Ren sat atop the last of the pirates, his dagger dripping scarlet as he wiped it down with a ripped piece of fabric that he’d taken from one of the dead men.
The deep blue of his hoodie looked almost black in the dim lighting, which, together with the falling locks of hair that obscured his eyes, painted an eerie, shadowy picture. The splashes of blood that sporadically coated the walls and floor didn’t help the image either.
I could see in that moment, as I watched him sit in the darkness that seemed to embrace him with the familiarity of an old friend, the Ren that had once been. I could see the monster Ren saw himself as, the ruthless killer he’d hinted at being.
And then he looked up at me, a bright smile colouring his face, and the darkness that enveloped him seemed to recede again. The Ren that I’d known returned, the happy-go-lucky nonchalance that defined him seeping back into his bearing.
“Well, that’s that, then,” I said, a complicated look on my face. I hadn’t managed to gather the courage to land the final blow on any of the men, despite having ample opportunities to. That was a failure on my part, in every sense of the word, and the thought robbed me of every last shred of the happiness that usually followed a victory – especially victories as one-sided as this. Even the fact that I’d made an incredible advancement in my overall strength was dampened.
My mood got worse as the thing that I’d managed to avoid thinking of the entire fight barged its way back into my mind: the fact that Leonard was dead.
I tore my eyes away from Ren and searched the dim room for Leonard’s slumped figure. It lay at the other edge of the room, utterly still. Unnaturally still.
Ren stayed quiet, although I was sure he could tell where I was looking, what I was thinking. A heavy silence fell over us, the full weight of Leonard’s loss settling in. It was a feeling I was sure I’d have to get used to if I didn’t get strong enough, fast enough. It seemed the fate of the weak everywhere, even in another universe, was the same: destined to be trampled over.
As the two of us sat in our silence, the elevator doors at one end of the room suddenly opened up with a sharp ting, the very same doors that Ren and I had stepped through only hours before.
“Ruby!” came Anabella’s worried yell, and I turned to find her running to me, relief etched onto her face. She crashed into me before I could react, squeezing tight before leaning away to study my face.
I grimaced as I realized what I would look like, but Anabella didn’t seem to mind the splattered blood and the mess of hair that I sported at the moment. She practically glowed with happiness as she saw that I was more or less safe.
I knew that she would lose that happiness soon, and I hardly had the heart to tell it to her now, to crush that happiness, but I knew I had to. But, before I could even open my mouth, Anabella had already begun speaking, the words falling out of her mouth like water down a cliff.
“I’m so sorry you guys were forced to fight here,” she began, “I rushed over as soon as I could after finishing up my own fight when I heard that you two and Leonard had been left to defend the Conference Hall by yourselves. If we’d known exactly how many pirates there were going to be, we would have been far more prepared to defend ourselves. But the last ship managed to escape our detection entirely, since it was part of the fleet of a Pirate Monarch. The cloaking system on their ship was far more advanced than our detection was, so they took us by surprise.” She shook her head then, abruptly ending her explanation. “Sorry, I’m rambling. You guys are probably too tired to listen to excuses.” Then she paused, looking around again. “By the way, I don’t see Leonard,” she said, her voice dropping a little, as if she was starting to realize something wasn’t quite right. “Where did he go?”
“Anabella, I’m sorry,” I began, trying and failing to find the right words. “He…” I trailed off, and before I could try again, Anabella filled in the blanks for me.
“He’s dead?” she asked, her face blank.
Wordlessly, I nodded.
“Is his core still warm?” Anabella asked, a frantic emotion beginning to seep into her voice. “Did you guys make sure to keep his core warm?” By now her voice was rising, and she had turned around before I even got a chance to respond. Her eyes searched the room wildly, desperately.
I had no clue what keeping a core warm meant, but it didn’t matter since Anabella seemed to have already entered her own world. She had just spotted Leonard’s body, and ran over with a swiftness I’d never seen her move with.
Ren and I stayed silent as she fell to her knees next to Leonard’s body. She rolled his body over and put both her palms over the center of his chest, his bloodied shirt painting her hands in the same colour.
Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could feel the Flux emanating out of her hands and going into Leonard’s lifeless body.
Once the Flux entered his body, however, I could no longer sense it, so I had no idea what she was doing.
Eventually, however, after a few minutes of pouring Flux into him, Anabella let out a long breath as her body sagged, like a balloon deflating.
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She stayed silent for another moment, utterly still, her head still held down.
“Uhh, Anabella?” I finally asked after a long moment, breaking the silence that had descended upon the room.
Anabella’s head shot up as she heard my voice, as if she had forgotten that I was still in the room. She turned around and gave me a bright smile, far brighter than any smile should’ve been in the situation. Tear streaks marked lines down her cheeks, but her face still glowed with happiness.
“He’ll be fine,” she breathed out, relief colouring her voice. “I’ve stabilized his core, and the machines at the infirmary should be able to do the rest.”
There was a beat of silence as Ren and I tried to process the information, but we quickly realized that there was no way we could understand what she was saying.
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked, my voice calm enough to surprise even myself.
Anabella gave us a small smile, pushing herself up to her feet. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve explained much about this to the both of you, right?”
Ren and I simultaneously shook our heads, both of us paying rapt attention to her.
“When a mage’s body dies, it isn’t necessarily the end of the road for them. And I know that all this information is going to be a lot for you, but you’ll understand it all more once you learn it in school. For now, I’m just going to need you to trust me, ok?”
Ren and I both nodded again.
“Ok, so, when a mage’s body is killed, in the sense that their heart stops beating and their brain shuts down, their Flux core still retains a lot of the Flux that it had gathered over the course of their lives; after all, it is like the heart for the Flux of the body. Over time, that Flux will gradually seep out of the core, but if you manage to retrieve the body before enough of the Flux leaves, you can essentially pull off a more major version of a normal Revive, which can reboot every organ and cell in the body, effectively bringing the person back to life. Unfortunately, doing so requires a significant amount of the mage’s Flux to be used as the spark to get the process going, so when the person comes back, they are left on a much lower level of strength than when they died.”
Anabella took a breath then, watching our shocked expressions with a little smile. “Obviously, that is a very gross oversimplification of the whole process. To be honest, even I don’t understand the specifics behind the whole process; it wasn’t my specialty in Healing, but I did take a few classes on it. It is a pretty big area of research for healing mages, since we’ve been trying to figure out ways to lower the toll Life Revives take on the mage. But for now, what we have works. The medics should already be doing their rounds, so someone should be here shortly, and Leonard will be fine soon enough. You guys don’t need to worry about it anymore. You two have done more than enough. You guys should head back down and get some rest. We’re just passing Argonis right about now, and then we should be at Adonis just after that. And after this, I say you two should just take it easy until then.”
Ren and I stayed silent again, still reeling from the information that Anabella had just dropped on us. I quickly understood why they hadn’t told us all this before. For people just entering an entirely different universe, all of these fantastical things would be far too much to learn about so soon.
I myself could sense that it was getting too much. I had barely understood Anabella’s explanation, but I didn’t much care since the gist of it was that Leonard wasn’t actually dead. And that was all I cared to understand.
Finally deciding to put aside the jumble of thoughts in my head, I returned to the conversation and nodded at Anabella’s suggestion. “Yeah, I’m exhausted. I think I may have pushed myself a little too hard with all those Revives.”
Ren laughed from beside me. “Oh yeah, I saw that,” he said, remembering. “That was honestly insane. I was genuinely in awe. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take such a painful gamble on themselves. The kind of confidence in yourself it must take to hope you understand something before you die in the middle of a fight with someone so much stronger than you…” Ren stopped there, shaking his head as he chuckled.
“Oh no, it was nothing like that at all,” I said defensively. “You should know me well enough to know that there was hardly any thought that went into that plan. It wasn’t that I assumed I would learn to control the Flux around me before he could kill me. I just noticed that every time I Revived, I could feel the faintest sense of the Flux entering through my skin. So I figured if I could pay enough attention while Reviving, I could unravel that feeling and start to sense the Flux around me.”
Ren shook his head. “Like I said, absolutely insane. But I guess I can’t make fun of you too much, considering the fact that I learnt to do the same thing the same way.”
I laughed at that. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Alright, I think we can all agree that both of you are pretty insane,” Anabella cut in. “Now stop talking and go downstairs, before I drag the two of you to your rooms myself.”
Ren and I chuckled at her order. “Alright, alright, we’re going,” I gave in, starting to make my way to the elevator with Ren in tow.
“Let us know when Leonard is back, alright?” Ren asked over his shoulder as we made our way to the doors.
“Of course, I’ll let the both of you know right away,” Anabella answered just as the doors of the elevator opened up before us.
But instead of the empty elevator room that we had been expecting, the two of us were forced to step to the side as five mages dressed in pure white robes stepped out of the room. Two of them carried a stretcher between them, which made it pretty obvious that these men and women were the medics that Anabella had mentioned.
They seemed to be friends of Anabella, as they all greeted her warmly. But they quickly got to business, with the pair carrying the stretcher going over to where Leonard lay, while the other three went to the various places we’d left the dead pirates.
Having seen enough, Ren and I stepped into the elevator and made our way back to our rooms. The walk back was silent, but strangely companionable. It wasn’t that we didn’t have things to say, but that we didn’t feel the need to say them. So instead, we stayed wrapped in our silence, the quiet a balm for my chafed mind. The pain of the Revives and my repeated failures had left their mark, and I didn’t realize how much I needed the peace and quiet until the both of us started walking.
Unfortunately, fate didn’t seem to have peace and quiet on the schedule for me, not any time soon. Because the moment I stepped into my room, the exhaustion of the day finally settling on my shoulders, a loud bang sounded out through the ship, followed by an intercom message.
“Void Bats!” a young, terrified voice shouted. “A colony of Void Bats has intercepted the ship!”