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“It is nothing so conspiratorial as either of those things,” said Gohvis, “but once I have explained, you will understand. So please, Father. If there is any amount of trust left within you, then let it be used here.”

Dozer leveled his steely gaze at him. If this were anyone else, there would have been an obvious solution here. As a show of good faith, the traditional course of action would have been to exchange reapers with one another and then encase them both.

To put their lives in each other’s hands, in other words.

It was a simple, ancient, and yet still quite effective method of creating a neutral environment for which negotiations such as this one could be conducted.

Problem was, Gohvis did not have a reaper.

Because the infamous Black Scourge was not a servant.

For quite some time, that particular subject had been an enduring mystery. For as long as Dozer had known him, Gohvis had always possessed the same powers as a servant with mutation. But a reaper never appeared.

At first, Dozer had thought that, surely, the reaper was just hiding--that Gohvis’ independence was merely an elaborate illusion. Even after Gohvis demonstrated his ability to invoke the regeneration on his own, without needing to be touched by any reaper, it had still taken Dozer many more years before he fully, truly believed it.

But as strange and obnoxious as it sometimes was, it also undoubtedly had proved very advantageous over the years. Reapers were the primary point of weakness for servants, after all. Gohvis being able to regenerate without one meant that he may’ve well been a true immortal.

Perhaps the first in history, even.

It was hard to know that for sure, though. As far as Dozer was aware, Gohvis had never been completely obliterated--never vaporized or atomized, for instance--so there was no telling if he could regenerate himself from such a state unaided. And rather understandably, the lad was not keen to test that out, either, because by all conventional wisdom, it was very likely that, no, he wouldn’t be able to.

But then again, he could still regenerate from having his brain destroyed, so it wasn’t entirely out of the question.

For the longest time, the questions that Gohvis provoked from others had been incessant. Naturally, many of their comrades eventually noticed that something was strange with him, and explaining his exceptional nature to them was not something that was in any way advantageous to him.