Chapter 11: The Law

“If you break a Rule,” Nightshade continued, “she’ll come for you.”

So it was a person after all. To be able to enforce the Three Rules across the whole world, she must have been the leader of a worldwide organization who had eyes and ears everywhere. … Hey, wasn’t this supposed to be a peaceful world? His impression of the place had been swinging left and right like a metronome the whole day — and he hadn’t even left the spawn point!

Alas, he was still too naive. “I once saw her up close,” Nightshade continued, trembling as she did. “Wings black as night, an icy cold glare” —

Craft narrowed his eyes. It sounded oddly like the leader of the organization herself showed up; wasn’t that a dumb thing to do? And why does that description sound familiar?…

“That time, she was flying right over me, and I swear, my soul was leaving my body.”

She trembled…with stars in her eyes? Oh no, Craft’s initial impression might have been wrong. It might not have been fear, but rather —

“I almost died but she was so cool!”

“Huh?” Craft blurted out. She had been trembling in excitement . There he was just thinking about how the Law must have ruled through respect and fear like any dignified enforcer, but was it that she ruled through a loyal fanbase instead?

It might sound silly, but in his former world, there had been an AI who’d managed to pull it off. The country it founded was a shining example of human-AI harmony, a leader in technological advancement, and arguably the most culturally advanced nation in the world — all because the AI loved streaming so much, it nationalized every web media platform it could layer its API on; the defense system was implemented as a community plugin.

That couldn’t be what was going on here, but whatever the case, knowing the Law was actually a person was a windfall. With both his and the impostor’s movements restrained by the Rules, whether he got on the Law’s good or bad side would give him an edge against the impostor.

“So,” he asked, “how does she actually do the enforcing?”

“Oh, she shows up and decides what to do with you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “She doesn’t send someone?”

“Nope, she actually shows up.”

The heck, that’s scary. “But isn’t that impossible? I get that there’s some kind of magic going on here, but she can’t be everywhere all at once, can she?”

Nightshade put a finger to her cheek and closed her eyes. “Hmm, that’s true.” She looked at him again. “I remember her saying, ‘My schedule is packed. Please die quickly,’ but that was almost three centuries ago. I guess she has some kind of sixth sense and just teleports all over the place, but before that, I think it’s really just that mostly everyone follows the Rules without being forced to anyway, so she doesn’t have to work overtime.”

Craft looked at the ground, leaning slightly, before straightening himself and looking at her again. “I can’t imagine it. Everyone following the Rules without anyone looking?”

Maybe not ‘everyone,’ but the thought of 99.9999% of people falling in line by themselves was outright magical. People looked out for their own interests, and it just so happened that their interests sometimes outweighed someone else’s.

“I think you’re missing something,” Nightshade said. “I’ve gone around a lot, and I’ve talked to a lot of people, so I’m confident enough to say ‘we all share something in common,’ and that’s why everyone finds it easy to follow the Rules. Everyone from the battle freaks of the down_realm until the laziest fisherman in the Uprealm all have this something that” — she paddle-wheeled her hands in the air, but she dropped them and sighed, chuckling to herself — “Boy am I bad at explaining.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Craft said. Though he chuckled along with Nightshade’s embarrassment, he wondered in the back of his mind whether the things she’d said were also true for the impostor: that they had this same ‘something’ as everyone else. That must have been the case, or else they wouldn’t have acted the way they did.

“Even someone who hates you would have that thing?” he asked.

Nightshade raised an eyebrow. “ ‘Someone who hates you’ ?” She thought for a moment. “I haven’t met very many people with a gripe against someone else, but there was that one time…” She nodded. “Well, it’s a long story, but to sum it up” — she paused, and after making some dissatisfied noises, she rubbed her hair into a mess. “Gah! I really can’t come up with a good summary…”

She beats herself up more than she ought to, Craft thought. She was actually good at explaining things and accommodating other’s confusion, and this frustration she’s got must have just been her being tired. In that case, he ought to throw her a conversational survival donut. “Even if the story’s long, I’m all ears. I might figure something out midway through.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She froze, raised her eyebrows. “Oh, you sure?” she finally said. When he nodded, she mirrored him and nodded too, putting a finger to her cheek. “Hm, well, it was actually like a love triangle. It’s been like a hundred years, so I don’t think they’d take offense if I talked about it now, but let’s just call them A, B, and C to be on the safe side.

“A and B were fighting over who loves C the most, even if C accepts both of them.”

“Classic.” In his spare time, Craft had seen some similar stories that had come out of Japan. Go figure for a country that had been swept by a virus that killed off 90% of the male population.

“A and B were actually best friends before they met C, and C was pretty upfront about the whole thing, so there’s no miscommunication going on here. In fact, there wasn’t a problem at all in the beginning!” Nightshade shook her head. “I don’t get it!”

It was true that nature abhorred a vacuum, but most people also abhorred needless conflict. Weren’t they just…bored? “What, they got bored of peace and invented a problem on their own or something?”

Nightshade froze. “That’s exactly what happened!”

“Hey, wait, I was kidding” —

“A and B thought the other wasn’t treating C very well, even if C kept on telling them he was more than fine with both of them.” She sighed. Her shoulders sank — and she threw her arms up in the air! “Turns out the both of them sorted out their misunderstandings halfway through, and they just went and drummed up the drama for more attention!”

This reminded him of that one textbook event where an old country called ‘Rosiya’ faked the collapse of their government, using it as an excuse to pull a 4-D political Hail Mary and justify a three-way peace treaty, ‘incidentally’ averting World War 4 in the process. It shouldn’t have worked; they had done it one-sidedly without any prior coordination with the other superpowers, but the trick here was that they knew how the Mericans saw them and — particularly — how they would react to blatantly-fake CGI of a city experiencing terrorism on a nuclear level. If that mutual understanding had been mismatched in any way, it wouldn’t have worked, and the CGI nuke would have become reality.

Comparing a minimum viable harem’s love spat to a historical event was neither a fair nor proportional comparison, though. “What happened after that?” Craft continued to ask.

“Oh, well, C was pretty upset about it, but since A and B already made up, things just went back to normal.”

Oh, the analogy held. “All that drama just to go back to the same-old, huh?” He shrugged and chuckled to himself. “Makes me wonder why anyone would want to drum up that kind of thing on purpose.”

“Hey, now, the root cause of their little spat wasn’t fundamentally petty. Making sure two people you know don’t mistreat each other isn’t a bad thing, you know?

“And besides, even if they were angry at each other, don’t you think it’s cool they still bothered to stop and think about each other’s intentions for a moment? If they didn’t, they would’ve just kept fighting.”

He tilted his head, his gaze veering off one way. Couldn’t that ‘thing’ actually just be that very same understanding that Nightshade was talking about? He looked back at her and straightened himself. “Yeah, I can get behind that. If it’s just ‘understanding each other,’ that sounds simple enough.”

“No — yeah — wait, no! It’s close, but — agh!” She threw her hands up, rolled her eyes, took off her hat, and stared at the ceiling. “Oh boys, girls, and everyone in between, do I suck at this.”

She smiled the way people who resigned themselves to their fates did. “Great,” she said and took a deep breath in…then out. She looked back at Craft. “Sorry. Hi. I’m Nightshade.”

Craft furrowed his brows. “Are you…okay? I mean, hi.” He waved with one hand, unsure whether he was playing along correctly.

She put on her hat again. “Great, thanks.”

He lowered his hand. “What was that?”

She smiled and did a peace sign. “Oh, you know, it’s just my job to explain stuff to you, but” — shrug — “I can’t. In this case, it’s best to forget my disappointment in myself — let it out, you know?”

“I think I got the point, though.”

“Oh, no, no. ‘Understanding each other’ is just a tangential concept, and — trust me — I learned the hard way the approximation isn’t the thing itself.” She sighed. “Well, anyway, I don’t think it’s too hard to figure out once you’re outside. If there’s any tip to make it easier… Well, I think even the Law has that thing in common.”

Her words made him pause and remember an odd thing Amacus had told him before: “If we’re alike in any way.” It didn’t strike him as meaning anything in particular at the time — wait, why’d he think of Amacus?

Nightshade chuckled. “Well, it’s not like you’ll just meet the Law on your first day.”

He shook his head. Whatever the case, meeting the Law on his first day would actually be the best case scenario. He needed allies against his strange opponent, and if he could gauge the Law’s personality and goals, he’d stand a better chance of getting her on his side.

“Hey, hypothetically, let’s say you meet the Law one day,” he asked. “How would you get on her good side?”

“Oh, that’s a fun one! Let’s see…” She put a finger to her cheek. “I’ve heard some stories about how the advice the Law gives is really, really good, so” — she shrugged — “I guess, if I wanted to get on her good side, I’d just do the nice thing and take her advice seriously.”

“Oh, that’s…straightforward” — but it was a no-nonsense approach. Even in his undercover work, ‘taking other people seriously’ was one of the core tenets of manipulating everyone from self-elected chancellors to trigger-happy cartel lieutenants. Trying to get his suggestions across without first making the other party feel that he understood them thoroughly was a recipe for a slow and painful death.

Nightshade chuckled. “Well, it’s not like the Law Herself is going to descend on us” —

The summoning circle started to shine. Winds of whispy white magic spiraled around the platform, whipping them in their faces and blowing wind into their ears without remorse.

“No,” Nightshade muttered. Long had she witnessed two summons in a row … and long had she witnessed the outline of those wings.

“No!” she screamed above the winds, but fate would not concede. Black wings sprouted, and the winds stopped suddenly — the air itself frozen, made sub-zero. It turned into snow, those white specks falling down with fluttering black feathers like pollen among falling petals in autumn.

The wings folded down, courteously tucked behind the dark angel as she turned around. Why is she here? Nightshade willed her legs to move, but they wouldn’t. She snapped her head towards Craft, looking for a comrade in shock and awe, but all she found was a mildly surprised man.

“Oh, Amacus?” Craft said.

“R-real name basis?…” Nightshade muttered. All hope was lost. There was nothing left to cling to — not even her consciousness. Her eyes rolled into her skull, and she tipped over backwards never to wake up again … for the next ten minutes.