Broken System Ch. 78-79 (Patreon)

Thank you to everyone who got a copy. As I mentioned in my note yesterday, the first book of Broken System had a very successful launch, and that was thanks to you! I really appreciate it!

As a consequence, I will probably be increasing the pace of these chapters to 3 or 4 a week until the end of book 3 because the publisher wants to launch book 2 sooner rather than later, but I want to make sure my patrons (and my wider audience) stay ahead of all that. 

Ch. 78 -  The Lions Den

The hour had grown late when they finally decided to go forward with the plan. When they talked about it, they almost delayed their plan to the following night but decided against it. After all, there wasn’t just the risk that they’d be caught when they acted. There was also the risk that they’d be caught if they waited, too.

The wine cellars were not a heavily trafficked place, but it was easy to hear all the boots moving on the floors above them, and it was clear to Benjamin that they had stirred up a real firestorm. Guards and other servants had come upon them each time while they worked to leach the poison from the dried tobacco into the brandy, and each time Benjamin had been able to talk his way out of the situation, thanks to his root access, but eventually that wouldn’t work.

Eventually one of the mages would come down here, and they'd have a real fight on their hands in the narrow confines of the basement. It was not a place where Benjamin would like to do battle; he’d already been shredded once by broken glass and couldn’t imagine that wine would add anything positive to that experience. Besides, every day they waited would probably make whatever was going to happen next worse as the Summoner Lords became more prepared. So, in one sense, it really was now or never.

With their freshly obtained uniforms and their crates of adulterated wine, Benjamin and his friends walked up the stairs and pretended like they were anyone else. They acted like they belonged, and no one treated them any differently.

There were many black-eyed warriors girded for war. That much was true. They were all facing the wrong direction, though. They stood on the ramparts and at the gates, preparing for someone from the outside to attack, and they paid absolutely no attention to a few slaves carrying another load of alcohol to whatever festivities raged above.

As they got closer, it became apparent that there was no party on tonight’s agenda. On any other night they would have already been able to hear the dull, roar of conversation beneath the music of the band, tonight the whole of the keep was shrouded in a tense silence.

When they reached the antechamber where the servants had everything staged, all the other refreshments, they deposited their crates on the top of the pile. They could leave now. Benjamin knew they could. They’d even discussed it in the wine cellar.

It would dramatically reduce the danger to the four of them but at the cost of dramatically increasing it for every other slave in the city. Benjamin knew full well that every person with a system had a self-destruct button and that once mages started falling over or vomiting, there was every chance that someone would press that button and kill hundreds or thousands of people in the process.

Benjamin couldn’t let that happen. Instead, he picked up a cloth and draped it over his arm, then he uncorked one of their poisoned bottles and walked into the lion's den with his heart in his throat.

No one even looked up as he did so. On any other night, he would have been invisible because the marble ballroom on the third floor would have been overflowing with revelers. Tonight though, it was a somber war council, and most of the men and women who were present crowded around a glowing map in the center of the room while someone lectured the assembled group about additional attacks.

“Plantations 204, 175, and 113 were hit last night, too,” an older man said obsequiously. “They’re coming faster, and from all directions.”

“And yet you still cannot tell me who’s doing this?” a younger man said.

While pretending to be a servant, Benjamin didn’t dare look up at the young speaker directly. However from his position on the gaudy throne that loomed above the milling crowd with a furious expression it was easy enough to see two things. He was definitely the leader here, and he was also the sort of man that really had no business leading. “All your hunters and all your spies and not one of them has given us a lead Lord Brannan? Hmmmm. Perhaps you want to join Lady Thraxsis in purgatory for a few days to think over the error of your ways?”

“N-not at all, Sire,” the older man said with a wavering voice. “You know that we still do not control the skies above the grass sea. We’ve had reports of bands and armies moving through it from a distance, but each time we get close, the Throne’s servants strike them down and—”

“Silence!” The Prince commanded, still seething. “I refuse to accept that a servant of the court could bring me such poor results. How is it that you are being outclassed by both a dead woman and a captive from Plantation 124? Huh? How are you able to sniff out the faintest whiff of treason in the heart of the empire, but out here in the hinterlands, you are completely useless?”

It was clear that whoever it was the Prince was belittling was an important man who was not used to being treated this way. Even hard men could be cowed at the threat of their deaths, and with several bodies already lying near the foot of the throne, it was easy to see that it was not a hollow threat.

Benjamin didn’t stare, of course, but he found it impossible not to occasionally glance at the mangled corpses and the slowly spreading pool of blood. He wondered if Margerot was among them. The Prince’s words seemed to imply that she was, but it was impossible to say for sure. In fact, given the state of the bodies, it was impossible to say if there were three corpses or five there.

He moved from empty glass to empty glass, pouring as he went; while the verbal beating continued, the map was updated to show the effect that their little guerilla war was having on the region. He only got a third of the way around the group before he had to return to the anteroom for a fresh bottle, so he missed out on parts of the conversation, but he was standing blank-eyed against the wall, waiting for someone to signal that they needed more to drink when the Prince finally summoned a creature.

So far, they’d seen and fought against many terrifying things. Fungal soul-stealing jellyfish and clouds of bone had topped the charts, and Benjamin had perhaps wrongly assumed that such things were the worst that the Rulvinarian summoners could do. He was wrong.

As he watched, a creature slithered into existence partway between a fantasy dragon and a moray eel. With its glittering scales, it was almost beautiful. At least, until it darted forward with blinding speed and wrapped around the man that had so displeased his ruler.

In a flash, the thing wrapped around the struggling gray-haired man, and everyone else stepped back so as not to get caught up in the melee. Then, like some kind of flying anaconda, it brought its catch back to its summoner. The room had been quiet before, but except for the gasps of the man who was about to meet a grisly fate and the grinding of scales against scales, the room was utterly silent.

While the doomed Rhulvinarian floated there, the Prince reached forward from his throne and plucked the soul amulet from his neck. “How many times have you died in your long life, Claudio? How many times has the grace of his majesty brought you back from death’s door?”

“E-eight times your Prince Agardian,” the man gasped.

The thing burst into green flames in the Prince’s hand, and he dropped the amulet to the ground, where it smoldered. For a moment, everyone waited, and Benjamin was sure that the eel-dragon was going to crush him into paste. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, with a gesture, he was dropped onto the pile of bodies unharmed.

“How very generous of my father,” the Prince mused. “You will find I am not so generous. Our King is sending me not one but two armies, and if you have not given me answers on where to deploy them, then you will not live long enough to replace your phylactery so that you might one day know the pleasure of being resurrected for the ninth time. Is that understood?”

“Y-yes, your grace,” Claudio said as he rose shakily to his feet. He bowed, still spattered with blood, and fled the room in disgrace and fear as soon as the Prince dismissed him.

Benjamin stared straight ahead as the conversation continued. At least until the Prince himself signaled Benjamin for more wine. He didn’t hesitate. Even though there was a small field of bodies between here and there, and the iridescent reptile still lay coiled around the throne, Benjamin walked over, one disinterested step at a time.

There was no avoiding the blood. Nor could he seek out his friends to make sure he had support. Still, he saw the messages flicker across his screen as he made his way to the throne and stepped over the twitching tail of the monster that lay there on the dais.

‘We got your back, Benji,’ Matt typed.

‘Just give the word,’ Emma sent.

‘Waiting in the Anteroom, just in case,’ Raja announced. That last part was comforting. The crate at the bottom of the stack held the group's weapons, should they need them. Currently, only Emma was armed because her knives were easy to conceal.

Part of Benjamin expected that he would die right there, even though the Prince wasn’t looking at him. However, that didn’t happen. Instead, he leaned over the man while he shouted orders at another of his underlings, while Benjamin poured the tainted wine into the glass. Even though his hands shook as he did so, he didn’t spill a drop. Then, sure that at any moment he’d be found out, he turned and started to walk away.

He might have gotten away clean, too, had not one of the men who had already drunk their poisoned wine started spewing blood and vomit all over the glowing map, disrupting the holographic image. The magic rebelled for only a few seconds, and the interrupted spell twisted itself into strange shapes as the man pitched through it. Then, it smoothly reformed above him like it had never happened. That, of course, caused a second and then a third man to topple over as all those who had been struggling to hold it together for the last few minutes began to give out at once.

Still, if he could just make it to the door, they might be able to hide from whatever was going to happen next.

“Stop!” The order rang out clear and cold in Prince Agardian’s voice, and for a moment, Benjamin wondered why it had applied to him as well as he suddenly found himself unable to disobey.

It occurred to him only belatedly that the command had applied to every sorcerer in the room as well.

So there is magic that can work even on the Rhulvinairan mind, he thought in surprise as he pulled up his system interface and began to pore through the log files looking for how the command had interacted with the system.

He could see the command that had come through, but there was no obvious record of how. For some reason, his own system was obscuring it. Benjamin struggled to find out the answer to that even as the Prince addressed him directly next. “You there - slave, what’s happening here?”

“Their wine has been poisoned,” Benjamin said simply. He didn’t even try to resist the compulsion. There wasn’t a point. This was much more powerful than the effects that Ethan or Lord Jarris had used on him. Instead, he struggled to find a way to shut down the effect and came up empty.

“Has it now?” the Prince asked. “How very droll. Finally, an old-fashioned bit of intrigue. Come here, and who put you up to this? Claudio? The Farrasins? Perhaps it was one of my younger brothers?”

As Benjamin turned, he didn’t see any fear on the face of the Prince. Even as more of his mages were vomiting or passing out, he seemed almost amused by the distraction. Immortality would have that effect, he supposed.

“No one told me to poison you,” Benjamin said with a smile. He knew that giving away the plan was the very worst thing he could do, but he couldn’t stop himself, so the least he could do was take a little joy in the act. “I wanted to watch you die slowly.”

Ch. 79 - Discovered

Benjamin expected a lot of terrible things in that moment. He was sure that the Prince would use awful magics to flense the skin from his bones. When that didn’t happen, he thought surely the man’s fifty-foot-long guard dog would fly over and rip him to pieces instead.

It was only after neither of those occurred that he realized that Prince Agardian could just flick whatever killswitch existed inside everyone’s system at his leisure. He didn’t seem to be in any rush to do that either. Instead, the Prince laughed, long and loud, at how quickly the tables had turned.

That was when Benjamin realized he wasn’t a threat to a man like this. He was a growling puppy that thought he was fierce, or at worst, a bumbling minion working for some actual threat.

“You don’t know, do you? That seems unlikely, but it will make the game of discovering who’s really behind this that much more interesting, at least. I… Oh, I see…” The Prince said, leaning forward. Before he even spoke, Benjamin already knew what he was going to say. He could feel the man rummaging around in his very soul as he used some kind of super user access to explore his system.

“Well, whoever’s pulling your strings, my little assassin, it’s someone smart enough to close all of the primary boundaries but leave the secondary ones untouched. Hmmmmmm,” the Prince mused as he played with Benjamin. “Does that mean that they didn’t know about my little back door? Or does that mean that they did and seek to misdirect me?”

“I… Don’t know…” Benjamin said, struggling against the magic.

Even though it was fairly useless, the idea of having someone tinkering around inside his mind felt so alien that he wanted to scream at the violation. His answer was literally true, but the Prince could hardly be expected to understand that he himself was the mastermind of this whole plan.

“Why would you?” the man laughed, digging deeper and more painfully into Benjamin’s system as he went. He stood up from his throne and walked toward Benjamin. “You’re a walking automaton operating under the orders of your betters, and if there wasn’t liable to be some incriminating information tucked away in the system that powers your very soul, you would already be ashes. Tell me, slave, do you have any accomplices in this room with you tonight? Come on, point them out.”

“Yesss…” Benjamin said grudgingly as he turned around and pointed out Matt and Emma. He hated himself for doing it, but he didn’t have a choice. He was just grateful that Raja was still hiding safely out of the room.

“Only those two?” Prince Agardian asked, sounding disappointed. “I was hoping you might yet implicate one of my many fine Lords here with us.”

“Well, come forward then; let’s get a good look at you,” he said to Emma and Matt. “As for you, I... Oh, and a file labeled evidence? Well, isn’t that the most obvious trap ever?”

Benjamin suddenly had the absolute certainty that the mage was going to force him to open that file himself, and that’s exactly what happened seconds later as he felt the runes triggering the short circuit to his mana pool, causing his soul to ignite. For a moment, his system interface glitched, and his UI flickered as it felt like someone detonated a small bomb just behind his solar plexus.

Error warnings piled up then, but he couldn’t read them. He couldn’t even hear what the Prince was saying as he fell to his knees in front of the pompous young tyrant and struggled to breathe.

“Well, it’s an interesting code; I’ll give my assassin that,” the mage said. He was standing over Benjamin now and looking down on him with nothing but scorn. “If they wanted to actually create a self-destruct, they should have sent someone with a larger mana pool. Perhaps your accomplices will prove more durable.”

Benjamin lay there amidst the blood of his enemies as he struggled to breathe. He was down to just over half his life, and he wasn’t bleeding out, so he was fine, in the broadest sense, but something felt broken inside after that. For a moment, he worried that he’d worsened his soul scar, but when he checked his status sheet, he saw that hadn’t happened at least. However, before he could breathe a mental sigh of relief, he saw the message after that and despaired.

Soul Scar (major): -5 to all actions,-50% mana, No natural recovery of health or mana.

Soul Bleed (Major): -5 health/hr,  -10exp/hr.

Fuck. That was the only word that Benjamin could think past the pain. All this time he’d been hoping to heal the wound he already had, and this asshole managed to make it twice as bad.

Benjamin didn’t exactly expect to survive , of course, but that was definitely not the way he wanted to go out. It gave him horrible flashbacks to where he was this time last year. Even the hint of that helplessness was enough to stiffen his spine. He was absolutely not going back to that place again.

He still couldn’t move of course, but it was enough to make him consider his options. The evidence file he’d created wasn’t enough to kill him, but he supposed that if he were to turn his network back on, he could channel enough mana from everyone in the city to blow up everyone in this room.

It was a fine plan, but Benjamin wanted to live, so for the moment he ruled it out. Instead, while the Prince interrogated his friends, Benjamin focused on what he could do on his system.

He couldn’t say for sure what ports Prince Agardian had checked. There was some intentional blind spot built into the whole thing that seemed to prevent that. But he had seen the ranges he’d checked, and he could just shut all of them off. Probably.

In theory that would be enough to prevent any further orders from reaching him without a password, so he did it. He closed down every port except for the one that connected him to his friend’s via his party status spell, since it didn’t seem to be a threat. Then, even though he didn’t think the Prince had lifted his password anyway, Benjamin changed it. Even with all that, the old order to stay still continued to apply to him.

He wanted to scream in frustration, but he couldn’t move. All he could do was move numbers around and watch as the Prince mocked and belittled his friends. It wasn’t until the man casually groped Emma while he and Matt were frozen in place and said, “This one has more spirit. Out of the three of you, maybe I’ll allow her to live at least another night or two.”

From where Benjamin was laying he couldn’t see Matt, but he was sure that his friend was about to have an embolism. Benjamin could sympathize. He was about to do something totally stupid too.

A moment ago he thought that resetting his system again would be too risky given his reopened soul bleed. Now he didn’t care. He’d give himself a reboot however painful that might be, and if that didn’t fix the problem, well - if he survived he could still blow them all to kingdom fucking come.

That process was simple at least. For a brief moment there was darkness, followed by numbness and pain, and then a few seconds later Benjamin was back, shivering in pain as his body struggled with what he’d just done to it. It was a terrible experience to feel like your soul had turned off then on again, but not quite as bad as feeling someone else reach inside of you and look at whatever they wanted.

Not much had changed in the interim. The Prince was still standing only a foot away from him, but now he was dressing down Matt instead while the whole of his court still looked on; half of them were standing in place frozen, and the rest were on the floor sickened by the tainted wine.

“She’s your woman then, is she?” The Prince said in obvious amusement. “I’ll be sure to enjoy her that much more because of that. I do so love—”

He didn’t get the chance to finish that statement because Benjamin reached up and grabbed the man by his cloak and yanked him down hard. He still had a broken bottle in one hand, and even though he was sure that the whole world was about to explode into violence, he was pretty sure he could kill the Prince before his monstrous pet could stop him.

“Stop!” Prince Agardian screamed. “You can’t disobey me!”

The man didn’t shut up until his head bounced off the marble tiles, but Benjamin didn’t have to listen. No matter how much the prick tried to order him around, the Man’s words couldn’t do much to stop Benjamin without their magic.

Even as they fell into a tangle of limbs, and his opponent struggled to regain control, Benjamin drove the jagged glass into the neck of his attacker again and again. He was a damn blood mage. He was supposed to use runic magic to fight his enemies from a distance, but he was still a man, and he knew how to make someone bleed, and the Prince was in too much shock that this was happening to do much more than flail and bleed out.

That wasn’t enough to stop the Prince’s summon though. Everyone else in the room might be frozen, but in the last few bloody seconds the thing had risen from where it lay coiled around the throne, and was barreling down toward them. Benjamin could roll aside and use Prince Agardian’s dying body as a human shield of course, but that would put his friends in the line of fire.

Instead he dropped the broken bottle from slick fingers and used both hands to snap his enemies neck. He should have been worried about the way the horrifying dragon-thing was barreling down at him, or the way that the light in its mouth was getting brighter, but as Benjamin embraced death in that moment, his last thoughts were that he’d never killed someone like this before, and that he hoped never to have to again.

Then the dragon beast impacted them. Well, it should have. Even as it reached them. It was already fading into non-existence without its summoner to anchor it to this world. Instead of ripping his head off, the thing passed harmlessly through the three of them before vanishing completely.

“Are you okay Benji?” Matt asked. That was the first evidence that the Mage’s order had died with him.

“No,” Benjamin answered wearily. “But that can wait. We need to kill these mother fuckers.”

“Gladly,” Matt said, but Emma had already drawn her knives as was running toward her first opponent.

Everything happened at once after that, but Benjamin wasn’t really a part of any of it. Emma plunged a knife into the heart of the first summoner she found, Matt turned and ran after her, and Raja opened the side door and let loose with what was essentially a missile launcher, blowing apart half a dozen mages with a single shockwave spell before they even really knew what was happening. A moment ago they were all frozen as their prince died, and now they were under attack.

The other guards and servants started moving toward his friends, but that was a problem that he could handle. Before any of them could even draw their weapons, Benjamin drained another 9 life from his hit points and refilled his mana enough to cast data leak.

This time there was no attempt to hold back, or limit the scope. He let it broadcast and rebroadcast all over the city. “Rise up,” he murmured to himself. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

It was going to be a long night, but even if he didn’t make it, this would be enough, he decided. As the battle picked up intensity all around him. They’d snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and he could die happy.