Time ticked by without Seras so much as shifting. She was so still it was like she was statue. Petra wondered whether that was good discipline, or just Seras setting her body to remain stationary.
Much about her friends bizarre nature still both unnerved and intrigued Petra. But she knew how touchy Seras was about the subject. She often recoiled to some questions, either giving them an answer chocked full of words they didn’t understand, or simply not answering at all.
“Does anyone else get creeped out when she does this?” Chase asked.
Chase wasn’t the smartest or most tactful man. He was an ignorant farm boy who had only limited experience with the world. He said he wanted to be an adventure to get money, women and power, but Petra was certain that he would have no idea what to do with those things once he had them.
“I’m mean, I don’t even think she’s breathing.” He continued.
“She is.” Petra said.
“Okay but Chase has a point.” Frank stated.
Frank was a lot like Chase, the two had been from the same village and were as close as brothers. But unlike Chase, Petra expected Frank would have been happy to spend the rest of his life in their home village, so long as his best friend stuck around. The two were so close the Petra suspected they were actually lovers, but she had never once smelled any sort of ‘nightly’ activities from them. Both spent more than enough time in the pleasure districts for Petra to confirm that they had a libido.
Shame, they would have made each other happy if they were.
“Its no different than Dustin or Flint entering deep meditation. Just because you guys are crap at doesn’t mean everyone is.” Petra scoffed.
“No not the meditation thing, the whole ‘strangeness’ swirling around her.” He said waving his hands about.
“Strangeness?” Garrette deadpanned.
“I mean, well, like all the weird things around her. She’s a woman made of metal who fell out of her world in this ‘space’ place of hers. Which is a lot, but then there’s everything else about her. The soul sickness that will kill her, the weird weapons, and now she’s trying to hold back her essences. I’ve never even heard of that before.” Frank explained.
Petra didn’t disagree. Seras was strange by her very nature, but then there was everything else she had going on. An incurable soul sickness that would kill her if she got too strong, one that supposedly had no cure Seras would accept.
“Fate swirls and eddies around Outworlders.” Rohan stated simply.
“But not like this.” Chase said firmly.
Rohan quirked an eybrow. “Oh, and you’ve met many Outworlders?”
“No, but we’ve all heard the stories-”
“Stories by their nature never tell the full scope of a person’s life. I suspect that there’s far more strangeness circling around Outworlders than the stories say.” Rohan interjected.
“But are we sure that staying around her is safe then?” Chase asked. “We know Outworlders bring trouble, and we’ve all heard about what happens to those who get drawn in with them.”
Petra looked to Seras. Trouble indeed, they didn’t know the half of it. But Petra hadn’t left home to avoid trouble, she left to seek it out. Chase wanted money and power, Rohan wanted to become strong and respected, Garrette was only here until he filled out his power set and had enough money to set up his clinic. But Petra was here to seek adventure. She could have left any time to more actively pursue a career in adventuring.
But she hadn’t. Not because she wasn’t strong enough yet, but because she was waiting until she found the right person. And she felt like Seras might be that person. She had tried adventuring with the wrong people and they had nearly gotten Petra killed for nothing.
She was a defender, and she would gladly lay down her life for her friends, but what they had tried to do went beyond that. They had tried to use Petra as a meat shield and a distraction so they could pursue petty greed. She wasn’t going to make that mistake twice.
“She is strange, and she’ll probably cause us trouble, either intentionally or by accident. But that’s fine with me, life’s too boring without a little trouble.” Petra said firmly.
~~~*~~~
The power still squirmed against her mental grip, but Seras eventually quelled it into a state of stillness. It still wanted to burst through the small barrier in between minor thresholds, but for now it was being less forceful about its attempts.
That was as good as it got for her.
Seras opened her eyes and hopped off the rock where she was resting. “Alright, that settled.” She said with as much carefree attitude as she could. In truth she knew that she was playing a dangerous game, one slip up and it might break through the barrier before she could stop it. Right now that wasn’t an issue, but once she started pressing against the limitation on what her soul could take then a misstep like that could lead to death.
“Its getting late.” Petra said. “We can either push on and then set up camp or we can start making our way to the next village. We were waiting on you to have the vote.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“I vote for pushing on. We’re use to camping, and we don’t know when we’ll next get a chance to hunt monsters like this.” Seras said.
Petra grinned “You heard her boys, tie’s broken, we’re pushing on.”
Chase and Frank groaned in unison.
Seras looked around and then quirked an eyebrow. “There are five of you, how was I the tie breaker?”
“I abstained as the leader.” Petra said.
Seras shrugged. “Is there enough time to go after any more monsters?”
“Maybe, it’s a rune tortoise, which means it’ll mostly be me hunting it.” Petra said.
Seras nodded in agreement. Her rifle was unlikely to make much of a dent in its shell even with the armor piecing technique. “Alright which way?”
“North Northeast.” Rohan said.
Seras turned in that direction, but as she did so she noticed something odd. Rising a ways off from their next target was a plume of wispy smoke, a plume that was quickly growing. “Petra, what’s off in that direction?” Seras asked, apprehension tinging her voice.
Petra followed Seras’ gaze, and her eyes widened. “The nearest village.” She said gravely.
“Is it a monster attack?” Frank asked.
More smoke began to rise.
“I doubt it’s a barbeque.” Garette quipped dryly.
“How fast can the punt get us there?” Seras asked. Even as she asked the question she was pulling up a map.
“I don’t think that ones attacked to the irrigation canal we’re on, we’d need to back track if we took the punt.”
Seras agreed, it would take too long if they went via the water ways. “Garrette, Frank, Chase, you take the punt the long way around. Petra, Rohan, and I are going to sprint over land.”
Chase looked shocked “Are you crazy, the next village is four kilometers out?”
She wheeled on him “Rohan’s swift essence will give him the speed to keep up, and Petra has the relentless endurance of a Leonid.”
“And you?”
Seras scowled “I am a machine. I don’t get tired, I run out of energy. And since I hit iron I’ve able to eat iron spirit coins safely.”
Chase looked like he wanted to argue. But Seras didn’t care to listen to whatever he had to say. Arguing would only slow them down.
She turned back to the direction of the village and noticed that more smoke was rising. Without another word Seras lurched forward and launched herself forward.
Each step launched her forward at speeds that threatened to bowl her over. The hyper elastic tendons in her knee joints and ankles contracted at speeds impossible for a normal rank person. Even iron rankers would be hard pressed to replicate her feats without snapping their own tendons. Synthetic leg muscles and power pistons pumped her legs as fast as a sprint Heidel.
Seras felt her hair whipped back, and the shouts of Chase were drowned out in the rush of the wind.
Petra and Rohan quickly fell behind her as they couldn’t match Seras’ bronze rank physique.
For all the trouble being a cyborg in a world of magic and monsters caused her Seras had almost forgotten why she had spent so much time and money upgrading her body. Meat could never match the cold power of metal. It took vast amounts of magic to make a normal person her equal.
Her feet ate up the ground and the burning village appeared before her. Building were burning, and men on Heidels wearing tan colored face coverings were storming through the village center. People burst through doors and dragged people out, the men tried to fight back, and the women struggled. But a whole village was no match for a brigands.
As Seras approached she slowed down, just enough for her spot a low roof and leap up. In all the chaos no had noticed Seras’ approach and a new feature of her active camo augmentation came in handy.
Active Camouflage is engaged, your Aura is being masked.
Any use of essence ability will cancel active camouflage for one minute.
Somehow the process that made her an outworlder had warped the active camo augmentation. Normally it change the skin of her color to match her surroundings, and even had several features to block her presence from digital systems. Cameras, Cyber-eyes, and even motion sensors if they were digital in nature. None of that would be useful on Pallimustus since nothing here was digital, but somehow her new body knew that it would need to hidenitself from magical senses.
That or the feature had already been built into her Biolite systems. Which seemed unlikely since her world lacked magic.
This newly discovered feature was how she had hid from the silver ranked golem in the astral city space, and it was also how she had run away from Dustin without his aura tracking her.
Seras took stock of the situation. She had run ahead of Rohan and Petra, and they were still minutes away from arriving. But as Seras observed the brigands at work she knew she didn’t have that long to wait. They were methodically breaking in to homes and dragging people in an iron cage wagon hitched to several strong looking Heidels.
And the cage was nearly full.
Well first things first. She summoned up her Rifle, the gun materialized into her hands in a series of blue lines and sparks. She lifted the gun up to her shoulder and gave a mental apology to the poor Heidels strapped to the wagon.
Maybe she could have hit the reigns or the hitch holding the Heidels to the cart. But right now she needed to buy time, and dealing with a dead Heidel and three other panicked beasts would give more time. She chose a Heidel at the lead so that the couldn’t easily run off.
BANG!
The Heidel reared up and collapsed to the ground, a hole in its chest quickly spewing its lifes blood. The screech of the dying beast was horrendous.
While her Rifle wasn’t powerful enough to deal death blows to durable iron ranked monsters it was still more the enough to deal with a normal ranked creature.
The three other Heidels began to panic, the cloaked figure that was watching the wagons ran up to try and calm them. But he was too late, before he could grab their reigns the beast began to buck and tried to bolt. The weight of the dead Heidel, as well as their panicked actions caused the top heavy wagon to tip over.
Seras apologized to the people inside who were just as terrified as Heidels, but a tipped wagon would buy her more time.
Even as she was watching the chaos unfold Seras was already reloading. There were a few men on Heidels riding around the village. They were corralling the people, running down any who fled, and keeping an eye for anyone coming their way.
Ass such they were Seras’ next target. The though of shooting out their Heidels crossed Seras’ mind, but as she turned to the mounted men she noticed one looking right up at her, doing her the favor of standing still.
She marked him with her power, which broke her active camo, and pulled the trigger.
Humans, and the many humanoid variants of Pallimustus didn’t have the natural toughness of iron ranked monsters. Only Leonid’s had the bulk to shrug off a bullet of this caliber, and the Draconians who had scales to deflect them.
Seras allowed a single satisfied smirk as his head whipped back at an unnatural angle. True, a normal persons head would have exploded. But a kill was a kill.
Men pointed up at the roof and Seras, and several of them pulled out bows and launched arrows. But Seras was already on the move.
She leapt across the buildings and pretended to be fleeing.
The men on horses chased after her. Seras smirked, she summoned up another keg much like the one she had used earlier that day and lit the fuse.
She wasn’t happy with her makeshift grenade/bombs. While wood splinters and iron beads launched at explosive speeds would be deadly to normal people, they were noticeably less effective against magically enhanced beings.
But what they lacked in indiscriminate killing power, they made up for in chaos. Seras had temporarily dropped down an alley between the mud brick buildings to draw the mounted men in, and just as the wick was close the bae she dropped the keg of gunpowder and leapt up onto a nearby roof.
She had been just a second too slow however.
Auto repair in progress time to full functionality 42 minutes. Consume bronze rank monster cores to speed up process.
Several beads had buried themselves in her back, and quick diagnostic showed her upper back was peppered with shrapnel.
But despite the injury the damage was negligible, and wouldn’t slow her down much. She brushed the pain away to a corner of her awareness. She looked down at the two men who were crawling out from under their dead Heidels.
She would need to give Buck extra apples to make up for today.
She pointed her rifle down and pulled the trigger.
One of the men dropped dead, a hole in his back blooming with blood.
She opened the trap and slid in another bullet, she just slid the bolt back when a loud twang and a black blur pulled her attention away from her victim.
Auto repair in progress time to full functionality 1hour and 14 minutes. Consume bronze rank monster cores to speed up process.
Omeda poison has been resisted due to Biomechanical physiology.
Even as Seras was turning she knew what had happened. There was an arrow in her shoulder, and another clothe covered men holding a bow on a roof three houses away.
Seras locked eyes with her would be attacker. In response he let his aura loose.
Bronze ranked power washed over her.
Bronze rank Omeda aura is attempting to suppress your iron rank aura. Effect has been resisted due to [Limit Breaker]
Despite herself Seras grinned. Ever since reaching iron rank Seras had wanted to match herself against a bronze rank essence user as a proxy rematch for her failure against Dale.