Chapter 144. It’s All Up To You
“To the northeast!” Leonard burst out.
Rhys blinked. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy. Was Leonard lying? Well, it doesn’t matter. I have enough men to verify without going myself. Rhys reached into his robes and drew out a trashy book he’d been reading, presenting the rear leaves—the empty pieces of paper at the end of the book—and a pen. “A map, please.”
“Is this all you need? Am I free to go?” Leonard asked, accepting both.
Rhys shrugged. “I haven’t seen the map yet, have I?”
“I’m not good with pain. I don’t want to die,” Leonard murmured, almost to himself. He glanced at Rhys, then back at his map, and grimaced. “You’d better kill all of them. I don’t want them coming after me.”
“Worry about me coming after you right here, right now, then about your family,” Rhys advised him, desperately wishing he had his backward chair for his villain act. There was nothing cool or villainous about sitting on a stool. He felt like a granny squatting by her grandchild’s side to hold his hand, or a grandpa lugging around the old easy-sit to a school football game.
A moment later, he paused. “Did you just tell me to kill your family?”
Leonard glanced at him. “Better you than them, at this point. You seem like the kind to give a quick death, as you did to Larry.”
“That was…” Rhys raised his brows, startled. Apparently their scales were totally different when it came to painful deaths. He personally ranked ‘melted from the inside out by toxic gas’ pretty high on the scale of ‘deaths he didn’t want to personally experience,’ but clearly he was the fool here. In this world, clearly they didn’t stop at toxic gas immolation. There was a near infinite realm of further, more painful deaths beyond organs melting while you still lived, and Rhys didn’t want to know anything about it. He nodded slowly. “I’ll take that under consideration.”
“Plus… my family never gave a fuck about me,” Leonard grumbled. “Family this, family that, go clean the stable, you skinny fuck. You’ll never amount to anything, because you like to read and actually learn about the world instead of wandering the countryside fucking idiot maidens and sucking down strength potions. Fuck ‘em. I’m not gonna get tortured to death by some clown maniac for them.”
Rhys clicked his tongue, shaking his head. “First off, it’s maniac clown, thanks. Secondly, eh? Yeah? Clowns? What do you think?”
“Fuck clowns,” Leonard spat, with almost more feeling than he’d just put into dressing down his family.