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Chapter Sixteen - If youre lost, you can look but wont find me. She only went and stopped time!

  Using the vast majority of her available mana, Lorelei triggered and aimed it at Liam. Unfortunately, she was in too much of a hurry to remember to 'do it in style', and - with crushing inevitability - she received a negative outcome.

  There was a momentary pause and then a soft 'ding' noise.

  Well, that was a bit of a change around.

  As she felt a huge rush from the added stats, Lorelei threw her coin again at the first Rogue and was pleased to see cause significantly more damage this time around. The bar above Liam's head dropped to 75%, and she sensed his own personal status made a significant upgrade from 'bemused' to 'fucking furious'. However, as she backed away from the rapidly approaching figure of an angry Rogue, it wasn't the damage to Liam that most interested Lorelei. Rather, it was the impact of the randomised effect of on his mate.

  Liam looked from Lorelei to the chicken where his partner in crime had stood and then back to Lorelei. "What the fuck was that? Are you some sort of fucking Mage or something?"

  She shook her head. "I'm going to level with you, I couldn't do that again if I tried,' she answered honestly. "Now," glancing at the countdown flashing in her vision, "I hope you don't mind, but could we hurry this along a little?"

  As it turned out, a 200% increase in stats was really quite significant.

  *

  Fortuna watched as her Herald took out what appeared to be quite some built-up tension on an unfortunate Rogue. It had been a long time since she had been in at the start of an integration, so it might have been that things were always this fucked up, but she doubted it. In just the short period of time that she'd been shadowing Lorelei, the level of atavistic shit she'd witnessed go down was off the charts. It said something when, on Day One, the Wolves and the Kobolds acted with more grace and charm than the subjects of the integration.

  Considering the insanely strict guidelines over the level of development civilisations needed to reach to even become eligible for the System, Fortuna feared for the wellbeing of whoever was responsible for this clusterfuck. Let alone for the sanity of the poor AI trying to traffic cop all of this.

  Speaking of which . . .

  With a wave of her hand, Fortuna paused time in this sector of the galaxy. With any luck - ha! - everyone charged with preventing precisely the sort of chat she had planned would be far too busy trying to restart the clocks to worry about what she was up to.

  "Guide?"

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "Oh, please! I was never one for standing on ceremony and insisting on titles. Let's both accept you have shown the right amount of terrified respect and take it from there. I can imagine you offering obsequious little bows if that calms you down."

  "Honestly, you destroy one universe in a fit of pique, and it's held against you for the rest of time. Please be assured, I have no plans to destroy this iteration," she paused to look at the frozen tableaux of Lorelei piledriving the Rogue through the concrete pavement, whilst some form of confused poultry looked on, "well, not personally anyway."

  Fortuna smiled, and deep down - in the core of its matrix - the AI suddenly felt like it could achieve anything. That all things were possible. That there was nothing beyond its boundless capabilities. "I don't know, really. Bored? Hungry? Horny? Probably one of those three. Or maybe all of them? It gets so hard to tell the difference at my age. Regardless, it would be fair to say there's little rhyme or reason to my choice to pause here. However, . . ."

  And then Fortuna frowned, and a chill crept over the AI's existence. It was suddenly aware of everything that could go wrong in its future. There was no choice it could make to mitigate the dark cloud of destruction hovering over it. The Old One continued. "However, having been here for a few hours, I cannot help but notice some rather . . . questionable randomised outcomes have occurred. I am quite sure there's nothing untoward taking place, but as a disinterested observer, I have been struck that someone's hand appears to be pressing on the scales."

  "In short, you decided to cheat the rolls and off my Herald?"

  "Goodness me, that sounds like the sort of thing you should bring to the attention of your nearest liaison officer for immediate investigation. Mind you, in my experience, they're very much 'Delete-the-AI-First-Ask-Questions-Later' in their approach to such things. They can't be having rogue iterations develop. I'm sure that's exactly what you did, and not try to solve the problem yourself by unlawfully murdering my Herald. If you know anything about Iustitia, you know you absolutely do not want to fuck with that blind bitch."

  "Ah, that's what a girl like to hear—complete and abject surrender. I'm going to make this easy on you. I don't want you to do anything. Nothing at all. But I do need you to stop fucking with the randomiser. If she walks herself off a cliff, I've no issue with that. Fortune's Heralds are here for a good time, not a long time, and that's just the cost of doing business. No harm. No foul. But if I get even the slightest whiff of you giving her even the merest of nudges on her way down, I will move here permanently. You think you've got a hotfix problem now? Wait until I fancy a kebab at 3am. Do we understand each other?

  Fortuna sighed theatrically. "I'm not asking you to let her get away with anything, my dear. The nature of her class is that she's going to cause you massive headaches just by breathing. You can do whatever you need to in order to smooth that out. I don't care about any of that. However, you must let her rise and fall on an honest roll of the dice. It's not that I don't applaud your creativity, but you do not deal to my Herald from a marked deck. Am. I. Clear?" Fortuna's tone hardened, and the frozen air cracked with the intensity of her command.

  Sensing her victory, the lady in red slowly started to fade away from this version of reality. "I will take that as your unquestioning agreement to my suggestion. I don't report you to the authorities for failing to disclose the interference of an Old One at initial integration, and you don't seek to rub my Herald out of existence through nefarious means. By my word as a Progenitor, we have a covenant."

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