Chapter 149. Evil Laurent
Snake Robes reached into one of his sleeves and withdrew a long, coiled whip. He released it, and the coils smacked the ground one after another with more weight and heft than a whip that size should have. Rhys faced him in an approximation of the Empire’s stiff sword form, based on foggy three-year-old memories of the one time he and Laurent had fought. Hopefully Laurent’s form was standard, because if he’d made any variations, then Rhys would be making them too. Not that Laurent struck him as the type to do anything but standard form. He probably worshipped standard form, to be honest. The guy was a little too upright and uptight for his own good. It was something Laurent would have to grow past, though the Empress wasn’t likely to let him.
Not that I care what happens to my enemies.
“This whip is the Thousand Poisons Steel Whip. It’s made of a thousand strands of steel wire, and each strand has been imbued with a unique poison. You will die screaming in pain, covered in boils, burning and freezing at the same time, and that’s only a few of the milder poisons,” Snake Robes told Rhys.
“Really?” Rhys asked, his attention suddenly piqued. The whip was doused in new and interesting impurities and filth? Had Snake Robes made it just for him?
“Truly. If you still wish to flee…”
“Huh?” Rhys blinked, then realized: Snake Robes was still trying to bluff him off. The guy really thought he was a dumb kid with a death wish. Which… from a certain perspective, he was, but from another perspective, he definitely wasn’t. For one, this Thousand Poisons Death Rope posed no danger to him, except in that he might spend too much time studying it after he stole it from Snake Robes’s cold, dead hands. For another, he wasn’t actually one of the Empire’s military school students on a righteousness kick. He had far more tools up his sleeves than any of them.
A thought suddenly whispered at the back of his mind: This might actually be too easy. If these guys were used to fighting rejects from the Empress’ school, who were all taught to fight in the same stiff way that only made sense in formations, then he was about to blow through this camp like a hurricane. The only people he’d really have to look out for were those with enough raw power to ignore his cheap tricks.
It did make sense. It wasn’t like the Empire’s nobility was going to up and quit military school one day to decide to take on some low-level criminals in the woods that the nobility was probably busy deliberately overlooking for some internal politics reason or another. It’d only be the kids like Laurent. The common, low-rank kids with no social standing and therefore no unique magics or skills, who split from the herd and decided they had had enough with the criminals, to the point they’d actually try to take them on. Only the low-ranking kids, who actually fell hook, line, and sinker for the Empire’s righteousness brainwashing (like Laurent), rather than the noble kids who could look around them as they grew up and see the Empire’s ‘righteousness’ for what it was: corrupt, full of holes, poorly patched up by the nobles, whose existence didn’t fit in the Empress’s world order at all, except that they were too powerful for her to eject, kill, or ignore.
It was strange that it was the privileged who were more likely to see the inequality of this world, but then, when Rhys thought about it, that would have been standard even in his world until more recently, wouldn’t it have been? It wasn’t as if serfs, eking a living out of their lord’s dry earth, had the time to think about whether it was fair or not that the King took ten percent of their food for the winter. They had no rights in the matter. All they could do was keep their heads down and survive. Knowledge was for the lofty thinkers. In his world, historically, the lords and nobles. In this world, mages. And in the Empire, which was tilted by the Empress such that the mages were no longer given universal access to knowledge, knowledge was once more locked in the hands of nobility.
Snake Robes snapped his whip, dragging Rhys back to reality. “If you won’t back down, then—”