Chapter 1121: Direct Action
From within his soul realm, Leon meditated, Iron Pride slowly spinning just above his hand. He’d met with Jamshid’s friends, all of whom turned out to be important and ambitious men within the city’s force of guards or bureaucracy.
It seemed like all of them were down for what he and Jamshid suggested, which struck him as a bit odd, but since it was all to his benefit, he decided to shelve any suspicions for the time being.
A few bolts of green lightning arced from the hilt of Iron Pride and into his fingers. He hardly felt a thing, nor was he that surprised as that very thing had happened several times over the few hours he’d been mulling over the problem. With his power surrounding the Iron Needle, the Iron Needle was responding, zapping him with its power every now and then. This wasn’t a hostile action, but rather something that the Thunderbird had recommended Leon do to try and grow closer to the Iron Needle. She remained convinced that the Iron Needle wasn’t sentient in the typical sense, but it had some kind of strange, alien intelligence to it anyway, and that letting it get more used to Leon’s power would be a good way to stimulate it to action.
Leon wasn’t so sure about doing so, but at least the Iron Needle was doing something, and it wasn’t harming him, so he let it do its thing. It hadn’t communicated with him at all since his black ice mace-induced coma, nor did it respond like an intelligent thing would to anything he did. He supposed maybe the Thunderbird was right, that his ‘conversation’ with the Iron Needle was something conjured by his mind trying to parse what the Iron Needle was communicating to him rather than an actual conversation with a sentient, sapient being.
The thought of using more black lightning intrigued him, but he held himself back from trying to use any more fancy lightning that the Iron Needle may show him. He felt like once he did, he’d lose himself in study, and he had much more important things to handle at the moment.
From behind him, the Thunderbird, who had remained on her perch the entire time Leon had been ‘training’ with the Iron Needle running her beak through her feathers, finally asked, “What are you doing, my boy?”
“Brooding,” Leon responded, a hint of sarcasm in his tone.
“It is unbecoming of you to brood so,” she stated. “You know what action you should be taking, and it isn’t sitting in your soul realm staring out at the Mists of Chaos.”
“I know what action I want to take,” Leon shot back. “It’s the action that must be taken. I’m just not sure if I’m ready to be going this far, yet.”