Mila
Mila didn’t know how to react.
Hugging wasn’t something her grandfather ever did, not once in her memory, yet here he was hugging her, and it was weird, so, for a few seconds, she didn’t do anything.
Then she pushed him off. “No. No. No. You don’t get to hug me just because you felt bad and are happy I’m alive.”
She sent him another contract.
Terms:
You may not reveal any secrets about Li Mila to anyone for any reason
Punishment:
Silent Pain
Do you accept?
Yes/No
“Now accept that and go away. I need to talk to Diana.” Without thinking about how high up they actually were, Mila used Telekinesis to open the door to another room and the door in that room out onto the rooftop patio. Then she picked up her grandfather and sent him out both doors and off the top of the building, which was over 200 meters tall.
Only then realizing what she’d done, she flash stepped out to the patio and thankfully saw her grandfather teleporting himself from shadow to shadow created by the city lights and the surrounding buildings to get down instead of dying, the setting sun very helpful. Then she breathed out a sigh of relief.
* * *
Diana
A lot of different thoughts were going through Diana’s head as Mila walked back into the room. First, Mila’s family was really weird. Who threw someone off a building just for hugging them? Second, Mila being a succubus made a lot of sense. The status of the System didn’t include it for good reason, but if a charisma stat existed Mila would have a very high score, and it seemed to fit with her skillset of stealth, disguise, and contract magic. She probably even had a charm skill. Third and most important, however, given what Mila had said before her grandfather hugged her, everyone who had died a month before the integration were reborn as monsters, and Aalam would be included among those numbers.
“Is my brother still alive?”
“Yes.” Mila sat down where Mr. Li had been sitting. “And he’s on Earth as well. But he’s in a coma.”
Diana felt her heart rate increase, feeling both excitement and fear at the same time.
“It isn’t anything to worry about, though,” Mila assured her. “Your brother has a berserker uniqueness that puts him in a state where his Spirit increases by an entire rank which can last for months. When he exits the state, he then falls unconscious for a long time as well.
“This last time, he was in the state for over two months, and he’s only been unconscious for about 23 days, so he’ll likely stay unconscious for a while. We don’t have enough data to really make an estimate.”
Diana stood up. “I want to see him.”
“Alright.” Mila stood as well, summoning out a token of some kind from the subspace in the fingerless glove artifact she was wearing. “First, though, you shouldn’t be following someone just because they transformed to look like the woman who betrayed your little brother. Talk to Nana Xara first.”
“Okay.” Heart still racing, Diana nodded. Then she sent to the Yin Yang Sage, “Evil Ancestor, is this really Mila and is everything she’s said true?”
“Evil Ancestor?” The Yin Yang Sage sounded mock insulted, but Diana wasn’t in the mood to play around with her.
“You purposefully didn’t tell me my brother was alive. That seems kind of evil to me. Is what she’s saying true?”
“Yes.” The Yin Yang Sage sounded like she’d decided to take the matter seriously as well. “But there were rules in place by the System so I couldn’t tell you. How does that make me evil?”
“You could have hinted and led me to figure it out on my own.”
“But then you wouldn’t have trained as hard.”
“Okay, let’s change it. Selfish Evil Ancestor.”
Diana just ignored the Sage’s response and instead turned her attention toward Mila, “The evil ancestor confirmed it. Where is he.”
“Tasmania.” Mila took one step, disappeared completely from Diana’s senses, and almost instantly reappeared next to her. “We’ll be there in a second.”
Mila then hugged her and Diana felt spatial element magic surround them. Then the next thing Diana knew the two of them were standing on what looked to be a portable teleportation platform next to a large lake, the atmospheric mana levels very low, likely due to the teleportation platform.
What lake, she had no idea. Like most Americans, her knowledge of Australia’s internal geography wasn’t good, and that was even more so for the state of Tasmania. There were mountains rising up all around, with the highest one seemingly to the north, and that was the direction Mila started running.
Unable to keep up on foot, Diana gathered cold dark energy into her left palm. Then she emitted the energy and the elementalized mana formed into the shape of a twin-headed serpent made of solid darkness which she started riding through the air.
About twenty minutes later, they arrived at a large tent on the mountain, the beasts they’d seen along the way all keeping well clear despite how out in the open it was, high enough to be above the tree line, and there was a man sitting at the entrance.
The first thing Diana noticed about him was his size. He was about 6’9” and he was seemingly built out of solid muscle. Second, he obviously wasn’t human. Yes, he had the complexion and facial features of a Scandinavian, but his short hair was lavender and his eyes were reptilian with indigo irises. Finally third, he was definitely not her brother. For one, he was conscious, but, more importantly, he was holding a spear in a relaxed posture like he knew how to use it, and Diana couldn’t imagine her brother choosing any kind of melee combat class. It just wasn’t in his nature.
Diana unsummoned the yin spirit and fell a couple feet to the ground next to Mila.
“Isaiah, this is Diana.” Mila pointed to Diana. “And, Diana, this is Isaiah.” Mila was speaking in Universal Standard, which Diana could understand with her Omniglot Reader racial ability, but Diana was more focused on wanting to know who this Isaiah was.
“Isaiah is Aalam’s knight and a former member of one of the invasion forces on the planet we were reborn on, and he’s also a dragon.” Mila was smiling and Diana’s mind started to race. “Isaiah, you already know who Diana is.”
Then, before Diana could start asking Isaiah questions, Mila took hold of her hand and guided her into the tent.
“A dragon. A real dragon. Mila, is poly—” Diana, a lover of the supernatural romance genre before the start of the integration, had so many questions. Why did Isaiah look human if he was a dragon? Did dragons actually know polymorph? Why was a dragon holding a spear? But everything in her brain stopped when she saw the man lying in the tent.
Aalam was much, much taller now, maybe 6’4”, with long dark blue hair down to his shoulders, and his skin, which he’d previously never taken care of, was flawless. Given he was only wearing a pair of pants and no shirt, his washboard abs and defined musculature, which he had never had before, were on full display. But the biggest difference was his face. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but he somehow looked like a cross between his original appearance and about five different social media stars she’d followed before the integration.
“What is that?” She turned to look at Mila, who still looked mostly like herself.
“An incubus, a Strong Soul Incubus Prince to be precise.” Mila smiled at her. “Now imagine him meditating naked on a rock in the middle of a small lake. That’s how I first saw his new appearance.”
“That must have been great for you.” Diana said the words absentmindedly, a bit too focused on the fact her brother was still alive, but it wasn’t like she’d never talked about sex with Mila before, so it wasn’t awkward and instead probably lowered the tension Mila was likely hiding.
“Not really. He’d just turned me into a succubus against my will at the time, so I wasn’t quite in the mood to enjoy the view.” Mila guided Diana out of the tent and they sat down on a pair of rocks a couple dozen meters away. “Remember how I said he was in a berserker state, well the first time he was in that state was all throughout the tutorial and, after trying to commit suicide, he thought he was dreaming.”
The joy of Aalam being alive finally faded and Diana remembered how he died. “Is he okay now?”
“Probably not.” Mila looked up, staring out at the beautiful sky where the sun was about to set. “During the tutorial he thought everything was a dream, so, being your brother, he went for an optimized build, and that build requires him to be an incubus but to not have sex or to farm his own lust filled souls to eat until he reaches D rank, so I do the farming for him.”
Quite a few thoughts started to rush through Diana’s head, but Mila quickly squashed most of them. “At the beginning, I just killed mating animals. Then I got a charm skill and things became much, much easier. Your brother also managed to get a racial ability which gives him a separate soul structure for storing souls during his racial advancement to F rank, while our bond is strong enough for me to send souls to him from over half a planet away, so it’s almost like grocery shopping by this point.
“The important bit is he was effectively stuck with me as his only support on a foreign planet where he didn’t speak the language, so he didn’t feel comfortable actually having the talk and breaking up with me until over a year after the tutorial finished and he entered into his berserking state a second time, afraid I’d abandon him.
“Then, during the Trial Tower—” Mila turned to look at Diana. “Do you know about the Trial Tower?”
“The basics, yes.” Diana nodded.
“Well, through the way my powers work and my Laws, I was able to fake myself as a native of the planet we were on and take Aalam as my familiar to bring him into the Trial Tower with me. There, in the second round of the individual tournament section at the end, this asshole elf tortured Aalam to death right before Aalam’s berserker state ended, and he might be somewhat messed up from that as well.” Mila smiled, looking up at the sky again, which Diana found weird until Mila kept talking. “Though he might not be. He quoted Obi-Wan from A New Hope when he died and managed to take the elf with him. It was kind of epic.”
Diana looked over at the tent, then to Isaiah standing in front of it, then back to Mila. “Is there anything we can do to help him wake up faster?”
“Yeah.” Mila stood up. “We can take over the planet.”
Diana looked at her with a confused expression and Mila smiled.
“Aalam and I earned enough points in the tutorial to each have a second uniqueness awakened and Aalam’s second uniqueness is called Prince, a royal line uniqueness. Has Nana Xara explained that uniqueness line to you?”
Diana shook her head. “No.”
“Well, basically, so long as Aalam’s Territory is large enough and he is within it, his stats can be tripled in a way different from other boosts, multiplicative rather than additive when interacting with other increases in stat effectiveness.”
Diana felt her jaw drop. That was so broken, more so than even her Nascent Energy Converter racial ability.
“First, though, we need this area to be part of your Territory.” Mila summoned an array disk from within the subspace of her fingerless glove artifact and handed the array disk, about the size, shape, and thickness of a manhole cover, to Diana. The slab of metal was covered with runes of all twelve elements and, with her Omniglot Reader racial ability, Diana could read the runes were all about claiming and expanding, though they weren’t clean enough to be translated as an entire sentence.
“Mark that with the energy from your Lord skill and then pour enough mana in to activate it.” Mila gave the direction and Diana followed it, surprised at how much mana the array disk took. It wasn’t much to her, but it would probably take 8 normal Earth mages all their mana to activate.
Mila then took the array disk back and tossed it like a frisbee to land next to the tent Aalam was in. “Have fun defending the area from monsters for the next twenty-four hours, Isaiah.”
“Monsters?” Diana felt she was missing something.
“Yeah. The array disks Aalam made help claim about 17 square kilometers of area over 24 hours, but they attract monsters during the process.” Mila had a pretty big grin on her face, though her aura was unreadable given how powerful it was. “But none of the monsters on Earth have grown to E rank yet, so we can leave claiming this area to Isaiah. Summon your yin spirit and let’s head south.”
“South.” Noticing Mila seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, Diana summoned Dioscuri, her two-headed snake spirit, and both she and Mila mounted it as they started to hear the sounds of roaring beasts. “Why?”
“We’re going to go slaughter some Ice Giants.”
Please only read at https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/48991/shadow-of-the-soul-king and https://www.scribblehub.com/series/461729/shadow-of-the-soul-king/. It is free and anywhere else this story has been stolen.
Mila
Mila didn’t know how to react.
Hugging wasn’t something her grandfather ever did, not once in her memory, yet here he was hugging her, and it was weird, so, for a few seconds, she didn’t do anything.
Then she pushed him off. “No. No. No. You don’t get to hug me just because you felt bad and are happy I’m alive.”
She sent him another contract.
Terms:
You may not reveal any secrets about Li Mila to anyone for any reason
Punishment:
Silent Pain
Do you accept?
Yes/No
“Now accept that and go away. I need to talk to Diana.” Without thinking about how high up they actually were, Mila used Telekinesis to open the door to another room and the door in that room out onto the rooftop patio. Then she picked up her grandfather and sent him out both doors and off the top of the building, which was over 200 meters tall.
Only then realizing what she’d done, she flash stepped out to the patio and thankfully saw her grandfather teleporting himself from shadow to shadow created by the city lights and the surrounding buildings to get down instead of dying, the setting sun very helpful. Then she breathed out a sigh of relief.
* * *
Diana
A lot of different thoughts were going through Diana’s head as Mila walked back into the room. First, Mila’s family was really weird. Who threw someone off a building just for hugging them? Second, Mila being a succubus made a lot of sense. The status of the System didn’t include it for good reason, but if a charisma stat existed Mila would have a very high score, and it seemed to fit with her skillset of stealth, disguise, and contract magic. She probably even had a charm skill. Third and most important, however, given what Mila had said before her grandfather hugged her, everyone who had died a month before the integration were reborn as monsters, and Aalam would be included among those numbers.
“Is my brother still alive?”
“Yes.” Mila sat down where Mr. Li had been sitting. “And he’s on Earth as well. But he’s in a coma.”
Diana felt her heart rate increase, feeling both excitement and fear at the same time.
“It isn’t anything to worry about, though,” Mila assured her. “Your brother has a berserker uniqueness that puts him in a state where his Spirit increases by an entire rank which can last for months. When he exits the state, he then falls unconscious for a long time as well.
“This last time, he was in the state for over two months, and he’s only been unconscious for about 23 days, so he’ll likely stay unconscious for a while. We don’t have enough data to really make an estimate.”
Diana stood up. “I want to see him.”
“Alright.” Mila stood as well, summoning out a token of some kind from the subspace in the fingerless glove artifact she was wearing. “First, though, you shouldn’t be following someone just because they transformed to look like the woman who betrayed your little brother. Talk to Nana Xara first.”
“Okay.” Heart still racing, Diana nodded. Then she sent to the Yin Yang Sage, “Evil Ancestor, is this really Mila and is everything she’s said true?”
“Evil Ancestor?” The Yin Yang Sage sounded mock insulted, but Diana wasn’t in the mood to play around with her.
“You purposefully didn’t tell me my brother was alive. That seems kind of evil to me. Is what she’s saying true?”
“Yes.” The Yin Yang Sage sounded like she’d decided to take the matter seriously as well. “But there were rules in place by the System so I couldn’t tell you. How does that make me evil?”
“You could have hinted and led me to figure it out on my own.”
“But then you wouldn’t have trained as hard.”
“Okay, let’s change it. Selfish Evil Ancestor.”
Diana just ignored the Sage’s response and instead turned her attention toward Mila, “The evil ancestor confirmed it. Where is he.”
“Tasmania.” Mila took one step, disappeared completely from Diana’s senses, and almost instantly reappeared next to her. “We’ll be there in a second.”
Mila then hugged her and Diana felt spatial element magic surround them. Then the next thing Diana knew the two of them were standing on what looked to be a portable teleportation platform next to a large lake, the atmospheric mana levels very low, likely due to the teleportation platform.
What lake, she had no idea. Like most Americans, her knowledge of Australia’s internal geography wasn’t good, and that was even more so for the state of Tasmania. There were mountains rising up all around, with the highest one seemingly to the north, and that was the direction Mila started running.
Unable to keep up on foot, Diana gathered cold dark energy into her left palm. Then she emitted the energy and the elementalized mana formed into the shape of a twin-headed serpent made of solid darkness which she started riding through the air.
About twenty minutes later, they arrived at a large tent on the mountain, the beasts they’d seen along the way all keeping well clear despite how out in the open it was, high enough to be above the tree line, and there was a man sitting at the entrance.
The first thing Diana noticed about him was his size. He was about 6’9” and he was seemingly built out of solid muscle. Second, he obviously wasn’t human. Yes, he had the complexion and facial features of a Scandinavian, but his short hair was lavender and his eyes were reptilian with indigo irises. Finally third, he was definitely not her brother. For one, he was conscious, but, more importantly, he was holding a spear in a relaxed posture like he knew how to use it, and Diana couldn’t imagine her brother choosing any kind of melee combat class. It just wasn’t in his nature.
Diana unsummoned the yin spirit and fell a couple feet to the ground next to Mila.
“Isaiah, this is Diana.” Mila pointed to Diana. “And, Diana, this is Isaiah.” Mila was speaking in Universal Standard, which Diana could understand with her Omniglot Reader racial ability, but Diana was more focused on wanting to know who this Isaiah was.
“Isaiah is Aalam’s knight and a former member of one of the invasion forces on the planet we were reborn on, and he’s also a dragon.” Mila was smiling and Diana’s mind started to race. “Isaiah, you already know who Diana is.”
Then, before Diana could start asking Isaiah questions, Mila took hold of her hand and guided her into the tent.
“A dragon. A real dragon. Mila, is poly—” Diana, a lover of the supernatural romance genre before the start of the integration, had so many questions. Why did Isaiah look human if he was a dragon? Did dragons actually know polymorph? Why was a dragon holding a spear? But everything in her brain stopped when she saw the man lying in the tent.
Aalam was much, much taller now, maybe 6’4”, with long dark blue hair down to his shoulders, and his skin, which he’d previously never taken care of, was flawless. Given he was only wearing a pair of pants and no shirt, his washboard abs and defined musculature, which he had never had before, were on full display. But the biggest difference was his face. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but he somehow looked like a cross between his original appearance and about five different social media stars she’d followed before the integration.
“What is that?” She turned to look at Mila, who still looked mostly like herself.
“An incubus, a Strong Soul Incubus Prince to be precise.” Mila smiled at her. “Now imagine him meditating naked on a rock in the middle of a small lake. That’s how I first saw his new appearance.”
“That must have been great for you.” Diana said the words absentmindedly, a bit too focused on the fact her brother was still alive, but it wasn’t like she’d never talked about sex with Mila before, so it wasn’t awkward and instead probably lowered the tension Mila was likely hiding.
“Not really. He’d just turned me into a succubus against my will at the time, so I wasn’t quite in the mood to enjoy the view.” Mila guided Diana out of the tent and they sat down on a pair of rocks a couple dozen meters away. “Remember how I said he was in a berserker state, well the first time he was in that state was all throughout the tutorial and, after trying to commit suicide, he thought he was dreaming.”
The joy of Aalam being alive finally faded and Diana remembered how he died. “Is he okay now?”
“Probably not.” Mila looked up, staring out at the beautiful sky where the sun was about to set. “During the tutorial he thought everything was a dream, so, being your brother, he went for an optimized build, and that build requires him to be an incubus but to not have sex or to farm his own lust filled souls to eat until he reaches D rank, so I do the farming for him.”
Quite a few thoughts started to rush through Diana’s head, but Mila quickly squashed most of them. “At the beginning, I just killed mating animals. Then I got a charm skill and things became much, much easier. Your brother also managed to get a racial ability which gives him a separate soul structure for storing souls during his racial advancement to F rank, while our bond is strong enough for me to send souls to him from over half a planet away, so it’s almost like grocery shopping by this point.
“The important bit is he was effectively stuck with me as his only support on a foreign planet where he didn’t speak the language, so he didn’t feel comfortable actually having the talk and breaking up with me until over a year after the tutorial finished and he entered into his berserking state a second time, afraid I’d abandon him.
“Then, during the Trial Tower—” Mila turned to look at Diana. “Do you know about the Trial Tower?”
“The basics, yes.” Diana nodded.
“Well, through the way my powers work and my Laws, I was able to fake myself as a native of the planet we were on and take Aalam as my familiar to bring him into the Trial Tower with me. There, in the second round of the individual tournament section at the end, this asshole elf tortured Aalam to death right before Aalam’s berserker state ended, and he might be somewhat messed up from that as well.” Mila smiled, looking up at the sky again, which Diana found weird until Mila kept talking. “Though he might not be. He quoted Obi-Wan from A New Hope when he died and managed to take the elf with him. It was kind of epic.”
Diana looked over at the tent, then to Isaiah standing in front of it, then back to Mila. “Is there anything we can do to help him wake up faster?”
“Yeah.” Mila stood up. “We can take over the planet.”
Diana looked at her with a confused expression and Mila smiled.
“Aalam and I earned enough points in the tutorial to each have a second uniqueness awakened and Aalam’s second uniqueness is called Prince, a royal line uniqueness. Has Nana Xara explained that uniqueness line to you?”
Diana shook her head. “No.”
“Well, basically, so long as Aalam’s Territory is large enough and he is within it, his stats can be tripled in a way different from other boosts, multiplicative rather than additive when interacting with other increases in stat effectiveness.”
Diana felt her jaw drop. That was so broken, more so than even her Nascent Energy Converter racial ability.
“First, though, we need this area to be part of your Territory.” Mila summoned an array disk from within the subspace of her fingerless glove artifact and handed the array disk, about the size, shape, and thickness of a manhole cover, to Diana. The slab of metal was covered with runes of all twelve elements and, with her Omniglot Reader racial ability, Diana could read the runes were all about claiming and expanding, though they weren’t clean enough to be translated as an entire sentence.
“Mark that with the energy from your Lord skill and then pour enough mana in to activate it.” Mila gave the direction and Diana followed it, surprised at how much mana the array disk took. It wasn’t much to her, but it would probably take 8 normal Earth mages all their mana to activate.
Mila then took the array disk back and tossed it like a frisbee to land next to the tent Aalam was in. “Have fun defending the area from monsters for the next twenty-four hours, Isaiah.”
“Monsters?” Diana felt she was missing something.
“Yeah. The array disks Aalam made help claim about 17 square kilometers of area over 24 hours, but they attract monsters during the process.” Mila had a pretty big grin on her face, though her aura was unreadable given how powerful it was. “But none of the monsters on Earth have grown to E rank yet, so we can leave claiming this area to Isaiah. Summon your yin spirit and let’s head south.”
“South.” Noticing Mila seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, Diana summoned Dioscuri, her two-headed snake spirit, and both she and Mila mounted it as they started to hear the sounds of roaring beasts. “Why?”
“We’re going to go slaughter some Ice Giants.”
Please only read at https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/48991/shadow-of-the-soul-king and https://www.scribblehub.com/series/461729/shadow-of-the-soul-king/. It is free and anywhere else this story has been stolen.
