Chapter 117: Contract!
Kurt stepped up to the glowing diagram where Zaza was still carving. "How much longer?" He asked.
She glanced at the partially carved circle, measuring. "Thirty minutes to finish the diagram. Five for the ritual."
Kurt checked the battered watch on his wrist. "Make it twenty."
Her eyes went wide for a half second, then she nodded and moved faster, the scythe tracing lines with tighter, more efficient strokes, and leaving trails of violet light that burned into the floor.
Kurt moved to the far corner and paced. The thought of his luck stat surfaced on its own and his mind circled around it.
Things had a reliable habit of bending his way when the number was high. Maybe this time it could tilt the odds on a contract that was supposed to make him a slave.
He pulled the interface up in silence without breaking stride and dumped twenty points straight into Luck. Why leave things to chance when you could give it a little nudge.
[ATTRIBUTES]
Strength: 103
Agility: 104
Perception: 94
Luck: 85
[Luck: 85 → 105]
[Available Points: 60]
[Notice: Increased Luck attribute has improved reward rate]
The System chimed again with another message.
[Notice: Probability of—]
This time, he shut it down mentally before it could finish the sentence, and the interface went silent. Morra was listening and he wasn’t about to hand her any reasons not to go through with this
Morra’s eyes had narrowed slightly across the room. "Be very careful what you choose to give up, Kurt." The words were unhurried. Like she was giving him one genuine opportunity to reconsider. "I’m not entirely convinced you intend to pay the price."
Before Kurt could reply, Zaza straightened and looked across, signalling him.
"Alright," Kurt said. "Let’s do this." He crossed to the diagram and Zaza placed a small knife in his hand, handle first.
He crouched at the edge of the carved circle and drew the blade across his wrist in one clean motion. Blood welled up immediately, and before it could drip—
Zaza caught his wrist with fingers that were light but firm. Her eyes moved to Morra, then back to him. "Are you sure?"
Kurt gave her a tired, crooked smile. "Your concern is duly noted, love."
Then he turned his wrist gently. The blood ran from it and found the carved trenches of the diagram, threading through them like water finding channels, filling the lines red one by one.
Zaza watched the diagram fill, then turned to face them both. "This is where you state your names. For the contract to hold, it needs to hear you."
Kurt spoke first, voice even. "Kurt Manchester."
As soon as he said his name, the diagram rippled. A single pulse, outward from the centre, like something underneath it was breathing.
Zaza looked to Morra.
The silence stretched as Morra sat still in the cage, eyes on Kurt, not on Zaza, not on the diagram. Weighing something only she could see.
"Morra," she said finally, but nothing happened.
Zaza’s expression didn’t change. "Your true name."
There was another silence, longer this time. The fluorescent light above them buzzed once, as though it too was waiting.
Then Morra exhaled, "@#^*#@*!*" she said.
What came out of her mouth wasn’t a word, not exactly. It was sound shaped like language but felt by something deeper than hearing, something that registered in Kurt’s chest and soul simultaneously.
The room shifted, and not in a physical sense. Kurt felt it move through him like a cold current through his spine and said nothing.
"Good," Zaza whispered.
The diagram ignited seconds after, and the blood in the trenches began to rise. It lifted from the carved lines in thin threads, hovering suspended in the air above the diagram, and then it caught.
However, this wasn’t fire exactly. It was something that looked like fire the way thunder looked like sound. Close enough to recognise, but different enough to notice.
It burned down fast, and when it died, a contract hung in the air where the blood had been. A dense and real paper, suspended without anything holding it.
Zaza’s cheeks went slightly red as she exhaled very slowly. "Now the terms."
Kurt looked at Morra through the bars. "You get your freedom from your role. No forced obedience. No cosmic leash pulling you back to a function you didn’t choose. What you do with the freedom is yours."
Kurt looked at Morra through the bars. "You get your freedom from your role. No forced obedience. No cosmic leash pulling you back to a function you didn’t choose. What you do with the freedom is yours."
Morra’s eyes narrowed. "And your part of the bargain?"
Kurt met her gaze evenly. "My agency. The ability to make my own choices, to refuse commands. It transfers to you."
Zaza’s eyes moved fractionally as she adjusted her glasses, sensing the careful wording but saying nothing.
Morra searched his face for deception but found only what looked like resignation. She nodded slowly. "Agreed."
Then she reached forward through the bars and touched the suspended contract, pressed two fingers flat against it, and let essence flow.
Where her fingers met the paper, a symbol burned itself into existence, forming just above the swell of her cleavage, slightly below where a collar would sit if she wore one.
Kurt placed his palm on the other side of the contract next. Essence surged from him, and a matching symbol seared itself into the center of his palm.
The suspended contract caught fire from both ends simultaneously, turned to flames, then collapsed into ashes that rained down into the diagram below and reignited the entire thing.
"Seal it," Zaza said quietly.
Morra extended her hand through the bars and Kurt took it.
The diagram went white immediately. Then it was gone.
Kurt felt sudden heat bloom from his chest. The Inversion sigil activated beneath his shirt, burning into life.
The directional flow of the contract reversed in the instant before it sealed, polarity flipping so fast that even he barely registered the shift.
Agency surrendered → agency received.
Master becomes servant → servant becomes master.
The binding inverted and a pressure emerged. Not seismic exactly but something existential.
Reaper contracts weren’t meant to exist. The natural order had no provision for them, and when one sealed successfully, reality itself registered the violation as a fundamental law being rewritten.
This pressure split the concrete floor and moved outward from where they stood in a clean line and released a tremor that began to spread.
It moved up through the sub-levels in a wave, through the floors, through the walls of the guild, and out into the street.
Hunters that were in the middle of conversations stopped mid-sentence as glasses rattled off a counter somewhere overhead.
"What the hell was that!?" Someone yelled as the guild shook.
In the B-rank district’s Proxima City, buildings groaned at their joints, and people stepped out onto balconies and looked at nothing in particular, waiting for an aftershock that wasn’t coming.
But It didn’t stop there. The tremor spread outward, beyond the city, beyond the district, rolling across every rank division in a pulse that didn’t weaken with distance.
The C-rank cities felt it. The D-rank outposts. The borderlands. People across the continent paused, exchanged looks, and found no explanation.
It kept going beyond that. Past the atmosphere. Past orbit. Out into the dark between stars, covering light-years, until it reached distances that had no name attached to them yet.
And somewhere in the S-rank district, in four separate locations, four separate cities, each of the families felt it at the exact same moment.
At House Crowley, in a dark room, the tremor was registered, and a masculine silhouette sat upright.
Slowly, he opened his eyes, revealing four diamond-shaped stars, arranged like a compass rose, burning in each of them as they locked onto something far, far away.
"Hmm."