Chapter 974: Most Practical Purposes

Tera Jun Casta looked through the transparent floor of the dirigible as it drifted across the sky. Over the course of the day, they had floated over canyons deeper than most mountains, forests painted white with snow, and deserts filled with rolling dunes and shimmering oases. The more exotic locations included a chain of islands floating in the sky over five waterfalls spilling over one long cliff face, into a tropical lagoon. Upstream, a town built entirely out of ice floated in the middle of a lake.

They were now flying over river lands that stretched from horizon to horizon, waterways snaking across the landscape like veins in a body. A vast escarpment ran along the direction they were moving, making for a grandiose vista. The messenger reflected that the same could be said about every destination they had seen.

In each location had been buildings that, like her villa, blended into their surroundings. This ranged from tree houses to whole towns carved into canyon walls. In each case, the designs and proportions were clearly built with messengers in mind. The scale was too large for humans, and access usually required the power of flight. Few of the locations were occupied, as even the messenger armies surrendered to Jason were not enough to fill a planet.

“How is this a prison planet?” she murmured, not noticing Jason’s pleased smile.

The dirigible’s observation lounge was mostly transparent, both the floor and the curving wall that made up the vessel’s stern. Only the section by the bar was carpeted, with the doors leading to the cabins and bridge. The construction was too strong and clear to be glass, instead being made of force magic. There was some scattered cloud furniture in the area, a few chairs, loungers and a hammock. They hadn’t seen much use, the occupants choosing to walk around and experience the panoramas.

Tera tore her eyes from the landscape to look at Jason.

“Why?” she asked.

“Why not?” he replied. “If a paradise is as easy to build as a gulag, why not make something beautiful?”

“Because it’s for housing your enemies.”

“The messengers that were surrendered to me are not my enemies. Few messengers are, even amongst those I’ve killed. Most are victims, forced to fight, to obey. So indoctrinated that they consider their own slavery to be righteous.”

Tera turned away, unable to hold Jason’s gaze. He kept his eyes locked on her.

“There’s no shame in what you went through, Tera. In what the messengers on this planet are still going through. There is only shame when you get to make choices. You’ve chosen to help your people, and that is something to be proud of. That shame your feeling doesn’t belong to you. It should belong to the astral kings, but they have no shame at all.”

“He’s right,” Jali Corrik Fen said. “From here on out, you make your own decisions, and give more of us the chance to make theirs.”

Jali had stayed by her friend’s side for the duration of Jason’s planetary tour. Tera looked at Jali, then turned her gaze back outside.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” she said.

“The good news,” Jason said, “is that messengers don’t die of old age. You have all the time you need to figure it out. Rather than look at it as one enormous job, break it down into manageable chunks. Maybe start with where you are going to live. You need a place to operate out of. What did you see today that you liked?”

Tera didn’t answer for a long while. She stood, staring through the glass wall in front of her. She didn’t turn away from it when she finally started speaking.

“In my life before, my first task after leaving the training world was to guard an unpopulated planet. It was teeming with life, but nothing sapient. It was a beautiful place. After I was assigned elsewhere, I returned a few years later. People from another world had arrived and violently stripped its resources, leaving a bleak, dead rock behind. I was tasked with teaching the people who did that the error of their ways, and I did. That was where I learned what would come of letting the servant species govern themselves. Of why, however cruel their subjugation might seem, they could not be allowed to despoil the cosmos.”

She drew a long breath and let it out in a long shudder.

“Thinking about it now, it was just more indoctrination. A justification of atrocities fed to those who showed signs of compassion. Those people were probably sent to ravage that world by messengers in the first place.”

She bowed her head.

“Even the one memory I thought was clean, they poison. I hope that you can give me better memories, Asano.”

“I can’t,” Jason told her. “The best I can do is give you the chance to make those memories for yourself.”

“I chose where I lived then, too. I didn’t get to make many choices for myself, but I had a whole planet to myself. There wasn’t anyone else, but that never bothered me. I lived in the desert. There was a network of canyons, like a tangled spiders web. Great crevasses of red rock, the wind blowing through them, strong and wild. Flying through them was a fresh challenge, every day. I lived in a tower, overlooking the sea.”

“I think we can manage something like that,” Jason said. He was about to say something else when he turned to look at the lounge.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Shade?”

“Apologies, Mr Asano,” Shade said as he stepped from a shadow. “Ms Park has something for you that I believe warrants your urgent attention.”

***

Jason rose from Natalie Park’s shadow like it was an elevator, startling her when she realised that he was standing right behind her.

“Apologies,” he said. “It’s a well-lit room, so no dark corners to emerge from. I shadow-jumped in case I need to portal quickly. I didn’t want it on cooldown.”

She took a moment to compose herself. They were the only people in the room, which was inside the Asano Village administration building. It was set up as a makeshift surveillance centre, with monitors on the walls and laptops nested amongst a jungle of cables on a central table.

“You were worried about the cooldown of your portal power?” she asked.

“Shade implied that I may want to act quickly.”

“Your portal power has a cooldown.”

“Everyone’s does.”

Shade emerged from Jason’s shadow.

“I believe, Mr Asano,” Shade said, “that her surprise is that you have any limits at all.”

“Just so,” Natalie said. “Everything we’ve seen from you implies that you don’t operate by the same rules as the rest of us.”

“I don’t. But for most practical purposes, outside of my private realm, I am just another gold ranker. By Pallimustus standards, not Earth’s.”