Sinatro
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Chapter 90 (Bk 2). Interlude 2
🕑 Added 2025-05-28 16:00:11 +0000 UTCA/N: We are back to the main story after this, don't worry.
Salazar badged into her office like she owned it. She did own it, but she was aggressively rude nonetheless.
“Gud, what are you doing?”
Gud made a point of looking around all innocent like, pretending not to understand.
“Sitting?” she replied. “Oh, is there a rule against sitting in the headmistress’ chair?”
Salazar's always severely controlled face morphed into annoyance. She was fast to clamp down on it, as par usual, but Gud was wearing her down. Soon, she'd have Salazar Bromwyn mastered down to an art. And then she'd prepare her. It was not time yet.
Some people got regressors who were ready for the battles, and what did she get? Well, the regressor was an F grade as compared to a C grade, so…
“I meant with my students. I gave you authority because I thought you'd never squander it, but wasting the student's time is—”
“Listen, Salazar. I respect your dedication to the little rats, but this was necessary. Think of it like a game. They were resources I needed at the time, so I used them.”
Salazar scowled, a very uncharacteristic expression. “People are not tools, Gud.”
“I understand you're salty about this because of your family. I understand, I really do. But I did not call them tools. I called them resources.”
“What is the difference?” Salazar seethed.
“It's in the connotation. Still, they didn't waste their time. By giving the best barrier mages in your academy a seemingly impossible task, I showed them their limits. Now those who have the chops know what they ought to challenge. Those who don't will live in mediocrity forever.”
Salazar stared open mouthed at her. Gud took that as a win. Slowly by slowly, she was wearing the woman down. She could no longer afford to emotionlessly surveil the world around her like she so often did.
“At least tell me why you did it?” she said with a sigh.
Gud gave it a few moments. She spoke just when the white haired beauty was about to lose patience.
“It's about that game we played that one day. The one about the hero,” Gud confided.
Salazar's face went blank. She turned around mechanically, slowly, and looked out the still open door to her office. The hallway behind her was packed. Her adoring students were shocked to see their normally cool-as-ice teacher lose it.
There was one particularly annoying fly Gud could see among the gawking students.
“Sister?” the blonde girl called from where she stood at the head of the crowd. “Is everything alright? I did inform you this bizzare woman wasn't to be trusted. Brother-in-law said—”
Yeah, that was all Gud was willing to give the little bitch. She wasn't even Salazar's real sister. She was her younger cousin. Salazar's parents had died when she was but a girl, so she'd been raised by her uncle, the second most important person in the empire currently.
Salazar loved and adored the little trump. And Gud could understand it a little. The little bitch had had nothing to do with the past, and Salazar had been with her since the girl had been born. Salazar couldn't bring herself to hate the conniving bitch. So Gud would hate her for her.
“Why did you just—” Salazar tried.
“We didn’t have time for that. We were discussing something important,” Gud interrupted.
“Fine,” Salazar said with a sigh. “Now, please explain yourself.”
“We need access to the tutorial sector.”
“What?” Salazar frowned, looking nonplussed. “...what?”
Gud nodded with a conspiratorial grin. “I think we can get to meet this purported hero before he crosses over to the multiverse. It will only be good for our faction to have such a rising star on our side. Or at least to have positive relations with him.”
Salazar blinked, letting her true confusion show for the first time this conversation. Gud inwardly jumped up and down like a sugared-up child. More expressions. More expressions!
“Our faction?” Salazar asked.
“Of course,” Gud replied matter of factly.
“I am to be Empress,” Salazar intoned. “What need have I of…whatever it is you're talking about?”
Gud bobbed her head up and down. She was sure she looked like the most agreeable person in the world.
“Right, right…but I'm a fortune teller. I know things.”
Salazar frowned. “Are you saying I will not be empress?”
Gud stepped out of her persona. She sat herself properly on the chair for once, her back straight and hands folded on the desk in front of her. And legs not lazily thrown up onto the table but neatly tacked below it. She pinned Salazar down with a fraction of her power, her cosmic aura. It wasn't a malicious action, and that was perhaps the only reason Salazar did not black out there and then or even vomit blood.
“Do you want to be?” she asked once she was sure Salazar could hear her again.
Salazar Bromwyn was finding it hard to breathe. She was only one of a few C grades in this sector, numbering in the single digits. She probably thought she would have little to fear once she reached that threshold. Foolish thought. There was always higher to climb.
When the pressure was lowered, Salazar regained her prim expression like nothing had happened. She did not respond to Gud's question though. Gud thought maybe she was angry, and she was pouting without contorting her lips like a normal person.
Salazar surprised her though. She scrunched her brow in consternation a minute later, and Gud let out a sigh of relief.
“I…” Salazar Bromwyn started. Gud's eyebrows rose. That was not like her. “I don't know.” Salazar Bromwyn admitted.
And that was enough. Gud had planted the seeds over many weeks now. There was nothing wrong with letting them grow on their own. Well, maybe she'd water them a little every once in a while.
“Did you know that your fiance is in the city?”
Salazar wore no expression as she nodded.
Gud knew her. Or at least knew who Salazar Bromwyn was on the outside. What anguish must she be hiding, what anguish must she be letting bottle up inside? Her life was not her own, and yet she'd rather defend everyone and everything. She would have to choose a side sooner or later.
“Well, at least his intention in coming this time wasn't to publicly slight you by visiting every damn brothel in your city before coming to see you!” Gud said venomously.
He did that sometimes. Sometimes he didn't even come to see her. And they both knew he'd gone to a few brothels this time too.
Salazar would marry him regardless. She had made peace with her destiny a long time ago. And hating someone you were going to spend the rest of your immortality with was stupid, or so she'd claimed when Gud pushed her on it. Gud would hate him for her too.
“Well, there is a promotion meeting happening right now.”
Salazar's eyes widened. The boundary would soon let out a few new planets into the multiverse. Where they would be positioned depended on the planet's current rank, but it also depended on potential.
Sometimes F grade worlds with exceptional performance in their tutorials found themselves getting to more central sectors of the multiverse.
The frontier was a safe choice, as the strongest worlds there were mostly in the D grade. C grade worlds were pushed to higher sectors by default. An F grade world could get into a frontier sector and hide out in some decrepit corner for hundreds of years until it ranked up.
Going to higher sectors though. The higher sectors were prime space real estate. Every inch of chaotic space had an owner. Getting into any sector in such places required meetings with the owners of said real estate. Worlds were forced into becoming nothing more than mining, or farming, or dungeon hosting hubs. It was the way of the multiverse. And apparently, a few worlds had now applied to move into Empire owned space.
“Yes, but why is that important to us? From what you said,” and the girl had the gall to stare at Gud suspiciously. “The boy's world is just starting the tutorial. How do you know this by the way?”
“Same way I know the boy isn't on his home planet right now. Now, have a look at my method to look into the boundary,” Gud said, a mischievous gleam appearing in her eyes.
With a wave of her hand, a mirror appeared before them.
Gud watched as Salazar carefully turned her attention to the mirror. There was nothing there at first, which was strange, because it was a mirror. Shouldn't she be seeing herself? But then a moving image started to resolve itself.
“Some kind of scrying instrument?” Salazar asked.
But the image resolved into another mischievously grinning Gud.
“What…what is this, Gud? Some kind of joke?”
She wasn't good at getting jokes, Salazar Bromwyn. But it was not a joke anyway.
“That is a beautiful mirror,” a masculine voice said.
“No, Salazar. Not a joke. Definitely not a joke,” Gud said seriously.
“Oh. Then is it a prerecorded image like in these visual audio technologies and magics.”
Salazar was a light mage. It was no surprise she was interested in those little technologies. Gud, though, was less tolerant of the abominable things. Scrying shouldn't be mocked like that.
“No! For your own information, this image is live.”
Which should have been impossible because Gud was sitting right there. In Salazar's chair.
The image in the mirror shifted to show the man now. A humanoid appearance, but his hair was so blue. It was aquamarine, and he had wide pupils that made his face effeminate.
“If that price is too high, we could cut it down by two silvers,” the Gud on the other side continued to haggle.
“I put a spell on him,” the Gud in the office said proudly. “He will not leave without the mirror.”
“And I suppose this is how…”
“Yes. The method I found to spy on the ‘hero’. Don't worry. It ought to work. And maybe we get rid of that tempting fruit before something goes terribly wrong.”
Salazar immediately looked away. Even Gud had found the fruit calling to her at times, even though the stats it promised were a drop in a very large bucket for her. It was the quality. The strength. If she had a thousand such fruits, she could create a new game in one year tops.
The man bought the mirror at a tenth the price Gud had first told him, and he walked away looking smug.
“Tch, stingy little bastard,” Gud complained as the picture cut off.
Then she went and fixed the mirror on the wall on the left of Salazar’s desk.
“And so it begins.”
Comments
Keith Byakika
Hmm, I'm sorry about that. I'm going through the chapter again, and I can't remember as I wrote it almost a week ago. I can see a few things to fix, but I don't know if that will help. I think I might have wanted somethings to be vague. Setting up small nuggets for payoffs way in the future. I will look through it either way.
Oken
I’m not sure if I missed something but I found this chapter really hard to follow - I couldn’t parse which characters were speaking and if sally/salazar were the same or if I was just super confused.
