Chapter 238: Filicide

Vincent was old.

Most of his kind led brief, short lives before they were inevitably discovered and killed. He’d been wandering the upper Floors for decades, only surviving by acting with the utmost discretion…and yet here he was now, laying siege to a stronghold, making a spectacle of himself in a manner completely against his nature.

He was so old that his previous forms began to bleed together, creating accumulated knowledge, preferences…forming something of an…identity, as repulsive as the thought was.

In order to survive that long, he had to be highly aware of how hosts thought. What made them suspicious, what made them angry, what made them afraid, and what that fear would make them do.

In all that time where every waking moment was spent thinking about other’ people’s thoughts, he felt like he had gained a firm grasp on host psychology, something that was rather foreign to him. It had been learned through careful study and decades of exposure to their panicky animal behavior rather than something innate.

He felt Keeney kill himself, and he withdrew from the battle a moment to re-materialize the strategist.

“Is it done?”

“Yes, master. No less than thirty-three of their people have been turned to your side. With this, you can slowly infiltrate their-“

“Right, well done.” Vincent said, clapping the strategist on the shoulder before dismissing him. Through close questioning and repeated experiments, he’d learned that the fae re-experienced the pain of their first fiery death every time he dismissed them back to the other side.

He just didn’t care.

The plan proposed by the fae strategist was as such: infect a number of the Stronghold’s citizens while the Lord was distracted by Vincent and use them to gradually take over every single host within the Stronghold, until Zodiac was the sole remaining host.

Once the old man was isolated, wear him down and kill him.

This was a good plan, and Vincent believed it had a chance of working, with one small caveat.

None of the hosts in the Stronghold were actually powerful enough to corner Zodiac, no matter how many of them there worked together to accomplish it. And with newborns at the helm? Unlikely.

The old man had the telekinetic force to shuffle the islands like a deck of cards if he wanted to. No coalition of norworm-controlled hosts would be able to even get close. None of them had the faefire to cut through the man’s telekinesis, after all.

Vincent glanced over at his undead clashing against the illusionist’s figments and scowled.

There might be another host that could cause problems, actually.

Vincent knew the type. He’d been in a Party with an illusionist twenty years ago. Chasing the illusionist down without a plan would end with him chasing his own tail. He needed to disrupt the paradigm of their conflict so severely that the Illusionist’s head would spin.

A flustered illusionist was a dead illusionist.

Therefore, infecting every single host in the stronghold is not the play. Zodiac and his backup would write the city off as a loss and destroy it before fleeing.

Zodiac could easily smash the islands together and eliminate 99% of the infected in one move, and then he would no longer be bound to the Stronghold or it’s people.

A host with nothing to lose.

Vincent had seen it before.

Hmmm.

Vincent checked his Influence.

Influence: 357

Not much. Those vassals are probably slacking off because there’s no one watching them.

Once again, Vincent considered converting Kyle and the others into his progeny, but…He trusted his own kind less than he trusted the hosts. He didn’t trust the hosts at all, but they had limits. They had lines they wouldn’t cross, things that would never occur to them.

Vincent’s kind did not.

As long as the hosts had hope of being rescued, he could control them, but his children would immediately try to scatter to the wind, simply based on their instincts. Too much attention was being drawn to them, they were powerless in the center of a typhoon that could easily scour them from The Tower.

Whereas Kyle and the others thought there was still a chance they might live. So they kept their heads down.

Wish they would build Influence faster…the things I could do If I had more…That’s it.

All of these disparate thoughts revolving around panicky hosts and a desire to acquire more Influence crystalized into a single idea.

It might not have the ‘tried-and-true’ appeal of simply infesting the entire Stronghold like a good, traditional norworm, but it had a small chance of bringing Vincent everything he needed all at once. It was a very…’human’ plan.

It was uncomfortable.

It was unfamiliar.

It was something Zodiac wouldn’t see coming.

Vincent turned his attention back to the ongoing battle, where his undead were pressing the attack, warded off by the illusionist’s seemingly endless army.

Vincent raised his hand and motioned for the fae to listen.

“Buy me some time. I’m going to draft a letter.”

In their observation tower, Travis was confused and Zodiac was pacing back and forth, his expression ominous.

“What is this bastard plotting?” Zodiac muttered to himself.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

They’d been fending off attack after attack for the last half hour. The necromancer had seemed like he had gotten enough of an upper hand to gain a foothold in the city, but each time he had pulled back before Zodiac was able to surround him with his telekinetic threads.

He was extra wary of Zodiac, despite having proven that he was able to cut through Zodiac’s spells with his faefire.

Probably right to be suspicious, Travis thought.

Zodiac had pulled out some gaudy kit from his vault and his telekinetic threads had started to feel…holier?

Did he swap out his rings to add Anti-undead properties to his attacks?

Travis wished he could see the threads like his illusions could. Because of some side-effect of being made of miasma, they were able to perceive spells in action.

He’d learned this because the first few generations of thinking illusions had figured out that this ability was not normal relatively quickly, and he’d been forced to modify their memories and perception of what was normal so that this didn’t lead to cascade failure in their mental state.

I wonder if I could replace an eye with an illusion and be able to see them. Not that Travis wanted to bet an eye on the off-chance that might work.

His illusions were currently harrying the seven undead and Vincent, performing a back-and-forth dance in midair as they gained and yielded ground without either achieving a significant advantage.

“I can keep this up for a couple days, but not forever, Lord Zodiac.” Travis said, unconsciously patting the pocket full of illusionary glass rods that kept his forces in fighting shape.

He’d finally beaten Will. He could make living Illusions that were stronger than the base creature they were representing, allowing him to create ‘people’ that were as strong as Climbers with Classes.

Whereas Will could only make Relics and cannonballs and stuff.

But this bastard necromancer was boosting the power of his undead to such an absurd degree that Travis’s Better than Real passive wasn’t keeping up.

Travis could make illusions barely strong enough to survive the 12^th Floor. Above that…he would need to reach level 60 to upgrade Better than Real. This was only achievable on the 14^th Floor. He would have to be carried through 2 Floors and possibly get killed on the off-chance that he might correct his Build.