Negotiation and Extorsion

If he remembered well, the magical attack he was about to be hit with was Shaula's infinite Hell. A normally terrifying attack.

That's why he smiled and shrugged after a moment and took a step forward, immediatly the pinpricks of light grew in intensity as he did so and he was pelted by explosive and incredibly hot light needles.

However, his strides did not waver, even as countless explosions of light made melted holes through his body.

He took another step as the holes were patched in a split seconds.

He could dodge them easily if he used Yang magic.

He could destroy them if he used enough PoD.

He could stop them if he used EC to create a thin veil of halted time on his body.

But really, why bother, when he could just take them and heal afterward?

After a while, the endless barrage of attacks abruptly stopped. To which he simply shrugged and jumped all the way from where he was to the tower without using any magic. The demonic beasts in his way were totally ignored.

Landing lightly at the foot of the and before the ten meters tall gate. Julian eyed the top and balcony of the tower but found no one. So he simply touched the gate and entered the tower after it opened automatically.

He was greeted by a giant hall pretty much empty of anything except for a staircase leading up and one leading down, and a hot girl with her brown hair in a braid in the middle of the hall...

"Hello, Shaula. How are you doing on this sunny day?" Julian said conversationally as if he was greeting a friend.

"Uh? eh, oh, I'm doing pretty good. I ate demon meats for breakfast and dinner to day, as usual. How are you doing yourself, intruder?" Shaula asked after her initial bout of surprise.

"Well, my day was rather busy. Stole some royal crowns and now I need a divine dragon's heart to finish my quest for a maiden's heart."

Shaula smiled confusedly. "Sound like an adventure, will you take the trials?" She change the subject, rudely not caring at all about how his day was going. "Because if you don't, I'll be forced to kill you in cold blood by becoming a terrifying killing machine, yep yep. Though I don't want that, becoming a terrifying killing machine. I mean."

"I'll take the trials, conquer the tower, and break your contract. How about it?"

"What? No! Master Flugel tasked me with protecting the seal and the tower from trespasser and gave me this contract! I don't want it broken!" Shaula eyes' widened in horror.

"If you try, I'll kill you!"

Rolling his eyes, Julian's eyes sharpened as he peered into a realm of white and black. Similar to the one he see when his consciousness separate from his mind and body, it was way easier now that he was significantly stronger. And the experience would prove invaluable for Essence Sight in the future.

With his current vision, he zeroed on the blurry figure that was now Shaula and peered force himself to peer deeper, and deeper. Until he saw her essence, a thing of dark red and hungry golden brown.

Whitout his knowledge, his irises began swirl and whirl as if they became liquid and his pupils turned reflective of what he was personally seeing right now.

*GASP*

Hearing a shocking sound, he snapped out of Essence Sight and came about to a Shaula who was white as the dead and stock still.

Curious, he approached her and waved his hand before her gave. "Hello? You alright?"

The browned haired girl blinked at his voice and put a hand to her head, she looked dizzy. "Eh? I don't feel very good. Not good at all, I feel sick. What happened?"

Profiting from the opportunity, Julian smiled and patted her head, his hand having an orange sheen. "Nothing important, there. Feel better?"

Shaula nodded once, numbly. Her eyes had a glassy look to them.

Nodding to himself, he let her digest the change he made to her psyche naturally and took her in his arms in a princess carry and ascended the stairs, finding her quarter on the floor above, he tuck her in bed and went away.

Julian couldn't hide the fact from himself anymore, he was self-righteous and he didn't even care much for it.

Some people would argue that nothing made Shaula more happy than fulfilling her master's order. But for him, spending 300 years guarding a tower with limited human contact and eating shitty food wasn't living.

Plus, Shaula was thoughtless and missing common sense, and that was coming from him. That made her a stunted individual, and you don't use your stunted daughter as a tool.

As he said, self-righteous, but damn. Fuck Flugel. Of course he was probably missing context.

Did he care?

Not in the least.

At least now Shaula would actually be free to think for herself, without having changed much.

—————

"Now, first trial, is it?"

Standing in front of him in the middle of the floow was a simple stone monolith. As soon as he touched it, the scenery changed as a series of monolith with stars and constellation inscribed on them rose from the ground.

Immediatly, he diriged hinself toward one in particular.

In this trial, one had to choose the constellation representating the greatest of heroes Shaula had extinguished in the past 300 years.

The correct answer, he knew already. It was the one representing the star Rigel. He wouldn't really consider himself someone knowledgeable concerning this world, its culture and past. But having read Roswaal's entire library he still knew the night sky he had come to see much in the past two months and some like the back of his hand. His memory was not perfect yet, but not by much.

Upon touching the the right monolith, the room shifted and tranformed into a library. The Taygeta library to be exact, a library filled with the books of the dead. Which contain the memories of the deceased.

He was rather interested in reading some of those books, but he could always come back later after he finish the three trials and become the owner of the tower.

However, now was exactly where things became interesting. While the first trial was easy and test overall knowledge and perception. The second test pure might by needing you make Reid Astrea take a step back in a fight.

As he was now, it wouldn't be a problem. Heck, he was pretty sure nobody in this world could kill him anymore. And he was packing some serious punch. He hadn't even gone all out yet, but he was afraid the damage would be too wide or global to reverse after all. Bringing back souls from Od Laguna's grasp was not so easy, as he was right now, he could probably bring back a few hundreds people to life within a dozen seconds of killing them. But one of his all out attack is almost guaranted to not just kill a few hundreds people, no matter where he was in the world.

Anyway, this wasn't what was interesting to him about the upcoming trial, it was that he could learn from a peerless swordman and knew just what this said dead swordman desired and grant it to him.

It would really be a shame for him to miss on such an opportunity. Wouldn't it?

—————

Arriving on the fourth floor which was a circular room with a broken sword embedded in the middle of it. Julian rolled his shoulders and strode to it confidently.

He touched it, and immediatly, the trial started by materializing a wild and rough looking red haired man.

Before the man could say anything, Julian grinned and said. "Reid Astrea, I have the deal of a lifetime to offer you. Want to hear it?"

The man rose an eyebrow. "Who the fuck are you?"

"A guy who can bring you back to life, with your body in your prime, the rest don't matter."

"Well, you sure are making a good point. But I'm left skeptical if you can do anything for the contract I have with this tower. That old cunt Flugel was a pretty decent mage all things said, the contracts he devised are unviolable of unviolable." Reid asked, a spark of interest lightning up in his calculating eyes.

"Not even asking what I want in exchange?"

"Nah, don't really care. As long as you can fulfill your end. Unless of course it's something sexual. I don't do guys, and I certainly don't let them do me. Oh, also no eternal servitude, had enough taste of that already."

Julian shrugged lightly. "We can agree on that at least. As for the contracts. It's true Flugel was peerless on magic or close to it, but I don't really play by the rules. As for my demand, it's simple, I want you to train me in your style of swordmanship until I deem myself satisfactory. Then I also want you to do abide by three orders from me after I bring you back to life, whatever they may be. We'll make a contract about it too, with whatever failsafe you want included in it."

"No contract. Kiddo, you just admitted that you don't play by the rules, whatever that mean. If you can mess with the contract of another person, you can sure as heck mess with your own." Reid refused, placing his broken sword against his shoulder.

"And I don't trust you to obey me without something forcing you to. So it's either a contract or something you'll like even less."

"... Are you threatening me, brat?"

"Pretty much."

"..."

"Ahaha!" Reid guffawed and slapped his knee. "You're a pretty funny guy!" Snorting, he slowly stopped laughing. "Either you're overconfident or insane. But whatever, I'll let you the benefice of the doubt since you can apparently bring back the long past dead. I'm in."

"Glad to be making business with you. Now to tamper with your contract. You'll feel a bit strange during the procedure, but nothing too extreme. Oh also, I'll need physical for it." Julian smiled and said.

"..."

"Sure, but don't make it weird. Or I'll cut off your hands. I'm serious, I don't like men."

Ignoring him, Julian offered his hand for an handshake. Upon being taken up on it by Reid, he immediatly invaded his entire being with EC. The soul was usually on another layer of reality than the mind and body, and its percerption was not accessible by anybody. But with his experience with Essence sight and flooding his eyes with EC with intent, he could see souls in close proximity to them.

Since a contract in Re-Zero was something soul binding, seeing it was neccessary to make precise changement to one. At least to him that's how it worked, because he wasn't sure if anybody else in the verse could mess with contracts like him.

Modifying the term of Reid trial were relatively easy with minute uses of time manipulation to dip into other timeline to destabilise the ironclad rules of the contract. Rules he would twist and deform to correspond to his narrative, temporarily rewinding back the entire contract to the time of its creation to settle them as natural and in order to not cripple Reid's soul or whatever the punishment could be for him.

After that, he simply memorized and left a part of his magic into Reid's soul. Both to bring him back to life more easily later and to utterly fuck him if he ever decided to do something funny.

Done, he retreated back a step and released a breath.

He wasn't sure why, but using EC to directly see souls and interact with them even the slightest bit was ridiculously straining and draining, even for his current self and his current ridiculous reserve of mana.

It was as if it was totally in his magic capability to play with souls, but it wasn't ready yet to do it. Like that particular fonction was far too heavy yet.

It was a particular mystery he had already a few guesses about.

Anyway, Reid looked rather disgruntled after having his soul tampered with, even if it was very little. "Man, that was weird. However, I can tell how loose the terms of my trial are now."

"Good for you, you ready for our contract now?"

"Yeah, whatever. Let's get it over so I can beat the shit out of you under training pretense already. I was laughing earlier. But really, I just want to punch your smug face in."

"Oh, yeah. You're supposedly at the pinnacle of martial arts too right? Well I'll add that to my training demand. Thanks for reminding me."

"You're shitting me right?"

"Nah."

"..."

"Crap."