City of Fallen Souls: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 3) by Jez Cajiao (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

in place as she gazed into my eyes. “I’ll never leave you,” she whispered, and I blinked away hot tears that I hadn’t realized were there. “I’ll  leave you,” she repeated. “But you need to ask yourself if you’re truly who you want to be right now. Jax, the man I first met, would have saved her. He’d have been angry, but he’d have done it.” She gestured down at the unconscious Alkyon that was bleeding out on the floor.

“I…”

“The man I first met would have saved her. The man you became when you freed Amon into your soul might not, but you need to decide who you want to be. You need to pick if you’re going to be who you were, or who you are, or if you are going to continue to try to be more.”

I replayed the things I’d done since coming to this realm through my mind at speed, comparing them to who I’d been before. I saw the change, the darkness and the fury. It had been set free when Oracle had enhanced our emotions accidentally, but it hadn’t been created by her.

It was me.

It had always been me. I’d always struggled with my temper, with the need to give someone just one more punch, one more kick. To leave them an injury that would last, to remind them of their place.

I’d killed in dreams, and god knew I’d left enough people in the hospital back on Earth that I’d never bothered to check on, but my guiding ethos had always been that Tommy and I were making the world a better place.

We’d fed a dealer a pound of his own badly cut shit after he’d fucked up a friend of ours with it, because he was scum and needed to learn about customer care. We’d fucked up people who started trouble in bars, and those who’d tried to steal cars. We’d beaten a guy half to death for mugging a little old lady, and then we’d sat there feeling really awkward and desperately wanting to get away when we’d taken her purse back to her. She’d made us come into her house to have cake that was stale as cardboard and drink tea that had no flavor, because she had nothing, but she’d still wanted to show how thankful she was to ‘such nice boys’.

We’d hated the belief we’d seen in her eyes that we were a pair of ‘nice boys,’ hated that it made us want to be, for her, for just a minute. Then we’d gone out and we’d made it clear to people that she was to be fucking well looked after.

We’d taken her milk and sugar, dropped off cakes, and made sure people cut her grass and fixed her door.

We’d done it because it was the right thing to do. Not because it was easy, but because it was needed, no matter how uncomfortable. We listened to her stories, ignored it when she called us by different names. We forgave her when she didn’t know who we were, or when she was afraid of us, because her mind was going. We told her that her grandsons had asked us to drop the food off, and those days when she invited us in, we sat there, in chairs too small, while her half-blind smelly old cat rubbed against us, or clawed the shit out of our hands. We were there when nobody else was.

We did it because it was right.

I did it because it was right.

I took a deep breath and turned back to the Alkyon sprawled on the floor, and I knelt, the knee of my shiny, new, and probably insanely expensive Drow Gloom Spidersilk pants resting in their blood as I started to channel.

I used almost all of my mana, with Amaat silently straightening the wings and limbs as I went. The hollow popping sounds, as bones realigned and healed, echoed around the room as we worked.

When it was done, I slowly stood up, exhaustion filling me along with a mana migraine pounding behind my eyes. Shame in what I’d almost done was warring with the fury and belief that they’d started it and deserved to die. I sought out Bane, finding him across from the now-stirring Alkyon and the imp’s body. I growled out an order, walking away to sit in the corner, separate from the others.

“Question them.”

Chapter Six

I sat in the darkness of the abandoned weaver’s building, barely registering the occasional scream ringing out from the imp as Bane questioned him. I heard nothing from the Alkyon, but I didn’t care. I’d done what I had to, and now Bane was doing what I needed him to do.

“It’s a bit wrong…” I whispered to Oracle as she sat on my knee, looking up at me.

“What is?” she asked. I shrugged, gesturing to the other room where Bane worked.

“I saved its life, and now he’s going to torture it for information.”

“Her life,” she corrected me.

“Really?” I frowned, and she nodded. “Weird; no tits makes it a lot harder to tell, you know?” I said. She laughed at me, shifting to show hers off better.

“Well, trust me, she’s a she. And as to what Bane’s doing… well. If they tell him the truth, then they’ll be okay. You didn’t tell him to kill them after he finished. That would have been a bit… yeah.” She shrugged. “But you healed her up when you could have let her die. Now she’s going to have a choice, to speak the truth or not, but that’s her decision to make. You made the right one for your situation.”

“Well, it still feels fucking weird,” I muttered, leaning my head back against the brickwork and closing my eyes. I drew in a deep breath and shifted, feeling Oracle take flight and relocate to my shoulder instead, as she understood what I needed to do.

I tried to meditate again, despite being crap at it. I needed the increased mana regeneration that