Free Web NovelChapter 15: Consequences of Trust I
Chapter 15: Consequences of Trust I
"Out." Akosa moved first. His voice cutting through the abrupt silence.
He looked at Spartacus and Oseka with the particular expression of a man delivering an instruction rather than a request.
Spartacus stood immediately. Oseka followed, glancing once at Alex on the way past. A small look that said; ’we’ll be right outside’ without needing to say it.
Akosa walked them to the door. Held it open, then closed it behind them with a soft click that somehow felt louder than it should have.
Then it was just Ignatius, and Alex. And the quiet hum of torches burning in their brackets.
Ignatius pulled the empty stool toward the bed and sat down. Unhurried. The way he did everything.
For a moment he simply looked at Alex. The bandages. The bruising along his jaw. The general state of a young man who had recently been crushed by a lion and survived to complain about it.
"You continue to impress me." He said finally. "Which is rare. I am not an easily impressed man."
Alex didn’t know what to say to that so he said nothing.
"The giant." Ignatius continued. "I assumed was luck. The spar, I assumed talent. Today..." he paused, his eyes briefly distant, like he was replaying something in his head. "Today I do not know what to assume."
"I got lucky, sir." Alex said. Automatic. The same line he’d used before.
"You were under a lion." Ignatius said flatly. "And you are alive. And the lion is not." He leaned in dropping his head slightly. "That is not luck, boy. That is something else entirely. I do not know what. But I know enough to recognize the difference."
Alex held his gaze and said nothing.
Ignatius let the silence stretch for a moment. Then he leaned back slightly, hands folding in his lap, and his tone shifted —businesslike now. The tone of a man getting to the actual reason he’d come.
"There is a matter you should be aware of." He said. "Two houses have taken interest in you. House Porcius, and House Aurellius." He let that sit. "Both have made offers. Significant ones."
Alex’s stomach tightened slightly.
"This is not a small thing." Ignatius continued. "Choosing one means making an enemy of the other. Houses like these do not forget being passed over. Whatever you decide — and you will be asked to decide, eventually, one way or another — you should understand the weight of it before the moment arrives." His eyes were steady. Serious. "Choose wisely, boy. There will not be room to undo it."
Alex nodded slowly.
Ignatius studied him a moment longer.
There was something underneath the warning that he didn’t say. Something that had nothing to do with bidding wars or politics or the value of a gladiator who had just killed a lion in front of fifty thousand people.
He stood up. Smoothed his toga.
"Rest." He said. "You’ve earned at least that much."
He walked to the door. Paused there with his hand on the frame.
"For what it’s worth." He said, not turning around. "I hope you choose well."
Then he was gone.
Alex lay there in the quiet and stared at the ceiling and thought about the fact that the man who owned him — who had named him, sold him, watched him bleed for profit — had just sounded, for one unguarded sentence, almost like he cared what happened to him.
"Can’t tell if that’s good, or bad." Alex sighed.
’Ping!’
"That was sudden." He gasped.
Alex then willed the system UI to come into view. He scrolls past his stats, until he got to the notification icon, and clicks on it.
"Mission prompt?" He said with wide eyes.
---
---
The villa of House Porcius sat on the western slope, away from the fashionable hills where the Aurellii and their peers built their homes facing the morning sun. This one faced west instead — catching the last light of the day, as the sun dipped beyond the horizon, casting orange glows over the city.
The villa had been beautiful... once. The mosaics in the entrance hall were still intact, still telling their stories of gods and conquests, but the colors had dulled with age and neglect. A column near the garden had a crack running its length, patched rather than replaced. The household slaves wore tunics that had been mended more than once.
Marcus Porcius received Ignatius in a small study that smelt of old books and dust, rather than a grand triclinium. He was somewhere past seventy, thin as old parchment, with hands that shook slightly when he reached for his wine. His toga was good quality but at least a decade out of fashion — the kind of garment a man keeps because replacing it feels like admitting something.
"Ignatius." The old man’s voice was steady despite his hands. "Sit. Please."
Ignatius sat.
"I will not waste your time with pleasantries." Porcius said. "My house is not what it once was. You know this. Rome knows this. We held three seats in the Senate once. We hold none now." He said it without bitterness. Just fact. The way a man states the weather. "But we are not without resources. And we are not without need."
"Need." Ignatius repeated.
"My grandsons squabble over what remains like dogs over a carcass." Porcius sighed, shaking his head. "I need something that reminds this city House Porcius is still capable of recognizing value before everyone else does." His eyes were sharper than his hands suggested. "I watched the boy fight. Twice now. I do not need to watch a third time to know what he is worth."
"Aurellia Magna has also expressed interest." Ignatius said.
Something flickered across the old man’s face. His eyes squinting for a second. Like tired recognition.
"Of course she has." He said. "She always wants what others have already noticed first." He set his cup down. "She has gold I cannot match, lanista. I will not pretend otherwise."
"Then what are you offering?"
Porcius was quiet for a moment.
"My name." He said finally. "Tired as it is. Patronage that comes without... complications. You know what she’s like, Lanista." A pause. Both of them understanding exactly what kind of complications he meant. "And the boy’s freedom, eventually. Properly earned. Properly granted. Not kept as decoration in someone’s villa."
Ignatius considered that.
"That is a significant offer." He said.
"It is the only one I have." Porcius said. "I am an old man with an old name and very little gold left to spend. But I know worth when I see it. And I think the boy would rather be free than owned beautifully."
Ignatius said nothing for a long moment.
Then he nodded slowly.
---
---
The room was dark except for the thin moonlight slipping through the high window.
Alex lay on his back, staring at the system window glowing faintly at the corner of his vision.
Sands of Fate System
Host: Human
Name: Alex Norman
Level: 2
Skills:Temporal Dilatation Lv 2 (0/5 charges)
Next reset: 19:32:17
Points: 10 / 200
Status: Injured. Recovery in progress.
"You’re not asleep." Oseka’s voice. Quiet. From across the room.
Alex’s head turned. "Neither are you."
"I can’t sleep." Oseka sighed.
"I hear you." Alex let out a sigh of his own. "So, what’s the matter?"
"Something’s been bothering me, since the fight with the beast." Oseka sat up, the straw rustling beneath him, and looked at Alex with an expression Alex hadn’t seen on him before. Not the usual softness. Something more insistent.
"And what about it?" Alex asked, his stomach tightening, as he felt his heartbeat accelerate.
"The lion." Oseka said. "I was under it. I felt it coming down. I closed my eyes and I was ready for it, Albius. And then I wasn’t there anymore. I was somewhere else. And you were where I’d been." He paused. "I’ve turned it over in my head a hundred times since and it doesn’t make sense. Not as something that just... happens."
"Oseka—"
"I’m not asking out of curiosity." Oseka said. His voice hadn’t risen, but something underneath it had hardened. "You saved my life. Twice. And I don’t even know what I’m thanking you for."
Alex stared at the ceiling.
The silence stretched long enough that Oseka might have given up, on anyone else. He didn’t.
"Please." Oseka said. Quietly. "Make it make sense."
Alex closed his eyes.
Then he sat up.
"You’re not going to believe me." He said.
"Try."
So Alex told him.
He told him about a system that pinged in his skull on the first day, about slowing time, about charges that reset and a voice that had never once, not a single time, spoken in actual words. He told him about a place that wasn’t this place — a world with machines instead of magic, with history already written and finished, where Spartacus had died seventy years before men like Octavian were even born.
He told him he wasn’t from anywhere Oseka could point to on a map. Not because it was far. Because it didn’t exist yet. Or had already stopped existing. He didn’t know which.
Oseka listened. He didn’t laugh. Didn’t call him mad. Just listened with his knees drawn up to his chest, eyes steady in the dark.
Alex kept going. The scrambled timeline. The names that didn’t belong together. The growing certainty that something had pulled the wrong man into the wrong century for reasons nobody had bothered to explain to him.
"And the system," he said. "It’s not just a tool. It has opinions. It’s threatened to punish me before. It’s—"
’Ping!
System Notice: Classified information detected.
Violation of disclosure protocol.
Consequences initiated.’
In that instance, Oseka made a sound.
Small. Sharp. Like something caught wrong in his throat.
"Oseka?"
Oseka’s hand went to his face. His eyes were wide. Confused. His breathing had changed — fast, uneven — and when he pulled his hand away there was blood on his fingers.
"Oseka!"
It was coming from his nose. And his ears. Dark and sudden, running down over his lips, dripping onto the front of his tunic.
"Hey!" Alex was already moving across the room, hands on Oseka’s shoulders. "Hey, look at me. Oseka. Look at me!"
Oseka’s mouth opened. No words came out. Just a thin, strained sound, like he was trying to scream and couldn’t find the air for it.
Alex’s mind went white with panic. He looked at the system window, still glowing faintly in the corner of his vision, indifferent as ever.
’Did you do this?’ He thought, desperate. ’Did you do this to him?’
Nothing.
No ping. No notification. No acknowledgment that the question had even been asked.
"Say something!" Alex’s voice cracked, aimed at nothing, at the air, at whatever force had been steering his life since the first day he opened his eyes in the sand. "ANSWER ME!"
The system stayed silent.
Oseka had gone very still, one hand gripping Alex’s wrist hard enough to leave marks, blood sliding steadily down his chin now, his breathing ragged and wrong.
The door slammed open.
A guard stood in the frame, drawn by the noise, eyes adjusting to the dark room. He took in the scene in half a second — the blood, the panic, the boy gasping on the floor — and bellowed; "What the hell happened?"
"I- I..."
"Move." The guard said, shoving Alex to the side. "Now. To the ward."
Alex got an arm under Oseka and hauled him up, Oseka’s weight sagging against him, blood soaking into the shoulder of his tunic.
They went out into the corridor. Into the dark. Toward whatever Gaius could or couldn’t do about something that didn’t have a wound to point to.
