“You know, Mom, some people would call us strange,” Lia quietly remarked, while we looked down into the Blessed City. After the excitement and the various talks of the night, and the reconciliation in the morning, we had both slept the day away, rising only after the sun had already set. During breakfast, Lia had given Luna a brief, and somewhat condensed, explanation, and once we were all sated, Lia and I had decided to continue our campaign against the Blessed City, regardless of their Mind Control wards.

  “Probably,” I allowed, “And, quite frankly, some people would be correct. We are strange, and there’s nothing wrong with it; everyone who is different can be considered strange. Now, consider how boring the world would be if everyone were the same.”

  “Mhm, true,” Lia nodded after a second of consideration, “Though I think all of us qualify as a little more than just ‘different’.”

  “I’ve been different for all my life. You either have to accept yourself, or you will be trapped in an endless cycle of insecurity, always stumbling about something that separates you from some ideal image you made in your mind. The problem with ideal images is that they are, well, idealised. They are not real, so you will never measure up to them; that’s just how it works,” I explained, noticing Lia freeze for a moment, her brow crinkled into a thoughtful frown.

  “I think I get what you mean,” she replied, before her focus returned to the town below us. “I’m still not sure what to do next. I mean, with the Mind Control and the horrific punishment, I’d think that these people will lie low for a while, unwilling to act out in any way.”

  “Yeah, they’ll probably sit on their aggression, but here’s the thing: If you just sit on your aggression and stew in your anger, it doesn’t fade. It’s like a sealed pressure cooker sitting on a fire, the pressure keeps rising until something breaks,” I reminded her, and her look turned thoughtful.

  “So, the best way would be to try something that’s not too big, maybe something that ostensibly allows them to relax a little, only to have that relaxation turn into the seed of future trouble?” she asked. The way she spoke, alongside the look on her face, made me immediately suspicious.

  “You have something in mind?” I inquired, one of my eyebrows jumping up unbidden, “You sound too…” I paused, trying to find the right word, “You sound too eager and smug for your own good.”

  “Oh, it’s going to be interesting,” she grinned, “You see, after you told me about a few of your tricks, I decided to get to mixing. If I’ve done everything correctly, I’ve got a fun powder that’ll make these people relax for a few days. Then it’ll all blow up spectacularly.”

  “We don’t really want to cause some massive, bloody event, you know? I’d rather those people lose faith in their deity, as opposed to having them all break apart, with a number of fanatics running rampant, possibly after murdering the rest of their community. I don’t think that’d turn out well in the short term, though it’s preferable to have the Blessed City continue to flourish long-term,” I admitted, feeling a little apprehensive and conflicted. I wanted the Blessed City to vanish, but I didn’t want the hundreds of people living there to die. There were too few humans left alive already. Who knew when the population would dip below viable levels, especially given how they were spread out? It remained a constant and persistent worry.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Lia assured me, “Well, probably. It’s not too bad anyway. Just something to make people easier to arouse, more interested in the opposite sex, and it might lower their inhibitions, ignore consequences and all that. It shouldn’t cause too much trouble, right?” she explained, and, somehow, the look on her face told me that she expected the opposite.

  This could go wrong on so many levels, especially given that Lia’s way of dosing the people living in the Blessed City involved introducing her alchemical concoctions and powders to their water supply, making the actual dosage individuals received a massive gamble. Some might ingest nothing of the substance, others only a tiny dosage, too little to actually do anything. At the same time, some unlucky few would get a massive dose, making the result of her drugs completely unpredictable.

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  A part of me was pretty intrigued, especially when I considered what the induced reckless state would do to my ability to mentally coerce and influence these people, but another part was apprehensive.

  “Do it,” I decided after a few minutes of contemplation. At the end of the day, I wanted the Blessed City to vanish. These people were our enemies, whether they knew it or not, and I had no desire to see my enemies flourish. Some of them, maybe even a majority, might only go through the motions of worshipping Sunna, but they were under the wards that bound them into Lorgar’s creed, so even if they might not truly believe, they were part of the problem.

  “If you give me some of that powder, I’ll try to introduce it to their wells. Unless it needs to be in running water for some reason?” I asked, considering the best ways to introduce the stuff into their water. Maybe I should try something slightly differently, now that I thought about it.

  “I’ve got some extra, and no, it should just dissolve in water. Slowly, if I keep it in a fairly waterproof sack, so I think it’ll work over the course of a few days after I put those sacks into the creek,” she explained, and, for a moment, I felt a shudder run down my spine.

  Alchemy needed preparation, and it wasn’t as immediately flashy as magic, unless explosives were involved. However, the subtle effects of it could be just as horrifying as anything I could conjure up magically. Maybe even more so, as I would have to remain in the area to sustain an effect, or set up some runic enchantment, while Lia could simply dump the stuff in the water, and bad things would happen downstream.

  Introducing the powder to the wells was fairly simple. I only had to take control of two birds using the usual combination of Blood and Mind Magic, easily sending them through the ward protecting the city. Once the bags were dropped into the wells, the water would be tainted, likely with a very high dosage of her concoction, meaning things would be interesting.

  However, this also meant I should pursue my goal of securing a few people for my Mind Magic experiments, which was why I kept observing the town closely, even after Lia headed home for the day, a few hours before the sun could rise. Almost getting caught out in the open last night and suffering the equivalent of a severe sunburn in the process had been enough for her; she wasn’t about to chance it.

  For me, that meant I was left alone, watching the people, trying to weave a bit of Mind Magic into town in an attempt to find a few suitable test subjects for my Mind Magic, and maybe even a couple on whom I’d be able to experiment with that new idea Lady Hecate had given me. To extract information from the strands of EXP running through somebody’s soul, I would have to get access to those strands, which would be challenging in its own right. And probably incredibly painful, or even outright lethal, if done on somebody else, which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise.

  After all, anything to do with the soul was complicated, and infiltrating it without causing damage was probably beyond my current capacity. Additionally, anyone who managed would be able to effectively know everything about somebody else. Their entire life, their motivations, dreams and everything that made a person into who they were, it would be all laid bare. It was about the most intrusive procedure I could imagine, making it quite obvious why Lady Hecate hadn’t been willing, or maybe even able, to demonstrate.

  For a moment, I considered to nab the few poor bastards who were out in the night, standing guard. But then, I realised that those aforementioned guards were probably the people with the least standing in their community, who got the worst jobs. Such as, standing around in the cold, occasionally trudging through the night, keeping an eye out so nobody could raid the fridge. Those would probably be the first to leave the community if things went south, so I didn’t want to inconvenience them.

  But their replacements, those I could consider fair game, especially if I noticed them being especially pious, or something like that. It would be somewhat challenging to find somebody fanatical enough to warrant the violation of their soul without also being important enough that Sunna would take offence to the point that she’d be willing to break the rules.

  Somehow, there was always a downside.