Sunwhisper could have stopped himself. Willpower was, in essence, the entire basis of his character build. But he hadn’t wanted to stop. Makoto was in his way, and Makoto was the man who had killed his family. His reason and his anger had been in perfect accord. The most reasonable solution was to bend his newfound power toward the object of removing the border guardian from the equation so that he and Janna could be free.

Vengeance was a base idea. It served no purpose. He had never seriously considered avenging his fathers before, even if he had occasionally experienced an impulse, or an intrusive thought to the contrary. Something had changed, and the culprit was obvious. Janna had convinced him to raise his EQ, and his feeling had gone from being distant neighbors to something that lived in the house with him. It was the difference between learning about something on an intellectual level and experiencing it firsthand.

Grief was real. Anger was real. It was just something he could consider and put aside. Now the source of those things should have been gone. The old man was on the ground, and Sunwhisper retrieved his spear.

(Nice, kid. It was a bit of a rush job, but you can’t argue with the results.)

Starscream’s voice sounded strange inside his head. He was the experienced one here. He had killed before.

{Does it always feel like this?} He asked.

(Like what?)

{I am in pain.}

(Well yeah, he hit you. I’m surprised you tanked it as well as you did.)

Sunwhisper’s body was sore, and he would need time to channel and heal before he was fully recovered, but that had not been what he meant. Seeing Makoto again had opened up a wound in his heart, and killing the border guardian had not closed that wound. If anything, he felt worse. He felt hollow.

Sunwhisper had never properly felt anything before. But what does a normal person experience when their family is murdered in front of them? When their entire race is effectively genocided as a matter of policy? The human response to any given stimulus can take a virtually infinite number of forms with differences stemming from individual experience, conditioning, chemical instability and general predisposition, even before societal norms are taken into account.

No mechanoborg before him had dealt with an EQ statistic being built into their System. It was natural that there would be some bugs, assuming this was a bug.

"How can you live like this?" He turned to Janna. She was watching him warily, but if anything, she seemed more impressed than afraid.

“What do you mean?”

“This!” Sunwhisper gestured to the body at his feet, to the road behind them, and swept his arm in such a way as to take in the grand uncaring nature of the world as well. Cultivators killed each other all the time, didn’t they?

Sunwhisper walked away from Makoto’s body to the side of the road. Starscream detached and began the grisly business of harvesting what was left of the old man’s core before all usable mana was lost to the environment. Janna saw what was about to happen and went after Sunwhisper so she wouldn’t have to watch.

"Live like what? What happened to you?"

"Like this," Sunwhisper grabbed at his face, stretching synthetic skin, feeling the wetness that was still stubbornly eking from his eyes. "It’s supposed to be a disguise. I’m not supposed to be like you. I thought I would understand you better now, but I don’t. How can you live?"

Janna took his hands in her own, lowering them gently. "Sunwhisper, please explain what is happening."

"It hurts!" Sunwhisper jerked out of her grip. "Why does it hurt? Why do I feel like my insides are all wrong? We aren’t supposed to be like this!”

"You said he killed your fathers, is that true?"

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"Of course it is! Why do you think I’m alone?"

Janna gave him a sober look, seeming to decide something. She nodded. "A beast seeks no revenge, a man does."

"What does that mean?"

"As a demon, you felt nothing. Then you changed yourself, and now you feel everything. You were made to walk among us, weren’t you? The best way to pretend to be human is to be human, I think."

"Do humans feel this way all the time?"

"No. This is extreme. But seeking a blood debt is not dishonorable."

Sunwhisper walked away from her. He didn’t care about blood debts, or what Makoto had done, even that his fathers were gone. This pain, these emotions; anger and grief, they were an assault upon his mind. They were wrong, and he didn’t want them inside of him.

He couldn’t go back in time to return his EQ to what it had been. He could only move forward. The problem was, he had overestimated humanity. They had these feelings, they lived with them, and he’d thought that being average would be good enough. Apparently, human beings were all moments away from losing control. All it took was one little massacre, and they were broken forever.

Assigning that kind of fragility to mankind went a long way to explaining the state of their world, and Sunwhisper wanted no part of it. His hands were still shaking, and his artificial heart was beating faster than it should have been now that he was out of combat.

Why had they built him like this? Why had they designed him to feel pain? The original mechanoborgs had been human mechanical blends, cyborgs, but those days were long behind them. He was Mechanoborg Ne Plus Ultra, built from scratch, without human components. His fathers had made him themselves after their landing on the Tree of Heaven and losing contact with the advance team.

It was possible that even they hadn’t known what he would become, what he was capable of. That was the nature of a System, it adapted to its participants. He was different from his fathers, and so was his potential development.

He didn’t want to be human, he wanted to be more than human. That was his destiny. That was what they needed, and because he couldn’t go back, he had to go forward.

If these feelings couldn’t be done away with, they had to be managed, and it stood to reason that the only way he could do that was by further investing in EQ.

Starscream had emerged from Makoto’s corpse to cut down Karasu, who had been cawing irritably in the background, and they both came to join Sunwhisper. He had wandered some distance off the road, lost in his thoughts. Janna had stayed with him, though keeping a safe distance, as she assumed he would need time to himself to come to grips with his new perspective. She was almost right.

Sunwhisper was staring at his status screen. The numbers seemed so unimportant now. The ranks he had put off spending meant so little. What good was being strong in a world where even the strong were in despair? His victory was due to his symbiosis with Starscream, there was no question about that. He was weak alone. He would always be weak, and he was going to fail.

A part of him recognized that what he was feeling was merely an experience, not an accurate representation of who he was, but he was no longer capable of making that separation.

Were all humans like this? What was Janna’s EQ, if he could put a number to it? It certainly didn’t seem as if cultivators cultivated their emotional intelligence as a general rule. A notification vied for his attention.

<<<>>>

Quest Update – Quoth the Raven

Karasu is free, and she owes you her freedom. You are not bound by anything deeper than her word, but this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

<<<>>>

He swiped it away. How high did his EQ need to be to fix this?

Janna left him to his thoughts and went to stand over Makoto. She adjusted his robes to better cover the result of Starscream’s surgery, then she whispered a prayer that his spirit would find peace, closed his eyes, and searched his body. She pocketed what she found.

It could be argued that Sunwhisper’s next decision was not an optimal one, or even entirely rational, but he was operating under the influence of unfamiliar feelings, and in that moment, his priority was regaining control of himself as quickly as possible. He was not interested in experimenting.

He raised his EQ as high as it would go.

<<<>>>

Sunwhisper (Mechanoborg Ne Plus Ultra)

Strength: *3

Dexterity: *5

Constitution: *5

IQ: *6

EQ: *9

Ego: *9

Dao Rating: 2137

<<<>>>

There was a notification.