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Morgunov knew the Old Man was up to something. He'd sent a sizable chunk of his men to Ardora for some reason, which wasn't exactly a normal decision during a war that was exclusive to Eloa. Morgunov was greatly tempted to pop over to Ardora real quick, just to spite Dozer and crash whatever little party he had going.

It would probably turn into a huge mess and almost certainly jeopardize the war effort in the process--but it would also be lots of fun, he was pretty sure.

Eh, maybe later.

First, he was determined to solve this Asad problem.

If the tattoos were baked into the lad's soul, then the only way to remove them was via direct manipulation of the soul. Which, they were actively preventing. It was like a safe with the keys locked inside it.

A pretty damn good binding mechanism, all things considered. By any conventional standard, no one could undo it.

Except...

Asad was a servant. And every servant's soul had one key weakness.

Ironically, if he were a normal human, then the soul-binding would actually be more secure. It would probably even protect him from things like Domination, unless the aberration using it had evolved. And that was still debatable.

But no. These tattoos were a perfect lock, apart from one fatal flaw.

Qorvass. The reaper.

The problem with trying to prevent direct manipulation of the soul was that reapers were doing it all the time. It was kind of their whole thing, in fact. Even if the tattoos protected the soul from all other forms of manipulation, they had to allow Qorvass access, else none of Asad's undead powers would function.

But using Qorvass would be a real pain, Morgunov knew. And kinda dangerous. Messing with reaper souls was sketchy work. They were durable in many ways, and yet so flimsy in others. One slip up, and he'd kill Qorvass, rendering all the time and effort that he'd put into this whole thing wasted.