"Your Majesty, is this truly the right thing to do?" Lancelot asked as he stood beside me like a silent guard, minus the silent part.
"I'm fairly sure he deserved it," I replied, gesturing toward the unfortunate man currently being driven into the crumbling flagstones beneath Mordred's feet.
The man groaned weakly, managing to spit out something between a sob and an apology — neither of which slowed Mordred down.
Lancelot sighed heavily. "We could have interrogated him."
"Isn't that what Mordred is doing right now?" My words made him pause as he looked over at the guy, face covered in blood, broken nose, missing front teeth, and jaw broken. Arms and legs twisted at odd angles.
"I don't think he can even speak at this point," came Lancelot's dry response.
Mordred delivered one last kick to his face, sending his body sliding across the floor and into a heavy oak bookshelf, which teetered for a moment before collapsing atop him. A loud thump, followed by the soft flutter of dusty pages, was the only sound for several seconds.
Then silence.
Mordred stepped back and dusted off her gauntlets with exaggerated grace. "He was lying anyway."
"You don't know that," Lancelot said, grimacing as he crossed the room to check the man's pulse.
Mordred shrugged. "He had it coming, he talked shit about Father, honestly, he should be happy I didn't kill him."
"Well, you did in fact kill him." Lancelot said as he felt no pulse from the man.
"What? He was alive when I kicked him." Mordred wasn't about to believe him.
I stood up and went over to the fallen man, and reached out, lifting the bookshelf off of him. "He likely died from getting crushed," I judged the shelf to be around a hundred kilos, pretty heavy stuff.
I stood up and went over to the fallen man, reaching down to lift the shelf off of him. Thick dust bloomed in the air, mixing with the metallic scent of blood. The man's eyes were wide open — not with fear, but in that empty, glassy way that meant nothing behind them was still working.
"He likely died from getting crushed," I said after a glance. The shelf had to be over a hundred kilos — solid wood, reinforced frame. It was built like a fortress and landed like a coffin.
Mordred leaned over, hands on her hips. "Well, that's not fair. If he was going to die from that, he should've said something."
Lancelot pinched the bridge of his nose. "Mordred, most people can't speak after you break their jaw in two places."
"Maybe he shouldn't have been a bad guy," she snapped. "Bad guys get beat up, that's fair."
I couldn't even argue with that, because, yes, bad guys do get beaten up. Even someone like Spider-Man, a good guy with zero kills, still beats up people until they end up with a lifelong mountain of debt from the American healthcare system.
So why couldn't Mordred beat someone half to death? Honestly, it was bad luck that something so heavy happened to fall over. An unlikely freak accident.
I let the shelf drop to the side with a dull crash, then stood and brushed the dust off my hands. "Nothing we can do now, I guess we should give the Resistance a call and have someone snoop around through his possessions."
Lancelot frowned. "We promised not to kill this man; he is a high-ranking politician, killing him is bad, even if he is evil."
"He was trash." Mordred completely disregarded the man's achievements in life.
"Dead is dead, so even if we promised not to kill him, accidents happen, so no need to bother with it." I wasn't interested in looking through the man's stuff to find any information about links to evil.
No, better let the resistance handle that thankless task.
Since leaving Lyon, we had spent our time either spending an absurd amount of money on food, because, while Mordred is happy enough to eat mountains of cheap junk food, she would rather have a burger costing tens of times that, and knock them down by the dozen.
She was pretty much on a roll. Given I put her in charge, she took charge of things, in particular when it came to deciding where we stayed and ate, and how often we ate. All my knights had a healthy appetite, yet none could compare to my own.
The only one who came close was Mordred, who turned every meal into a competition. She always lost, but she never gave up.
"Father, are you drooling?" Mordred broke me out of my thoughts.
I blinked, then calmly wiped the corner of my mouth with the back of my hand. "No. I was thinking."
"Sure, thinking about food, no doubt. And after all that food we had last night, and this morning, and a second breakfast." Mordred's voice was filled with smugness.
"Thinking about what we've been doing the last few weeks," I said, brushing a bit of plaster off my shoulder, "and how we ended up here, in the home of a politician, with him dead on his floor."
"Again, accident," Mordred said, not even trying to sound convincing. "He tripped. On my foot. At high velocity."
"Why are you even lying about it? It was an accident. And yet you somehow make it sound like you are hiding something." It was amazing how Mordred ended up sounding guilty, even though she, for once, had nothing to be guilty about.
She just scratched the back of her head, giving an embarrassed laugh.
Lancelot gave a long-suffering sigh from where he was checking the man's desk drawers — likely more for something to document than out of real hope of finding useful intelligence. "We were supposed to question him."
"And we did," Mordred said, planting her hands on her hips. "It's not my fault he folded faster than a cheap chair."
"Enough, no need to argue about this," I shot Lancelot a glance. He was a good man, a noble knight, and a better knight than even I, much less Mordred. Mordred was always more about being loyal to me and earning my approval rather than being a proper, honorable knight.
And me, I was once a fine knight, but in my current state, I honestly couldn't even be bothered to care about any deaths Mordred caused; to me, it was just so much beneath my attention.
Only Lancelot still cared, and it often led him to clash with Mordred; she hated him, and he was disappointed with her. It was a right mess.
Over the weeks since we left Lyon, they had been at one another's throats, mostly Mordred, but honestly, Lancelot wasn't helping when he constantly pointed out how unknightly Mordred's behavior was.
It wasn't easy controlling those two, but Lancelot was constantly proving his worth as he dealt with our contacts in the French Resistance movement, people who didn't blindly believe in the hate against mutants.
Those who were willing to look at the clues and realize that this wasn't demons, there was something dark and rotten hidden in France, and it needed to be dealt with.
It was a mix of mutants, mages, other enhanced people, normal people, law enforcement, military, politicians, and more. People are working to solve the real problems, the ones most people didn't want to think about.
One of the reasons all of France wasn't dealing with the real problems was people like the dead man here — those who sold out their home for personal benefit. Men with silver tongues and dirt-covered hands, who smiled for cameras while handing city blocks over to cults in backroom deals.
They hid behind diplomacy, behind committees, behind rhetoric, and when the demons came — real or metaphorical — they turned their heads, or worse, invited them in.
This one had invited them in.
And now he was dead.
It was almost poetic; he had sold out his people, his home, in exchange for a longer life, and now he died so much before his destined time.
These people were always the same, wanting power, eternal life, wealth, things everyone was quick to offer them, but rarely delivered, yet fools kept making deals with them.
Finding them would have been impossible if not for the resistance, which is why we worked with them. They gave us intel, targets, and we, in turn, slowly tore away the network Morgana had built for herself.
One by one, her minions fell; most had no idea who they worked for, minions of minions, never knowing the true goal, the master in the shadows.
Still, if we continued to limit their means of acting from the shadows, they would have to step out into the open, and once they did, I could find them. Eventually, either they would know where Morgana was or draw her out.
"Alright, let's get out of here, Lancelot, you handle the contacts, you know what happened last time Mordred tried to be helpful."
"Come on, it wasn't that bad," Mordred said while following me down the stairs.
"You insulted everyone the moment you met them, insulted France for the next five minutes, started a fight, and beat everyone until they couldn't move." Lancelot reminded her as he cast one last look at the dead body, before following behind us.
"I stand by all of it," Mordred said proudly. "They were French!"
Lancelot muttered something that sounded distinctly like a prayer for patience-or divine retribution, I couldn't tell.
But if he wished for the latter, I'm afraid he would be disappointed, the only divine allowed to smite Mordred was I, and I understood where she was coming from. The French… were just too easy targets.
We emerged from the crumbling manor into the cold air of late afternoon. The sky above was overcast, clouds stained with the last hints of gold as the sun began its descent toward the horizon.
The motorcycles were where we left them: parked just past the property line, beside the husk of an old roadside shrine.
Mordred had grown jealous of mine, and demanded we get some to travel around in style, and I had agreed. She had Riding B, though sadly, while she could ride that thing better than professional racers, she still ended up breaking it most of the time.
All in the name of cool tricks.
Even this one was beat and about to fall apart.
"Let's go back and rest." I said, throwing a leg over my bike.
"Nahh, Father, first we gotta get something to eat, some snack, and then we hit the hotel!" Mordred announced, already straddling her half-battered bike like a victorious warlord preparing to invade a pastry shop.
"The Adulterer can go on ahead without us, do some work or whatever!" Mordred shouted over the roar of her engine as it sputtered to life, belching smoke with a cough that matched the bike's cracked exhaust.
I followed a second later, my own machine purring beneath me like a contented beast. Sleek, black, without even a scratch on it, very different from Mordred's forty-seventh vehicle.