[Conrad: He’s dead.]
Emilia breathed out a small sigh of relief at knowing that Conrad was still alive—that he hadn’t been the one taken out when his and his nephew’s energies had collided so viciously that the aether had literally seemed to scream. The other visitor had already explained to her what would happen, were their abilities to come up against one another: the most focused would win.
That was why Emilia had needed to remove both herself and Oria from the equation. As long as they were around—as long as Emilia was in danger from The Quiet Boy and Oria could intervene in the fight—they were a liability. Conrad needed to focus, and Emilia had been willing to do anything to give Conrad the edge he needed to take out his nephew, even if she’d clearly hurt Oria’s feelings.
Not that the woman actually seemed to remember that. Once Emilia had laughed at her renewed confidence in the real world, even with her trauma and lowered abilities, the tension between them had broken, and now they were just kinda standing there in the snow, each staring in the direction Conrad and The Quiet Boy had been fighting, although likely for very different reasons.
Oria’s face betrayed nothing of what she was feeling, but Emilia highly doubted she was as concerned over her brother’s death as she herself was. Emilia was glad Conrad was alive, but killing his nephew hadn’t been the plan, not when they had no idea how corrupted by the heartcores he was. Hopefully, her friend had simply managed to figure out that his nephew wasn’t completely corrupted by them and decided to kill him.
Somehow, that seemed too easy.
Across her vision, Conrad’s light purple dot—she’d noticed that every member of her party were no longer normal, red dots—was swiftly moving towards them, and Emilia sent off a message telling him to not just attack his niece, if he thought she could even vaguely be trusted.
[Conrad: Seriously? Did you really manage to become friends with her?]
Emilia could hear the incredulity in his message, and she didn’t really blame him. Granted, she’d always been good at making friends, but the state of her friend making skills in this world was insane. Not that she would consider herself and Oria friends, but that had at least come to some sort of temporary truce.
Conrad did apparently consider his niece at least a somewhat trustworthy, sliding through the shadows to come up behind Emilia, as though aware that boxing his niece in wouldn’t be polite… or that Emilia might chastise him for it. That might have been more likely.
⸂Oria,⸃ the man greeted her, having already realized that, despite his refusal to tell Emilia more of his family’s names, she had learned his niece’s anyways.
“Uncle…” the girl greeted, although the way her voice caught on the word—the way her eyes slid to Emilia and back—it was clear they didn’t usually refer to each other this way. Probably, they used names or words from their native language, and worried that she would track them down through whatever words they used.
That was smart—Emilia had learned several dozen languages and dialects during the war, partially so she could eavesdrop on people whose native tongues had yet to make it into Censor translators, partially out of boredom and as a way to get to know the members of their unit who hailed from the Free Colonies. That said, given she hadn’t spoken most of those languages since being dragged to the Dread Coliseum by Helix, her skills were probably pretty sketchy.
“Is—” Oria’s voice caught in the same way Emilia had noticed Conrad’s at times, her eyes once more flickering to Emilia before she finished, “my brother gone?” Hiding names as well, then. Must be something they expected each other to do in raids, although that didn’t explain why they didn’t just use different names.
⸂Yes.⸃
“So blunt,” Emilia whispered, smiling when Conrad stepped closer and bumped her shoulder.
Across from them, Oria visibly relaxed. “Good. He was being weird.”
If Oria relaxed, both she and Conrad tensed, the concerns they had discussed before the fight even started vibrating through each of them in turn.
⸂What do you mean weird?⸃ Conrad demanded, voice so sharp and unbending that his niece straightened and stars above did she really seem to be a child. ⸂He seemed normal enough to me.⸃
Ah, so that was it. Conrad had deemed his nephew normal enough to kill. He hadn’t spent very long with the boy, though, before killing him. Evidently, he had missed something that his niece hadn’t—something that disturbed her so much she was glad he was temporarily dead and yet still caused her to shrink in on herself at the mere reminder of it.
Emilia had acted younger than she was. Even at Astrapan, most people assumed she was closer to Beth in age. If you knew how to do it, you could let years of life experience float away from you, leaving someone a little more innocent, a little more naive, in your place. The fact that she had a propensity for not thinking things through definitely helped. Usually, in serious situations, that persona naturally vanished. For Oria, it seemed to deepen, the feelings of child and adult seeping out of her ebbing and flowing so abruptly that Emilia wondered if it was the result of trauma—if something had occurred that had forced her mentality into that of a child, at least for spurts of time.
“I… he was just being too intense? Like mother level intense. It was weird. Usually, he’s so… level-headed. He wasn’t. No one else seemed to notice—he’s always so quiet—but every time we visited one of those labyrinths—”
Conrad sucked in a harsh breath, a stream of profanities—including several that Emilia knew were shared between a few Free Colony languages—leaving him before he asked, ⸂Oria, how many heartcores did he touch? How many did everyone touch?⸃
His niece shifted, blinked wide eyes at him. With her sparkling clothes, within the still quietly falling snow, she looked like a princess—a terrified one. “Uncle, what’s going on?”
“The heartcores—the things inside the labyrinths—seem to be affecting our minds,” Emilia said before Conrad could answer her. The girl’s pink eyes darted back to her, afraid—she was so afraid. “The more we touch, the worse it is. We don’t know if it will affect our real minds, either.” She was trying really, really hard not to scare the poor girl more, but they also needed her to understand the gravity of the situation, so she’d answer truthfully. “Oria, how many did everyone touch?”
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The girl’s mouth opened, closed. She was going to panic.
Stepping forward, Emilia knelt in the snow before her. Oria cowered back slightly, but to Emilia, it wasn’t fear—not of her, anyways. It was the cowering of a child who was used to people yelling at her for not behaving the way that they wanted.
“She really is a child, right now,” Emilia mused, reaching out to slowly take the girl’s hands. This was the type of trauma that every soldier knew was possible. This was the type of trauma that led to people being institutionalized, to their Censors being forcibly wiped of all skills by The Black Knot, out of fear that they would lose control—go berserk—and kill, kill, kill.
“How many did you touch, Oria?”
“O-only two.”
“Good. That’s even less than me, and I feel mostly normal, now that a little time has passed. How about you?”
Behind her, Emilia felt Conrad step closer as well. She wondered what he was thinking—what he thought of her treating someone who was simultaneously older and younger than her, who had only minutes before been trying to kill her, with kindness.
Oria nodded, frowning as though she were trying to decipher her insides. “I feel normal.”
“Good. What about your brother? The quiet one who was just here?”
The hands inside hers tensed, shook. Emilia squeezed them back in quiet support.
“I don’t know… at least as many as mother, but more, I think.”
“Your mother touched more than you?”
A nod.
“Your brother more than her?”
Another nod.
“And the rest? Everyone else touched more than you, but less than your mother?”
“Except the two you killed before,” she whispered. Something passed over her features—some flash of anger that Emilia had done that—before it faded away, sliding back under fear and childhood innocence. “Mother visited…” Oria’s face screwed up in thought, lower lip pulling into her mouth like she was solving a particularly difficult puzzle—the puzzle of her memory, sliding away under the strain of trauma, Emilia assumed.
Shaking her head, Oria finally said she didn’t remember. “But,” she added, just as Conrad was beginning to grumble about wasting time—and Emilia really didn’t want to know if he meant they were wasting time when they should be figuring out the next step, or wasting time when they should be forcing answers out of his niece—“Li— my brother started getting weird after the eighth one.”
Both Emilia and Conrad froze.
Eight.
Eight labyrinths.
Eight heartcores, melting that boy’s brain.
Eight, and that was only when he’d started to get weird.
⸂Emilia…⸃ Conrad was saying behind her. Something followed, but she didn’t hear him, her brain sliding pieces together.
Their family had been aligned with the Enclave the whole time, and while they hadn’t been able to confirm that the heartcores affected visitors associated with each group the same way they affected local members, it was a safe assumption. Hadn’t she watched Vermilion disappear into the hive mind? Seen the members of the other Clarity group rise and fall out of the hive mind as they made their way through the Ingogia estate?
Potentially bringing a piece of the hive mind back to the real world was bad enough, but for Enclave members, the heartcores had enhanced personality traits that already existed within them. It turned believers into zealots, willing to do anything to get what they wanted—willing to kill anyone who got in their way.
⸂Emilia,⸃ Conrad called again, startling Emilia into looking back at him.
The man looked practically distraught, his normally pitch black skin having gained an unnatural, bloodless pallor as stress overtook him.
⸂Kill me.⸃
It took a moment for Emilia to realize what he’d said. “What?”
⸂Kill me,⸃ he repeated, dropping down in front of her. ⸂I have to get back. That boy— my sister— I can’t let them. If they’ve changed then— My brother won’t—⸃
Fucking stars, he was panicking, and Emilia gave him a wonderful smack across the cheek. “Yo, breathe. If you’re panicking, that isn’t going to help the situation.” Her hand fell to his chest, her own breaths naturally beginning to pull in huge and overexaggerated in an attempt to make him breathe at a more reasonable pace.
⸂Emilia, I have to go back. They already don’t like the situation in… in our home. The things they could do…>
Behind them, Oria was saying something—asking what was happening, if they really thought her mother would hurt her other uncle or their enemies—but Emilia barely registered her words.
“Done panicking?”
⸂Yes.⸃
“Good.”
Conrad smiled. Not his usual, wide-mouthed smile that creeped everyone out, but something smaller—something thankful and sweet. ⸂See you on the other side.⸃
Energy ripped through Emilia’s {Blood Ring} sending blood splattering over the white snow.
Oria screamed and scrambled away. At least in this case, Emilia couldn’t blame her—they really should have warned her beforehand. She’d have to go find her and explain what was happening. Not quite yet.
[Boundary: What happened?]
Across her party information, Conrad’s name had gone black. Emilia supposed it was nice that Boundary was paying so much attention to them that he noticed the moment Conrad died. They hadn’t said goodbye, she realized. Only she and Key had given each other proper goodbyes. Between everyone else, it had seemed premature—like bad luck. Boundary and Conrad had been reluctant allies, but they still hadn’t gotten to say goodbye.
Quickly, Emilia messaged Boundary and Rin—the only remaining members of their group who actually had access to their group message—what had happened. Hopefully, whatever logout procedure there was wouldn’t be long. Conrad had already lost so much time, especially regarding his sister, who had been removed from the raid well over than an hour ago—not that that would translate to much time in the real world. Oria hadn’t mentioned her being weird, but perhaps she just hadn’t noticed an abusive mother becoming more abusive.
Hopefully, whatever home Conrad was returning to wouldn’t be one filled with violence.
Had she known where he lived, Emilia might have logged herself out then as well, left this situation to Boundary and the rest of the Risen Guard. Conrad—her friend—had never told her where he was from, though, and forcing the information out of Oria was out of the question.
Plus, who was she kidding? Even if Payton had fixed up her knots, she still had no idea how well her skills would work—if she would even be able to spark to Conrad and not just become another liability.
Instead, she contented herself with looting his body, removing his few blood weapons—another dagger, much like her own, and a small sculpture he’d grabbed from the Risen Guard compound—and… that was it. So many weeks inside this raid, and that was all he had gotten himself.
That, and her for a friend.
Their plan to meet up echoed through her head. Hopefully, when that day came, they’d both be there. Hopefully, she hadn’t just sent him off to his death. Hopefully, this fucked up raid and its mind manipulations hadn’t just gotten people killed or started a war.
“⸂Fuck,⸃” Emilia growled, pushing herself up. “⸂Don’t get yourself killed, asshole.⸃”
Turning and refusing to freak out because, with Conrad gone, so was his suppression of her aethervoice, Emilia set off, searching for an already traumatized child she’d just traumatized some more. Wonderful.