Oh.
…
Oh.
That certainly clears up a lot. Huh. That’s also possibly why Jervin was giving me such a weird look. He probably realized I was being framed, or at the very least had a sneaking suspicion that was the case.
The shock and confusion must’ve been evident on my face as the guard captain just frowned and leaned back in his seat.
I looked down at the table where the remains of my wooden hand rested as I ran the information through my head. This wasn’t a good situation to be in. Their hostility makes a lot more sense given the situation, I was really curious as to who would be trying to impersonate me, and what do they get out of trying to impersonate me. I’m a nobody as far as anyone besides Illesea is concerned.
The only person that comes to mind is Raylith doing something to get me in trouble, but there’s no possible way he knew I was heading to Verdanst from Elendar. So it realistically couldn’t have been him, unless he had access to way more power than I was assuming. Which honestly wouldn’t be impossible since I didn’t really understand the reach he might have as the head of the personal royal guard for a princess of Seltas. They are a small country, but a powerful one. The Spell-blades give them a lot of leeway that they wouldn’t normally have, they were the personal party members of the queen during her adventures that she gathered. So it made sense how strong they were.
Who knew what kind of stuff they had hidden away, the real question is if the queen would support his actions. From what little I’d seen and heard of her, the answer to that was a resounding no. If she had a problem with me, it would be blatant and apparent. She wouldn’t hide it and use subterfuge like what’s happening now.
I shook my head trying to focus on the here and now. I could speculate later once I was no longer under suspicion. If I could get to that point.
I raised my head and looked at the captain’s unwavering gaze. He seemed to be trying to scrutinize me and somehow pull out what I knew from my brain by staring at me. Hell, there was probably a way to do that already and I just didn’t know about it. I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s also not something I was particularly happy to think about.
If there was one thing I was terrified of, it was having my mind read or controlled. Being a passenger in my own body scared me to an unnatural degree. Not like it’d ever happened to me before on Earth considering it wasn’t possible. But whenever I read about it in books and stuff, specifically superhero stuff, it made me extremely anxious and uncomfortable. Hell, I was getting anxious just thinking about it.
Not cool stuff.
“My name is Alexander King. And I’m being framed. A week ago I was in Elendar when a contingent of Alixian soldiers attacked the capital. I participated in the defense effort to repel them, soon after we managed to repel them we were attacked by The Harbinger before it was repelled by the Queen herself. After which I participated in the celebrations for roughly a week before making my way here which took me around three days to make the trip. So it’s not possible I was the one to attack the city.”
The captain's face remained impassive as I talked about where I was and what I was doing. I went into explicit detail on how long I spent at each place and even mentioned my staying at Mila’s Bath and Board in Lustirne. His frown deepened the longer I talked to him. The guard's face behind him shifted slightly from being impassive to being annoyed, presumably thinking I was lying or something else. Not that I particularly blamed him, but it still stung a little bit to realize my explanation wasn’t going over so well.
It also didn’t bode well for my chances of leaving this prison tonight.
Our next few sentences would probably decide my life for the foreseeable future. That thought left me feeling extremely anxious. If they decided to press forward with pinning the blame on me, there would be quite literally nothing I could do at this point. My chance to escape came and went at the gate.
Fuck I should’ve just bailed back then without considering the situation. Although I’m not sure I would’ve been able to outrun anybody they sent after me, it would’ve been the best chance I’d have at least at surviving the ordeal. Rather than being chained to a table hoping that they won’t execute me for something I didn’t do.
“I’ve heard that elves can change their level, is that true?” The captain asked, matining his monotonous tone.
“Not entirely. I can hide it from view. Like so.” I focused on trying to hide my level, the runes coating the walls flashed preventing me from once again doing anything that was considered a skill. I frowned.
“Huh… I guess I can’t show you. What it should do is make my level show up as question marks, if there’s a way to change it beyond just leveling up I haven’t discovered it yet. I’m more inclined to believe it just doesn’t exist given that I’ve never seen anyone do it before regardless.”
“Are elves just naturally more powerful than other races? As a tier two would you be able to kill someone like me for example?”
“Yes, to the former. No, to the latter. As an elf, it seems my baseline is much higher than say, humans. Thus I’d be stronger than a human while at a lower level. That’s not enough for me to close the gap between the three tiers. The best I’ve done is fought a group of tier two’s with one tier three. And I barely came out of that alive. They also weren’t really built for combat entirely either. The tier three kind of was, but she didn’t feel as strong as some other tier three’s I’ve met and traveled with.”
He nodded slowly as I answered his questions. He posed a few more to me that were of little consequence, such as how long had I been in Seltas. How long was I planning on staying in Alixia? He asked if I knew anything about someone matching my description causing issues at the border.
Well, shit apparently they did have a way to get that info to the cities. And of course, I run into the one person who cares.
“Is that relevant?” I asked, trying to deflect from the situation.
He just let out a sigh, “Not really, but I think I got the answer to that question regardless.”
I chose not to respond to that, not like there was much I could say.
We sat there for a few moments before he stood up.
“I will verify your claims. In the meantime, you’re going to have to stay here. You’re going to have to lose the prosthetic and the pouch you’ve hidden in your arm is going to have to be confiscated in the meantime. We’ll have to decide what to do with you after we figure everything out. In the meantime, you’ll be in our custody.”
I frowned, I guess it made sense. It also completely fucked up my plans. Well, not much I could do about that currently.
With absolute precision once again the woman behind me moved and her blade came up and through the wood, perfectly severing it from my shoulder without injuring it. I flinched long after she had finished and sheathed her sword. She was moving faster than I could currently perceive. I glanced behind me.
[Level 15⁵]
Fair enough. I didn’t think a tier four had that kind of speed, but a tier five makes more sense. A lot of tier-fives in the guard industry here it seemed. Although I hadn’t really looked into the guard situation in Elendar, so it could’ve been similar. It seemed like this group was at the upper end of the spectrum as well. I highly doubt they had people like this in spades, otherwise, there’d be no point in having tier-three guardsmen in the first place.
The captain grabbed the arm observing it for a moment, before giving me one final look and scrutinizing my appearance as I just glared at him. If he saw what he was looking for he didn’t say so as he left.
The guard that had led me here came in shortly after they left. He hesitated slightly seeing the smashed remains of my arm on the table before removing the remaining bit of chain on my remaining arm.
“Come on, let’s go.” He grabbed me by the arm, not nearly as roughly as when he had been when he brought me back here. I hissed slightly again as my wounds were aggravated on my standing up. The guard gave me a moment to recover before leading me out of the room and taking me back to the cell I had been in and pushing me inside. He locked the door behind him and this time left without any expletives aimed at me.
I slowly sat myself on the bit of hay left in the room to serve as a ‘bed’. It also seemed like they had removed the previous bucket or at least emptied this one out. The smell still lingered, however, leaving me feeling slightly sick to my stomach still. I leaned against the wall just looking at the ceiling trying to piece together the information in my head.
I almost didn’t notice when someone came by to bring me some food. I looked at it and it looked extremely appetizing. I tried to eat a few bites of it, but wasn’t able to stomach the rest so I just drank the water and then left the rest of it by the door.
I was completely fucked.
***
I woke up the next day, not even realizing I had fallen asleep. I looked around blearily blinking my eyes, trying to clear my vision and trying to remember where I was before everything came rushing back to my mind.
Right. Prison cell.
I heard someone jingling around with a key in the door before it popped open. A different guard opened the door.
“Come on, prisoner. You’re being moved.” He grunted at me.
I stared at him for a moment, my brain still trying to wake up and process language.
He quickly got annoyed with me, “Are you dumb or deaf? I said let’s move you stupid bastard!”
He walked over and grabbed me by my good arm, yanking me to my feet roughly before pushing me towards the door. Once we got just outside the door a couple of other guards were there and stopped me from going much further.
“Stop. Turn around and place your hand behind your back.” One of the guards said.
I didn’t argue, way too tired and fed up to really care about what they wanted to do at this point.
They slapped a metal collar around my neck with a chain leading down the back that was attached to my one arm holding it behind my back. There was a loose chain for my other arm that they just left since there was nothing to attach it to.
They quickly pushed me out of the building where there was a prisoner carriage. You know the one that is basically just a giant metal cage with wheels. There were several other people already on the inside. They led me up to the back and helped me climb up the back before pushing me inside and closing the door behind me.
My mind was finally catching up with what was happening as the carriage started moving.
This can’t be good, I thought the captain said I was going to be in his custody. So why are they moving me then? Surely they’d want me on hand in case I was lying about something in which case they don’t potentially have a high tier walking around unchecked.
So why were they moving me? Something wasn’t adding up here.
The carriage left the city before rounding around the side of it to the west, we were currently on the east. So it took them quite a while to make the trip around the side.
On the west side of the city off in the distance, probably about 10 miles away was a large gorge that Verdanst mined for one of its more profitable exports. Salt. Once we started approaching that gorge, the pieces started clicking in my mind.
Ah. Slave labor. They’re going to make us work the mines for them. They probably ship prisoners from all over the country here. Why would they be putting me here though? It doesn’t make sense that they’d potentially let a high tier just walk in here. I guess it might make more sense once we actually get there.
***
It took us several hours to eventually make it all the way to the slave camp. We pulled up to a large wooden gate that blocked off the entrance to the gorge, the entire thing was covered by a twenty-foot tall wooden wall that went all the way around as far as I could see.
It was an absolutely massive operation as well. There had to be thousands of prisoners here all working. There were just as many guards by appearance as well. Or at least close to a similar number, which made sense. Even if they weren’t armed they couldn’t possibly manage all the different skills of all the different prisoners here, and those runes probably only worked in enclosed areas or were prohibitively expensive to make. I had noticed there weren’t any runes on my chains so I had managed to heal my wounds up so I was no longer in pain during the trip here.
The gate was opened up and we were waved through by the guards manning the walls. It was double-gated apparently. There was an outer gate and an inner gate creating an airlock. They closed the outer gate before opening the inner gate which allowed us to proceed on into the facility proper.
We were pulled into a staging area where the carriage finally came to a stop. A platoon of soldiers came up to us and the one leading the procession opened the back of the carriage before yelling at us.
“Alright, out of the carriage maggots, the free ride is over! Get out there and line up in a line. I want to see what I’m dealing with for shit stains today!”
I suppressed a sigh. This was going to get old very quickly.
Oh.
…
Oh.
That certainly clears up a lot. Huh. That’s also possibly why Jervin was giving me such a weird look. He probably realized I was being framed, or at the very least had a sneaking suspicion that was the case.
The shock and confusion must’ve been evident on my face as the guard captain just frowned and leaned back in his seat.
I looked down at the table where the remains of my wooden hand rested as I ran the information through my head. This wasn’t a good situation to be in. Their hostility makes a lot more sense given the situation, I was really curious as to who would be trying to impersonate me, and what do they get out of trying to impersonate me. I’m a nobody as far as anyone besides Illesea is concerned.
The only person that comes to mind is Raylith doing something to get me in trouble, but there’s no possible way he knew I was heading to Verdanst from Elendar. So it realistically couldn’t have been him, unless he had access to way more power than I was assuming. Which honestly wouldn’t be impossible since I didn’t really understand the reach he might have as the head of the personal royal guard for a princess of Seltas. They are a small country, but a powerful one. The Spell-blades give them a lot of leeway that they wouldn’t normally have, they were the personal party members of the queen during her adventures that she gathered. So it made sense how strong they were.
Who knew what kind of stuff they had hidden away, the real question is if the queen would support his actions. From what little I’d seen and heard of her, the answer to that was a resounding no. If she had a problem with me, it would be blatant and apparent. She wouldn’t hide it and use subterfuge like what’s happening now.
I shook my head trying to focus on the here and now. I could speculate later once I was no longer under suspicion. If I could get to that point.
I raised my head and looked at the captain’s unwavering gaze. He seemed to be trying to scrutinize me and somehow pull out what I knew from my brain by staring at me. Hell, there was probably a way to do that already and I just didn’t know about it. I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s also not something I was particularly happy to think about.
If there was one thing I was terrified of, it was having my mind read or controlled. Being a passenger in my own body scared me to an unnatural degree. Not like it’d ever happened to me before on Earth considering it wasn’t possible. But whenever I read about it in books and stuff, specifically superhero stuff, it made me extremely anxious and uncomfortable. Hell, I was getting anxious just thinking about it.
Not cool stuff.
“My name is Alexander King. And I’m being framed. A week ago I was in Elendar when a contingent of Alixian soldiers attacked the capital. I participated in the defense effort to repel them, soon after we managed to repel them we were attacked by The Harbinger before it was repelled by the Queen herself. After which I participated in the celebrations for roughly a week before making my way here which took me around three days to make the trip. So it’s not possible I was the one to attack the city.”
The captain's face remained impassive as I talked about where I was and what I was doing. I went into explicit detail on how long I spent at each place and even mentioned my staying at Mila’s Bath and Board in Lustirne. His frown deepened the longer I talked to him. The guard's face behind him shifted slightly from being impassive to being annoyed, presumably thinking I was lying or something else. Not that I particularly blamed him, but it still stung a little bit to realize my explanation wasn’t going over so well.
It also didn’t bode well for my chances of leaving this prison tonight.
Our next few sentences would probably decide my life for the foreseeable future. That thought left me feeling extremely anxious. If they decided to press forward with pinning the blame on me, there would be quite literally nothing I could do at this point. My chance to escape came and went at the gate.
Fuck I should’ve just bailed back then without considering the situation. Although I’m not sure I would’ve been able to outrun anybody they sent after me, it would’ve been the best chance I’d have at least at surviving the ordeal. Rather than being chained to a table hoping that they won’t execute me for something I didn’t do.
“I’ve heard that elves can change their level, is that true?” The captain asked, matining his monotonous tone.
“Not entirely. I can hide it from view. Like so.” I focused on trying to hide my level, the runes coating the walls flashed preventing me from once again doing anything that was considered a skill. I frowned.
“Huh… I guess I can’t show you. What it should do is make my level show up as question marks, if there’s a way to change it beyond just leveling up I haven’t discovered it yet. I’m more inclined to believe it just doesn’t exist given that I’ve never seen anyone do it before regardless.”
“Are elves just naturally more powerful than other races? As a tier two would you be able to kill someone like me for example?”
“Yes, to the former. No, to the latter. As an elf, it seems my baseline is much higher than say, humans. Thus I’d be stronger than a human while at a lower level. That’s not enough for me to close the gap between the three tiers. The best I’ve done is fought a group of tier two’s with one tier three. And I barely came out of that alive. They also weren’t really built for combat entirely either. The tier three kind of was, but she didn’t feel as strong as some other tier three’s I’ve met and traveled with.”
He nodded slowly as I answered his questions. He posed a few more to me that were of little consequence, such as how long had I been in Seltas. How long was I planning on staying in Alixia? He asked if I knew anything about someone matching my description causing issues at the border.
Well, shit apparently they did have a way to get that info to the cities. And of course, I run into the one person who cares.
“Is that relevant?” I asked, trying to deflect from the situation.
He just let out a sigh, “Not really, but I think I got the answer to that question regardless.”
I chose not to respond to that, not like there was much I could say.
We sat there for a few moments before he stood up.
“I will verify your claims. In the meantime, you’re going to have to stay here. You’re going to have to lose the prosthetic and the pouch you’ve hidden in your arm is going to have to be confiscated in the meantime. We’ll have to decide what to do with you after we figure everything out. In the meantime, you’ll be in our custody.”
I frowned, I guess it made sense. It also completely fucked up my plans. Well, not much I could do about that currently.
With absolute precision once again the woman behind me moved and her blade came up and through the wood, perfectly severing it from my shoulder without injuring it. I flinched long after she had finished and sheathed her sword. She was moving faster than I could currently perceive. I glanced behind me.
[Level 15⁵]
Fair enough. I didn’t think a tier four had that kind of speed, but a tier five makes more sense. A lot of tier-fives in the guard industry here it seemed. Although I hadn’t really looked into the guard situation in Elendar, so it could’ve been similar. It seemed like this group was at the upper end of the spectrum as well. I highly doubt they had people like this in spades, otherwise, there’d be no point in having tier-three guardsmen in the first place.
The captain grabbed the arm observing it for a moment, before giving me one final look and scrutinizing my appearance as I just glared at him. If he saw what he was looking for he didn’t say so as he left.
The guard that had led me here came in shortly after they left. He hesitated slightly seeing the smashed remains of my arm on the table before removing the remaining bit of chain on my remaining arm.
“Come on, let’s go.” He grabbed me by the arm, not nearly as roughly as when he had been when he brought me back here. I hissed slightly again as my wounds were aggravated on my standing up. The guard gave me a moment to recover before leading me out of the room and taking me back to the cell I had been in and pushing me inside. He locked the door behind him and this time left without any expletives aimed at me.
I slowly sat myself on the bit of hay left in the room to serve as a ‘bed’. It also seemed like they had removed the previous bucket or at least emptied this one out. The smell still lingered, however, leaving me feeling slightly sick to my stomach still. I leaned against the wall just looking at the ceiling trying to piece together the information in my head.
I almost didn’t notice when someone came by to bring me some food. I looked at it and it looked extremely appetizing. I tried to eat a few bites of it, but wasn’t able to stomach the rest so I just drank the water and then left the rest of it by the door.
I was completely fucked.
***
I woke up the next day, not even realizing I had fallen asleep. I looked around blearily blinking my eyes, trying to clear my vision and trying to remember where I was before everything came rushing back to my mind.
Right. Prison cell.
I heard someone jingling around with a key in the door before it popped open. A different guard opened the door.
“Come on, prisoner. You’re being moved.” He grunted at me.
I stared at him for a moment, my brain still trying to wake up and process language.
He quickly got annoyed with me, “Are you dumb or deaf? I said let’s move you stupid bastard!”
He walked over and grabbed me by my good arm, yanking me to my feet roughly before pushing me towards the door. Once we got just outside the door a couple of other guards were there and stopped me from going much further.
“Stop. Turn around and place your hand behind your back.” One of the guards said.
I didn’t argue, way too tired and fed up to really care about what they wanted to do at this point.
They slapped a metal collar around my neck with a chain leading down the back that was attached to my one arm holding it behind my back. There was a loose chain for my other arm that they just left since there was nothing to attach it to.
They quickly pushed me out of the building where there was a prisoner carriage. You know the one that is basically just a giant metal cage with wheels. There were several other people already on the inside. They led me up to the back and helped me climb up the back before pushing me inside and closing the door behind me.
My mind was finally catching up with what was happening as the carriage started moving.
This can’t be good, I thought the captain said I was going to be in his custody. So why are they moving me then? Surely they’d want me on hand in case I was lying about something in which case they don’t potentially have a high tier walking around unchecked.
So why were they moving me? Something wasn’t adding up here.
The carriage left the city before rounding around the side of it to the west, we were currently on the east. So it took them quite a while to make the trip around the side.
On the west side of the city off in the distance, probably about 10 miles away was a large gorge that Verdanst mined for one of its more profitable exports. Salt. Once we started approaching that gorge, the pieces started clicking in my mind.
Ah. Slave labor. They’re going to make us work the mines for them. They probably ship prisoners from all over the country here. Why would they be putting me here though? It doesn’t make sense that they’d potentially let a high tier just walk in here. I guess it might make more sense once we actually get there.
***
It took us several hours to eventually make it all the way to the slave camp. We pulled up to a large wooden gate that blocked off the entrance to the gorge, the entire thing was covered by a twenty-foot tall wooden wall that went all the way around as far as I could see.
It was an absolutely massive operation as well. There had to be thousands of prisoners here all working. There were just as many guards by appearance as well. Or at least close to a similar number, which made sense. Even if they weren’t armed they couldn’t possibly manage all the different skills of all the different prisoners here, and those runes probably only worked in enclosed areas or were prohibitively expensive to make. I had noticed there weren’t any runes on my chains so I had managed to heal my wounds up so I was no longer in pain during the trip here.
The gate was opened up and we were waved through by the guards manning the walls. It was double-gated apparently. There was an outer gate and an inner gate creating an airlock. They closed the outer gate before opening the inner gate which allowed us to proceed on into the facility proper.
We were pulled into a staging area where the carriage finally came to a stop. A platoon of soldiers came up to us and the one leading the procession opened the back of the carriage before yelling at us.
“Alright, out of the carriage maggots, the free ride is over! Get out there and line up in a line. I want to see what I’m dealing with for shit stains today!”
I suppressed a sigh. This was going to get old very quickly.
