193. Counterattack Thoughts

He couldn’t help but think about the counterattack, now that he knew there was a counterattack on the horizon. It lived in his head rent-free, whether he wanted it to or not, lurked in his mind like a virus, like a parasite, something he couldn’t break out of his thoughts or dig out of his brain. He spent all morning looking over his shoulder, then had to retire into the back room because it was too stressful to be in public.

It was ridiculous. He recognized that. Ridiculous that he was so hung up over it. It wasn’t like Bast was going to lead the counterattack tomorrow. Bast didn’t even control the counterattack, for one, and for two, it wasn’t like they were going to reach out for the very first time on the eve of the counterattack. Probably. It was possible, he had to admit.

No, Rhys! Don’t give in to the mind-killer. The little fear that leads to, mostly, me thinking too much and spiralling into an abyss at three A.M.! He shook his head hard and slapped his cheeks. It wouldn’t help him to get anxious about it, anyways. What he needed to do was make his final preparations.

Which are… what?

Finalize the shops? But the shops were already at capacity. Or rather, Rhys was at capacity, so he couldn’t realistically expand the shops any further. He could try teaching people his path, but he doubted people would be interested in picking up a trash path if they could pick up anything else. Also… he kind of didn’t want to? Call it selfish and trashy of him, but it was a massive benefit to be the only one who was basically immune to impurities. If he made a student, and that student went rogue–and they’d be a trashy student, so why wouldn’t they do something trashy like decide to kill their teacher?--then he’d be the one in the most trouble. True, in this hypothetical scenario, he’d be much stronger than his student… but that was assuming things went as normal. He was a trash talent, though. If he trained a star talent, he didn’t even want to imagine how powerful they could become, or how rapidly they could gain power.

Anyways! His anxiety-fueled spirals aside, it would take years for someone to accumulate enough knowledge of trash to replace or even augment Rhys, so that wasn’t an option with a counterattack around the corner. And anything else… expanding further wasn’t really an option, and they were already as virulent as he could make them without risking getting caught as impure by every mage with half an iota of sense. The shops were in their final state. No, they weren’t across the entire Empire, and no, they weren’t as epidemic as they could be, but they stretched a good distance into the Empire, and they were as viral as he could make them. All he could do was his best, and when it came to the shops, he was comfortable saying he’d done his best.

He could grow his underlings, but… growing mages was a long, slow process. He’d re-cored them all with the energy from the criminals, and more than that? Reaching Tier 2? Not realistic. Even the first ones who had joined his group hadn’t reached Tier 2 yet. Even his Tier 2s were struggling to reach Tier 3, and they hadn’t been recored and had a long time to practice their paths outside of the time they’d spent in the Empire.

Though, speaking of… the looks in the eyes of some of those rescued mages when he’d finally re-cored them. He hadn’t realized how close he was to mutiny. True, seeing their friends run around with cores and use magic while they were growing older as mortals couldn’t be fun, and he understood that, but from the way some of them had eyed him on return, boy, they’d been closer to their absolute limit than he’d realized. It was fortunate that between the criminals and the Tier 4 he’d absorbed, he’d been able to re-core all of them, or else he might not have had many underlings left. Not to mention the damage they could do, if they got frustrated and decided to go talk to the Empire? He couldn’t imagine. They couldn’t delete his entire operation, but they could do massive damage to him, and in the worst case, force him to activate his impurities before he was ready.

People are dangerous, he thought to himself, shaking his head. When this was all done, he might just hare off into the wilderness and be a hermit for a while. Just spend some time on his lonesome, where there weren’t any politics or interpersonal dynamics to deal with. He was someone who’d spent his entire life working from home because office politics sounded like hell. Having to deal with people now was basically his worst nightmare, except that the Empire had introduced an entire new dynamic of nightmare that he hadn’t previously anticipated.

He could raid more camps, but most of the camps had already been raided, and the ones that remained were deep in the heart of the Empire, even deeper than his shops could reach. He hadn’t rescued everyone from his region, he didn’t think, anyways, but after his big raid, the Empire had closed those camps and moved all the remaining workers and guards–the few there were, after Rhys’s raids–into the deeper camps. There was nothing he could do about that, not without overextending, nor did he want to create a big fuss on the eve of a counterattack. If all went well, the Empire might not exist after their counterattack, or at worst, it would exist in a weakened state, on a path toward death, and it would be easier to attack the camps after their counterattack.

Not his underlings, not his shops, not the camps. Then… what else? He could search for Straw… but at this point, he was pretty sure Straw was in the Alliance with Ernesto, so there wasn’t much to find over here. He could empower himself, but aside from continuing to slurp up Impure Wells–which was more of a top-up than an empowerment these days–there wasn’t much on the menu that he could do quickly. Sure, he could go dedicate himself to finding some powerful poisons and impurities to level up, or spend some time wracking his brain over the void, but the first one took time and the second one took mental health, neither of which he had in spades right now. Plus, he could do either of them any time. When the Empire was gone, he could still level up. So what should he do right now, while the Empire continued to exist? If possible, something he could only do with the Empire around, which ideally would also help him destroy the Empire…

Rhys snapped his fingers, his eyes widening. That was it! The trash heaps! The Empire had stripped all the manuals and powerful artifacts from the pre-Empire mages and threw them into giant trash heaps. He’d known about them for the longest time, but other things had always come up. But now he was at capacity on his restaurants, had no easy or quick ways to level up, and the Empire was coming down any day now. This was the time. The moment was here! It was time to go raid the trash heaps!

As it turned out, finding the location of the trash heaps–or, properly, heap–was as easy as asking a few long-term Empire citizens, aka the ex-criminals. The heap’s location wasn’t secret. It was well-known, especially amongst the criminal element, who were equally as interested in the heap as Rhys was, for their own reason. Apparently, the mana battery that Logan Waters had been using came from the heap. The problem, however, was that the heap was well-known by the Empire’s citizens because everyone knew it was full of valuable artifacts, the Empire, its criminal elements, outside mages, everyone. As a result, the Empire guarded its heap well. Guards patrolled it 24-7, and not weakling Tier 1 guards, either, but Tier 2s, 3s, and 4s. It would be the hardest heist he’d done so far, harder than all the camps combined, harder, even, than raiding the criminals.

His eyes glittered. He grinned. But I’m up for a challenge. And if all goes right… it might even be the kind of challenge where I end up getting stronger… and maybe Lira and Mouse too, if we’re lucky!

And so, Rhys set his sights, at last, on the garbage heap full of powerful artifacts from the Empire’s conquest.