Chapter 147.1: Examination
PART 1/2
I opened my eyes, finally done with my choices. Erani, sitting on the floor, seemed to be still working through hers, and Ainash was keeping herself occupied exploring the small outpost. She was currently in the kitchen area, poking and prodding at the various foods and appliances, much to the annoyance of Bon, who was watching her intently.
But he glanced over when he saw me with my eyes open, and took a breath. “You ready to answer some questions? I’ll get the Truth Stone.”
“Yep, I’m ready,” I nodded. I’d taken some time to speak with everyone through the silent communication of Ainash—and mentally communicating with Index to ensure my plan would work—and it seemed like I might be able to work through this.
“Good. I’ll be right back.” Bon stepped through the door to their sleeping quarters, disappearing for a moment while I waited in the main room with everyone else.
“Father, mother says to tell me if there is question you cannot get past. If happens, will tell mother and we will escape! I will kill all the Humans!”
“Did mother tell you to say that last part?”
“...No.”
“Okay. Don’t kill all the Humans, even if we escape.”
“What if they are mean?”
“Even if they’re mean.”
“My name is Humanslayer! Dragon gave me that name! Have to kill at least some Humans.”
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t believe I had to argue with her on this. “Just ask mother if you’re allowed to kill any Humans, and you can talk about it with her. I’m going to be busy soon.”
“Okay!”
I glanced over at Erani and watched as her face shifted into one of exasperation as Ainash no doubt messaged her with the same fervor as she was speaking to me with. As I held back my laughter at that, the door from the sleeping quarters opened again, and Bon walked out, a small, round stone in his hand.
“Alright,” he said as he sat down in a chair at the small table, “go ahead and turn yourself around so we face each other.”
“Sure,” I nodded, trying to hide my nervousness.
He watched me situate myself and smiled. “First time taking a Truth Stone test?”
“Uh, yeah,” I chuckled, “just worried about false positives or whatever.”
“Nah, nah, these things aren’t faulty,” he said. “You’d have to be a flamin’ mastermind of self-deception to get past it. Would probably need your entire life to train yourself to get them to spit out anything but the correct answer—whether that’s tricking it into thinking you’re telling the truth, or into thinking you’re lying. It goes off what you know to be the true answers to what you’re being asked. So as long as you know you’re answering truthfully, you’ll pass just fine.”
I took a breath and nodded. “Right, right.”
“Yep. It’s pretty much just a formality anyway, but we’re required to say whether we used a Truth Stone when giving our reports back to headquarters, and they’d be pretty flamin’ mad if they knew we shirked our duties like that by not questioning you lot properly.”
I nodded again. “It’s fine. Should we go ahead and start?”
“‘Course. So, I’ll put the stone on the table and ask you a question, and all you have to do is put your hand on the stone when you answer. Although, uh, the System needs to see your body touching it, so your armor…” he gazed at the Dark Plate still covering my body.
“Mm, shouldn’t be a problem. Objects pass right through it. See?” I reached up and grabbed his hand, and as I said, his body went straight past the armor and touched my hand as though the armor was just an illusion.
“Woah…” he said, gazing down at it. “I didn’t even know there was an Enchantment that did that.”
“Well, like I said, it’s stuck on me, so I wouldn’t be able to eat otherwise,” I laughed.
“Man, you are one weird group of people,” he shook his head. “Anyway, just be sure you show me your hand when you’re touching the stone, so I can see it passing all the way through the armor like you said it would.
“Sure,” I said.
He reached out and dropped the palm-sized rock in the middle of the wooden table with a thunk. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pencil and some paper. “Okay, you ready?”
I nodded, sending a mental message to Index.
“Great.”
Erani sat on the floor of a small, cramped outpost. She watched as Arlan, in his still kind of scary Dark Plate, sat across the table from that Bon guy. They went over how everything worked, and then began.
“So, to start off, could you tell us a lie, just to ensure the Truth Stone works? Let’s see…when I ask you what color your skin is, tell me it’s blue, okay?”
“Sure.” Arlan reached out and picked up the Truth Stone, turning his hand over to show that it was, indeed, passing through his armor and touching his skin.
“Okay. What color is your skin?”
“Blue.”
As expected, the Stone lit up bright red, shading the entire stone outpost in its crimson hue. Arlan, who was obviously not expecting it to be so bright, turned his face away in surprise. If the circumstances weren’t so secretly tense with the lies they were about to try and get away with, Erani would have even thought it was cute.
But she couldn’t ruminate on that nice feeling for long, as the moment the Stone dimmed down, Bon spoke again.
“Okay, great. Keep the stone in your hand just like that. First question, tell me your name, age, place of birth, that sort of thing.” Bon asked.
Erani held her breath, knowing that this would be the moment that decided whether they’d be able to enter this country, or if they’d be chased out for being fugitives of the Demons.
“My name is Annor Ton, I’m twenty-four, and I actually come from an unnamed village in the Koinkar Kingdom, but it’s near Waterinn, if you know that town.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh, well it’s a bit southeast of here, few days’ travel from Kingdom’s Edge. Or, my bad, you guys call it Empire’s Edge, right?”
Pretty much everything Arlan had just said was a lie. Waterinn was technically a town that existed—and it was where he said it was—but it wasn’t even close to where Arlan was born. And of course there was the fake name and age. They’d spoken and agreed that they should probably increase their ages, since being as high-Level as they were in such a short time was, if not impossible, at least notably rare. It signaled that they’d obviously gotten their Levels in an extremely risky, life-threatening way.
These lies were completely blatant. In any normal scenario, the Truth Stone would have absolutely no issues with detecting the flagrant falsehoods—Arlan knew his own name, age, and place of origin, so he’d know he was lying. That was all the Stone needed to activate.
But it sat inert in his hand, doing absolutely nothing at all. Not even a hint of that bright red light.
Unsuspecting of any foul play, Bon, nodded and jotted down the information on his notepad. “Okay…Waterinn, spelled with two ‘n’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. Next question, why did you come to the Barinruth Empire? And why through a passage so dangerous as Empire’s Edge?”
“Well, you’ve heard of the Demon invasion, right? We,” Arlan gestured to Erani, “were neighbors who fled from Waterinn together when it happened. With all the death and destruction…Well, we knew we didn’t really have any other choice but to leave the whole kingdom. Especially as time went on and it became more and more obvious that the kingdom wasn’t going to do anything to repel them. Kingdom’s, er, Empire’s Edge was the nearest escape route, and the Demons pretty much said that running away from them meant the death penalty, so we took the fastest way out as possible.”
“You just decided to walk through the mountain range? I can’t imagine doing something so dangerous.”
“You can’t?” Arlan frowned. “At your Levels it wouldn’t be too bad, right?”
“Well, yes. Don’t try anything. But the Dragons are still deadly for anyone.”
“Oh, right, yeah, I guess that’s true. Well, Demons were more deadly than the Dragons, as far as we were concerned. Choosing between an army and a monster, we felt like our chances were better with the latter.”
“Hm. Anyway, next question,” Bon moved on, continuing the interrogation, and Arlan continued giving the answers that Erani had been preparing with him through Ainash. Fake identities and backstories for each of them to try and distance themselves from the identities that would undoubtedly get them kicked out of Barinruth and thrown to the Demons.
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