Simple man with his overpowered army

Chapter 83: Again

Lud asks Li "You going for a trip? That’s a bit unusual for you."

Li says "Yes. I find that my... mental health has deteriorated some ever since Sarah... I hope you understand."

Lud says "Absolutely." As he looks at the papers that Li prepared for his leave.

Lud then asks "It doesn’t say when you will be returning, so is it one of those kinds of trips?"

Li answers "I don’t know how long I need time to handle my feelings, so I cannot place a date when I would be returning. I sincerely apologize for the trouble this will likely cause."

Lud says "Oh there is no need to apologize. I too thought about whether I needed to take a proper break for the same reason, but I find working somewhat soothing, though exhausting at times."

Li says "I hope that you won’t get buried by the paperwork and overburn yourself."

Lud responds "I have plenty of people who would remind me to rest every once in a while, so I don’t think I need to worry about it too much. Still..."

Lud looks more closely at the papers Li brought him and then says "If you don’t mind me asking, do you have a destination in mind?"

Li says "I plan to visit a few countries, though I’m not so sure what I’ll do in those places."

Lud responds "I understand. You may leave."

Li bows and starts to leave Lud’s office. But before he closes the door behind him, Lud says "Li."

To which Li stops and asks "What is it?"

Lud thinks carefully what to say next, until he finally brings out the words as he smiles "Remember that we will be waiting here for your return."

Li thinks for a moment, until he responds with "Right" and closes the door.

Lud sighs and leans a bit on his chair. Then he mutters "I hope that he isn’t planning anything stupid. Then again, this is Li Last we are talking about, so it is hard to imagine. And even further then again... no one is perfect."

Li went to Rusteror in search of Union, the famed miracle drug for some deranged ritual. When he searched around, his status made it a bit hard to gain access to it, but as he dug deeper, he found an interested seller who was "willing" to let Li have the stuff.

In exchange, the seller requested anonymity in the kingdom of Elysium as well as some hard cash. Li had some with him and agreed to the terms, but little did the seller know, the fate of Elysium was nearing its end in his eyes.

When Li left Rusteror, he ventured through the new dwarven capital of Coaltal to assess the situation there before making the move he was planning.

There, he saw that nothing had changed from the report he had read. Humans were in slave status and brought with the utmost disregard of their safety. Humans were nothing. They were but items sent to the Kingjewel to extract more ore and jewels. Lucky ones got to serve their dwarven masters, but few were lucky enough, neither happy about it.

As he drank some whiskey he bought from a supposed high end dwarven vendor for the taste he commented "I can’t even get drunk on what these people have. Ah, I miss the days when me and my fellow rell took some wild substances to fill our curiosity. Luckily our kin doesn’t harbour a concept for addiction, so that never got to the point of becoming an issue, but still..."

He drank a few hard gulps of the whiskey he bought and took a breath. "Then when those bastard gods came to our home, the races they made blundered what little land we left from exotic goods before gods turned the place more and more hospitable for their little creations."

As Li continued to drink in public, he saw a few drunken dwarves beating their human slaves as they laughed and drank. Li stared at them for a moment and had an idea. "Since this is the path I will now walk, might as well drop the pleasantries for a sec."

Then he went to the two drunken dwarves and acted all drunk with the whiskey bottle on his hand and said "What yo guys do? Why havv I not been invitet to dis... event?"

One of the two dwarves says "See Pappe? This guy gets it! We should make *hick* a public beating for these lil wastes of space. Maybe the *hick* then they would contribute something to us bigger pe*hick*ple."

The dwarf name Pappe says "Hahhahaa! You might be right, but they do... do... do... do some stuff at that place where we used to mine all... the stuff. Until that bastard king from Elyswhatever came and now people can’t sleep there good. This is why we got to make these humans do the stuff that king tried us to suffer from in a grand... scale of irony? Iron. Iron. Funny word."

Li dropped to dwarf level and hugged the two dwarves from behind as he said sharply "The name of that place is Elysium and the king’s name is Faust Ilumnos. You better remember that when you go to the reincarnation pool in about five minutes."

The dwarf gets confused and asks "Whatya on about? Why you getting cold?"

Then Li began to hug the two dwarves so tightly that they began to have a hard time breathing. Then Li rose up while still holding the two dwarves’ necks in a tightening hug.

Onlookers began to form and Li slightly glanced at them with a cold gaze.

Then Li squeezed the dwarves’ neck so tight they were crushed and snapped. Li just dropped them like trash on the ground and said "I guess I might feel a little tipsy. Or so I say, as I didn’t have the patience to wait for a few minutes as I promised."

As he spoke, someone had already called guards to the scene. As the guards called for Li to surrender, he made a slight chuckle before commenting "I guess... Ill was onto something."

The scene that day became a horror story every dwarf would tell their kids for generations. The name that all in Lutah would call what happened that day was "The butchery of Coaltal", and the name of the perpetrator, "The Coaltal butcher". None could really tell who was the perpetrator, since barely anyone who saw Li’s face that day lived to tell the tale, and those that did, the terror that came back to them made them unable to recognize that face.

As Li bathed in a cold river to wash off the blood, he listened to the birds chirping like nothing ever happened. There was no smile on Li’s face after that, and if he would see someone smiling, he would always remember Sarah’s face.

But it was not like he would talk too much with other people after what he was planning on doing next. And that was...

.

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To go to Elysium mines and dig as deep it was needed to make contact with Ru’ugwell’s ever sleeping body. And then... to use Union... to challenge the very world order after what he would then become.

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But Li wasn’t a fool. As he was journeying to that place, he knew that, should things get out of rails hard enough, Maumar would do something about it.

But in the corner of his mind, he had a fear... a fear that this was some unimportant timeline that had branched off for whatever reason and would be erased by the main timeline. That none of what he was doing in this life bore no meaning to the ones that exist in the right timeline.

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As Li dug deeper and deeper in the mines, the pressure from the sleeping dragon titan came more and more powerful. It was when he finally hit the end and was almost completely exhausted from all the digging and bearing the pressure of the dragon titan, that he sat for a moment in that cave with no light in sight.

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He poured the contents of the Union to Ru’ugwell’s body that was visible and then poured the rest to himself.

Before he touched Ru’ugwell and finalized his sin, he said but one word on the tongue of rell "Mi’telamlok" that meant roughly... "I’ll be with you soon".