The Weight of Legacy

There was one thing the widow had always excelled at—not family history, not research, and certainly not interpersonal relations.

No, the one thing Malwine’s past life had been a uncontested expert on was taking even the worst of her problems and turning them into somebody else’s problems. That had been her greatest skill even before she had come to learn the world was such a better place without Rupert in it, and she had only further honed it between then and her death.

Sure, bullshit could only get you so far, but the widow had never seen it as a way to get ahead—it was all about avoiding responsibility!

And Devils knew Malwine could use some of that in this life too, especially now that she had quite the situation on her hands.

With its current level, the [Toll] she accrued for using [Earthless Glory] had somewhat normalized between the maintenance of a double and the act of creating it. Where once she might have found it preferable to minimize how many times she actually created doubles, instead just choosing to make the most of her time with them, Malwine could now somewhat afford to just keep dismissing them. It still cost her more to create them than just keeping them around for a few minutes would, but it was no longer a dealbreaker.

Mimicking the mayor was somewhat easier than making her double look like Lambrecht, as his getup had been striking enough for her to get a general idea. Now that she really thought about it, she wondered if the man had been drunk—that would certainly explain some of the recklessness. Still, showing up with seawater while calling out to your enemies probably implied a level of premeditation that made it unlikely for this to have been some sort of drunken ‘oopsie’ gone wrong.

More and more people had started looking out their windows by now, and Malwine ‘s latest double rushed across the street. This one was a slightly more disheveled version of the mayor, chasing after the fake officiant she had dismissed mere seconds earlier.

“You treacherous scum!”

There weren’t that many lines she remembered from the mayor’s tirade back at the estate, but she remembered enough. Her main concern now was whether she was making too much of a mess—she’d honestly intended to just spawn as Lambrecht in the middle of town and accuse the mayor of fatally wounding him, before disappearing at the nearest dead end, but it struck her that it might just get dismissed as a weird event. Stuff like that probably happened all the time in this world.

…The fact that she didn’t even know the guy’s name certainly played a part in that too.

In the end, she’d settled for putting on the appearance of Lambrecht being chased around Beuzaheim by the mayor, complete with dramatic shouts. It probably wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny if anyone who wasn’t a mortal came knocking, but it would hopefully help. The idea was that if the mayor came here and tried to make any accusations, his claims would immediately be doubted by the myriad witnesses who saw ‘him’ chasing the officiant around.

Here’s hoping there’s no one with Veit-level senses around…

It was unlikely, but that risk alone made her choose to cut her display short. She ran as Lambrecht, fleeing the town proper—at this hour, none of the guards she remembered seemed to be around, though the gates were closed. She made a show of climbing and dropping—which should, to be fair, have been well within the capacities of a man at the Tree Veins stage—only to dismiss her double before it hit the ground.

Malwine repeated the route then, this time making her double once again look like the mayor, who slammed his fists against the town wall, now that his opponent had fled outside. She let out some loud curses about scum and how he would have his due, then sent the double tumbling off into the distance before dismissing it as well.

Hopefully, no one caught on to the fact that not once had those two men had been seen in the same place at once. She’d never particularly wanted to have more than one double—especially not after Veit’s warning—but that certainly would have been convenient when it came to pulling off this stunt.