the magelight to get a good view of the room, but Nezz, as always, was completely at home in the dark. I left her to it for the moment.

I was still thinking about what my Luck level up meant. It was a stat that never leveled up on its own, on top of doing apparently very little.

I’d noticed a few things that might have been my Luck stat kicking in, but also they could have been completely random chance. All the same, I didn’t regret dumping points into Luck, especially now that I’d apparently discovered a way to start leveling it up. It kind of made sense that Luck wouldn’t level up until you had a certain amount of it. I mean, about as much as anything made in this world.

Sometimes, I thought the designer of this isekai experience wasn’t all there in the head. I certainly wouldn’t pay for it if I had a choice.

But enough of that, I had a job to do.

“Anything interesting?” I asked quietly.

Nezza shrugged. “Nah. Why do rich people keep all this shit?”

I hummed. “Looks like spare linens, maybe for the staff’s clothes.” I poked a pile of wood with my foot. “And firewood.”

“Wouldn’t he have, like, heat stones?” Nez tilted her head in askance. “Even I got a few of those.”

“I have.” I dodged away from her annoyed jab, sticking my tongue out. “And some people consider heat stones low class, considering how easy they are to make.”

Really you just painted a rune onto a relatively flat rock and charged some mana into it.

“What was it like in the palace?”

“We had much more comprehensive enchantments.” Someone had told me the entire complex existed in a network of enchantments that kept the interior of the Imperial Palace perpetually warm and balmy, no matter the season. “It’s about as different from a heating stone as can be. Takes teams of mages to keep it running.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Teams.” I shrugged. “Anyway, we’re not gonna find anything valuable down here. Even if the Magistrate is incorruptible, I doubt his entire staff is.”

Nezza blew a raspberry before turning back into a dagger. I slipped her into the sheath.

“Let me know when we find the good stuff,” she told me.

I nodded. “I got you.”

The door to the room wasn’t locked; after all, who locks their own basement?

I took a breath, pressing my ear against the keyhole. After a few moments of silence, I eased the door open. There was another storage room, with stairs leading up to the ground floor. The room was cleaner, more organized, but clearly not designed for hosting. I saw a bed tucked away under the stairs. It seemed like the Magistrate was rich enough to afford at least one housekeeper.

I took a brief sweep of the room. It always paid to know your escape route.

I realized that maybe we should have left the entrance to the sewers a bit more open, but doubling back now would just increase the amount of time I had to spend out in the open.

I didn’t have a watch or anything, but I didn’t see any light coming from beneath the door. It was probably after dark by now. I cupped the mage light, so that it wouldn’t shine as obviously, but unless I wanted to leave this job to Nezza, I needed to be able to see.

I’d just put a foot on the stairs when the click of a latch shattered the silence.

I threw myself beneath the staircase as the door at the top creaked open. I shoved the magelight into a pouch as quietly as I was able.

“What in the hells is that smell?” A man’s voice came down the stairs. “Did the damn sewers flood?” There was the creak of the stairs, then the room brightened with soft blue light as the man turned on a wall sconce. He sighed, and I saw a pair of plain pants come down the stairs in front of me. “Wouldn’t be too late to change residences, would it?”

I curled up into a ball, pushing myself against a sack of what looked like laundry.

The man looked like a simple housekeeper or manservant. He was older, dressed in simple clothes as he came the rest of the way down the stairs. He cast a brief glance around the room before heading into the other room.

I used that chance to sneak up to the wall separating the two rooms.

“Level 25.” Nezza sent me. “I…I think.”

“Nezz?” I crouched, slipping Nezza’s Bite from the sheath.

“I don’t think he’s put many points into physical stats.”

I blinked. “Your eyes? You can see that now?”

“I think so,” she told me.

I frowned, focusing on the sound of shuffling in the next room over. The man was muttering something, tapping against the flagstones with his foot.

I was level 15, which meant he had ten levels on me. However, because most people only got 10 stat points a level, and I got fifteen to twenty five, that meant it was more like I was about level 20 in physical abilities.

A five level gap wasn’t insurmountable; each stat point was an increase to your abilities, but even if Elysia could probably lift a horse one handed, the difference of five levels wouldn’t be that big unless the man had put most of his points into Strength or Dexterity.

And if Nezza was right, there was even a chance that I might be able to physically overpower him…

For a second, I was still tempted to retreat back up the stairs. But…

Never leave an enemy at your back.

It would come back to bite me at the worst moment possible. Instead, I should come up with a plan to take him out as quickly as possible, so he couldn’t alert anyone—

“Aly!”

I grunted as the door hit my shoulder when the man pushed through it again.

He spun, eyes opening in surprise.

I lunged, dagger first.

The servant jerked backwards, and my first blow only managed to draw a thin line of blood across his shin. He grunted and I quirked my lips.

Decent Constitution.

I didn’t have time to think, and my arm was out of position. I slammed into his knees, and immediately knew that Nezza was right.

Unlike the last time I’d pulled this stunt, it felt like I was a normal kid hitting a man’s legs. Of course, that man was old and off balance. He staggered, back slamming into a stack of crates.

Then Nezza was on her feet behind me, arm pressed against the man’s windpipe before he could scream.

I glanced up, saw that she’d pinned one arm, and grabbed the other.

He jerked against my grip, but between the two of us we were able to hold him in place. Nezza was right; he’d probably neglected his strength for Intelligence, or maybe the secondary attributes from his other class.

A few minutes later, he stopped breathing, and Nezza stepped back.

I caught the man, letting him slump to the ground, before realizing that I hadn’t gotten a notification.

“Is he?”

Nezza blinked, shifting slightly. “I didn’t think…” Her voice was a low hiss. “I pulled back after he knocked out.”

“Shit.” I rose up, pulling a spare dagger out from under my belt. Life wasn’t like a movie, where he’d stay unconscious for the rest of the night.

I lifted up the dagger, then hesitated.

I didn’t know why.

I’d already resigned myself to this life. Shit, I’d already killed a bunch of people for all sorts of reasons.

Well, as I bit my lip, I realized those reasons were that they were assassins, or rapists, or just utter bastards who would turn a woman and a child out on the streets because it was more convenient.

And I’d been so angry, way back then.

It was much harder when it was just some guy on the floor, a normal person who probably didn’t abuse street rats or run crime rings.

And the justifications I’d been telling myself ran a bit thin.

“Aly?”

“Fuck me.” I hissed. “Get the rope, we’re tying him up.”

I snatched a wadded up ball of fabric, a tunic by the looks of it, and shoved it into the man’s mouth. Nezza got his arms and legs bound just as he started to stir.

I leaned over the man as he jerked away, holding a knife in front of his face. “If you give me a reason to, I will kill you. Got it?”

The man looked up at me groggily, fear clear in his eyes.

“Got it?” I hissed.

He nodded.

I rolled him so that he was facing the wall, quickly tying the gag so it wouldn’t just fall out. Nezza jumped into my hand as I made for the stairs.

“Alex.”

“It’s different, okay?” I shook my head. “I don’t know how it’s different, but it’s different.”

It didn’t make sense even in my head. Hell, I knew I wasn’t a good person. I might have pretended to have some kind of moral fiber when I was a prince, but I’d knuckled under pretty quick when my back was against the wall.

Now I was flip flopping.

I shook my head again.

“I get it.”

I paused at the top of the stairs.

“Arto and Grek, they were…they were fucking assholes!”

I blinked at the venom in her voice. “Uh…” Would this be a bad time to say I hadn’t even remembered their names. Like, fuck, how hippocritical could I get.

“They made me do every shitty job they could just for a bit of extra copper. Honestly, they deserved everything they got, and if you hadn’t fought to kill right away, you probably would have died.”

I rubbed the back of my head. “Yeah, back then…” Stats meant a lot, but a knife to the throat meant a lot more. This wasn’t like one of those games where your body took the same amount of damage no matter where you were hit after all. “Still.”

“Look, I’m saying that you don’t have to explain it to me.” Nezza sighed in my head. “I…didn’t want to kill some old guy either.”

I swallowed, saying nothing as I levered the door open.

The first floor was dark.

“If you don’t want to, I can handle the Magistrate.”

I glared into the darkness. “I’m not a baby. Fuck, I’ve killed people before.”

“It’s different.”

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment.

It was, I realized, because it was different. I could go down a list of the five people I’d killed in this life. And while they weren’t all good reasons, they all basically boiled down to ‘These people are assholes, fuck them.’

I mean, really, who was gonna cry about some minor gang boss.

I guess it meant that I couldn’t be so blasé when it was a person who was just trying to live their life.

Which made this a real bad time for me to realize that I’d never confirmed who Magistrate Scionus was working for.

“Oh fuck me dry.”

It really was so much easier to say ‘I’ll just kill him’ when I was sitting in an empty room half the city away.

I turned, catching sight of a second, more grand set of stairs going up to the second floor. Scionus’ office was probably up there.

“Aly?”

I quirked my lip.

Well, if I wasn’t just going to go full murderhobo, I certainly picked the perfect time for it.

“I’ve got a plan.” I told Nezza. “We’re gonna do something really stupid.”

“Don’t we always?”