Half a dozen {Blood Needles} shot from Emilia’s hands, her black nails glinting in the light of the world. Each needle landed on their targets with pinpoint accuracy that would have made even Halen—nearly impossible to impress man that he had been—proud, the explosion they summoned from the aether wiping out swathes of the quite frankly obscene number of people who were gathered outside the buildings.
Why were there so many people?
It hadn’t taken more than a glance for Emilia to realize most were Clarity members—those were her first targets, with their too many powers and the fact that killing as many Clarity members as possible was a large part of their reason for being there in the first place. The dust from her explosions cleared. There were still far too many people, the remaining Clarity members now clambering to grab the visitors among them, many of whom who looked… rather less than impressed.
That was interesting.
“⸂HEY! Don’t kill us!⸃” someone yelled in her direction as they slammed an elbow into the Clarity members who had grabbed hold of them, the local earning themself a bloody nose that didn’t seem to bother them—or didn’t seem to bother their hive mind persona, anyways. “⸂We’re on your side!⸃”
“How do you know she isn’t on these guy’s side to begin with!?” a man who looked to be in his late-20s or early 30s called as he tried to pull himself free of another Clarity members, but while he was tall and thickly muscles, he also didn’t appear to be well versed in hand-to-hand combat.
“Well, aside from the fact she just blew a bunch of these guys to pieces, I know her. You trust me, you trust her,” an older woman with dusky brown skin yelled, pitch-black eyes shooting Emilia as amused look as she threw her own Clarity assailant to the ground and promptly bashed in their head with some sort of bat-shaped blood weapon.
⸂Hetexia,⸃ Emilia breathed out, already surging forward to rip the young man—clearly from Nur’tha, like Hetexia, now that she was actually looking—free from his attacker and slice the woman’s throat. ⸂Been a while.⸃
Hetexia snorted, muttering something about how that wasn’t exactly her decision. “Didn’t think you enjoyed these things.”
⸂Who told you that?⸃ Emilia asked, legitimately curious who’d be gossiping about her—who would even know enough about her current life to do so.
Her {Blood Needles} had reformed in the intervening moments, although they were coming slower and slower as Emilia’s assumed Cade’s blood supply came to an end. Unfortunate. Most likely, this would be the last battle where she could use them, if she used them all out. Better to use a few other weapons, even if the {Blood Needles} were her most useful weapon, due to their range.
Instead, she pulled out her {Blood Fabric}. Having always preferred a combination of long-range attacks and a sword, her lack of anything similar was annoying. In the end, the {Blood Fabric}, with its several feet of length and ability to be whipped about, was probably her best option, even if she had little experience using it.
“Alex. He lives in Piketown. Sees you around sometimes. Asks after you, but keeps his distance,” Hetexia called as she hurled another blood weapon at someone. It hit with a scream, the man tugging at the thing that had attached itself to his face and was… was it eating him!? And moving!? Catching Emilia gapping at the weapon, her old friend smiled. “Cool, isn’t it? Only semi-sentient blood weapon I’ve seen, and these assholes have had us making as many as we can—visiting a shit ton of labyrinths, too. Say…” The woman trailed off, eyeing Emilia up skeptically.
⸂I haven’t visited too many,⸃ Emilia said, telling Hetexia over the cacophony of physical and aether voices about being coerced into that ridiculous mission.
“Gino, too,” the other woman said as she and Emilia met over a dead Clarity member, one of his teammates turning to raid his body for something—a blood weapon or magic gem, most likely. “Bunch of us got weird with them, so they only took those who weren’t acting too uppity. Gino’s a good actor, and could teleport, to boot. Never told anyone that. Came back and warned us about what went down, about what those heartcore things can do to a person.” Hetexia gave a mock shudder, although the hardness around her eyes told Emilia she was concerned.
⸂All these heroes with you?⸃ Emilia asked, contemplating the disaster before her. If Hetexia had been done with Clarity, it was no wonder things had turned out this way. The woman, crude as many often considered her, had led her tribe since she was barely more than a child. She had dragged herself through trials at the Norvel Coliseum for money and fame and power when she was only a teen, only to find herself forced into a war alongside people who looked down on the Northern Tribes like they were scum.
The irony that Hetexia was one of the most powerful people on the continent. People would see what they wanted, though, and when people looked at the Northern Tribes they saw nomads, covering themselves in fur and too stupid to stop foreigners from exploiting their land. Maybe some were stupid—and the leader of the pseudo-tribe that had willing allowed PollyPollen to be harvested to near extinction, an entire ecosystem collapsing under its loss, were definitely on the stupider side—but there were stupid people everywhere.
Different people had different skills, and Emilia was pretty sure that if half the people she grew up with were dumped into the far north without their Censors, they’d be dead within hours. Frozen solid. Eaten by a vil. Killed by one of the Moonlit. What a tragic way to go.
“Not all of ‘em,” Hetexia told her, before asking if she was fine focusing on the Clarity members and letting her and hers handle the other heroes. “Not gonna be too mad if you off one of us by accident,” she laughed, a blade appearing in her hand before disappearing into a random visitor’s stomach, the curved blade pulled clean, intestines and gore spilling out of the woman and adding itself to the growing red of the ground, vibrating impatiently as it waited for someone to summon a blood weapon from it.
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Waiting to see who came out on top in the battle, perhaps.
“It is a game, after all,” the other woman continued, and if she’d been in a call with someone, the other party unable to see the red splattered over the fine white of her clothes, they would never have been able to guess she was in the midst of a battle, killing people without a second thought.
Hetexia stopped, sliding a look at Emilia. They were close, fighting almost back to back, like they had so many times during the war. Emilia had made her avatar slightly shorter than her real self, while Hetexia had set her height to match her real body’s, leaving their height difference over a foot and half, and Emilia had to crane her neck to meet her former teammate’s eyes.
“It’s good to see you,” Hetexia said, all amusement disappearing from her face. She looked like she wanted to say something, probably ask Emilia to come see her, when they were back in the real world. The northerner didn’t ask, instead she just seemed to take a moment to analyze Emilia before turning and continuing on her killing rampage, her fur-cuffed boots growing thick with blood and gore.
Emilia turned as well, scouting out each of the heroes who were clearly on Hetexia’s team, each bearing the markings of Nur’tha in their appearance, each occasionally yelling at Hetexia or each other for one reason or another.
There were a few people amongst their numbers who likely weren’t from the north, neither their appearance nor accent suggesting they were anything but Baalphorian. Still, they called to the northerners like they were old friends, and maybe they were. Perhaps they had joined this raid together, hoping to win; perhaps they had met while being held captive by Clarity—become close through force proximity and annoyance.
It didn’t matter, nor really did their lives or place in the game, except Hetexia trusted them, and just as she’d told them that they could trust Emilia because Hetexia trusted her, it was the other way around as well.
Any friend of Hetexia’s was a friend of hers, and Emilia surged forward to block an attack to the young man’s back, one that likely would have sent his mind spiralling back to the real world.
“OH!” he squeaked as he turned, fumbling his weapon. The long sword clattered to the ground, the northerner groaning and leaning to grab it, nose wrinkling as he wrapped a large hand around the now bloody hilt. “Sorry, I’m not so good with such large blades.”
⸂Prefer short ones?⸃
“Mm…”
⸂Trade you?⸃ Emilia asked, tugging her {Blood Dagger} out and offering it to the man. It wasn’t that she couldn’t use the dagger, nor that it didn’t have uses in certain fights, but the idea of getting her hands on that sword…
“Oh! Really?” the man asked, Emilia noting his pitch-black eyes for the first time as he excitedly eyed up Emilia’s blade. He didn’t wait for her to reply before practically throwing her his sword and snatching the dagger from her hands. He turned, and suddenly, the clumsy man was gone, and he was surging through the crowd, a trail of gurgling bodies left in his wake as he slit throats and wrists and unsuspecting femoral arteries.
Well. Emilia had heard it said that some people became a different beast when certain weapons found their way into their hands, but this was truly too much! How could one person not be able to handle a battle with a sword, yet slaughter everything in their path with a dagger!
⸂Ridiculous,⸃ Emilia muttered to herself, thinking that if this child had been recruited into their unit—and something about the way he now fearlessly moved through the battle told her he may very well have, although with the raid system supporting him, it was impossible to tell how skilled he would actually be in the real world—he would have been forced through a lot of remedial training.
Not only had their unit been sure to train everyone into being able to use each other’s willbrands in an emergency—even if their willbrands had been personalized to their genes and using another’s wasn’t exactly a comfortable affair—but they had also been sure to learn how to fight with and against nearly every weapon.
In the early days of the war, most of the military brass had looked down on them for that—it wasn’t like they were fighting other humans, after all. What was the point in learning every weapon, if you’d never have to use or fight one? Monsters didn’t wield weapons like that, theirs were claws and teeth and blood that burnt straight through your soul.
It hadn’t mattered. The Blood Rain General had insisted: it didn’t matter that they’d never face a scimitar or spear in battle, knowing how each was used was an expansion of their knowledge, and when it came to life and death situations, you could never know too much.
Indeed, the first time a monster had spewed toxic chemicals at their forces like shots from an arrow, it had been those who were in units that followed this sort of training who had come out with the least casualties. The first time a monster with a whip like tail spun through the world, they were relatively unharmed. With each mutation of the monsters, more and more of the brass had accepted they had fucked up: they should have trained everyone more, they shouldn’t have insisted they learn their own willbrands and skills and the current army of monsters so well that every other ability fell away.
Some units had tried to adopt their training style then, but while those first years of war had been marred with stupidity and death, the attacks had been relatively few, at least compared to the end.
As the years rolled on, more and more attacks came, larger and harder, and those skills that should have been supplemented when there was time became nearly impossible to improve in their limited time. Then the training system had come, time left a near meaningless thing, even if it had left many of them with brains burning from overuse, their souls splitting under the trauma of it all.
Then, it had become standard to make sure every soldier knew every strategy, Free Colonies that had long held their training style secret letting Emilia and their unit code bits and pieces in so fewer people would die—so they could survive just a little longer, save a few more lives.
Around her, more and more Clarity members fell, blood leaking out of them along with organs, shit and piss. A true battlefield, largely exacted by the hands of people who hadn’t even fought in the war, hadn’t learned all the myriad ways to fight and kill and maim.
“What’s that look for?” Hetexia asked, slinging a thickly muscled arm over Emilia’s shoulder as she stared out at Hetexia’s group, hunting down the few people who remained on the field.
There were eight of them left, including Hetexia herself. There had been far more visitors when Emilia had first pushed her way out of the building, and Emilia had noted most of them being cut down by Hetexia’s group as chaos reigned. It wasn’t surprising their group was so small—most of their group were northerners, and unfortunately, most Baalphorians would balk at the idea of teaming up with them.
What was surprising was how Clarity had come into so many visitors.
It was the same question that had been niggling at Emilia’s brain about the Enclave, since she’d learned they had a few dozen visitors between them, on top of Conrad’s family.
The Risen Guard was supposed to have swiped nearly all the visitors up, save perhaps a few like Astra, who had been able to pass themselves off as lost locals. So, how had so many seemingly escaped their custody, only to fall directly into the hands of the Risen Guard’s enemies?