Mila

  Mila felt her heart start to race, but her husband had a point. She was avoiding taking the hard first steps to forming a truly strong oath, and it wasn’t healthy.

  “I don’t think I can forgive him.”

  Aalam continued to hug her. “You don’t have to. That’s your choice.”

  Mila thought about all the help the United Federation of Planets had received from her grandfather over the last ten thousand years, how much effort he’d put in to help make her life in particular easier, and how great of a dad he’d been to Evelyn, even going so far as to make sure she and Mila had a good relationship despite how much Mila ostracized him. And, when he and Silvia got divorced, he’d made sure to make it as amicable as possible, putting Evelyn and Silvia’s feelings first rather than his own.

  “Your emotions are your own.”

  Mila pulled away from Aalam slightly so she could look him in the eyes. “What would you have done differently if you were in my place?”

  “Me?” Aalam looked thoughtful for a second as he took her hands from his shoulders and held them in his own. “I would have forgiven him back when we were E ranks.”

  Mila gazed into her husband’s eyes for a while, pondering if she really wanted to ask what part of her minds very much wanted to know. Then another part of her minds decided such indecision was stupid and opened her mouth to ask the damn question. “Why?”

  “Because I have experience forgiving someone for a big betrayal and it’s the best decision I ever made.” Aalam smiled at her, his emotions through their bond showing a deep contentedness and warmth. “Also, personally, I don’t think he did anything that bad.”

  Mila felt herself start to smile. It was hard not to with Aalam projecting such pleasant emotions after the first thing he’d said. But the latter part kept her from doing so. “Could you elaborate?”

  “Sure.” Aalam nodded and squeezed her hands a little tighter before loosening his grip again, a gesture she’d taught him as a way to physically show comfort. “First, he took you away after your parents died, not allowing you to meet Irena or your other grandfather. That was a selfish decision, and I would argue his worst, but it was also a decision made out of grief, right after he’d lost both his wife and his son, so I find it hard to hold it against him.

  “Given what I’ve learned about the man over the years, I think he probably would have done something incredibly stupid had he not had you to take care of.”

  Aalam took a deep breath.

  “As for raising you the way he did, I’m actually kind of jealous about that.

  “You had an expert in survival and social manipulation to train you from a young age, someone who put his heart and soul into making sure you could handle any situation and protect yourself in the event he couldn’t protect you himself.”

  Mila’s thoughts immediately went to Aalam’s childhood as she felt his sadness, how his mother had abandoned him and his sister, how his father had died in a car crash when he was only three. Sure, he’d had Diana all his life, but his sister had been seven when their father died and Aalam hadn’t been an easy child to take care of. It had been all Diana could do to make sure they were always in the same foster home.

  Compared to Aalam’s early childhood, Mila’s had been better.

  Sure, her grandfather had always been pretty much incapable of showing affection through words or gestures, the first time he’d ever hugged her when she’d returned to Earth after dying and becoming a monster, and, sure, he’d been strict. But he’d never once hit her except while teaching her to fight, and, while he’d made her learn pretty much every second of every day, he’d gamified it so much she’d actually been quite happy.

  “Due to what he taught you, you were able to protect yourself when you were twelve and those human traffickers kidnapped you, even saving several other girls and women, and, after that, from what you’ve told me, he didn’t have much control over where you were assigned as a teenager.

  “From what I’ve been able to figure out, he traded in a lot of favors to get your real identity assigned to Harvard almost instantly after learning what you’d been made to do while outside of his control, and, according to my sister, he helped you when he figured out you wanted to be assigned to me, manipulating several people you didn’t have access to.”

  “Oh.” She’d always assumed her grandfather had been aware of what she’d been assigned to do in Africa from the beginning and thought it was entirely her own work that she’d later been able to make her life better by being attached to spy on Aalam instead of receiving repeated assignments, deliberately never having looked into the matter after taking over Earth. And those two new pieces of information potentially changed things.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “If you really want the truth, you could always ask to read his mind.” Aalam squeezed her hands again. “He’d probably say yes.”

  And there it was. Part of her problem had always been that she didn’t trust her grandfather to not lie to her, but this was something her current powers could easily get around, powers she’d had for thousands of years.

  There were good reasons, however, she hadn’t used them, reasons that had nothing to do with any kind of ethics.

  Still, not dealing with the situation was costing her valuable time, resources, and, most important, power, power she needed if she wanted to protect her people, herself, and those closest to her.

  Aalam’s Oath of the Acceptant God Touched and her grandmother’s Oath of the Zen Mourner were undeniably the two strongest oaths in the United Federation of Planets, and both came from her two family members truly coming to accept themselves, something that would be impossible for Mila to copy without first dealing with her childhood traumas.

  “Okay.” She moved forward to give her husband a kiss.

  Then, before she could chicken out, she used the Royal Law Steps skill she shadowed from Aalam, infused with her space and time element Laws, to teleport away from their condo to where her grandfather was meditating under a tree on the other side of the planet, in a small courtyard in between the main buildings of the headquarters of The Watchers, the man still leading the force responsible for monitoring information from the Prime Material.

  “Grandfather, I would like to read your memories of my childhood.”

  She stood there awkwardly for a few seconds as her grandfather looked up at her, his face placid but his aura showing extreme nervousness.

  Finally, he just nodded and said, “Okay.”

  Then, before she could change her mind, Mila started accessing her grandfather’s memories, quickly sifting through those that came up first to find the ones she wanted, but, with her Spirit stat being what it was, she couldn’t help but read those memories, and they made her smile.

  She saw Evelyn’s birth and how nervous her grandfather had been, a lot of his focus on her standing with Aalam in the same room during the several minutes of labor, thinking about what he could do so his daughter would live up to his granddaughter’s achievements. She saw how, by the time Evelyn’s son Thomas had been born, her grandfather’s focus had changed to what he could do so his new grandson would be as happy and content as possible instead. And then she saw how, when it came to Thomas’s daughter Olivia, he’d become content, not worrying about anything.

  She felt his immense pride as everything she had worked for over thousands of years came to a head in the Universal Tournament, how he was the first person of the United Federation of Planets to realize one of Aalam’s clones had taken the place of his grandson for the fights, and his joy at seeing her and Evelyn spin the tournament’s narrative.

  She saw how he’d worked tirelessly to make the United Federation of Planets prosper so his family would have a better place to live.

  But then, inevitably, she started finding what she was actually looking for.

  She saw his relationship with her grandmother, a brilliant professor of economics her grandfather had met at university, and how unhappy it had actually been, her grandfather’s patriarchal views at the time causing him to look down on his wife even if he didn’t show it, just wanting an intelligent partner to produce intelligent offspring. She saw how her grandfather hadn’t even been present for the birth of her father, off on an assignment at the time and repeatedly throughout most of her father’s childhood. She saw just how disappointed her grandfather had been in her father right up to the day he died.

  And then she saw how her father’s death almost broke him, and how the death had broken his wife, her grandmother committing suicide while her grandfather went to get their son’s ashes.

  She saw how her grandfather had stolen her with a plan to give her to her grandmother to raise as a way to replace the loss of their son, a plan that her grandmother’s suicide completely ruined. She felt how frustrated he’d been dealing with an unhappy and always hungry baby on his own. And she watched as he realized just how disarming being the single caretaker for a baby made him, greatly helping with his job of weeding out corrupt domestic officials.

  Then she felt his excitement as he discovered how smart she was, deciding to train her up so she could help him more and in the future help the country. She watched as he began to think of her more and more as a recruit, not a little girl. And she observed as he deliberately moved them into the known operating area of a human trafficking ring with the express knowledge that his beautiful half-Caucasian granddaughter would be a prime target.

  She felt his exhilaration after learning his twelve-year-old granddaughter had been kidnapped. She experienced his sense of pride, not in her but in himself, when she’d escaped after killing the traffickers’ leader, leading to the destruction of the entire operation. And she felt his anticipation as he recommended her to the Ministry of State Security, knowing full well the type of work she’d be assigned to do, even if he didn’t know the specifics.

  She didn’t try to read any more memories after that one, even though a part of her knew he’d come to regret his decisions. She couldn’t.

  And then, without thinking, and with tears in her eyes, she attempted to punch her grandfather in the chest as hard as she could, not caring at all about how the difference between their stats would make her punch far more than lethal.

  If Aalam hadn’t teleported her grandfather away and taken his place, catching her punch in his palm, her grandfather would have been reduced to paste, completely unable to survive. And, if Aalam hadn’t instantly created individual runic teleportation arrays around every living being within 100 kilometers, moving them all to the other side of the planet, most of their citizens in the area and a whole bunch of wildlife would have died from the resulting shockwave, one that, even on a B rank planet, destroyed three cities and a lot of the natural landscape.

  Mila then broke down and started to cry, Aalam moving forward to hug her, and they just stood like that for several minutes, Mila only partially aware of how Aalam was using most of his minds to fully rebuild everything she’d destroyed, from an already broken children’s toy, which he returned to its previous broken state of two pieces from its new state of thousands, to large buildings and even several entire mountains, Aalam even somehow repairing and bringing back to life the entire area’s plant life.

  Then Aalam teleported them back home and brought her over to the bed, where he continued to hug her for several more minutes, already having returned her grandfather and everyone else to where they’d been teleported from.