Shards of metal and glass peppered the room in the wake of the mind spike screen’s sudden end. Noem stared down at the hollow corpse of his sister. A void to be filled by someone from another world. Vivid anger rose from his chest, so all-consuming that when he came to he found himself grabbing a handful of cords on the wall.
He should’ve felt sick that he even considered it. That he would kill the chance that it was some strange dream, and Mona was still in there. But he didn’t. Her eyes were moving. Her chest was pumping on its own, and all of her vitals had surged the moment that the goddess spoke the parasite’s name.
Screeching warnings sounded off through the house. Noem glanced out of the room with empty eyes at the Qi detection alarms, their specific tone telling him that it was too late. The surge was coming from inside of the house. He took a shuddering breath and stared up at the ceiling. At the bright blue ball of light that only he could see, which indicated that the Qi was, indeed, in this particular room.
Mona was dead. And whoever was in the process of waking up was just a parasite.
“Keira Baker.” Noem spat. The words tasted like poison and burned like fire. Rumors of otherworlders had been around ever since he could remember, but he’d always thought they were just that–rumors. Like Djinn or the shards of shattered pasts.
Yet there one was, crossing over into his sister’s body. The only reason he’d isolated himself for so long–and ruined his life and future prospects–gone. On the exact same fucking day that he’d accidentally stolen the damned corundum. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Noem glared down at Mona and tried to compose himself. His life was over. But that didn’t mean his future was. He summoned another screen from his inventory and connected it to the mind spike, waited for it to synchronize again, and forced himself to watch the parasite in his sister’s mind talk to the thieving goddess.
“-captor recently came across something terribly powerful. If you can best him, it is yours for the taking.” The goddess said. “Someone such as him has no place on Terret. His actions will catch up to him in two weeks, so that is all the time you will have. Take the stone, bring it to an expert bondsmith, and force the apex in the quarry to bond with you. The university will have to accept you if you have an apex under your control, and from there you can begin your cause.”
“My cause?” ‘Mona’ asked with obvious confusion. “I don’t even know what all those words mean. And what university are you talking about? There can’t be one university in this entire world, right?”
The goddess shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Do not speak, my child. It is unbecoming of you. I will grant you the ancillary knowledge you need when you transition from asleep to awake, but until then, you will have to deal with the temporary confusion. As my summoned hero, you will not be burdened by any bonds, and you will be able to internalize any fire or light-aspected skills. When combined with the apex’s mastery over air and darkness, you will be a force unlike anything this world has ever seen.”
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“Now, my child, close your eyes. The locations you see are where the seven great devastations will occur, and where the monstrous generals of the wandering monster’s army will emerge.”
Images flashed over the screen far too quickly for Noem to take in. Luckily, he already had more than enough processing power for that. “Isolate each individual image and put them on my main screen out in the living room.”
Noem went right back to watching Mona’s ‘dream’. He’d never heard of anything like a great devastation before, but if a goddess was giving a hero a quest, he had no reason to doubt it. Mona staggered and fell to her knees under the weight of new information, but the goddess didn’t so much as lift a finger. For some reason, that tugged on Noem’s nerves.
“In ten years, the end of Terret will come. You will be the shining beacon of hope against the hordes of destruction. Gather allies. Recruit the legendary Djinn who slumber in secret. And do not fail me.”
The goddess waved one of her many hands dismissively. “You will wake when your body is strong enough to host a conscious mind. From this moment forth, you are Mona Crest. Your brother is Noem Crest, a monster who you cannot trust. Gain his favor, use him, and discard him to those that come in two weeks for your ticket to the university. That is where you will find your true allies.”
The screen cut out. Noem stared at his reflection in the black mirror for more than a few seconds–the mixture of pain and anger seeping through his expression was something he could barely understand was his own. In the goddess’ eyes, he was a monster. When Mona woke up, she would be terrified of him no matter what he did.
But he still had plans. Contingencies’ contingencies, for the worst outcomes and for the best. He stood and rushed over to the living room, slammed the door shut behind him, and beelined for the stone. The goddess thought it was hers to give. But he’d been the one that had stolen it.
If he was going to burn for it, then he was going to burn the fucking brightest.
A snap of his fingers summoned a small pick. He set it down on the table next to the stone, then summoned a much larger knife with an edge that seemed to cut the air as he set it down. He’d run a side racket of cutting counterfeit gemstones for a few years now, but as his notoriety had grown, he’d turned that into a legitimate business of creating bonding anchors for the hopefuls of Terret. Rock, gemstone, metal, wood, even strange things like string and steam; he could turn anything into something bondable.
But he’d never worked on anything like the crater corundum. He pulled up his interface and did a quick search for the things’s properties and ideal facets, but unsurprisingly, he only came up with results for replicas. Anyone who’d cut one of these gemstones before hadn’t recorded it in the slightest, which most likely meant they were the greatest of great masters of their craft.
Noem wasn’t anywhere near that good. But he knew how to pretend to be.
Steady and Ambidextrous activated with a single thought each. Focus and Imagine joined the pair as Noem felt his surroundings soften in intensity, whereas the stone before his eyes sharpened to a needle-like point. Most people could only handle one or two skills at once, since their bodies and Qi reserves were stunted from years of focusing on their bond, but Noem didn’t have that problem. The one upside of being bondless, he always told himself.
He grabbed his knife and twirled it between his fingers as he stared at the stone. Ideas swam through his mind thanks to his mix of skills, yet he didn’t put the knife to stone. Not until he saw the perfect match.
“Little miss meteorite, what do you want to become?”