Capítulo 10: Twisting Minds
The cold, early morning wind blew at my hastily worn jacket, only a few lampposts by the street below providing any source of light, dim as it was.
Brick tiles cracked like eggshells under my flip flops, only to be fixed not a second later with a use of Alteration.
Miffed was a good word to describe how I was feeling, but, looking at my restrained target, I couldn't help but take pity on him for what was about to happen.
"Don't stare at them TOO hard now. Innate magic resistance rarely saved anyone's sanity when looking at them if your circuits aren't good enough. I suggest you close your eyes." I warned.
Sadly, the nameless hitman didn't respond, nor did he do as I say.
He was staring and being stared at by dozens upon dozens of spirits. Spirits born from the residual essences of numerous dead humans I came across, given a transparent physical form through the prana I was giving them and the ether that made up their bodies.
Men, women, and children were the most effective at producing my intended hypnotic effect - all of them at my beck and call, ready to do my bidding. Individually a mediocre threat, it was both cost effective and easier to put quantity over quality, and the enemy would fall all the same.
They were death personified, carrying the regrets and guilt and spite of the people they were in life. Because in death, the strongest of emotions were enough to carve one's will onto many things and people.
And these particular ones carved their hatred onto their places of rest - the same symphony of clustered hatred that I was directing at my would be killer.
He was starting to know fear, and the shit I was smelling cemented that fact even more.
But enough about my chuuni, edgelord inner monologue. This asshole just delayed my drinking of the daily grind.
And mercy was, unfortunately, something I mostly lacked the first time an assassin was hired to try and kill me twice. Like the Spinelle family who I robbed of their precious gemstones; they never financially recovered from my counter attack did they? Oh well.
I restrained my wraiths back into their astralized forms, leaving only 4 to add an intimidation factor.
Anyway, "You have one minute to come clean and tell me who hired you. For each subsequent minute, one finger will be cut. Choose wisely."
Garbled noises. Pissing pants. Choked sobbing.
…
Nothing changed over the past minute, and I was still looking at a guy who was in the middle of an episode of shell shock.
"…I overdid it again, didn't I?" I muttered, checking through my familiars to see if his sanity was still salvageable.
He was already disarmed, with a rope of ectoplasm binding his arms behind his back, and a triple check of Structural Grasp showed that he had nothing but his mundane clothes on his person.
The least I could do was restore his sanity before throwing him to the Department of Policies.
{W̶̖̼̒ë̸̛̬ą̸̱̇k̵̨̜̎̆ ̷̷̥̥̿̿l̶͇̰̎̚i̶̟͒̍e̷̼̦̒̓s̵̛̻.} The collective consciousness of the wraiths sent through the mental link.
"Hey, you all can't expect for everyone to be like me. Not many people know what void space even looks like, let alone Nothingness." I verbally responded.
In one of the more prominent aspects of Equivalent Exchange, my mind, by proxy, was also bared to most of my human ghost horde's intrusive throughts. Rage, vengeance, sadness, sheer defiance, all the what-have-you's that let human souls stay in the material plane, waiting to affect an unsuspecting victim.
It was easy to corral them into submission. After all, I knew the feeling of dying, the cessation of my senses, and the gradual feeling of being remade into another life and another body over the course of months.
Their wails of hollow contempt were nothing in comparison.
With that thought out of the way, I put hands to the sides of his head, cupping around his ears.
An imaginary thunderclap sounded in my mind, followed by an active flow of heat rushing through my body.
"I promise." The trigger chant was spoken, a basic hypnosis to initiate the use of mystics.
Each mental trigger and trigger chant was different for every caster. The important part is for them to evoke an emotion, something that means enough to the caster that it moves their very being.
A flash, followed by the strike of thunder, was the last thing I heard before I lived this life; it was only natural that it would be the thing to stimulate me so.
In the same boat, promises were things meant to be kept; and as each chant was basically a declaration of bending reality to your whim, I thought of the notion as something I kept close to my heart.
As the mental blueprint of a human figure appeared in my mind, I hummed in both annoyance and interest.
The basics of Spirit Surgery was one of the first things we were taught in the Department of Spiritual Evocation: a way to alter the soul to accommodate the evoking of spirituality both inside and outside the perceived Self of the material reality. Safe to say, I've had a few classmates who lost their proper mental faculties due to moving the wrong soul stuff or being possessed by evil spirits.
An advanced application, like what I was doing, was the restoration of sanity and lost memories, among other things like knitting flesh, curse breaking, and purifying poisons.
And, upon a few minutes of perusing through my failed killer's memories, I let out a frustrated: "Fuck."
There was practically nothing concrete to trace back to a hirer.
2 days ago, the stored timeline in his mind had unceremoniously cut between driving through a nondescript highway, and then suddenly looking at a magical contract that detailed the hit, no important detail to help me get back at whoever wanted to kill me.
I know I said something about this being a regular, every other Tuesday sort of deal, but if they were actually competent enough to have another Spiritual Evoker on hand…
"The cookie crumbles, and the plot thickens. Fuck my life." I grumbled as I grabbed the man by the arm and floated down on the street.
A simple trick when one had circuits as overpowered as my own. Evoking a liberal amount of prana in the foundational belief of the poltergeist phenomenon, things like telekinesis on objects or making sound appear out of nowhere were trivial tasks.
Seeing as this place was part of the university town of magical academics, I luckily wouldn't be detained for breaching the concealment of mystics.
"And now I have to spend my precious time healing you back from a vegetable. The things I do to be a good Samaritan in a grimdark, urban fantasy world…" I sarcastically lamented.
In truth, I couldn't help but sympathize with the man I just mindfucked into a vegetative state.
A third child of a magus family, bartered into a minor family for his superior magic circuits, ran away when he was of legal age, and now at my mercy as an employed mercenary, crumpling on the ground in a state of shock.
I shook my head. It was really too easy to empathize when you know the ins and outs of a person.
{F̶̱̮̾̿u̴̟̿n̵̯̓ņ̵̀̋y̶̻̲̋̓ ̵̺̆̍l̴̝̈i̸̟̔e̸̞̖͝.̷͖͛̀}
"Shut up, you. I'm still taking a hand and an eye for compensation. I'm not that merciful."
I was still keeping the free M1911 and Sniper Rifle as my loot though.
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NonToxicRespondent
NonToxicRespondent If you've already figured out where I get the chapter titles from, then you get a free digital cookie.
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