243. How Dangerous?

Rhys quickly left the frozen wastelands behind, changing into his ordinary robes when the fur ones grew too warm. Even if he didn’t feel the temperatures that much anymore, comfort and discomfort were still a thing; he only felt it as a mild twinge as opposed to the sweaty hell he was used to overheating feeling like, but then, not only was he a mage, but he was also a few hundred pounds lighter. He’d be shocked if heat felt the same without all his blubber locking the heat in, let alone the massive difference ‘being a mage’ made.

The whole time, he kept his mana senses extended. He didn’t know that it would help him detect Mouse, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt. Every now and again, he pulsed the cursed energy sense. It was too stressful to leave that on full blast all the time, so in deference to his mental health, he only turned it on for a few moments each time, but he didn’t neglect it, either. Mouse had trained around cursed energy users, it was true, and might be aware of the possibility of a cursed energy sense in the same vein as a mana sense, but Daran had told him it was a technique he hadn’t taught to any of his students.

If Mouse knew of a cursed energy sense, it would be whatever Ernesto or a modern mage had invented, not Daran’s cursed energy sense. Now, through convergent development, the modern mage could have stumbled upon the same principles Daran had used to develop his cursed energy sense in the first place, and developed the same technique, but at the very least, it wasn’t something that would have been readily available to modern cursed energy users. In other words, while he couldn’t guarantee that Mouse didn’t know about cursed energy senses, he could at least be reasonably sure that the two senses, if a second version existed, were not exactly the same. At the worst, he might have a one-off shot at detecting a Mouse who didn’t want to be detected, and at the best, he would have an ace-in-the-hole Mouse detector to prevent her from getting the jump on him.

As for her more subtle abilities, vanishing things from his past and limbs from his body… he had no idea how he was going to handle those. His best bet right now was to sense Mouse before she got close enough to use her techniques, though that did assume that he could sense her before she got that close.

Rhys grimaced. Dammit, Mouse. I didn’t want to be your enemy. Not only was she terrifying in a way few other mages he’d encountered were, but he’d also liked her as a person. Maybe even… hoped there might be something more between them. To find out she’d been feeding information to the enemy this whole time…

He rubbed his face. No. I can’t think of it that way. Virgil hadn’t been ‘the enemy’ until after the Empress battle. They had technically been on the Alliance’s side until the very last moment, which meant Mouse had been feeding information to their allies. He would still have preferred that she told him about it, rather than doing it behind his back, but he had to admit that he wasn’t shocked. Mouse, doing something in secret? That never happened! /s. Slash all the s. The amount of time he knew what Mouse was doing was notably less than the time he spent not knowing what she was doing. She could’ve been doing anything. Running the farms. Sneaking off to the library. Feeding information to the enemy.

Stop. He wasn’t the enemy at the time. But she had to have known. She knew he and Bast were friends. Even if she personally disliked Bast, she knew Rhys liked him. If she’d seen Virgil mark him and said nothing, then she’d betrayed Rhys, whether she’d thought of it that way or not.

Unless Virgil marked her. Unless he pressured her in some way. She’s not actually invisible. Higher-tier mages can see her and act against her; Lord Ravin made that clear. There’s no doubt that Virgil is higher-tier than her, and it’s not as if I know her life story. He could have any kind of leverage to force her to act against me.

A mean little voice at the back of his mind muttered, or she just betrayed you, idiot. You were a fool for trusting anyone. This life is no different. It’s every man for himself, just like the first time around.

Rhys took a deep breath, forcibly stifling that voice. It wasn’t correct. It was just his fears and anxieties, spiking because of the cursed technique. That voice was just a small part of him. It didn’t own him. It wasn’t all of him. Just a small piece. He had to believe in Mouse. She’d never acted against him, not intentionally. She must have made a mistake, or something like that. He had to believe in her good-heartedness. After all, everyone made mistakes. Everyone had those days… in the words of one of the greatest pop divas of all time (who also liked to swap between a blonde and brunette wig a lot).

I need to find Mouse and ask her what happened. Until I hear it from her own lips, I won’t believe anything else I hear. Lord Ravin actively hated him, after all. He really doubted the man knew Rhys knew Mouse, especially since Lord Ravin hadn’t even known Mouse’s name, but who knew? High-level mages were dangerous. Moreover, he had no clue what Lord Ravin’s path was. Maybe the man could see fate, and he knew that Rhys and the woman he’d seen were connected. Or maybe his path had to do with radish farming, and Rhys was insane. Either way.

I highly doubt his path is radish farming. Still, it was a valid point. Trying to double-guess Lord Ravin’s path and assume that he might know Mouse’s connection to Rhys thanks to some obscure path he didn’t even know existed was insane. It was better to assume that Lord Ravin didn’t know, and simply leave open the small possibility that there was something like that going on. The small possibility.

Currently, he still looked like Justin Rockstar, but he had gone around asking lots of questions with that face, and besides, Mirai and Grave had noticed him—though he suspected Grave’s Path of the Servant or whatever had helped clue him in, and admittedly, he wasn’t exactly hiding his aura up in the northern wastelands where no one knew him anyways—so he needed a new face. And new clothes, but since he’d just shredded all the trash in his star, he either needed to visit a dump… or go to a store and buy things for once in his second life.

He opened his storage ring he kept specifically for coins and looked at his wealth, then paused. The last time I bought clothes at a proper store, Bast and I were separated and Straw got attacked. And then, when he bought clothes in the market, he’d ended up meeting Laurent, which… wasn’t necessarily a bad omen, but it was definitely an omen. Every time he bought clothes, something strange happened. But when he made clothes, nothing in particular happened. He could make clothes all he wanted, and no bad or good things occurred immediately afterwards. Making clothes was the safe route. All he needed was a garbage dump.

Rhys climbed up to the top of the nearest tall tree and perched at the very tip of its crown, lifting a hand to his brow. There were a few mountains around, and true to form, he spied a few small mage schools perched atop them. None of them seemed particularly prestigious, and none were particularly large, so after a moment or two, Rhys picked the biggest, strongest-feeling one and ran toward it. As he approached, he suppressed his tier to the Tier 2 level to prevent anyone from paying too much attention to himself, then circled around to the back, toward where he sensed the trash heap. Climbing the mountain and closing the distance took him so little time and effort that it wasn’t worth mentioning; after all his reforgings, his body was powerful even without his trash star burning at full power. He didn’t need to use mana to hurtle up to the top of the mountain at breakneck speed.

The school had a minor barrier around it, which he barely had to put forth effort to get past. He pulled the pillar materials out of his trash star and activated the pillar again. The ceiling of force spread out, creating a kind of umbrella effect and lifting the edge of the barrier, and Rhys slid underneath his umbrella, then deactivated his pillar and drew it back into his trash star. The garbage heap was right up against the edge of the barrier; honestly, he was a little surprised it was on the inside of the barrier, but then, maybe they were worried about crows or something, pests, flies and the such infesting their garbage heap. He wouldn’t worry about such a thing, but some mages were prissy about the idea of a fly-covered, reeking garbage pit sitting out in the open for anyone to walk by and see.

He walked the pit, sucking up all the garbage. This time, he sorted it into more and less useful garbage, crushing the less useful garbage into the density that was now standard for his trash star, while keeping the more useful stuff floating loose and whole around the star. The natural gravity of the star would naturally crush it after a while, but for now, he could keep it free. Instead of putting it into the trash star at all, he kept the ruined clothes and rare swathes of cloth he found abandoned and filthy in the depths of the pit apart, and idly sucked the impurities and filth out of them as he walked.

When he was done, Rhys stood back and admired his good work. The pit was now… not sparkling clean, but at least empty. Not even a wrinkled wrapper or stray piece of straw remained. He nodded, deeply pleased with his job. Not a single piece of trash or filth would escape him. He was the trash man, and he’d come to take his due.

Hell yeah. I’m so cool.

Rhys walked away, heading into a nearby stream to wash the cloth. After all, sucking out all the filth and impurities didn’t always remove the scent, and some of the clothes had deep stains that even his impurity-sucking couldn’t remove; or rather, the very threads of the fabric had taken on a new color thanks to the length of time and the ferocity of the stain, and though he could remove it through his present means and capability of thoroughness, he would risk sucking out the dye as well and rendering all the fabric pure white.

It sounds like good training, a part of him whispered, and he had to agree, but first, he wanted to change his face, and he might as well make the job a little easier, so he headed toward the sound of tinkling water.

The stream was slender and narrow here, but continued upstream, growing thicker as it went. Before long, he found the place where this little stream split off from the main stream, and stared in disgust. How was he supposed to bathe in this to change his face? The water was filthy! Black-brown and putrid, lumps of fat floated on its top, while strange colors mingled in its depths. It stunk so viciously even Rhys could smell it, and exuded a strong medicinal aura, as well as thick impurities.

A slow smile spread over Rhys’s face. Excellent. He could use some liquid filth.

It wasn’t his first time purifying water; he’d done it under the Empire’s city, and had occasionally returned there to suck up more filth, in between running his snack shacks. He extended his mana aura and absorbed all the dirty water he could reach, walking slowly but steadily forward to suck up more and more filth. He walked uphill, naturally, toward the peak, which made him a little nervous. He didn’t want to get anyone’s attention, especially not with such a delicious source of trash at hand, his face unchanged, and his new clothes still raw fabric. Just to be careful and exude the minimum possible energy, he lowered his tier to Tier 1 as he approached the peak. He couldn’t stop, though. The filth only got more intense the closer he got to the top. Already, it was nearly at the level of an Impure Well. The filth had sunk into the stream bed and the earth around the stream, too, which Rhys naturally sucked up, cleaned, then spat back out as he went, though it was a bit of a running-on-a-treadmill task. If he let up on absorbing the stream’s filth for a second, it immediately began flowing downhill and undoing the work he’d done. He was happy to absorb it, but the further he went, the more he began to wonder if there was an end to it at all. His capacity for trash was immense, but this stream was borderline endless, and it just kept getting wider and wider. Already, it was nearly as wide as he was tall, and in all defiance of common sense and the way streams functioned, it looked to only be getting wider. Even with all the baby streams splitting off to his left and right as he continued to climb, which, walking uphill as he was, ‘joined’ into the main stream, it was still ridiculous.

Unless, a little voice whispered, someone deliberately split the stream a thousand times to dilute this filth as much as possible, so their neighbor schools wouldn’t notice their filth.