I lay on the ground in my room, thoughts swirling. Someone had just killed me, but another person saved me at the exact same time.

Who could they be? Did I just get both incredibly unlucky and lucky at the same time? No, not really, I owe my saviour a favour now. So maybe not that lucky. I have no idea what they'll ask for or what the limits of the favour are.

"You're not going to figure anything out thinking about it here. Head out there and figure it out," Novi said. She was right, I just… Ugh.

I got up and dragged myself out of the room. Before I opened my door, I activated [Argent Flow,] pushing the power from it into my eyes. The world took on a silvery quality. Every surface shone slightly as if coated with ice.

That was cool, I always liked visual distortions. I had a bit of a phase playing around with certain consumables that shall not be named. Until I died, I used to have Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, or well, I technically didn't have the disorder because by definition, a disorder had to impact your life negatively. I always liked having cool visual effects on display.

I guess it impaired my vision slightly, though.

"You're stalling," Novi said, ruining the moment.

I let out a groan, then I pulled the door open.

The first thing I noticed was that my door had what appeared to be a bloody handprint on it, which was definitely the 'curse' that 'killed' me. The second was that, based on my Role's abilities, I could tell my liege was in the wrong room.

I hadn't noticed that he had moved at night, which is odd. Thinking back, I don't think I could even tell where he was at the time. I just hadn't put it to mind. Interesting.

Closing my door, I leaned against it and waited for people to trickle out of their rooms.

I felt like I could track every movement, every footstep disturbed the silver-coated stillness of the world and stood out to me like a child screaming in a supermarket.

Every heartbeat in the room was also highlighted. Like searing lights, they told me a story of life that should not be.

I kept my eye on the three people who had communicated with each other before. If anyone were to have the ability to kill someone every day, it would be the one faction I know of. Or at least in the traditional way that the game of Mafia worked.

I could be wrong. I had no idea if we were even playing with that sort of ruleset.

Only two actually left their rooms. The third didn't appear. I thought it was a younger, rough-looking guy.

Looking them over, they didn't seem surprised by my survival. That didn't mean anything until the last guy came out of his room.

I noticed the man with glasses was staring at me… No, wait, he was staring at the handprint. That could mean something, so I started heading in his direction.

I deactivated [Argent Flow] and suddenly felt the world crash into me. I blinked in surprise as I both lost a state of hyperfocus and also gained the ability to see the actual room. It was as if I had been missing the forest for the trees, but a more literal interpretation of that idiom.

The whole room had been lost on me because it wasn't warm, and it wasn't moving. It has been a picture of perfect silver stillness that didn't need to be disturbed.

Maybe sending Argent aspected Mana through circuits connected to my mind was a bad idea. It could be very useful occasionally, but I'd rather not be in Terminator mode at all times.

It's uncomfortable being annoyed every time someone so much as takes a breath.

I could get over the fact I was surrounded by, ugh… Humans. Just fine. I understood my distaste for them was a compulsion placed upon me, and that was fine. I didn't really mind the compulsion. It was kind of fun to lean into it. It felt like I was being given a little reward every time I had a thought that was correct in the eyes of whatever force is making me feel that way.

That didn't mean I was going to fall into it, completely ignoring rationality. No matter how much I enjoyed the little mental treats it gave me. I could control myself if I wanted to.

"Hi, little girl, can I help you?" the guy I walked up to asked. I forgot I had done that and was just staring at him from a few feet away.

Wow, with that greeting, he sure was lucky I couldn't harm him in any way.

"I'm twenty-two, you prick." He had the gall to look genuinely surprised. "You were looking at the mark on the door, indicating someone had killed me, like you knew what it was. You wanna tell me why?" I asked. I didn't feel like pussyfooting around the point.

He looked around us, opened his mouth, then closed it again when someone walked by us.

With a sigh, I pushed my Authority out in a bubble around us and wrapped us in Winter Mana. The world suddenly quieted as the air around us stilled.

"Nobody will hear us now," I said. "What is it?"

"What do you mean you were killed?" he asked, which wasn't an answer to my question.

"What's your role?" I demanded. He pushed back against my command, grunting as he resisted it. It looked like he was about to walk away.

Part of me was surprised this wasn't considered harm. But I suppose I wasn't technically hurting him. I was just making him do something he didn't want to do.

I switched to Root and threw more Mana at the problem, "Tell me what your Role is."

"Inquisitor," he grunted out.

"So you're fighting against the faction that's growing right?" I asked.

He tried to run but hit the edge of the Winter boundary and bounced off. It was kind of pathetic at this point.

"Dude, I'm not going to hurt you, just work with me here," I said, then after a moment decided to commit. "I swear to you I will not lie to you or harm you until I drop the bubble around us."

I felt the Oath take effect and waved away the warning.

He seemed to come to his wits when I did that and locked eyes with me. Huh, he could feel the Oath was real? Why didn't Novi tell me about that aspect?

[Could you tell whether the Oath I made with you did what you'd think it did? No? Then stop being stupid, we're the same person, the rules are probably different. The Skill isn't supposed to be used like we used it.]

"How did you hear that? I didn't even project my thoughts to you."

[I'm practicing reading the fluctuations of your thoughts. It's actually fairly fascinating. There's a waveform—

I tuned her out. There were more important things to focus on than learning Artificery theory right now. No matter how much I wanted to do otherwise. If it was all that important, she could have just dumped the knowledge into my head instead of telling me about it.

Ignoring the incessant pings from her, I continued.

"I don't have any intention of harming you, I just want to know what you know about those three…" I had turned to look at the group of three and paused. There was one more now. A dark skinned woman had joined them. The rough-looking guy left his room at some point after I started this discussion. I was slightly annoyed that I didn't see his reaction to me being alive,

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"Okay, four now."

I think he was shaking with some emotion, I couldn't tell which.

"The Inquisitor Role is supposed to root out the cultists. Their goal is to kill everyone who isn't a cultist. That's why you were targeted. How are you alive?" he finally answered.

"Someone with a doctor's Role saved me. Do you know anything else about them? How are they growing?" I asked.

"No idea, I'm supposed to figure out who the Priestess is and work with her. You aren't the Priestess, are you?" he asked.

"Nope, I'm the Oathbound," I answered. I felt like he had more he could tell me, like how he knew what the red hand meant. Unfortunately, at that moment, I saw something that didn't make sense to me, but was way more important, so I dropped the bubble. "Sorry, I need to handle something."

My liege had finally left his room. Actually, I guess I should say her room now, though maybe I shouldn't make any assumptions in that regard, given the situation. It now looked like they were a well put-together female mage with fresh bloodstains on her robe.

I let out a long sigh. Why does everything have to be so complicated?

I wasn't interested in doing subterfuge right now. If my liege was doing weird shit, I needed to get involved to protect them.

I just left the guy I had been speaking to sitting on the ground where he fell. I could handle the cult later. I just needed a handle on this first.

"You look a lot better in this body," I started with. A bubble of Winter was already thrown up around us to prevent anyone from overhearing this mess.

"Thanks, it—Uh, sorry, I don't know what you're talking about," they lied completely unconvincingly.

Yeah, okay, this person's a hot mess, and I'm going to have to go all in to protect them.

"My Role is Oathbound. I have to protect you until the end of the game. We'll win together at that point, no matter what your objective is," I said. My goal was to convince them I was an asset. "One of my passives allows me to know who I'm supposed to protect. It was the dishevelled guy yesterday, and now it's you."

They frowned, "I can't sense if you're lying or not."

"Is that something you're supposed to be able to do?" I asked. That would be a useful ability if they had it. It didn't sound like a Role-based thing, though. Otherwise, it would have worked. Probably. I didn't have anything that would block something that worked through the system.

"Yes, your face is locked in one position, and you aren't expressing any emotions right now. You feel like a rock. What are you?" they asked. Definitely Skill-based, then. Also, can people stop fucking asking me that?!

"I'm a small metal sphere," I replied. I had a tendency to forget to ensure my facial expressions matched the situation's demands. It was such an effort to remember to smile. Even when I was a human, I struggled with this.

Argent Bastion definitely did not help with that. It felt almost natural for me to stand perfectly still now.

"That doesn't make any sense."

"I don't know, dude, what are you? A shapeshifter or something? Because I'm certain you're not a human." I wanted to get them answering questions so that I could ease them into ones he was less likely to want to answer.

They groaned, "You're absolutely sure nobody can hear us?"

I held my hand up and snapped my fingers, activating the sound circuit inside it and produced what sounded like an artillery shell landing next to us. I just pointed at the people nearest to us who didn't even flinch.

"Fine, I'm a Mindsprite." A little green hand poked out of the side of their head for a moment and waved at me.

Huh, wait, is the human they're using still alive? I activated [Argent Flow] for a moment and detected no heartbeat.

"So you're puppeting her corpse around? Gross." I said.

"Technically, the body is still alive," they replied.

"Your heart isn't beating."

"I said it technically is. The brain still works. Sort of. It's complicated. Does this look like a corpse to you?" they asked. To be fair, the woman's body was remarkably well preserved. If she weren't coated in blood, I wouldn't even be able to tell she was dead. Speaking of blood.

I pressed my Authority underneath their clothes and grew a bunch of Bloodroot seed material against the robe. The wet blood was quickly absorbed; then the misshapen seed, having no access to Life Energy, died and fell to the ground.

I pushed Fire into the debris on the ground, turning it into ash. Now it didn't look like they had just participated in a knife fight. It was odd how their clothes were undamaged with that much blood.

"You're gonna have to tell me how that works at some point. I'm staying with you at night, by th—"

"No, you can't do that!" they practically screamed.

I wish I had the height to slap them. It couldn't be considered harm if it was for their own good, right? I could see some people were giving us odd looks, so we needed to wrap this up.

"I obviously already know you have a role that requires killing people," I said. The fact it looked like they were shocked by that reveal made me want to drive my palm through my skull. "You were coated in blood and are puppeting a different body from yesterday. Your old body can't sustain itself after you leave it, right? Since it would go from being technically not dead to actually dead."

"Please don't tell anyone," they harshly whispered.

"Why the fuck would I… You know what, never mind. I'm coming. How does your night thing work? You moved rooms without me even being able to tell, and I can sense where you are at all times."

They didn't look like they wanted to say.

"Whatever, we'll talk more at night," I said, and dropped the bubble.

Just as I was walking away, I realized they had been wearing a human body before. Which meant they lived near Fateswatch. I needed to ask them about how things were going there.

If they could hop bodies, they probably had access to a lot of information, even if they seemed to be lacking in the Wit department.

Actually, would Wit even help them or would it just make them stupid faster?

A few minutes later, the chime sounded as the vote began.

People shuffled into a circle around the podium. I ended up right next to my liege.

"I see we're missing one person. Do you mind explaining how you got all that blood on… Ah, sorry, what's your name?" One of the cultists, a well-built blonde guy with a sword on his hip, asked my liege.

"S-samantha, and that man attacked me last night. I had to defend myself," they answered, voice trembling.

Surprisingly, they actually came across sounding believable.

"You wouldn't mind telling the room your role then, would you?" he asked, clearly overstepping. I was about to interject, but they signalled to me with a hand behind their back to stay quiet.

"Sure, right after you reveal yours," they replied.

He seemed to deflate with that.

"I should probably state. The red hand on my door indicates someone tried to kill me. Luckily, Role powers like that don't work on me, but I wanted people to be aware of that fact," I told the crowd. It wasn't a good idea to make an enemy of the cult quite yet. They had far too much voting power.

"I will admit that was me," someone who wasn't even a cultist said. "I need to kill at least one person here by marking their door at night. Since the kid's immune—"

"I'm not a fucking kid!"

"Does anyone feel like being a sacrifice? If not, I'll just be choosing at random," he continued, ignoring my interjection completely.

Several people started shouting at the same time. I just gave up on the vote for today, because voting for him was definitely a trap, and I took Samantha's, if that even was her real name, hand. They glanced down at me, surprised for a moment, then seemed to concede.

Somehow, three people were brain-dead enough to vote for the guy who was basically asking people to execute for him. The rest of us abstained, except for my liege, who voted for herself for some reason.

When the vote finished, he let out a whoop.

"Bye, suckers!" He yelled and vanished.

Did he actually get out of the game for good? Damn, that was an easy Role to be.

The angel appeared the moment he was gone, "Alright, so we have three people who voted for the Clown. I'm sorry to say, but you probably should have thought twice before making that decision."

One of the people who voted for the clown started begging while the other two seemed confused. She turned towards the frog that had been sitting in the corner and made what sounded like an unholy howling noise. It opened its mouth and made a noise that sounded like dozens of children being immolated in response.

Then the sound of a whip cracked three times in rapid succession, and the people were just gone. Splatters of blood coated the walls and floor in a cone from where they had been standing. The frog licked its lips.

Damn, I didn't even see it move. The people just vanished, that's crazy.

The angel was already gone by the time I looked back.

I tried to follow my liege as they walked back to the room of the woman whose body they were puppeting. But I found I couldn't actually do that.

I had completely forgotten that my liege hadn't rescinded her request for me not to stay with her at night.

Even though they seemed surprised when I walked away, but I didn't correct them. I didn't want her to know they had that kind of power over me.

I re-entered my room and sat down. A moment later, an owl's hoot signalled the start of the night.

How could I phrase a request to remove that command without letting her know they could issue commands to me?

"Why don't you try—" Novi began, but was cut off as my door slammed against the wall when it opened.

"You wanted to stay with me? Come on then—we don't have all night," "Samantha" asked. After a moment, they seemed to notice that I had more than one body.

"Wow, what are y—"

"Please, ask literally anything except that," I replied, heading towards her. Novi followed alongside me.

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