Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 1: 1 - The End of One Life

Six screens, and he only cared about one of them.

The other five were noise. Traffic cameras, mirrored feeds, a car park in a country he had never visited. The screen in the middle showed a green bar and a number that had been climbing for nine hours.

97%.

”Come on,” he muttered. ”Just a little more.”

98%.

The place had never really been a bunker. People would probably call it that if they ever found it, because bunker sounded better than what it actually was: a hole in the ground at the end of a dirt track, in a part of the world nobody drove through unless they had a reason.

A steel door. A generator. Six monitors.

Nothing with a name on it.

The steel door was supposed to be the good part.

It lasted about four seconds.

Two men came through it, and he knew within a breath that these weren’t the kind of people you talked your way past.

They entered one behind the other, the second covering the first, weapons already raised and aimed at the only living thing in the room.

No shouting and nothing getting knocked over.

Gloves. Covered faces. Boots that barely made a sound against the concrete.

Professionals.

Nobody moves like that unless somebody has paid a great deal for them to move like that.

He got up out of the chair with his hands going for the keyboard.

The first shot went through his left arm above the elbow and put him back down, and by the time the room stopped tilting they had his wrists behind him and had him strapped to the chair with something that was not rope.

Fast. Twenty seconds from the door to that.

Plop.

The first drop came off his fingertips and hit the concrete under the desk.

”The transfer.” The one on the left had a voice with nothing in it. ”How do we stop it?”

”You don’t.”

”You will tell us how to stop it.”

”That’s not the same question.” He worked his jaw. Everything on that side of his body had gone hot and thick. ”The first one was reasonable. The second one is just you being optimistic.”

Plop.

”There is a version of tonight where you walk out of here.”

”There really isn’t, and we both know it, so let’s skip that bit.” He tipped his head at the man’s boots. ”You didn’t come in with a bag. Guys who plan on bringing somebody out bring a bag.”

Plop.

The one on the right went to the desk and looked at the screens the way people look at a dog they have been told bites.

99%

”Nine minutes,” the first one said. ”You give us the kill switch in nine minutes and this stops being your problem.”

”There’s no kill switch.”

”Every system has one.”

”Mine doesn’t, because I built it knowing that one day two of you would be standing in my house asking about it.” He smiled at him with about half his mouth, because the other half had stopped taking instructions. ”You want to know the funny part? You’re not even late. You’re on time. They just sent you to the wrong week.”

The barrel came up and rested against his forehead, and it was cold, and he had genuinely not expected it to be this cold.

’Alright. Alright, I really don’t want to die.’

That surprised him more than the gun did. He had made his peace with this in theory about six years ago, and theory turned out to be worth nothing at all.

’I’d have liked to say goodbye to my mother. Even her. Even after everything we said to each other.’

Plop.

’And my sister. She hasn’t spoken to me since Dad’s funeral, and she’s right not to. I couldn’t go. Borders are a difficult thing to cross when every country on the list has your face in a folder.’

Plop.

100%

The green bar went white, and then the screen changed, and a line of text came up that he had written himself eleven months ago as a joke to nobody.

DELIVERED.

Everything. Nineteen thousand documents. Accounts, transfers, names, dates, the whole rotten cellar under eleven of the wealthiest men alive, sitting in four hundred newsrooms at the same instant.

They were going to fall like flies. Every one of them.

He started laughing, which hurt, and did it anyway.

Behind him, a phone went off. The man with the empty voice answered it, said two words, and then stopped saying anything at all, and even through the ringing in his own ears the hacker could hear the shouting coming out of that phone.

”You have failed! You did not get there in time! Do you understand what has just happened? All of it, everything, it is all gone!”

”Agh.” He let his head fall back against the chair. ”That feels good.”

Plop.

The sound arrived before the pain did, and then the pain did not arrive at all, which he understood was a bad sign and could not make himself care about.

Plop.

The room went out like somebody pulling a plug.

Plop.

Plop.

’Strange. I always thought dying would be a lot quieter than this.’

Plop.

Plop.

He opened his eyes.

What was falling was not coming off his fingers and hitting concrete. It was coming down out of a low grey sky and landing on his forehead, and it was cold, and it was rain.

Plop.

Plop.

”...and so we return him to the earth. Alaric Clairmont, once of this house. Condemned by the Crown for the sale of state secrets to a foreign power, and put to the sword nine days past.”

He was standing up.

That was the first thing his head could deal with. He was standing up, outdoors, in rain, in a coat that was too big through the shoulders, in front of a hole in the ground with people all around it.

The coffin was not on ropes.

It hung above the grave on six threads of pale light that came out of nothing and went into nothing, holding several hundred kilos of oak in the air as though it weighed about as much as a coat.

’What the hell? Why is it floating like that?’

He looked around at everyone else, waiting for somebody to also find this remarkable, and nobody did.

Forty people in black. Black umbrellas over most of them, held by other people who did not have umbrellas of their own. Long coats, high collars, gloves, and not one item of clothing in that field that had been bought rather than made.

The threads let go.

The coffin went down the last two feet on its own and landed with a sound he felt through his shoes.

The man doing the reading closed his book, stepped forward, and turned to face him directly.

”Adrien Clairmont.”

Every head in that field turned with him.

”By the last recorded instruction of Lord Alaric Clairmont, given before sentence was carried out, the seat of this house passes to you.” The man’s voice did not go up at the end of anything. ”The Crown recognises a house through the man who holds it, and a man holds nothing until it is written down. Your assessment will take place here in three days.”

Somebody in the crowd laughed.

It was not loud. It was worse than loud, because it was the laugh you let out when something has been funny for years and has just got funny again.

”Three days,” a voice said, not quite quietly enough. ”For that one? They should bring a chair, he’ll want to sit down halfway through.”

”Careful. That’s the head of House Clairmont you’re talking about.”

”That’s the useless Clairmont I’m talking about, and he’ll be the useless Clairmont in three days too.”

The man in the Crown’s black gave no sign of having heard any of it.

”Have you words for your father, my lord?”

And from just behind him, close enough that he felt it in his back, came a voice he had never heard in his life and recognised anyway.

Soft. Wrecked. Holding itself together with both hands.

”Adrien. Sweetheart. Do you have something you want to say?”

His mother.

The field tipped sideways, and the last thing he managed before the ground came up was one clear thought.

’Where the fuck am I?’

...

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