Chapter 708: Over Tea
Alex stopped on the second floor. Ten private rooms stretched ahead of him, curtained doorways spaced evenly down the hall, the quiet of the place sitting undisturbed. His eyes settled on the room at the far corner without deliberation, and a few strides brought him to it.
He pulled the curtain back.
The space beyond was small and neat, a carpet covering the floor in warm tones, cushions resting against the walls at sitting height, a low table at the center carrying a teapot and two cups.
On the left side of the table, seated on the floor was a man, holding a steaming cup and in the process of taking a sip.
The amber and gold met the abyssal black, and Magnus smiled, the genuine kind, not the social one, the smile of a man who was, at this particular moment, simply enjoying himself.
"I have to say," he remarked, lifting the cup slightly as if presenting evidence, "this place has quite a soothing and rich tea."
"Yes," Alex said. "It does."
He settled cross-legged on the opposite cushion, reached for the cup already waiting for him, filled it with tea, and lifted it.
The first sip arrived with the accumulated weight of every imagining, tasting better than memory, its warmth moving through him with the particular completeness of something small that was entirely right.
He had thought about this tea over a decade of harsh battles, in the moments after long, harsh campaigns, since such small, insignificant memories were what kept a person going.
He savored it until the cup was finished, and then he set it down, reached into his inventory without preamble, and withdrew what he had come to deliver.
The object that appeared in his hand was oval, its shell hardened and dark, pitch black, covered in a dense network of veins that traced across its surface like a nest of worms.
It was strange to look at and revolting in the particular way of things that existed slightly outside what living things were supposed to look like. Its mere presence seemed to eat the light around it, drawing the surrounding air into a faint lightlessness.
"As promised," Alex said, and tossed it across the table the way one tossed a stone.
Magnus caught it. His eyes in that moment were doing very little to hide the two things moving through them simultaneously- excitement and satisfaction, each one feeding the other, the expression of a man receiving something he had wanted badly.
He looked at it for a moment with the focused attention of someone confirming what they already knew.
"The heart of the Sin of Envy," Alex said, and picked up the teapot to fill his cup.
"I presume you have learned of Pride’s fate?" he asked, setting the teapot down.
The question did its work cleanly. The satisfaction on Magnus’s face receded, the smile finding its way somewhere else as he gave the heart one final look, placed it into his inventory with the decisive motion, and turned to meet Alex’s gaze.
He nodded.
"You wanted the hearts of Gluttony, Pride, and Greed, two of the three." Alex let the statement sit for a breath. "Two of them are now one, and now Gluttony is a wild and dangerous element with no interest in being found."
He paused, and Magnus settled into the posture of a man prepared to navigate an unexpected complication, still, attentive, giving nothing away, the good negotiator’s instinct to listen before responding.
"I will hunt down Gluttony, and I will take your guilds as the price, but there is something else I want," Alex said.
"What is it?" Magnus asked. His voice was now leveled and direct, the pleasant nature absent, the voice of someone who had moved past the social layer of this conversation and was operating on pure substance now.
Alex looked at him across the low table, his cup held loosely in one hand, his expression carrying the particular calm of someone who had already decided what they wanted and was now simply delivering the terms.
"But first, tell me how quickly you need his heart. Or the heart of any other two Sin Generals, for that matter." Alex said, the small smile carrying something in it that didn’t quite reach his eyes, "Because Gluttony may very well be planning to flee the Ancient World entirely."
"After all, He betrayed the one being he couldn’t afford to, Ahrimon." Magnus’s expression shifted, not dramatically, just the faint compression of a man who was facing an inconvenient variable he hadn’t fully accounted for.
The silence stretched.
"He will not leave, and it has to be Gluttony," he said finally. "As for time, three years, five at most."
"Good." Alex set his cup down. "Then that is the time you have to erase the Demonic Cult from the face of the planet," he said it so simply, like he was asking a simple matter.
"Not just from the Human Continent, from all seven, and from the Malefis Domain as well." He added, and Magnus closed his eyes slowly.
The expression that settled on his face was dark in the controlled way of someone who had received something they didn’t like and had decided, for the moment, not to let that decision show in anything more than the set of his jaw and the quality of his silence.
He drew a breath, composed himself, and was about to speak, but Alex cut him off.
"There is no one else who would hunt Sin Generals for you," Alex said, not unkindly. "Not unless they are a Monarch, and even then victory is a distant prospect at best. And how many Monarchs even are there, willing to risk everything for someone else’s agenda?"
He picked up the teapot and refilled his cup with the unhurried ease of someone having a very different conversation than the one his words were describing.
"I am the only individual with both the strength and the immortality to attempt it." He smiled at Magnus across the low table. "So I am your only choice."
Magnus said nothing, not that he needed reminded of any of these facts, just that Alex’s explanation told him he would get what he wanted, if he really wished this deal to get done.
"However, I won’t be unreasonable. I won’t expect you to hunt demon hosts of significant strength, possibly even Monarchs, on your own." Alex’s tone settled into something more precise. "You provide me with the intelligence of such individuals, and I will handle the rest."
A pause.
"The normal headquarters, the cult infrastructure, the hidden networks, the common cultists spread across the continents, those are your problem."
He held Magnus’s gaze.
"Coincidentally, five years is also the deadline I am working with myself. So clean it up by then." The precision in his voice sharpened into something with an edge. "Or we have no deal."
Magnus looked at him for a long moment, the amber eyes calculating and going over every detail shared out loud or through actions. When he spoke, his voice carried a touch of cold that hadn’t been there at the beginning of the afternoon.
"You are asking a steep price. Too steep, even." A pause. "I would be right to think you have no intention of actually allowing me to use my guilds in exchange for a goal this significant."
Alex blinked, a single confirmation.
"All right," Magnus said. "I’ll do it."
He poured his last mouthful of tea and swallowed it cleanly, setting the cup down.
Alex was left quite surprised, and he allowed himself to sit with that for a moment. He had expected Magnus to have a counteroffer, at minimum, offer him more guilds added to sweeten the terms, or the leveraging of Evangeline’s outstanding request that he owed her, for giving information on Caden.
Perhaps offer something related to Earth, a demonstration of how far Magnus’s influence actually reached, which Alex had been genuinely curious to measure.
He had been prepared to refuse all of it, but still he had wanted to hear it.
Now he wouldn’t know. Which was fine, because removing the Demonic Cult was a victory at any price, and earning four of the top ten guilds in the process of doing something he had always intended to do regardless was not a loss by any reasonable measure.
Though handing him Sin General hearts, the essence of entities who stood at the absolute peak of the world, and three of them at that, was far from a wise decision by any reasonable measure. But Alex had no better option.
Magnus had made that clear through everything he was willing to go to great lengths to secure them, the full extent of which Alex still didn’t know, and that alone was reason enough for caution.
So using him... exploiting him was the best available path. The same way Magnus was perfectly willing to force Alex’s hand.
Magnus was resourceful. More than that, he was motivated, and motivated resourceful people with reach across seven continents were not tools you turned down because you hadn’t fully mapped their nature yet.
So, Magnus would be the blade that cut at the roots of the demons, working from the ground up while Alex himself brought the Eldravian Empire down from above.
"Let’s put the terms to paper," Alex said.
The contract appeared between them, light blue, translucent, suspended in the air at a height convenient to both, every discussed detail arranged in the clean and unambiguous language of something that Zero would hold and enforce without sentiment.
Magnus read it with the focused attention of someone who had signed enough agreements to know exactly where the edges of things were and exactly how to find them.
"Let’s hope everything unfolds without new surprises," Magnus said, the calm smile returning to his face, as he signed the contract.
He offered a small nod, and then he was gone. A blur of lightning where he had been, before even that vanished.
"It never does," Alex replied to the silence.
He reached into his pocket and placed two gold coins on the table, setting them down knowing Magnus had certainly already paid. He didn’t particularly care; he was going to pay for his tea, after all it cost and then some.
The darkness came for him quietly, and soon the room was left empty.
When Alex opened his eyes, he stood suspended in the sky. Below him, at the edge of a tall cliff, a palace rose, its spires pressing upward into a sky the color of crimson, the red of it deep and total, not the red of sunset but the red of something more permanent.
Below the cliff, stretching away in every direction as far as the eye could carry, a vast city spread itself across the landscape, dense and alive and illuminated by the light that the crimson Moon above it provided.
Comments