Chapter 732: The Hidden Blade

"In my defense," Andrei said, "forty thousand angry voices in my skull telling me to kill and consume is a lot to argue with."

"No one’s asking you to argue with them. Arguing implies negotiation, and negotiation implies they get a vote." She finally looked at him properly, eyes sharp with the particular brightness of someone who found the failure more interesting than frustrating.

"You need dominance, not dialogue. Right now, your command signal isn’t fast or strong enough to withstand the feedback coming through the connection."

"You’re trying to imprint your will onto minds saturated with rage and hunger, but before you can reach deep enough to seize them, those instincts overwhelm your own neural signature. And guess who loses when that happens?"

"Spoiler: it’s you. Every time."

"I am trying," Andrei said, some of the easy humor dropping out of his voice. "The second I connect through the crown, it’s not like hearing them. It’s like drowning in an ocean of them all at once. Every one of those things’ entire being is just hunger and rage pouring straight into me."

"They also don’t just sit there and take it. They fight back. Hard. Like I’m trying to steal the last coin out of their pocket." He exhaled. "Which, I guess, is generous, since what I’m actually doing is worse than that. I am trying to steal who they answer to. Their whole will, redirected."

He gave a small shrug.

"So yeah, they resist, and no matter how hard I try to cling to my humanity, I get dragged into that mindless rage and insatiable hunger, until there’s nothing left of me but the urge to feed."

"I know," Lady Elmara said it simply, without the softness the words might have carried from someone else. "That part isn’t a flaw in the design. It’s the actual difficulty of what we’re attempting, and no amount of wishing will change the fact that you need a stronger will than the one pushing back against your attempt to take control."

She stepped back, already cataloguing something on a slate that hadn’t been in her hand a moment ago.

"The good news, again, for whatever comfort it offers you, is that the trend line is real. You are getting better. Twelve seconds a week, roughly." She glanced at him, and whatever brightness had been in her expression sharpened into something flatter. "At twelve seconds a week, full dominance is approximately a decade out."

"We do not have a decade, Andrei."

He didn’t have an answer for that one.

"So." She was already turning, tucking the slate away. "Off your butt. Back to the lab. I need to make a few adjustments to the resonance dampening before we run this again, which means you get to sit still and be useful in a different way for a while."

"Come on." Andrei let his head drop back with a groan that came from somewhere genuinely tired, not performed. "I just fought a two-hundred-meter bug-centipede-thing and had my brain half-eaten by forty thousand angry murder-nut jobs. Give me a break."

"You can rest in the lab." Lady Elmara said, already turning away.

"That’s not the same kind of rest, and you know it," Anderi grumbled, with a tired exhale.

"Stop being a crybaby," Lady Elmara said, closer to comfort than order. "This is the last trial we run under these conditions, for what it’s worth. After this, we change the approach entirely, because what we are doing right now clearly isn’t working fast enough."

"You can hold command over ten thousand Devourer beasts on their own eight times out of ten." A small, almost approving nod, gone as fast as it came. "Add a single fiend into that same batch, and your success rate drops to somewhere around one in ten."

"I knew that tempering your will against larger numbers first would build the resistance you’d need before we introduced a command-tier target into the mix."

"And it does work, to a degree. It simply isn’t working nearly fast enough."

Andrei was already on his feet, following her with his head hung low, unwilling but without any real choice in the matter, because there wasn’t a version of this conversation where he got to say no and mean it.

Then the word break surfaced somewhere near the tail end of what she had said, and something in him lifted despite himself, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth before he had fully decided to let it.

"So." Lady Elmara was already far in the distance, not slowing to check whether he was keeping pace. "A change in approach is necessary, and that’s going to take me a few days to prepare properly on my end. A few days you are free to spend however you’d like."

The smile held for exactly as long as it took the rest of that sentence to catch up with him.

Because change, where Guardian Elmara was concerned, had never once meant something restful.

It meant waking up to find some new device already fused somewhere onto his body before anyone had thought to ask his opinion of it. It meant, more often than not, discovering exactly how far "for results" she could go.

He shuddered, visibly, at whatever thought had just crossed behind his tired eyes.

Anderi exhaled and steeled his heart, understanding that all his troubles and pain were to serve a greater goal, and if they succeeded in it... No, when they succeeded, it would be the day the war against the Empire changed fully.

Everyone here was serving some purpose in the war against the Empire, whether they had chosen it consciously or simply ended up carried along by it.

Andrei was chosen as Shadow Oblivion Organization’s representative on the Beast Continent, but his purpose extended far past that.

Andrei was always meant to be one of the sharpest blades against the Empire, but his nature as a holder of the Beast King legacy made him far more than that, and if used properly, he could turn the tables and bring the Empire to its knees using its greatest advantage against it.

As the inheritor of the Beast King’s legacy, Andrei possessed an authority over beasts that no other class or power in the world could match.

It ran deeper than persuasion, deeper than fear, reaching into the very instincts that governed a beast’s obedience, an authority that did not ask them to follow, but made them recognize him as the one they were meant to obey.

Under ordinary circumstances, that made him valuable.

Against the Devourer’s beasts, it made him something closer to unprecedented, because underneath every layer of mutation and corruption the curse had stacked onto its victims, they were still, at the root of what they’d once been, beasts.

This meant Andrei could control the Devourer’s horde, making even those rage-filled horrors his loyal thralls, but only on a small scale, since those things were not only broken by extreme emotions but also answered to a monster that was Ahrimon.

It was a problem that could only be solved by Andrei overpowering the will of Ahrimon and erasing his control over the Devourer beasts, and the simple way of achieving it was by growing stronger, but that was not happening any time soon.

This was where Guardian Elmara came into the picture. As the world’s smartest and most qualified individual, she had ways of solving the issue of strength in other ways.

The solution she had created was the crown fixed to Andrei’s head, called the King’s Crown.

The Crown was a device built for exactly one purpose: to amplify Andrei’s innate will past whatever ceiling his own body and world imposed on it, high enough that he could actually wrest control away from Ahrimon’s grip, and take the horde for himself.

They had made progress going from him controlling a few hundred creatures to tens of thousands, but that was certainly not enough when the horde had hundreds of millions in their ranks.

Soon they reached the lab, which sat at the base of a small hill, a silver door half covered by moss, that slid open with runes shining at its side, revealing a set of stairs that led down.

’We need to succeed.’ Andrei clenched his fist hard as memories of the hell that the Human continent had become came to mind.

’If anyone can do it, it’s her,’ Andrei thought, watching Elmara disappear ahead of him into the lab with the brisk, singular focus of someone already three steps into her next set of calculations.

The lab opened up wider than the stairwell promised, a long chamber cut into the hill’s own bedrock and built out from there, glass tanks lining one wall, each holding some sample or fragment suspended in fluid too dark to make out clearly, tags glowing faintly beneath each one in handwriting too small and cramped to read from a distance.

"Workbench," Elmara said, not looking back, already halfway across the room and pulling instruments off a rack with the ease of someone who had made this exact motion a thousand times before.

Andrei stopped walking.

"...Workbench," he repeated, in a flat tone.

He eyed the white marble bench in question, which had looked perfectly ordinary and unthreatening right up until something beneath it stirred, unfolded, and rose.

Twelve limbs, thin and articulated and entirely too fast, climbed up out of the table’s frame in a smooth, spider-like unfurling, each one tipped in a long curved point of iron that caught the cold light and gleamed with the kind of precision that suggested it had never once missed.

They arced up and inward, converging above the exact space where a head would rest if someone were to lie down.

’I know it’s to work on the crown... Still, it looks like it wants to peel my skull like a piece of fruit,’ Andrei murmured under his breath as he settled on the table.