You lie awake and you feel like you're dying

To see the world through my eyes

Maybe for once in your life

Barely alive to the sight of the sirens lights

Your lies had taken what lied behind your emerald eyes
- Amanda Lexus, Emerald Eyes


The kid across from Percy tried (and failed) to look like she wasn't staring at him whenever he looked away. He didn't think it was malicious, she was probably just… curious.

He couldn't claim to know her type all that well, but judging by the brainwashing she'd been put through he imagined that things were pretty rough where she came from. The 'if you disobey an order you don't eat for a week' type of rough. More likely than not she expected him to be just as harsh — harsher, even.

"Are you going to eat?" Percy asked, popping a dumpling in his mouth casually. Don't get him wrong, he'd kill for a burger right about now, but as far as Mistrali foods went the dumplings were pretty nice.

The noodles in front of Lie, however, were pretty much untouched. When she wasn't staring at him she stared at her meal uneasily, her hands clasped respectfully under the table.

At his insistence she nervously picked up her chopsticks and poked at the meal, lifting a single noodle to her mouth and eating it. She was very cautious, as if afraid the noodle would burn her or something, but eventually she ate the noodle. She looked at him expectantly, as if that was his que to do something. Considering her background he didn't want to know what.

But when he continued eating his own meal she slowly became more emboldened, scooping up noodles and inhaling them. Percy finished his dumplings and sat there with a small smile on his face, watching Lie devour the noodles like it was her first time eating this year.

He gave her a few minutes until she had finished her noodles, looking up at him embarrassedly and quickly glancing away.

Percy chuckled, waiting until a nearby waitress took away their dishes to speak.

"So, Lie—"

"Ren." she corrected immediately, before suddenly realizing she'd corrected him and flinching harshly.

"Ren," Percy continued with a soft smile, trying to put the girl in as much ease as he could. "You said you have to 'stain your blade with the blood of my enemies', I have a question. What if I have no enemies?"

Of course he had enemies. Despite nobody actively going after him he could think of a lot of people that it would be advantageous for him if they were dead, and a lot of people he really didn't like, to the point he'd be alright killing them. So yes, if he had a button that he could push and get rid of someone he would press it a fair few times. But there were a couple issues with that. The first being that his 'assassin' was a little girl, who is… dubiously competent.

The second is also that his assassin was a little girl. He had dipped quite a bit in morality points recently, but he didn't think he was a monster. And using a small child to murder his sort-of enemies in cold blood? That was something a monster would do.

The girl — Ren — across from him, swallowed. "Then I am to take my own life. My creed is by the blade. This is as much a trial for me as it is a service for you, Lord. Should I fail to perform my given task and stain my blade with blood, I have failed in my duties and my life is forfeit."

Percy rested his face in his palms. "Have you done this before? Killed, I mean."

Ren hesitated. "My blade has tasted the blood of a dying man. I have taken lives. Many lives. Those that disobey the clan are sentenced to death, either by their own blade or that of an initiate's. An assassination, however, I have yet to carry out. I am not an Onyx Viper until I have stained my blade in the blood of the clan's enemies. And now, your enemies are our enemies. If I fail in my trial, the only acceptable outcome is death."

Percy tiredly waved a hand through the air. "Yeah yeah, kill or die, you mentioned that before. Is there no way out of it?"

Ren remained silent.

Percy closed his eyes for several seconds, running a tired hand down his face. He thought of loopholes for a moment, but couldn't come up with any worth considering. He could just… keep her around for a while, always promising to order her to kill eventually. But then he'd be stuck with her attached to his hip forever, and he had no idea if there was some vague time limit on the thing. She seemed brainwashed enough that if she decided he was leading her along she might just commit suicide.

There was also the option of just ordering her to kill some random person on the street. While that would eliminate a lot of the danger of an assassination it wouldn't keep her from actually killing someone for him. And on top of that, it would just be killing some random person he didn't necessarily want dead, or who wasn't necessarily a bad person, which… yeah, that option was out.

But she had already killed people. More than one, if he understood correctly. While he hated himself for even considering it, the best option might just be to… let her kill someone for him. He wouldn't pick someone all that protected — someone like an Atlesian senior officer or the head of a great family or something. So, who would he like to die that wasn't particularly secure?

He couldn't think of anyone specific at the moment, but that didn't mean that Shiro couldn't. He was sure there were specific people blocking them from progressing in Vacuo. Or maybe Percy would have trouble with some Valean bosses soon enough. He wondered why he hadn't assassinated them already before realizing he'd yet to assassinate anyone. He'd yet to sink that low. When he was doing such morally… (ambiguous would be a generous term) things, he almost forgot he still had a moral compass.

To be fair he was doing some pretty bad things. He was funding a small war on both sides, funding terrorists and super corporations both. Gods, what exactly was he doing?

Well, he'd have an internal crisis later. Nothing like 72 hours without sleep to make you think about things in simple terms. Maybe that should be some form of therapy. Blinking repeatedly, he turned his attention back to the conversation he was having.

"Do you have a deadline until you have to… you know…"

"Thirty days." She responded robotically.

He sighed. He was glad he'd asked that, at least. Loophole number one was a bust.

So… what? Just have her kill someone, or leave her to kill herself? Go wipe out her clan and try to convince her not to be quite so brainwashed?

He needed sleep. He was currently in the middle of a moral crisis — a quite brief one so far, granted — but a moral crisis all the same. He… as much as he hated to admit it deep down, his people would probably be fine without him. All he was doing was signing checks and approving things that would already be approved in the first place if he hadn't bothered being on site. For the first day or so he'd certainly been integral in organizing things, but now the faunus and the population on the lower floor in general (the portion that he'd managed to put in his employ, anyway) were a machine all their own. They were moving of their own volition, and there wasn't much he could do to help them anymore.

"Alright." Percy decided. "I'm going to bed, and when I wake up we're leaving. I'm going back to Vale, and you're coming with me. I'm sure there's a spare room in the building somewhere I can get for you."

"As you command." she agreed. Percy groaned. He hated formality in the first place, but it was something else entirely to have a small child acting that way. Children were supposed to be unruly, and rebellious, and mischievous. They weren't supposed to be so… disciplined.

He let out a disappointed sigh as he scooted out of the booth. You know, maybe there were more things in this world to fix than the grimm, or the potential end of said world. Maybe he should throw that into his internal crisis as well.

"But, well, just… one thing." Ren interrupted his renewed monologuing.

"Oh?" Percy raised a tired eyebrow, genuinely curious.

"I uh… I have someone. With me, I mean. I mean, uhm, not with me now, but we stick together. We kind of—"

"Are they also in your clan?" he asked, suddenly realizing exactly where this was going.

"No." Ren gave up forming a coherent sentence.

"Then they can come as well." Percy said. "Just…" he almost told her to keep to herself until he needed her, but barely managed to bite his tongue in his tired state. "Just bring them here. Let's go." she nodded, quietly following him out of the restaurant.


Percy waited until he was settled in back in Vale to have his moral crisis. Well, internal deliberation. That sounded nicer, so that's what he'd call it.

Ren and her… accomplice? Partner? Whatever — were in another room. Same floor, but not adjacent. He'd been sure to make sure they weren't in the room next to him, so they couldn't eavesdrop on anything if he happened to make a scroll call. Don't get him wrong, he didn't want to treat them as enemies, but two children showing up at his front door — one of which asking him to tell her to kill someone — was… not the most trustworthy sight. The least he wanted to be prepared for was for them to try and pull a little espionage.

But that was neither here nor there. Internal deliberation now, internal monologuing later. Or never, that would probably save him a lot of time.

Well, he had no idea how to tackle this, or why he hadn't had second thoughts earlier. He just… hadn't thought about it. Well he had, he'd known he'd been doing some things that he wouldn't have done a year ago in the name of saving the world. But he hadn't thought about it, thought about what that meant, or if the ends justified the means.

So, let's go through what he'd done recently that was a bit less than morally top-notch.

He supposed what he'd been doing in Mistral recently could be considered exploiting cheap labor, but the people seemed to be quite happy about it. Besides, what was he supposed to do? Not give them jobs, or keep them from starving to death? Was it for his benefit — of course. But other than just paying them more (which he'd talk about with Shiro later), he couldn't do much to make their situation better, at least for now.

So that was fine then. What about what he'd been doing in Vale? Maybe working with someone like Roman Torchwick was pretty bad, but threatening him had not been. Roman had tried to kill him right then and there, as far as he was concerned nothing he was doing was cruel, so pretty much anything he did was justified.

But then, was working with Roman in the first place immoral? Maybe. But now that he wasn't actually paying Roman anything, nobody was really harmed by his working 'with' Roman. If his initial plan of paying him had gone through then he may have caused second-hand suffering by allowing Roman to do more and larger things with his budget. But that hadn't happened, so it was moot. He'd have to think about that anyway, though, in case he ended up buying his way through the rest of the Valean underworld.

Well, onto the next one. What he was doing in Windpath, and being a noble family. Was how he got here immoral, maybe even downright evil? Yeah. But now that he'd gotten to where he intended in the first place, he was improving things.

Sure, crime still existed. Suffering still happened and people were still treated harshly. But you could say the same of any government. Last he'd heard Shiro had even begun phasing out their hired thieves from Windpath and moving them elsewhere, like Mistral itself. Though considering recent events that may also be on the downtrend. Other than that he sold drugs, he smuggled goods, he laundered and forged money, and some other miscellaneous crimes he was sure he never got involved in. Mostly victimless crimes — or at least, certainly not violent. Forging money, for instance, technically harmed everyone on Remnant by very slightly lowering the value of everyone else's lien, but so did just taking money out of savings and spending it. Hades he could just steal the money from some of the great families and the effect would be the same as forging it, and then he'd have the moral excuse of stealing it from people who really didn't need it, or deserve it. A bunch of money that was just sitting there suddenly being thrust into the economy would cause inflation, but that wasn't some huge crime, it was just a part of expanding economies. Considering Mistral had suffered from deflation the last few decades, it was probably a welcome change of pace more than anything.

Now, onto one of the… less savory examples. His conquering of the continent.

It was… he didn't really have an excuse, did he? It just felt like the thing to do. Could he have just made allies with them? Probably, for most. Hades, of those that he couldn't become allies with, who had a moral form of governance themselves, he could have left most of them alone. Sure they may help in stopping the end of the world, but how far did that reason take him? If he thought of freedom and independence and even human lives in such a way, how far would he be willing to go to stop the end of the world? There was no limit. After all, if you thought about it logically it was acceptable to kill almost everyone in the name of saving the world.

Sure, they were safer from grimm and bandits. Much, much safer than they were previously. Exponentially so, actually, due to his quick response forces scattered around the continent to help with smaller incidents. If a larger grimm attack struck they were still over and done with, but the vast majority of settlement-destroying events were now protected against. He was sure there was gonna be a population boom in Mistral soon as well due to that same reason.

But who was he to make that decision for them? To choose security, life — survival — over freedom and autonomy? He wasn't, was the answer.

So why had he had no problem doing what he'd done? Because he hadn't thought about it, was the real answer. He'd bit back his distaste (and he'd been getting a bit too good at that recently, now that he thought about it.) and continued in the name of necessity. Sure he hadn't conquered them to control them necessarily — they still elected their local officials, had their local taxes, and he imposed just about nothing on them despite some pretty low taxes, in return for protection. But that didn't make it all that much better to invade them because he could.

Well, he realized belatedly, he'd had another reason. He'd needed to be strong enough to be able to stand up to any of the Mistrali families, and the entire rest of Mistral outside the city combined could give him that. He had already closed that gap, though, and his recent promotion to the lord of a minor family opened up golden opportunities which could replace a rather large settlement with a single city block. Besides, while it was grim, (no pun intended) any villages which shirked his protection would quickly become the only targets for the few remaining bandits in the area and collapse, or be the victim of a small, routine grimm attack, and unlike every other village, be razed.

So, offer autonomy to the people of the settlements under his control. Got it. It would be bitter, and months of effort would be thrown out the window, but he would still keep most of them, he'd bet. And as he'd said before his quickly mobilizing men in Mistral would soon make the loss a much less important one.

Okay, mistake fixed, now onto the big one. The kicker.

His proxy war between the Schnees and the White Fang.

He was not being a good person, there was no way to get around that. He was lying to both sides, using both, taking one's money which he'd use in part to fund their enemy in the war in the first place, and then going to the organization that he'd agreed to support and supplying their enemy with the weapons which would keep their war going and kill many of their comrades. On top of that, he was engaging in internal backstabbing and politics. He certainly didn't own Adam, but he had enough influence with the organization through the bull faunus to be shady at best.

So, time to break this down. First the one which was much easier to justify, to be honest, which was… funny, in a way, considering their competition had been dubbed terrorists.

The SDC.

He had no real qualms about what he was doing with them. Well, not quite. But generally, he considered it within his moral fibers. He was taking their money, sure, but he'd made sure no non-combatant employees had been seriously injured or killed, and had just sold them on a solution to even their security personnel problem. And considering the level of technology Remnant had access to, he was sure it would be no time at all before some civilian company came up with a way to make trains self-driving. Maybe he'd buy a small locomotive company and give them access to his drone's AI technology, just to speed along the process.

So within a couple months the SDC would be losing absolutely nothing but money. At least, until the White Fang became emboldened enough to launch attacks on their mining zones.

And taking the SDC's money (even if he had to lie and pull some sleazy moves to do it) didn't exactly make him lose sleep. He was double dipping, too. He was stealing their dust, destroying their infrastructure, and charging them out the nose to help defend against it.

But no, the SDC had more money than God and didn't have enough to spend it on. He was being completely honest with himself when he'd realized that their level of wealth was literally unheard of, even among the most famous robber barons of the past back when he was speaking with Heather. Percy could probably be easily compared to someone like Rockefeller, now.

Hades, through the power of shady government he might've been richer than the richest of them. If he recalled correctly, according to some documentary he'd fallen asleep watching with Annabeth, Rockefeller — the richest man in modern history — had been something like 2% of the US's GDP walking around on 2 feet. Comparatively, Percy controlled about twice that much of Mistral's GDP (the country, not the city), if not much more due to his recent expansions, and he was 18. By the end of his life, (assuming he was a normal person and could even consider dying of old age) even if he just stayed as powerful as he was now, he'd have more money than all of Mistral's GDP, if he saved it or invested it.

He quite literally made as much in a year as the richest man to live in the modern age on Earth had made in his life.

To put that in perspective, the Schnees made him look like a kid working minimum wage, and Rockefeller a child getting his allowance.

He had no idea if they were publicly traded, granted. That seemed like something he should certainly look into. For all he'd spoken about the free market and done his fair share of manipulating it, he'd not actually gone and looked through the thing.

But either way, he wasn't taking money from the Schnee family, he was taking money from the SDC, and he knew very well that they had more than someone could possibly spend, much less on a few drones and turrets. Sure, he'd thought that a billion dollars was more than anyone could spend — and of course it was, for a normal person. But that didn't apply if what you were trying to buy was, say, a navy. Or an entire sector of the economy. But Schnee-level wealth? He wasn't sure there was enough value on the planet for them to run out of lien.

It was… wrong. It was more than wrong, it was impossible. For that large a company to exist without a government thinking to break it up had to involve a lot of shady things he wasn't sure he wanted to know about. It made him wonder why Jaques had bothered haggling over the price at all. More a force of habit, he supposed. Or maybe it was like a game for him, where letting Percy have more than the goods were worth was just not fun enough.

Either way, no, he didn't feel bad about anything he did to the SDC. If anything, the guilt he felt from deceiving Jaques and the Schnee family on a personal level far outstripped that of anything he was actually doing to hurt the company.

Now, for the one he was looking forward to the least.

The White Fang.

He was manipulating, lying to, and using them, and he was actively and directly causing the deaths of many of them. There was no love lost between him and any of their members, necessarily. He didn't like Adam all that much, he found most of his lieutenants annoying, grating, or downright hostile, and most of the grunts were just alright from his experience. The other leaders of the White Fang — from the news he'd been trying to keep some track of — were either stupid, fanatically cruel, or just plain self-interested. Of course he couldn't truly know until he met all of them and got to know them, but he had no intention of doing so. The point being, he had no personal attachment to the White Fang like he did to the Schnees.

But their cause… he had some amount of sympathy for.

Percy had never been a politically minded person. By the time he'd gotten old enough to poke his nose into politics, he'd known about the gods for a couple years and had no real interest in whatever the mortals were doing that would inevitably prove to be inconsequential.

Now, all that being said, he'd been raised in the 2000's. He wasn't much a fan of racism, even if it had hardly been a focal point of his life. He felt for the White Fang, he really did. It didn't seem to be as bad as it had gotten back on Earth — or at least, it wasn't at the moment — but it did genuinely seem pretty mainstream on Remnant to view faunus as lesser, in some way. Not completely people.

Part of him looked to Earth's history. The non-violent movements which had had success in America, but he also wondered if he could look a faunus in the eye and just tell them to turn the other cheek. He knew it'd work… eventually, but it was hardly unreasonable to become frustrated to the point of… well, to the point of violence. Of terrorism.

Besides, they weren't targeting civilians. Even the cells that weren't under Adam's command only attacked military targets, or a corporation they saw as being particularly anti-faunus. The SDC chief among them. So while he wouldn't exactly give them the moral high ground, he could also hardly condemn them as evil, especially all of them, or the cause in general. Which meant he couldn't justify lying to them and causing so many of their deaths. And he was causing their deaths, by selling Atlas and the SDC (and soon a few other collections of nations and corporations, he was sure) weapons and drones and airships.

He'd admit, more White Fang had died than if he'd not sold weapons to the SDC. By how much, though, he wasn't sure. There would certainly be someone else selling weapons to them right now, if he hadn't been here. Maybe there'd be half a dozen startups created just to try and chase that paycheck, an industry revived. Competition created, innovation demanded, and improvements made even further than what he was doing now — perhaps moreso, as instead of spending the extra money on other investments, they'd likely be pouring it back into the company and R&D. Maybe, in a twisted way, he was saving their lives.

Or maybe J&W would be selling to the SDC right now. They'd sit there, stagnating, selling the same weapons-

Except, that wasn't true, was it? The SDC had made him a generous offer for his company, one that anyone except him, perhaps, would have accepted. Especially a bunch of executives looking for a windfall. They would've made it just another department of the SDC and flooded it with money, likely researching far beyond what Percy himself was willing to do, and giving themselves much better profit margins in the process. Not that that really mattered for them, he supposed.

Either way he looked at it, the SDC would be getting their weapons. But that didn't free his hands of blame. It didn't mean he wouldn't acknowledge he was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people, and would be in the future, but… just like exploiting Mistrali workers, what was he supposed to do to improve the situation?

It wasn't quite the same. Where in Mistral he was (he was pretty sure) actively making things better here he was just… not making things worse. Or at least, by dropping everything and walking away from the whole thing he wouldn't be making things better, and very well may be making them worse. After all if he didn't have the means to procure so many weapons, the White Fang would never have been able to mobilize on such a scale this early.

So, was what he was doing good, or even acceptable? No, not really. But, this was a grey area. It was… wrong, but what was the point in stopping? And unlike allowing the outlying settlements to choose freedom, stopping everything he was doing with the SDC and White Fang would be more than a serious blow to his hopes of stopping the apocalypse. He'd lose the income from selling arms to the SDC, which in and of itself would be a huge blow to his ability to act, or at least control enough to unite as much of humanity as possible, by whichever means. He'd also lose all the dust he'd been stealing and selling, which, while not enough to make the SDC much more than swat at him like a fly, was still a serious bit of revenue for him which was only growing each day. And it also meant no more disruption to the SDC's supply chain, so any hopes of moving in on the dust market through more legitimate means were null and void.

And lastly, perhaps most importantly, he'd no longer be able to use the White Fang when he needed it. At the moment the White Fang wasn't all that much of a threat to even him, much less a kingdom. But as the war continued, and their movement grew, that could change. Their manpower at the moment was unmatched by any bar Atlas, or maybe all of Mistral. They were beginning to recruit for a war when nobody else on Remnant was. The problem was that they had no real equipment, training, discipline, cohesion, unity, the list went on. But that could change. They could be trained, united, and armed properly. Even now they collectively served as enough of a force to potentially turn the tides in a war between kingdoms, but properly equipped, with a larger base, they could wage a war against a kingdom.

That… was some time away, however, and mostly wishful thinking at the moment. But his point still stood, by stopping this admittedly pretty horrible racket he'd created he stood more of a chance of making things worse than better, and would be throwing away all of the most powerful tools he'd gathered as of yet.

It left him with a slimy feeling, like he hadn't showered in a few days. He didn't like it. In fact, he hated it. But he supposed Shiro was rubbing off on him a bit more than he'd thought, because despite the feeling he forced himself to choose the pragmatic answer. The one that would lead to the best net result. Though, he still had his own lines he wouldn't cross.

Standing up from the couch he'd been lazing on, he stretched. Well, that was decided he supposed. Let the settlements choose their own future and otherwise stay the course, regardless of his… hesitance.

Well then, now that he'd gotten that sorted out (and hadn't he needed to do that for a while now) all that he had left to do was move forward.

Glancing at his scroll, he noticed a couple of new messages. Move forward indeed. The two girls residing in the room he was paying for could wait. He had a meeting to get to.

A meeting with Hei Xiong.


So, outta the gate, sorry. This is late, 2 days late. I never miss these, because I take my word very seriously. So usually the way the process goes is all of my days are taken up beforehand, (every now and then I get like 1k words down) and then the night of the chapter update, I just trade in my sleep to write the chapter. This time, however, I was already trading in my sleep on the 1st and 2nd for school. So, I just couldn't finish it.

Those of you that wished me well and hoped I was doing okay thank you, I appreciate it. Those of you who asked why the fuck the chapter was late, I understand at least I suppose. Also, I was tellin people about this on discord, so if you wanna know about when this happens next time in 2 years, join the link on my profile and give me human interaction thank you.

This is, as I said, the last chapter before timeline go NYOOOOM, and the next chapter is up on pat-reon.

Also huge shoutout to Silence for betaing chapter 29 for me. Dude came in clutch again

Next Chapter November 15. Just please don't yell at me if I'm not physically able to update then :)