“What’s that?”

Emilia glanced back at V. They’d been walking beside each other for a while, as they searched for Key and Rin, but he had paused to examine a cut on his leg that was taking particularly long to heal and fallen a few steps behind. “What’s what?”

“That thing on your back. Did you really spend the time giving yourself a custom tattoo? Or is it a reflection of real life?”

Her steps halted and V ran into her, his chin colliding painfully with the side of her head. “What tattoo?”

“The one on your back,” V said, absently rubbing both her head and his chin as he smiled innocently at her. Fucker.

“I didn’t give myself a tattoo,” she said, trying to twist so she could see whatever was on her back. “Key didn’t say anything about it, either, when he found me before.”

“Would he have?” the other visitor asked, taking a step back, his eyes glued to her back.

“Uh… maybe?” Maybe not. Key had been particularly embarrassed by her clothing, and aside from pointing out places to store weapons, hadn’t really commented on it. She was almost certain she would have at least caught him staring at her back, were it suddenly covered in a random tattoo, however.

V’s fingers ran over the lines of her tattoo, sending a shiver through her.

“You know, most men ask before touching.”

The man’s fingers stilled for a moment, before continuing on their path. “Sure, but you’ve already been on top of me. I think that affords me a moment of touching, as payment.”

Emilia snorted. “Payment for climbing on top of you, so I could save your hide?”

“Oh yeah~” V teased, one finger dragging over her armour, presumably where the tattoo disappeared into her shorts. “I’ll have you know people buy me all sorts of stuff, trying to get on top of me.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Emilia glanced back at V again, finding him already smiling at her, and she rolled her eyes. “Of course they do.”

“Of course they do,” he parroted back. “These lines are red, like blood.”

“Like our missing blood weapons, you mean?”

“Yup.”

They’d woken up and searched the heartcore cavern, but found no sign of either Emilia’s {Blood Orb} or any new weapon, created during the storm. Eventually, they’d given up, and figuring that an extra few minutes were unlikely to affect Key and Rin’s wellbeing much, Emilia had also touched the heartcore.

So far, she had no idea what new ability the heartcore had given her, but waking up with her head cradled in V’s lap had been an experience. A nice one, and despite her misgivings about any sort of friendship or relationship with the competition—especially one so clearly in need of a good shower—she was definitely entertaining the idea of asking if he’d like to engage in the sex that locals could barely even speak of.

Had they been in the real world, she was certain her Censor would have questioned her about that particular decision and her seeming sex addition, but hey! If she had to be without her Censor for a month, she might as well make some fun, if possibly ill-advised, decisions!

“I really don’t like the idea that there’s now a blood weapon integrated into me,” Emilia said, a shudder running up her spine. Random blood inside her skin was bad enough, let alone the fact that she’d both lost a weapon and potentially gained one that she had no idea how to use and—

Emilia cut off, pulling away from V’s lingering fingers to turn towards him. “Show me yours,” she said, enjoying the way V smiled and waggled his eyebrows before turning and letting her examine his back.

“Tattoo,” she said, tugging the torn fabric up as far as she could.

“Sweet. Does it look nice?” V asked.

Emilia ran her fingers over the fine lines, trying to find a pattern but—

“Lose the shirt,” she said, taking a step back and coughing. “It seriously stinks.”

“The smell might be more me than the shirt,” V admitted, shooting her an almost apologetic smile—almost. Regardless of his worries, he stripped the shirt off and Emilia sucked in a harsh breath. Not from any smell—thankfully it did seem mostly contained to the shirt—but from the sight of the tattoo, as well as—

“I can read…” she whispered, fingers running over the symbolic words etched into V’s back. Was her back covered in something similar? Exactly the same? They’d have to have someone check, once they found the others…

“We should go…” she said, swallowing down the want of knowledge cracking through her. “We’ve already wasted enough time, and need to find the others.” She’d feel seriously bad if something terrible happened to them while she was wasting time examining V’s tattoo. Sure, it could come in handy to know what it said, but—

“Should we?” V whispered, so quietly Emilia almost didn’t hear it through her thoughts.

“What do you mean?”

V hesitated, the tension through him almost palpable, before he said, “I know it’s cold, but shouldn’t we be trying to win? I don’t mean the game, but the blessing, so maybe the whole blood magic thing will stop, or at least calm down. Don’t get me wrong!” he quickly added, tone tight and strained. “I don’t want anyone to die—not unless they deserve it, like Taoran—but if it’s between finding the others and figuring out the secrets of this world…”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He trailed off, and Emilia wasn’t sure what to say. He was right. He was wrong. Collateral damage was an acceptance of war, and not a nice one. Sometimes, you had to sacrifice one city to save another, basing your choice on the chance of winning and the importance of locations. She had made many of those decisions during the war, when even the OIC System been overwhelmed and hesitated to condemn people to their deaths simply because they’d chosen to live in the wrong spot.

It was terrible.

It was also inevitable.

Emilia swallowed around her guilt, blasting up through her in full force as faces of people she had watched die flashed through her mind, and suddenly a laugh burst out of her. Small and humourless, but there, and V turned towards her, eyebrows pulled together in concern.

“Emilia?” he asked, eyes searching hers.

“Ah~ sorry. I was just thinking that it’s weird to have memories without my Censor? I don’t know about you, but I always… blur my memories of the war a bit with it.”

V hummed in something along the lines of agreement. “I don’t quite do that, but I do use my Censor to manage them a bit.”

Emilia nodded, telling him that while she’d had moments of reflecting on the war since arriving, something about the being reminded of the people she had chosen to save and chosen to die during the war had highlighted how strange it was to remember without a Censor.

“Can you remember anything before you had a Censor?” her friend—Emilia thought they were probably friends now?—asked, truly curious. Almost too curious, and she wondered if perhaps he didn’t have many memories of his own childhood.

“I do,” she told him. “From one on? I’ve heard that’s a little young,” she added, almost immediately cursing herself. One of the main ways you could guess at a child’s D-Levels before they were tested as teenagers was through the age of their first memories and the clarity of them. To be honest, Emilia had a few memories from before that, most notably one of taking her first steps, one of the carers cheering her on in a way that wholly unlike the standard, serious nature of the people who had taken care of them during those first few years. She’d been about seven months at the time.

If V knew the significance of memories and D-Level—which admittedly most people outside of the sub-50s didn’t, she’d only learned it because of her own odd circumstances—he gave no indication of it. Instead, he simply waited for her to ask why he wanted to know.

He shrugged, telling her that he had always found pre-Censor memories to have a slightly different flavour to them than the ones that came after. “This—being here without a Censor—reminds me of that. It’s different, but in a way that seems more natural?”

Emilia contemplated that, his voice echoing similar sentiments she’d heard from Free Coloniers who had chosen to never fully install a Censor, as she examined his tattoo more closely, fingers running lightly over the lines and swirls. It wasn’t like the writing she had seen in the cities, decorating sandwich boards and the shops she’d wandered by, nor did it remind her of the writing she had seen inside the few books she had glanced through.

Honestly, the entire thing was barely discernible as writing, and had she not apparently gained the ability to read through the heartcore, she would have actually assumed it was a simply a piece of art. The entire design covered the majority of the other visitor’s back, and as Emilia told V what she saw, he confirmed that he had also seen the majority of the details in her tattoo, even if he couldn’t read it or confirm they were identical.

“Huge. Pretty. Ominous,” he laughed when she asked him to describe the image she wasn’t bendy enough to see more than the edges of. “It reminded me of a war zone. Bodies—or in this case, balls of lines and fine details—scattered over a battlefield.”

Emilia hummed in thought. “Yours is similar,” she told him, although she wouldn’t have described it in such a terrible way. “I probably would have described it as bloody flowers over a field.”

Her friend laughed, firm back muscles shaking under her fingers. “So I got the pretty version, eh?”

“Oh yeah,” Emilia agreed, nodding sagely. “You’re definitely the prettier of us. A little flower~”

“Cute nickname,” V said, smiling sharply at her. “Little Flower and War.”

Emilia rolled her eyes. “You cannot go around calling me War.”

“Why not, War?”

Emilia didn’t dignify him with an answer, but when she began broadly explaining to him what words she could read on his back, she couldn’t resist calling him Little Flower.

“So… it’s not even instructions for anything?” V sighed as she finished explaining that all she read was a muddled biography.

“Not unless I’m missing something, which is pretty likely. As far as I can tell, there are multiple ways to read this thing? But when I try…” Emilia glared at the red lines, trying to switch up the order in which she took the lines in. Almost immediately, her brain began to hurt. “Fuck. Yeah, no. There’s definitely more to it, but I can’t read it without my head wishing it was splattered across the wall.”

“Gross,” V laughed, turning and giving her head another little rub.

Emilia turned into his hand, and when her eyes, which had clenched closed under threat of popping out of her head, opened, she found him watching her much too closely—much too softly. “Not gonna tell me?” she asked, wishing he would just admit that he knew her and put her out of her misery.

The man smiled, all soft, innocent, sadness. “Tell you what, Emilia?”

She sighed, hand snapping up to grab his hand. “You’re an ass.”

“I’ve heard that,” V laughed, tugging playful against her grip. “Only recently, though.”

“How recently?”

“About a decade—a little less, I suppose.” He smiled, sharp and evil and reminding Emilia much too much of monsters that lurked in the sea. The smile of a creature waiting for just the right opportunity to rise up and clamp its jaws around your leg. “I changed a lot, after the war.”

In other words, if she had known him—and at this point, she was just going to assume she had because fucking stars was the man being overly familiar with her!—she had likely known him before the war and was unlikely to find anyone with his personality in her memories. Vague verbal ticks and knowledge it was then. Surely, if she spent enough time around the man, he would eventually slip up… right?

“So, what kind of weird biographical information can you read on my back?” he asked, turning away again so she could summarize the exact details to him—as much as she had come to agree that perhaps prioritizing winning a blessing for this world should come before protecting a few locals, they were still her friends and she wanted to find them quickly.

Emilia had barely gotten through two sentences of her summary when V stopped her.

“That… sounds familiar,” he said, telling Emilia that the information sounded a lot like what he had learned about his Enclave babysitter. “He didn’t tell me much himself, but he had a sister who seemed to… not like him. She gave me some… less than savoury information about him. I think she almost wanted me to kill him? She didn’t say it in so many words but…”

He trailed off, and Emilia didn’t really know what to say to that.

Luckily, she was saved from having to say anything when V clarified that that wasn’t why he had killed Taoran. “He was threatening you,” he explained when Emilia asked why he had killed his main ally. “He was part of the group that killed my Enclave guard, so I knew he was capable of murder. I was trying to not hold it against him, but to try a kill you? Your Enclave babysitters? People we are supposed to be allies with, if possible?” He growled lowly.

“You don’t have a problem being allies with me?” Emilia asked, returning to running her fingers over V’s back, more in an attempt to soothe the man now than anything else.

“Nah.” He smiled back at her, eyes adorably crinkled, his image overlaying with another for the barest of moments before it was wiped away by time, trauma and her lack of Censor. “I don’t want the tickets that badly.”

“Then why’d you come?”

V watched her consideringly for a moment, a thousand thoughts floating through his blue eyes, beautiful and intuitive, before he said, “I knew what raid I was entering. I already had information about the platform and the previous, failed raid.”