World Keeper

Chapter 743: Betrayal

With the concept of the trinity discovered, I had opened a new path for me to begin planning my abilities. Thankfully, Tsubaki had amassed over a millenia of combat experience, learning how to use various types of powers to overcome enemies even stronger than herself. With her help, I knew that I could find a set of techniques useful to me. But first… Irena, are you free?

Of course, Dale. Her reply came back immediately, as if surprised and happy that I would call for her help. What can I do for you?

I gave a small smile as I thought my request through. I’d like you to guide me to someone truly deserving of punishment. I want to test out a new ability I came up with.

There was a brief moment of silence as she considered my request. Very well. I assume that this is a ‘permanent’ form of punishment?

If all goes well, I would hope so. At the very least, they would not come out the same. I did not know just how strong the power I created was, and needed to properly test it out. With that in mind I received a set of coordinates from Irena.

The woman’s name is Margaret Hatchet. She’s a dovah in charge of an orphanage. However, she uses the business mostly as a front for her… more feral urges, luring in unsuspecting people looking to acquire one of her children. Once she has their address… well, the police have never found a full body. In order to keep them off her trail, she will occasionally attack families that she finds on her nightly walks.

I shuddered as I thought of that, offering a small nod. Yeah, she’ll do. Part of me didn’t even want to meet this woman in person, but I needed to see the actual effect of my ability. Thus, I teleported myself to the coordinates she provided, the nearly empty book in my right hand.

When I arrived, I was standing over a kilometer away from a three-story building at the edge of a large city. The walls of the building seemed worn down, but the security wards on it were still well-maintained. Behind the building was a small playground, where I could see a group of energetic children playing.

Supervising this group was a dovah woman with a black robe, wearing a pair of glasses over her elongated snout. She had a kind smile as she watched the children playing, such that I found it hard to believe she was as bad as Irena had claimed. However, I trusted Irena’s judgement. She was the God of Justice, after all.

Thus, I suppressed my aura to the bare minimum, opening the book in my right hand to the last finished page. There, the protagonist of the story was introduced. I focused on the features of the thin dovah woman, her dark fur, and her soft brown eyes. Using the power of the Words domain, I transcribed her appearance directly into the book, focusing my perception on her entirely.

There would be too few times that I would be able to get the name of an enemy during a battle if we were facing a true invasion. Therefore, I set the activation condition as detailing the target’s current appearance while focusing on my perception of their identity.

At first, nothing seemed to happen, the woman entirely unaware that she had been locked on by a divine power. Once I finished my description, however, the text within the book began to glow a golden light. Only then did she react, eyes going wide and scanning her surroundings. Long lines of text could be seen drawing themselves over her fur, and she let out a strangled cry before vanishing.

The children were naturally shocked, afraid by what they had seen. Their caretaker had vanished from in front of them, seemingly attacked. Many of them began screaming and crying, others looking around to try to identify the threat. Since I was observing from a considerable distance, I was confident that they would not be able to find me. Even if they did, I was hardly afraid of being punished by the law for what I had done.

Can you arrange for someone to take care of the orphanage? I sent my voice back to Irena as I looked at the crying children.

I was preparing from the moment you told me your plan. Irena assured me, and I could see several robed priests walking towards the orphanage.

With a relieved sigh, I looked down at the book in my hands, noticing that the text had been greatly expanded. No longer was it a simple prologue, as new chapters were being written at a blinding speed. My eyes widened as I realized that it would only take an hour, at most, before the book filled its pages.

Given the speed that the text was filling out, I could only skim through the pages as they were being written. Even so, it painted a rather clear picture for me of what the woman was going through. And I had to say, a smile of satisfaction rose over my mouth as I read.

First, she was naturally confused, unsure of how she had arrived in a strange world. She seemed to notice that something was wrong, and commented that the air tasted stale. I didn’t exactly know how to fix that, but I wasn’t particularly concerned. This wasn’t an illusion that could be broken by identifying that one was trapped.

Soon, she encountered the first wave of the demon king’s forces, an army of goblins that had attacked a nearby town. As she was a fairly skilled combatant herself, she easily slew the goblins in her attempt to find out any useful information from the town’s survivors. That was where she learned about the story of the demon king.

Obviously, no such being existed within my worlds. Even on Desbar, the demons were ruled by a president, not a king. Thus, she was able to further confirm that she was transported somewhere else entirely. Adding onto the fact that she noted the absence of any system menus appearing, she began to question whether any of this was really happening or not.

Regardless, she soon left the town. Without the ‘protection’ of the system, as well as access to her saved skills, she had no desire to fight something like a demon king. Sadly, this was the worst choice that she could have made. The demon king was such a being that it would grow stronger as time passed and its forces dominated more of the world.

There seemed to be several long timeskips, each spanning between months and years. They only occasionally referenced any special events, such as important acquaintances she made, or crimes she committed. It was nearly twenty years after her arrival within the world when the demon king had conquered ninety percent of the planet.

At this point, Margaret had been praying that a hero would rise up, never realizing that she herself was meant to be the hero of this story. By the time that the approaching army spurred her to act, it was already too late. The rank and file soldiers may not have been a match for her, but the commanding officers had grown far too strong for Margaret to handle.

The story seemed to be coming to an end, but I was confused… less than half of the pages had been used. Was she going to make some form of comeback to escape from the army?

Curious, I read on. As it turned out… no, no she was not. The final battle against an officer in the demon king’s army had been woefully anticlimactic, the dovah woman easily beheaded. Once she was slain, another page turned, and blood red text began to write out the words ‘The End’.

As for the unused pages? It seemed as if they would remain blank for this book. The cover changed as well, a picture of the dovah in her prime depicted beneath the title, ‘The Life of Margaret Hatchet’.

However, this did give me some ideas in regards to the limitations of the book. For instance, the page count. If the hero of the story managed to fill out the entire book without finishing their story, it was hard to say what would happen. They could either continue their story unprinted, or perhaps they would be directly released. Either way, doing so meant that the hero led such an interesting life that the book determined the details had to be included in the adventure.

Next was the fact that the individual trapped within the book was able to identify that they had been trapped. I could easily write in that the world’s system appeared in the setting of the story, but that would hardly help. The senses themselves were just slightly off, which I was unsure how to overcome.

With this in mind, I shouldn’t use the book on people who possess powers relating to freedom or transportation. Otherwise, they may be able to simply use their own domains to break free of the book’s bindings. This was strikingly different compared to Terra’s books, in which one was simply trapped within their own life story with no escape.

Of course, this book had its advantages as well. For instance, there was no harm in someone reading the story of the trapped individual. Margaret Hatchet would not reappear simply because I read the book she had been confined to.

At the same time, I was able to adjust the setting of the story itself while writing the prologue. The only requirement was that I include a plot hook for some form of adventure, in this case the demon king. It would be just as easy for me to set up an intergalactic space opera, or a prehistoric world where one had to escape from dinosaurs.

Given that Margaret moved outside the normal confines of the story, I could safely say that the world within the book was ‘fully developed’ when it was created. Otherwise, the background events such as the demon king’s progress would not have been recorded. However, this was simultaneously not a complete world.

The distinction here was important, because there was no normal way to travel between the real world and the world of the story. It was not a world that existed within the void, but rather the projection of a world created with divine power. There were likely other factors in play, like the hero’s perceptions shaping the story, but I would need to conduct further tests in order to identify those details.

What I did know was that Margaret Hatchet wasn’t coming back. The book had confirmed her death, and even written ‘The End’ in her own blood. It was entirely possible that even her soul would not be able to escape from the story I had written. And given what I had seen of her actions in the book, and the recounting of her crimes, I wasn’t the least bit sorry.

With this test taken care of, I gave a small nod of satisfaction. Within the orphanage, the priests were already working to calm the crying children, though they did not seem to know how to explain what had happened. Given that this was Irena’s preparation, I had faith that she would handle it suitably.

As for me… it was time for me to go back to the Sky Citadel and write more prologues. I wanted a variety of options available to me, so that I could properly match a story against the appropriate target when the time came.

“Julia!!!” A voice shouted out, incessant knocking audible from the wooden door. The resident elven goddess raised her brow at the unfamiliar voice, choosing to rise from her couch to go answer the door. Aurivy had only recently decided to go out grocery shopping, though Julia was certain that they weren’t lacking anything important. Still, she did this sometimes when she wanted to get a present for Julia, and Julia did the same herself.

Thinking about that, and how this guest might be related to why Aurivy had left, Julia’s face softened. She opened the door, smiling at the blue-skinned girl standing behind it. “Hello, there. Is there something I can help you with?” She asked softly, completely unprepared for the girl to lunge and wrap her arms around the elven goddess.

“The Keeper said that I could ask you to make me a library! Pretty please?! It’s going to be my new divine artifact, and it will be awesome! I’ll fill it full of books about all different kinds of adventures, and maybe I’ll even just smash people with the library itself sometimes!” The girl said in an overly energetic tone, her cool skin practically plastered all over Julia’s torso.

“Wait, wha--the Keeper?” The pieces began to click in Julia’s head, and she suddenly realized why Aurivy had actually left. “Aurivy!? Curse this sudden but inevitable--” Her curse was cut off as the girl’s neck extended unnaturally far so that she could look in Julia’s eyes.

“So? Can I have it? I’ve got a design and everything all planned out!”

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