Chapter 116: Rules and Loopholes!
Kurt stood a few feet back from the cage, hands in his coat pockets. He looked at Morra while maintaining a neutral expression as the fluorescent lighting flickered and buzzed.
"You look comfortable," he said finally.
Morra smiled, chains barely shifting as she leaned back against the bars. "You get used to it."
The light above flickered twice, then held.
Her smile didn’t shift but her eyes did as she made an attempt to read him. "You’re in a hurry. That usually means a bad decision’s coming."
Kurt frowned. Despite not letting anything slip in his expression, she was still able to tell. Perhaps, his face wasn’t as neutral as he thought it was.
"Hell Gate," Kurt cut straight to it. "I don’t have time for games. I need to die to get in, but my death seems to attract things I definitely don’t want to attract."
He tilted his head. "And I’m guessing you know something about that."
Upon hearing this, her smile deepened. "Then you came to exactly the right person."
"Skip the cryptic nonsense, love. How do I stop it happening?" He stepped closer. "Will being inside a dungeon barrier hide the signal? Or will they crash through anyway?"
Morra’s smile faded slightly. "The barrier might muffle it. Make it harder to detect. But a hell gate won’t stop what’s coming if it does come." She shook her head. "And if you die too many times in there..."
"They’ll find me anyway," Kurt finished.
"Exactly." Morra leaned forward. "Unless, of course, I were present. Reapers are essentially predators to such creatures. If I were there, none would dare show up."
Then she glanced around the cage with a mild expression. "Too bad about my current situation though."
Kurt’s eyes moved to the chains and Morra followed his gaze. "This?" She looked at the bars. "Merely decoration, Kurt. What binds me isn’t steel."
She wasn’t wrong. The cage always felt more conceptual than physical. This was established when Rook tried to absorb it and failed.
Her eyes came back to his. "It’s the rules, Kurt. Reapers don’t act freely. We don’t choose. We don’t deviate. We don’t want." She paused. "We execute."
Kurt took his hands out of his pocket. "I don’t think I like where this is going."
She looked at him steadily. "I don’t want out of the cage, Kurt. I want out of the rules. And your blood seems to be the key to that."
"And how exactly does my blood manage that?"
"I don’t know," she said simply. "You’re the genius who figured out how to cage a Reaper."
Then her eyes shifted to a shadowed corner of the room. "We have an eavesdropper."
Kurt didn’t turn. He already knew.
"...Figured."
The shadows peeled back, and Zaza stepped forward, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear, looking entirely unbothered about being caught.
"Hi," she said softly.
Kurt exhaled through his nose. "You shouldn’t be here."
Zaza ignored him as her eyes drifted to Morra with a focused, quiet fascination, then came back to Kurt, then went to Morra again, as though she was working something out.
"There might be a way," she said, pushing her glasses up her nose.
"Eavesdropping now, are we?" Kurt rubbed his forehead with his thumb and index finger, then sighed. "Alright, what do you mean by that?"
"You can’t free a Reaper outright," Zaza answered simply. "It’s more like... you rewrite the condition that binds them. Altering the terms at the root."
He leaned back against the wall. "And how does one do that?"
Zaza hesitated. For her, that meant the answer was going to cost something.
"A contract," she said at last.
Morra laughed softly, stopped, then straightened slightly, eyes narrowing at the possibility. "That shouldn’t even be possible."
"What shouldn’t even be possible?" Kurt asked. Clearly the only person in the room who hadn’t caught up.
The System chimed in response.
[NOTICE: Host is attempting to bind a Reaper to himself]
"He’s not binding anything," Morra said flatly.
Kurt’s head turned. "Wait. You can hear that?"
"Yes," Morra said. "And as I said, it shouldn’t be possible. A contract of that nature would require a tether capable of breaking the rules of creation itself." The moment the words left her mouth, something shifted behind her eyes. A realisation taking form.
Zaza, still working from her own angle, continued. "A Reaper’s binding is existential. You’d need something that can overwrite a law, not just bend it."
"And I have that?" Kurt asked.
"You might," Zaza said. "Your resurrection already breaks rules. It doesn’t follow the correct sequence of existence. That kind of anomaly... it might be enough of an anchor."
Morra had gone quiet. She was watching him now with something that hadn’t been there before. Not amusement this time, but rather, actual interest.
Kurt pulled out a cigarette, lit it with a snap of his fingers, and took a long drag. "Alright. What’s the catch?" He exhaled. "Because there’s always a catch."
Zaza didn’t answer right away. She rested one finger against her lips, staring at the ceiling, that absent expression settling over her face while her brain went somewhere else for a moment.
"Three things," she said finally, lifting one finger. "First, blood. Enough to anchor the contract to your existence."
She raised her second finger. "Second, her true name."
The room went still as Morra’s smile disappeared, and Kurt felt something cold move through his bones, and he took another drag to calm his nerves.
Zaza lifted a third finger. "Third," her voice lowered, "you give something up."
Kurt’s eyes narrowed. "Define ’something.’"
Zaza met his gaze. "Agency."
"What?" Kurt said after staring at her for a long moment.
"Agency is defined as—" Zaza began.
"I know what it bloody means." He looked at her. "So she walks free and I spend the rest of my life taking orders. That’s what you’re describing."
"Yes," Zaza said.
Morra watched him. "What did I tell you about making bad decisions in a hurry."
Kurt paid no heed to Morra and turned back to Zaza. "How certain are you this even works?"
Zaza stared at the ceiling again as she calculated seriously. Then she looked back at him. "Zero point zero zero one percent."
Kurt shrugged. "Fine. Set it up."
Both of them stared at him. Their faces told him they were both not expecting him to make that choice as easily as he did.
"Sam’s the priority," he said. Then, to Zaza, in the flattest possible tone: "You can get started, love."
Zaza nodded, summoned her scythe from nothing, and began carving diagrams into the floor around the cage with pmethodical strokes, the blade leaving lines that glowed faintly where they cut.
Meanwhile, Kurt walked away from the cage, toward the elevator. He needed distance—because now he knew Morra could hear the System, which changed the situation of things considerably.
As the doors closed, he teleported the moment they did, stepping sideways out of the guild entirely and arriving on a rooftop in a different city, wind cutting across the open air above a skyline he didn’t know.
"Oi," he said quietly. "Talk to me."
[A contract of this nature will transfer agency to the Reaper upon completion. Host’s autonomy would be structurally compromised.]
"Yes, caught that. I’m not signing up to be anyone’s lapdog." He took another drag. "Is there a way around it?"
[Reviewing anomalous variables...]
[Notice: Host possesses six sigils gifted by the Reaper of Endings. Some may carry sufficient means to interfere with contract terms at the structural level]
The System surfaced them one at a time behind his eyes, each symbol hanging in his vision like something carved into the air.
The first—Recursion. Loops causality back on itself. There was no use of it here.
The second—Banishment. Exploit loophole to eject a person from a space or context. Kurt recognized this sigil and moved to the next.
The third—Inversion. Reverses the directional flow of a rule without breaking it.
Kurt looked at that one longer.
[Inversion sigil assessed. If tattooed onto host prior to contract completion, the directionality of any contract clause may be reversed]
"Meaning?" Kurt asked.
[Clause states: ’Kurt Manchester surrenders agency to bound Reaper.’ Post-inversion: ’Bound Reaper surrenders agency to Kurt Manchester.’]
Kurt smiled slowly. "So instead of becoming her servant, she becomes mine."
[Correct. The reversal occurs at the moment of contract sealing. At which point the binding will invert]
"She won’t know until it’s done."
[Correct]
"Hmm..." Kurt considered it. "What’s the probability of success?"
[Probability of success: 61.4%.]
Then the system added:
[Warning: If Inversion sigil fails, host will become permanently bound to Reaper’s will. Autonomy cannot be recovered once contract seals]
He stared at the symbol in his mind’s eye as he dropped the cigarette off the rooftop and watched it fall. "Good enough."
He unbuttoned his shirt. Raised one finger, and let a thin thread of blue flame run down to the tip, steady and precise as a needle. Then he pressed it to his chest and drew.
With slow strokes, he replicated the inversion sigil from memory, the flame tracing the lines into his skin, burning clean and leaving the mark sitting just over his sternum. Becoming more visible once the heat cooled.
He buttoned his shirt back up. But not before checking it in a dark window nearby.
With that done, a new quest was created by the system.
[New Quest: Successfully Bind a Reaper]
[Rewards: +25 points]
He stared at the notification for a moment, then teleported back to the elevator, stepped out as the doors opened, and walked toward the cage where Zaza was still carving and Morra was still watching.
"Right," Kurt said, hands back in his pockets. "Let’s get this over with."