“Hello.”
He didn’t sound like these panicked people saying a questionable “hello” towards the thin air where a demon may hidden. Instead, he said in a very certain, unquestionable tone, to the level that his voice sounded rather lifeless and robotic. Trust me, his voice made him sound like a chill guy, but at that moment, that voice grabbed onto the tip of my heart and pulled it up brutally.
I looked at Brian when he looked back. He already pointed the rifle towards the wall, with my nod he would probably pull the trigger. But they continued talking in a way of them seeing through the wall and still didn’t care at all, instead of being preys that would be torn apart, which prevented me from giving any instructions.
“I see you only brought three people instead of five, and your guardian is not here.” The person on the other side of the wall said, “Is he bringing one more down, or these three are all you want to bring?”
“Blimey,” The engineer whispered, “Homunculus is actually talking to you.”
“I know. Does it look like they are talking to themselves?” I whispered back.
“No, kid, homunculi should be the boogeymen that eat children silently, not whatever is actually on the other side of the wall.” He had the attend to crane his neck to the other side of the door until Scathach pulled on his collar and pushed him away from the door, “Not planting any of these ideas into your head, kid, but we might want to go back.”
Oh, but he did, at least he made me feel nervous. I pulled the borrowed revolver out, massaged the cylinder and made sure the fancy gold would not spoil her roar. Scathach stared at me doing these, she hesitated but eventually decided to speak up.
“Let the grown adults do this, darling,” She reached to push the gun away.
“It doesn’t actually seem like they want to talk to people other than him,” the engineer almost immediately refuted, “what do you want the poor boy to do when he needs to fight back, throw a wooden stick to them?”
“Have you done this before?” Brian suddenly asked, stopping an argument before it even started by surprising people with the fact that he was actually capable of starting a conversation.
“Done what before?”
“hurt people.” He said, reaching out a hand to me, “I know people your age might think this is cool, that was what encouraged me to join the military. But it is not. Hurting other people permanently damages your spirit. So this is what we are going to do—I am going to take the gun away from your pocket, and you don’t need to fight anyone if they advance on us, I will cover your escape—”
He spoke faster and faster until all of a sudden, reached a dead silence but still had his hand up towards me requesting for that gun. His eyes were clear but firm as a newborn, some rare scene you could see in adult society. It was impossible to change a person’s mind when he looked at you with such eyes, I thought, had no alternative but to plug the pistol back into my pants.
“You guys heard Brian, we basically have to talk instead of shooting our way out.” I said, turning to the engineer, “One more thing. Mr Bennett, Do you mind if I borrow your tie?”
He happily gave his tie to me, but the moustache sold his mood out when I tied the piece of cloth around Brian’s eyes and the moustache sharply tilted again. I tried my best to tie a knot on Brian’s ear, but his air was surprisingly bouncy.
“What gives you the idea to do that?” The engineer asked in an unfriendly tone.
“I want to make him only be able to see where he is walking his next step on,” I answered, giving one last try to tie the end to his ear and failing, “I figure there might be things in that room, that Brian wouldn’t want to see.”
“He is an Ignorant soldier. He actually already got used to seeing corpses.” He blew a burst of breath towards the left edge of his moustache, but his fringe instead of his moustache flew. I waved in front of Brian and made sure he could see something but not too much.
“Don’t worry too much, Brian,” I comforted him, “I have plot armour.”
The fact is, little spoiler’s alert, plot armour isn’t a thing. I had the idea to put my white underwear on a stick and walk out, but unfortunately, I wore black that day, so I could only walk out with my hands shown from the door first. “don’t fire, we come in peace,” I said, exposed my entire body, quickly realised that they are pointing their rifles towards Brian in two perfect angles, “I’m just here to talk.”
They hooked their rifle in the crooks of their arms with the safety on and did not hide behind some of these pillars when I entered the vast and empty space, showing the most peace they could give. Unlike what I would imagine homunculi being these big hands, big lips statues in London’s museum, they actually— just looked human, wearing grey uniforms with silver collar badges, two columns of shining, big buttons, and skirt-like edges. They didn’t wear any hats, which blinded me from knowing which country’s badge they would put on their heads, instead, they let their flaming red hair down. Later I got to know that was their “Friend or Foe” identification, and was amazed by their designers’ creativity.
“Do you guys want some candies?” I stuck half of my body out from Scathach’s shelter with her candies in my hand, “I have toffee, and these are probably grapes, judging by the colour of the cover.”
“They are grapes indeed.” Scathach sounded stiff. The two red-headed people grabbed their candies quickly, for some reason I felt like they fluttered when they puffed out their cheeks with candy in them, as the things wrapped under the waxed papers were philosopher’s stones. Scathach also picked one, but she gazed at them and crunched on the candy — not a peaceful scene she was creating, but somehow I felt harmonic in it for the reason I couldn’t tell.
“Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola,” Brian whispered to me, answered my question before I could realise it.
“What?”
“Professor’s hair is darker— the colour of Dr Pepper’s cans. And these two—” he pointed at the homunculi, “— bright red, like Coca-Cola.”
It was probably the worst moment for it ever but I burst into laughter. Why was I the one laughing when the creator of the joke stood there silently with a poker face? I started to think he got choked by the joke and was suffocating, so I slapped him on his back, figured that could make him short of breath as I did, and that successfully attracted their attention to us.
“Is he an Ignorant’s agent?” The redheaded male one asked.
“Actually, people working for the CIA prefer the title ‘officers’ than ‘agent,’ or you can directly say their job duty, such as Librarians Brian or Data Analyst Brian.” I corrected, “I learnt that from the CIA director during my birthday party.”
He turned his face to his homunculus colleague and mumbled something, that sounded like Slavic language. “We cannot let a CIA officer go with you.” The female colleague said, “We will assign our newest model to escort you if safety is your concern. I also doubt if this one officer left can endure your safety.”
“What happened to the rest of the officers?” Scathach asked.
“We discarded them.” They gave an answer that sounded rather confusing and didn’t even look at Scathach when she asked, “We will also have to ask you, not to release your five friends back to the Empire of Enclaves. Our employers wish this assault to be a mist of history.”
“Political framing?” I asked, peeking at my new Imperial friends — both of them don’t seem like the type that knows how to shut up.
“You have all the freedom to assume all the possibilities.” They gave out ambiguous answers like always, “But, on the other hand, we know a CIA officer would talk. He has to come with us.”
I tried my best to scrape together the information they provided. No gunshots, no blood, and no bullet holes, they used magic that was very different from what I saw from me and Scathach, and these rifles were just in their hands for misdirection and intimidation. The CIA officers who came down were unlikely to scatter and gave them a chance to eliminate them one by one, so there were definitely more homunculi in the building, all moved at the same moment so none of these officers had a chance to report this assault to Brian. But again, I knew these, smarter people than me like Scathach and the engineer knew it, these homunculi that kept us in information gaps also knew it.
If there weren’t any choice, I thought, I might just go straight forward on the existing track.
“Sorry, Brian,” I said, “Two friends are more than one.”
“Ninety-nine—”
“Do you want to save one or more than one, Scathach?” I caught her hand and dragged her towards the position behind Homunculi, ignoring the resistance, “Or you would actually risk my life to save some Ignorant?”
“That’s right,” The engineer said smugly, reached for a hand and tried to join this tug-of-war until I slapped his hand away.
“Get your hand the fuck away from my friend,” I said, frustration struck me once I saw Scathach’s eyes looking at me. Disappointment. That was the only thing I read. Countless nights after that I awoke with shocks, just because she looked at me with the same eyes in my dreams. Just to escape that, I stared back at Brian, and felt the hidden eyes under the silk staring back. He compressed his lips together with force, to the level of both lips turned bloodless white. “Well, farewell, Brian.” I said, “It is nice knowing you.”
“Me too.” He forced a weak smile, “Can I borrow your tie for a few minutes?”
“You can have it,” The engineer said, walking behind the two of the homunculi. That was the first and only talk he and Brian ever had, “ever since it was on you, I actually don’t plan to use that tie anymore.”
The two homunculi turned the safety of their silenced rifles off. I bet they spent millions of hours using these guns, you can tell from how familiar they were putting their hands on guns, like a pianist in front of a Steinway. For a million hours they fought with their guns, it was probably the first time they didn’t watch their back, and this one time it happened to be a despicable guy standing behind them. The revolver in my hand roared louder than a cannon in such a small and tight space and proudly fired a bullet that penetrated a head twice as large as herself.
One friend of mine, who happened to be a journalist, wrote this in her article criticising me: “It is hard to imagine when this famous manipulator killed his first opponent, did he feel guilt and frustration as every one of us does?” The answer is yes, when I turned my gun to the female homunculus, this feeling of frustration appeared but only flashed across my mind, like a summertime mosquito that gave a buzz and was never to be found. That bullet penetrated her face from her nose to her brainstem, slightly deflected and scratched across Brian’s cheek— I guess soft people have stiffer skulls. Brian fell to the ground, sat there in a trance, and covered his face in his palms even when I dashed to remove the scarf off his head.
“Get the fuck up, Brian!” I shouted, “Guns up! More is coming! Bennett! Put the dynamites in the right position!"
The engineer didn’t even bother being magically racist this time, he rushed like a hound under command. Brian opened his eyes but kept sitting rooted to the spot and paralysed with fear. “What you—I mean—I thought—” he could barely speak some words out, “but—why?”
“Because I don’t trust them — help me pile their bodies together into a cover!” I drained my strength trying to pull one of the corpses by the arms, “Scathach, come—”
My brain stopped my mouth abruptly when the dead corpse with a bullet hole in his head clamped my arm and automatically translated the rest air in my lungs into a long scream of pain. My feet left the ground, he held me like his back was my shield, and staggered towards the window, while my fear was preventing me from even thinking about the possibility of him getting me out of this room.
“Legs, Brian!” I cried in fear, “Help! Shoot his legs!”
I heard three short, pressing bursts, but I could only see bullets nailing into the ceiling and the walls, a scene that I would later see a thousand times with myself being comfortable under protection. All my group project mates are fucking useless, I realised it without the need of going to college, and found myself under extreme frustration and resentment but refused to admit it all started with these disappointed eyes.
“Help!” I cried, this time in desperation, looking at the window approaching closer and closer until a flash of white lightning nailed the half-dead corpse onto the closest pillar. The sharp side of the spear that penetrated his neck, seemingly made with some kind of bone, expanded into seven pieces with countless thorns and grasped into the concrete, like spiders’ legs all entwined together, like a whale’s ribs after bone cancer, and like a seriously screwed up white rose. The figure of this pile of mess’s creator emerged from a bouquet of dark mist out of thin air, she twisted the spear to further nail the meat on the wall, no harder than a kid’s first time eating Kebab, and carried me in her arms to prevent my noodle, scarred legs to fall.
I hesitated to look up, but once I peeked into the eyes, these two I assumed would stay disappointed, looked at me in peace like the moon’s reflections in a clear lake, the feelings stacked in my brain immediately breached the already weakened levee.
“Scathach,” I sobbed, shaking the forearm in her eyes without feeling even a bit more painful or a bit less wronged, “he broke my forearm.”
The way she picked up my arm with a comforting smile was exactly like the moment when child me picked up my first hatched cygnet — we both didn’t know the things in our hands would chase us around, try to devour us, and even shit on us, but it still felt like our fingers were wrapping the entire universe. Her life energy seeped through my skin, shining the colour of a predator’s red, but only reflected the kindest revive.
“Oh, my bumblebee,” the word coming out of her mouth dripped love and care like a lullaby, even managed to wash off some layers of pain, “I am right here,” she said, covering my hand with hers, “you are going to be alright, I promise. You are incredibly brave, you saved our lives like a true hero.”
“I— don’t want to be—a chosen hero now.” I sobbed to burp, “I want—to go home. I want Souyo.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Aye, and I will bring you to your family, then you and Souyo can introduce us to them, right?” she said gently, not seeming to mind me taking all her credits for saving us. My splints were two broken sides of a broom Brian found silently, which eased up the pain, but I still kicked him twice with anger.
“Why the hell couldn’t you save me?” I yelled, “You aim worse than a Russian peasant in Stalingrad with a sawed-off Mosin!”
“I am sorry,” he apologised at a loss, “I just— I don’t know.”
“Can you please forgive him, Ninety-nine?” Scathach held my shoulders and pulled me away from my violence quietly, “These homunculi are using Skyward magichnology.”
“Magic—what?”
“One day I will happily introduce you to my class and teach all of you about that, dear, but at this very moment it is not something that can be explained in a few words.” I felt a flash of moisture when she kissed my hair, “Right now you can simply understand that as something that will stop all projectiles that plan to hurt the users.”
Unfortunately, I don’t have a smart brain like my later friends with PhD degrees, never had the privilege to her class as a college student. My head was built with a binary switch of “good” and “bad,” at that moment, Skyward switched to the bad side.
“I'm going to tell my dad to charge them a shit ton of taxes next year.” I buried my unhappy spirit in her arms, “Before I find whoever sells these magical things, and kill them all.”
“If you find that necessary, dear.” She patted my head once and once, “But I don’t know about the killing part.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, I’m actually doing all the job here!” I heard the engineer screaming, “For god’s sake, I’m using a hand drill to open a hole in a concrete pillar!”
“Aren’t you a magician?” Brian’s question seemed pretty naive but taunting at this moment, “Why don’t use your Void magic?”
“Because I don’t have a bloody Void nature!” I could see the engineer spitting a rain of saliva even that far, “Professor! Stop playing your babysitter gimmicks, come help me!”
His embarrassment successfully made me chuckle, and that infected Scathach into a smile. I stared at the poor alive kebab when Scathach rushed to jab on the wall when the kebab rotated his eyeballs and looked back, A thorn went through his jaw, he continued trying to say something to me but only spit an expanding bubble of blood until it hit the pointy tip and explode.
“How many are still out there?” I asked, “Please gesture, one finger means one.”
He gestured three fingers twice. 33 homunculi could block five hundred people in a building while killing twenty CIA officers silently and effectively, my mind calculated silently, I need to invest in this thing in the future.
“What’s our next move, sir?” Brian asked.
“Most people don’t even have dignity, do you know that, Brian?” I looked at the kebab, “My grandfather wrote in his diary, that during the second world war, 6 Japs can occupy an entire Chinese county without anyone trying to resist.”
“Very similar situations happened in Iraq and Libya, sir.”
“And now, 33 homunculi managed to occupy nearly six hundred people.” I sighed, “People don’t change.”
“Can I be honest with my opinion, sir?” Brian asked, continuing after I nodded, “I think it is a very brave act that you stood out to help people, but you cannot expect people to sacrifice themselves just because you think the outcome will be good.”
“I don’t get it, you were in the Marine Corps.”
“yes, but that was volunteered sacrifice. Civilians are not obligated to die for politics, although many people across the world are willing to do that—”
His words took a brake abruptly— Brian, this guy, has some kind of spider-sense. He shielded himself in front of me when danger appeared behind, but the danger hibernated at the door, did not make any aggressive movement. Half of her body was covered by a red flag, fluttered under the staircase heater wind.
“Brian?” I heard my voice shivering, I heard my friend’s breath heaving. It was like the homunculus standing by the entrance was spreading fear, and we were the lambs too scared to move in front of a lion, “Can—can you use your rifle grenade on that?”
“No. Too close, we’re within the arming distance,” he remained calm, “and we are within the casualty radius. Unless you or the professor can use your void to shield for a brief moment.”
“Why—why is she just standing there—man—man—”
“Menacingly?”
“Yeah—”
“Because she is asking for a duel,” Scathach slowly moved to few steps away from us —to not provoke the homunculi but still include us in her protection range, “this was—more commonly seen during world wars.”
“What if we just don’t react and do our things?”
“No previous examples,” Scathach replied, “no living examples to tell, to be exact.”
“These things usually do black operations after the Cold War,” Brian added, “not standing in front asking for a fight.”
“Meaning this individual is very confident that she will win?”
“Very possibly,” Brian nodded, “I suggest you accept the duel and buy enough time for the old plan.”
“Woah, why Scathach?”
“She’s more injury-tolerant than me,” Brian answered frankly, “and I’d lose.”
The possibility of her “dead” again scared me, but trust me, if it was you who was stared at by a pair of golden lifeless eyes from a homunculus, it would take you less time to make the decision. Scathach didn’t have a Scottish flag with her, unlike most Scottish I had met. I took off my jacket, quickly drew my family’s name on it with my finger, and gently tied the sleeves on her neck.
“Hao’s things are extremely expensive,” I said to her, “bring it back in one piece. I don’t want to recover a cloth with blood and holes on it.”
“I will,” she smiled.
“I mean, really, really expensive, the kind of expensive that you can’t afford even if you sell yourself to Hao,” I stood on the tips of my toes and raised my wooden comb. Compared to how my mom organised my hair, her hair was longer but meek and mild, even the best new breed of lamb’s hair couldn’t compare.
“Guides from the afterlife can’t find you,” I mumbled charms I read from my grandfather’s diary, “your enemies’ bullets fly around you.”
“Go,” Brian put his thumb up to her, “achieve victory for the House of Haos.”
My heart dropped half a beat when looking at her pulling out of a long, shining spear out of the void. A dense cloud of void danced around her fingers, and reminding me the algae that would fully grow overnight, the void expanded slowly, wrapping her hand, with wisps of escaping energy flashing between her fingers. For a young magician, feeling the energy erupting from a Demi-immortal felt exactly like when someone working in a hazardous lab smelt the odour of rotten eggs— all my hair stood up, while the natural instinct shouted warnings of blood red.
The second that homunculus stepped into the room and doubled the energy, I almost fainted. “Aleksheeva 178,” She said, voice surprisingly energetic and pleasant to my ears, sounding extremely like a broadcast instead of some lifeless killing machine, “slash 3. It is my pleasure to meet you.”
“What does the numbers mean?” I asked Brian.
“Meaning she is the third product of Soviet Russian project 178 led by scientist Aleksheeva,” Brian replied, “most homunculi are from project 166.”
“Where are the first and second products, then? Somewhere out there?”
He glanced at me and patted my shoulder, “Haos destroyed the first one in a similar situation, I think that is where your memory starts to blur,” he said, “The second we killed in Libya.”
“Using Tomahawk?” I remembered my father’s weird laugh last year when he heard the explosion in Libya.
“Yeah.”
If Scathach was beside us, she would probably judge us for being happy for something hurting civilians, but she was busy focusing on the duel. The homunculus slowly pulled her blade out, a beautiful one with copper and agate handles. It trembled, buzzing excitingly, and all of a sudden I started to sympathize with a sword.
It was happy, too. Even the idea of being used to kill someone triggers this pair of owner and tool. Face could be faked, but emotions from the soul couldn’t.
“So,” the homunculus grinned, “I need to make sure, you are a Demi-immortal, correct?”
“Does it matter?”
“You may die from blood loss if you are not,” I wondered how a delicate face could contract the lips to speak such harsh things, “my primary target is not you— no matter, I just need to cut off your limbs to make you immobile, which is why you need to take that clothes off.”
“Didn’t you hear what my friends said?” Scathach let the spear slip until her fingers touched the other end, flicking the ruby sphere, “Me, Scathach of Connaught, will bring victory to the House of Hao.”
“Oh, right,” the curly blade waltzed around her wrist, “you Westerners like that kind of style.”
And she marched towards her, inexorable, as mountains and waves consolidated and bearing down. The tip scratched across the floor squawking, until she gave a sudden and short rush, hacking askew towards the shoulder of that arm holding the spear. The magician she aimed at edged her way into a cover by the pillar, the blade roared on the splashing pieces of concrete before even touching the rim of the void.
Scathach walked out from the shadow of the void of the intact side of the pillar calmly, even having enough time to look at me with one of her eyes and blink. Compared to the homunculus’s nothing but dignified, overwhelming might, she looked way too casual, like a cat dancing in the rain, dodging the drops. The sharp side of her spear darted towards a now empty and unshielded side of the homunculus's body, submerging into the flesh, but turned out to be just a quick dip and withdrew itself when the homunculus tried to cut the spear’s cue into half.
“You should’ve used that exploding technique,” the homunculus used her chin to point at the homun-kebab nailed to the wall, “like what you did to him.”
“Indeed,” Scathach said, “except that can only be used once per spear, your blood would taint my clothes, and you would grasp the chance to cut my arm off.”
“Once per spear?”
“Everybody knows that!” I stretched my head out from the pillar I hid behind and yelled, trying to buy more time for the engineer to plant the dynamite, “Didn’t you watch ‘Big Hero Setanta’ when you were a kid? The cartoon sponsored by the House of Boyles?”
The fact is, homunculus grew into a battle unit in three months, but hey, I didn’t know that. The homunculus rubbed her chin and showed a confused face, “I didn’t watch it before,” she said, “you’ll show it to me when I catch you and fly you back to your family. Isn’t it a bad idea to use a long spear in the narrow space?” she looked at the ruby almost touching the ceiling.
“Is it so? It doesn’t seem like I am the one getting injured because of lousy equipment.” Scathach’s voice made provocations sound pleasant, “You are quite talkative for a homunculus.”
“You got me there,” the homunculus smiled, “I am curious, that way I learn faster. You’ll see.”
Her blade whirled past the air, this time at a more cunning angle paralleling the ground, aiming to cut the opponent in half. The opponent dodged backwards, one foot kicking into the tip of the spear to give it the force to rocket fiercely, and like an extremely heavy and sharp pendulum, cut into the homunculus’s stretching armpit.
“Magician’s movement logic is so easy to guess,” the homunculus said, the injured side of her hand dropping the blade onto the ground, but her other hand slightly raised and clenched. Something shot out from half of the pillar she destroyed, faster than I could blink, shackled and entwined Scathach’s right arm — it looked like a chain, but made with concentrated energy, shining dull golden light.
“Scathach!” I shouted nervously.
She twisted her body and swung my clothes to the other shoulder, her right hand pulling out the spear and throwing it to her left hand before the sharpness flashed across her own arm and chopped all the parts entangled. “Do you think you were the only one that did something to that pillar?” The homunculus picked up her blade, glanced at the falling arm and looked back at Scathach, “You see why I told you to take the clothes off? Now you put blood dots on it.”
I rushed into the battlefield, and the homunculus immediately lowered her arms when I used the sleeves of those clothes to tie tightly onto the broken arm Scathach cut, although that wasn’t very helpful because the blood already stopped. “I gave that shot to your head, you know,” the homunculus leaned forward with her two hands holding the blade as support, “you regained a head not too long ago. That slows down your speed to regain that arm now, right?”
She was calculating her tactics ever since that? I looked up worried, my sight crashing onto her pale face. “I am so sorry,” she said, forcing out a smile, “That chain was absorbing my Dynamics.”
“I still have an arm and two legs of Dynamics left to absorb,” The homunculus seemed like she was enjoying the excitement, with that chain on the ground obediently jumped onto the handle of the blade and merged into her hand, “So, you want to call it quit now? I don’t know why you are resisting, your friend here is going to shelter you anyway.”
“You are trying to kill my people, and you bother to ask why?”
“Not exactly, our patron wants them dead, we are swords to hire,” She swung her hand, and a much longer and thicker chain appeared, “for example, if you got cut by a knife, you don’t fight the knife to get more cuts, you go find a bandage. I don’t see why focusing on saving yourself is so hard to understand. It is not like you magicians are consumables like homunculi.”
“What if I hire you to kill your current patron?” I shielded myself in front of Scathach, “We can out-price your patron.”
“We don’t kill patrons. And what makes you think, that your house is currently not in a patron with us?” the homunculus looked at me with excitement, “Of course, if you want special service, then we can talk about it after we are done with this annihilation task. Does this suggest that you can stop obstructing our task and continue to your leaving at the airway?”
Yeah, I asked myself, why do I need to stop these homunculi from finishing their task? I wasn’t particularly in love with these Imperials, anyway, in fact, only a few of them showed goodwill to me — and knowing that my family is also patron, what if this was ordered by my family? It won’t make any difference for these homunculi to kill them here, if I brought these people back and only found out that my family is the patron that wants them dead— and Brian is a bargaining chip here—
“If I want to go now, can you let Brian go with me, too?” I asked, my brain as chaotic as a strawberry milkshake considering all the complicated things.
“I’ll cut you a deal,” the homunculus seemed like she had some higher jurisdiction than the weaker two, “if your CIA friend promises that he will abandon his loyalty, and Haos would promise to wipe his memory, I’ll let him go. How does that sound?” She raised her voice at Brian.
“Never,” Brian’s answer was short.
“You should make smarter friends,” the homunculus held the blade back into her hand and sighed, “Look, I can’t save your CIA friend, but I’ll cut your gorgeous friend’s head down, so you can carry her to your plane. Don’t worry, the body grows back.”
The pressure she spread came back to me again, suffocating me. I don’t know why this happened to me, I cried silently, I’m just a teenager. I looked at the adult right behind me to seek help but only found out that she was also looking at me with helpless eyes.
“Please don’t,” she pled.
Then gave me a miracle to turn the table around, I shouted silently, it is not like in the cartoon when Setanta can turn into a huge monstrous killing machine whenever he gets angry. And wasn’t you the one to teach Setanta in the cartoon and you live in a country with Nordic culture? Just turn yourself into a berserker and go fight—
And the answer to this predicament, the key to the lock, the dim dawn of victory, reached her two hands from the pillar behind the homunculus and crazily gestured to me.
We bought enough time! He successfully installed the explosive onto the bearing structure of the building!
The homunculus reacted faster than I could, turning her head back sharply as she could see what was happening behind her and whipping that chain in her hand with all her might towards the pillar where the engineer hid. But I can protect him if I’m in her way! I thought, my body and magic reacted with the self-taught skill naturally, just like a baby knowing breasts mean food.
Why do magicians call their magic trait “nature” anyway?
Probably because magicians naturally know how to use them at some point in their lives.
The world’s colour instantly changed in my eyes, and instead of the side of her figure, I was looking into the homunculus’s panicked eyes, and my body was in mid-air of her attacking track. That chain’s initial intention was probably to cut the engineer in half, but could only entangle me and throw me towards the opposite direction of the engineer — and that was enough. I flew backwards, looking at Scathach dived towards the homunculus during the second I distracted her, the spear thrust upwards, this time penetrating the homunculus’s shoulder and nailing her onto the ceiling.
“YOU—”
The homunculus howled before the spear exploded inside her body and tore half of her body to shreds. I crashed into Brian’s bosom and fell to the ground when Scathach backed up to dodge, only the tip of the tossed blade streaked across the side of her face, taking her ear and some red hair. The homunculus spared her hand trying to whip the chain again, but Scathach was faster to pick up that arm she left on the ground, a dark void nestled on the edge of her broken limb, turning it into an axe of human flesh, and bit into the other arm of the homunculus until the arm was cleaved in two.
“Try to absorb that,” Scathach whispered.
“Yes!” I yelled in happiness, “Bennett, run—”
Two more homunculi rushed into the room between us and the engineer before I could finish calling, turning my winning war cry into a desperate scream. Another golden chain broke the window from the outside and tangled a pillar before a homunculus breached into it, looking at us from a dangerously close distance. The engineer flustered to take out the detonator from his pocket, almost dropping it when he pressed the handle, but nothing happened.
“That thing is triggered by electricity!” Brian shouted towards him, “YOU NEED TO HOOK UP THE WIRE!”
“We don’t have enough time, you ignorant moron!” the engineer tossed the detonator to the ground, “Don’t mind me! Shoot the pillar!”
Scathach bounced in front of us, raising a shield made of a fathomless swamp of the void, before Brian fired the grenade. Through the translucent edge of the void, I saw Bennett flicking his collar, before raising his hand to me and smiling. The chain explosion burst a few meters away from him, blowing his moustache to a naughty tilt, before devouring everything in the room into glaring flames.