CHAPTER 103 TO HOLD ON AND TO LET GO

“I think he has potential.”

I groaned in pain as my bones slowly shifted back into place. The fight had been going pretty well right up until the point where she had stopped pretending that I even had a chance in hell of beating her.

Not that I really had expected to win in the first place. I still remember my fight with Firebird. I hadn’t stood a chance against her in the first place, she was just sandbagging to put on a show for everyone else.

“I thought so, well, as usual, compile the report and start thinking about where you want him. He’s still got to go through the written assessment, so we’re headed over there now,” Mortimer said with a commanding tone.

Katherine fired off a salute to him before turning back to the squad she was with before. As she did she gave me a curious look.

I dismissed all the things I had created leaving just my wooden arm, and pushed myself to my feet. With my health finally topping back off and the pain in my chest and wrist fading I walked over to Fiona who had a slight smile on her face.

“You’ve gotten stronger,” She said simply.

I looked at her for a moment before responding, “I had to.”

She tilted her head slightly giving me an inquisitive look.

“When I was kept as a slave in Alixia… I skipped over that part, but they made some of the slaves fight for blood sport. I was one of them. I had to keep winning or I died.”

She gave me another sympathetic look causing me to grind my teeth.

“I hate that look,” I mumbled under my breath while looking away.

Mortimer walked over to us, “Well are you ready to head to the next area? This next part will take a little bit longer, but it’s a lot more relaxed. It’ll be testing your academic knowledge and the extent of your learning. We don’t necessarily expect our members to be educated so this doesn’t affect your membership with us.”

I wasn’t worried about it in the first place though.

I just nodded in reply. And Mortimer returned it before walking off, our entourage falling in around us as we walked through the hallways further into the building.

The training areas eventually gave way to smaller rooms, the insides of which were filled with chairs and desks that gave me eerie reminders of my time in public school.

Some of them were occupied, but more often than not they were empty.

Honestly, for an organization that they made sound like it was having trouble still getting off the ground, they had a lot of resources and manpower. Despite how many of these rooms were empty, it seemed more like they didn’t really expect a lot of these rooms to see a lot of use.

Eventually, we made it to an empty room that didn’t look any different than the others.

Mortimer gestured to it, “In here,” He then turned to one of the guards walking with us, “Head to the offices and ask for the assessment tests and something to write with.”

The guard saluted and jogged off to carry out his assigned task.

Mortimer walked into the room, “Feel free to pick a seat, he should be back pretty soon with what we need to take this test.”

I just nodded and walked into the room. It really did feel like a classroom from a public school. It was uncomfortably nostalgic.

Fiona stuck close to me while I chose a chair and then leaned over and whispered, “Do you even know how to read yet? Last I heard that was something you hadn’t figured out yet.”

I shrugged, “I’m not sure, I was able to read something during my… time in Alixia. Not sure why or how though.”

She hummed thoughtfully, “Well I guess we’ll figure out. We use the same writing and number system as Alixia does, so if you can read their stuff it should work out fine here.”

I didn’t respond instead just sitting and waiting.

As Mortimer said, it didn’t take long for the guard to return with everything. Mortimer then set several sheets of paper in front of me. The paper looked fairly similar to what we had on Earth, but the writing utensil was not a pencil.

It was… What was this? I picked it up and looked at it. It looked like some cap, with a pointed tip, that went over something? I wasn’t sure, so I asked.

“What the hell is this?”

Both Fiona and Mortimer frowned, “It’s a thinnil.”

“A what?” I asked confused.

“It goes over your finger and magically dispels a formula that writes on the paper.”

Huh. That was actually pretty neat.

I slipped it over my index finger testing how it felt. It fit snugly and seemed to glow slightly before molding to the shape of my finger.

Enchanted finger pencils? Sign me up I guess.

I looked at a few of the papers looking at the front and then flipping it over. The back side was blank.

So wasteful not to use double-sided pages. Ah well. I wrote a few test lines in English across the back of the paper trying to get used to the way that it felt.

My writing back on Earth as a human had been… atrocious would be a compliment all things considered. So I nearly choked on air when, while using a utensil I wasn’t even comfortable with yet, I wrote with perfectly straight lines. I was putting out letters like a printer, with absolutely perfect legibility.

High dexterity for the win?

Mortimer and Fiona looked over my shoulder seeing what I was doing.

“What language is that?” Fiona asked.

“English,” I explained, “I’m just testing out this thing, getting used to it.”

‘Ping’ A new general skill [Calligraphy] has been acquired.

Nice.

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Happy with how I was writing I flipped over the paper again and looked at the front. The runes in front of me looked strange. To say I could read them wasn’t quite accurate to what I felt happening in my mind. It was more like the runes imparted their meaning and context directly into my mind. So while I couldn’t read what was in front of me, I knew what it said.

The paper in front of me was math. Math. My arch-nemesis. I hated math. Not that I was bad at it, I was fairly good at it. At least when I was in high school, I never looked at another textbook. But I had gotten through my calculus and physics classes with pretty good grades.

Looking at the paper I could see that math here was basically the same as it was on Earth. Which… Made sense? I wondered if it differed at higher levels. What I could see here was just steadily increasingly complicated math problems. Starting with simple addition and subtraction and ending with complicated differential equations.

I grinned, I had been good at math with one mind before, but I might be a little out of practice…

Okay, a lot out of practice. But I had like 17 extra minds to work with now. I rapidly began filling out the answers to the easier problems that constituted half the page. Even the multiplication and division problems that had massive numbers attached to them were pretty easy to solve when you had a bunch of minds to remember each individual number and how it changed from step to step.

What I hadn’t realized until I stopped for a quick break was that I was writing in their language without a single problem. I felt a slightly warm pulse from my chest.

The Heart? Was it what was allowing me to read and write in their language? It would make sense. I’d had a sneaking suspicion that it was perhaps a layover effect from Lurks occupying my mind.

I wasn’t sure this situation was necessarily any better. The Heart had been a gift from the elves, but the elves were apparently genocidal and would be world-conquering psychos. Or at least their god-queen was one.

I moved on to the differential equations, derivatives, and integrals. They started off somewhat simply, but the very nature of them was more complicated. Surprisingly, how to solve the problems slowly filtered into my minds as I looked at the problems. My minds ravenously tore apart the problems, breaking them down and tearing the answers from them.

It was oddly cathartic.

Before I even realized it I was on the last problem. It was a pretty long one. The answer to it wasn’t so much a solution as a rearranging of the numbers and letters on the page into a different fashion on the other side of what they considered an equal symbol.

‘Ping’ A new general skill [Mathematic Calculation] has been acquired.

Huh.

I’d take that happily.

Well, that was one subject down. On to the next then…

I flipped to the next piece of paper I’d been given.

History.

This was gonna be rough.

***

Putting the last piece of paper down as I finished with it, I looked up and finally announced, “I’m finished.”

Mortimer picked up the papers flipped through them and frowned slightly, “You’ve left the history paper practically blank.”

I shrugged, “I mean, yeah. What did you expect? I know nothing about your world history, if you want I could recount my world history to you though, or at least some of it.”

He looked like he wanted to say something before stopping and sighing, “That makes sense. We might make an effort to help that if you’d like, but that’s a discussion for another time. For now, you’re free to go. Take a week to think about it, when you’ve made a decision come back here and tell the guards at the gate, Prithantico. They’ll know what to do.”

He looked at one of the guards with us, “Show them out would you?”

He gave a salute to Mortimer as he walked away and then turned to us, “Follow me, please.”

The guard then led us out of the facility in a brisk march.

***

“Well that was eventful,” Fiona said, groaning slightly as she stretched her arms.

“Let’s go find the rest of the team and get something to eat. I’m starving.”

As she said that, my stomach rumbled loudly enough that she heard it. She looked over at me and smiled at me, “Guess that makes two of us then, come on. The sooner we find them the sooner we eat.”

It didn’t take us long to find our way back to where they were staying and pick up the rest of the group. Then we headed to a restaurant, sat down, and ordered our food.

Now we were just waiting.

The Silver Maidens were chatting happily amongst themselves. Striga, as usual, was quiet, and uninterested in the conversation around her.

This left me in my thoughts. Which immediately drifted back to what had happened recently. I hadn’t had a lot of time to try and internalize my emotions yet. The memories still felt raw and heavy.

They were dead.

I wasn’t sure how to feel. I wanted to be angry and hit something, I also wanted to cry, and I wanted to hurt someone, but I also wanted someone to hold me. The confusion just left my chest feeling like it was going to burst, my heart hurt so badly it almost felt physical.

They were dead.

It was my fault…

“What was?”

I glanced up at Fiona who was looking at me oddly. I hadn’t realized I had spoken out loud.

Something in her gaze made me feel uncomfortable, I couldn’t hold it so I turned away looking back down at the table.

“Them dying,” I whispered, “If I had never gotten involved with them in the first place she wouldn’t have targeted them or the city.”

Fiona didn’t respond for a moment, either thinking about her response or waiting to see if I had more to say.

“So… what? Are you saying you should’ve just lived your entire life hiding away from everyone instead? Given everything we’ve heard about this ‘god-queen’ she wouldn’t have let you do that. She set you up. It’s not your fault, it’s hers.”

“But at the end of the day, I chose to get involved with them, I could’ve gone anywhere else, or brushed them off, or anything! And then she wouldn’t have killed them.”

“Alex…” She sighed.

“Alex, it’s not your fault. They wouldn’t blame you for what happened just as we don’t.”

“They’re dead, Fiona, they can’t do fucking anything!” I screamed at her.

Our surroundings went quiet at my outburst.

“So what?” Kaylith said.

I turned to look at her.

“What?”

She just shrugged, “So what? They’re dead, like you said. They can’t feel anything. Which means they can’t hate you for what they did. You can apologize and feel bad all you want, but it’s not going to change what happened. They’re the ones that died. Someone was going to die, that’s the way this whole thing was set up. She wanted you to get attached to someone so she could rip them from you. That’s the whole thing.”

“Kaylith, I don’t th-” Fiona started,

“Just, shut up for a moment, Fiona. She was going to kill someone regardless. She put you there so you would hopefully form attachments to someone in the first place so this would happen. It could’ve been anyone, hell it could’ve been us instead. Who knows what her plan was, certainly not you.”

Kaylith sighed before continuing, “Alex, you can’t be held responsible for the actions of the world around you. You feel guilty because they were killed since they were your closest friends. That’s fine, but surely I don’t need to tell you survivor guilt is a thing. So now the question is, so what? So what are you going to do about it? You feel guilty about it, so do something about it. Take your time, grieve, mourn, and do what you need to. But make no mistake, we knew them better than you did. At the very least we knew them longer. We did several missions with them while you were gone as well, and you know what? They missed you while you were gone. Penny especially, not hard to know why. She was infatuated with you.”

Tears started welling up in my eyes again as I just sat there listening.

“And I know what I’m saying doesn’t make this any easier to bear. It’s only going to make it harder for you to move on, but you’re a big kid. You have to deal with it. This is life. They liked you, and you know what? If they’d known it would’ve ended like this, I doubt they would’ve made a single separate decision. Other than maybe deciding to keep you around instead of letting you leave. They wouldn’t have blamed you for their deaths. They wouldn’t hate you for it. What they would hate you for though? It’s if you just gave up. I doubt they’d expect you to try and get revenge. But if you do feel guilty? If you do feel responsible? Make sure she can’t do to anyone else what she did to you. I doubt you’re the first, and I doubt you’ll be the last.

“How many people has she killed to make people like you? Why is she doing this in the first place? When will she stop? Those are things to figure out. But if you want to take responsibility for this situation. Don’t let their deaths be in vain.”