"Are you okay?" Vert glanced at me. Today was the day. The big day. It was something already in the works before I arrived. The ACIS had been causing no end of trouble, from general street crime to pirating. I hadn't had any interaction with such criminal elements, besides the Fenrir attack, with the ACIS being the major suspect for such a move. Releasing such a mob into the city had turned public opinion against them, for the time being. But it had hurt the shares as well. Which was important in its own right.

Vert had given me enough of a crash course on the matter. Shares were the belief that a nation's people felt in their Goddess. It was fuel for our transformations. The more faith we had, the stronger we became. Sounded simple, but there were three other nations, each with its own Goddess to counterbalance.

It sounded like a setup built to ensure some degree of rivalry, if not outright aggression. After all, if the Goddess with the most shares was the strongest, why share? But there was peace between the four nations. It apparently, worked better this way. Competition without domination. If that's how things were I saw little reason to stir the pot.

Part of that advantage was being able to call on the other three to deal with problems one might not be able to deal with on their own. Or in other words, the ACIS. Which, granted, had picked a fight with all four at once.

But they were getting backing from something else. So Vert and the other three Goddesses were going into the Gamindustri Graveyard to remove the head of the snake at its source.

I had my concerns. What if it wasn't a snake, but a hydra? Cut off one head, and two more take its place. Kill one problem, and create a bigger one.

Of course, the current situation couldn't continue as is. The ACIS was getting power, and at a pretty decent rate at that. Something had to be done.

"I," wasn't sure what to say. Things were still tense. Of course. They were never going to go back to the way they once were. Sure, we talked and tried to be more open about our thoughts.

But it was still like repairing a burned-out bridge. Even the foundations couldn't be potentially safe.

But this could be the last time I'd see her. Probably a few days. Quite possibly, a few weeks, depending on how strong this enemy was. Did I want the last words during that time to be me choking on my tongue?

I reached out with my arms, pulling Vert into a hug. "Please come back safe, okay?" I said just loud enough to be heard. Vert was taken by surprise, as her body briefly stiffened in my grasp, before reaching up and ruffling my head.

"Of course, I will," I looked up at Vert's face, her eyes firm, but still holding a pleasant warmth to them. "I'll be back before you have time to miss me."

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

"You are going to put a hole in the floor," Chika was far from wrong in her assessment. If this kept up, I would be putting a hole in the floor.

Several holes. It was a miracle I hadn't broken the bed yet, but I was also incredibly stressed, so sleep did not come easy. My nerves were flayed, practically shot, and feeding a giant, gapping pit in my stomach. I hated the feeling, from the bottom of my soul. It felt insatiable, never content, always hungry.

It makes me feel, no it was, exhausting. Frankly, the only reason I was still moving was, well, movement. The nervous tapping of my foot, the pacing, the tapping of my fingers.

I was perpetually full of energy, and at the same time, I was running on a near-empty tank. And it had only been a day. Not even a full twenty-four hour timespan. It, ideally, wasn't going to take that long to clean up whatever was in charge of the ACIS. The key word is ideally.

Plans never did tend to survive contact with an enemy. Especially ones focused on the best case scenario. Hope for it, maybe, but never plan around it. So it not being a swift cleanup was in a way, unexpected.

But telling myself that didn't make my nerves any better.

"Sorry," I plopped down into a nearby seat, my foot tapping against the floor to compensate for my lack of movement. "I'm just, nervous, that's all."

Nervous was underselling it, but. Chika gazed at my foot, as it attempted to bore its way through the floor.

"Vert is fine. You don't need to worry," Chika said coldly. There was a nip in the air, almost as if the room's temperature had dropped by a few degrees.

I wanted to call her out for lying. She was just as anxious as I was. I could see the bags under her eyes. Chika had gotten less sleep than I had!

But it wouldn't be worth the effort. I could call her out on her own nerves, but what purpose would it serve?

Chika wasn't like Vert. Vert was willing to give me a second chance. But any bridge I had with Chika felt as if it had been ground into dust. Before the land where the foundation stood and was salted. At last degrading into a rancid, stagnant swamp.

No, not a swamp. A gross, unmoving, filthy, pond. One in the process of turning over, all the rancid things that should be on the bottom and remain there coming up to the surface.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Safe to say, that bridge wasn't coming back anytime soon. Sure, the hatchet might well be buried, but that didn't mean the damage hadn't been done.

I scowled, clutching my knee, trying to make it stop. It wasn't like it would but I wanted to keep up appearances.

It was stress relief. No, not fully accurate. It was stress release. About the only damn way, I could get my anxiousness out of my system. Especially as it seemed like the only thing I could do was sit around with my thumb up my ass.

I wanted to stand up again, and start pacing. Quite frankly, I knew in a fight, I was a determent. My level and it was weird hearing that thought with anything resembling a straight face, was far too low for me to be anything but a hindrance in a fight like that. So I stayed put. I didn't like it, but I stayed put. I knew it was stupid, I knew this was, at the end of the day, the safest and smartest play to make. But that did nothing to ease my tight nerves.

Ignorance is bliss. I couldn't think of a more blatant lie at this very moment. I would take knowing what was going on over any day of the week. At least I wouldn't be driving myself ill with worry! Because that's what I was doing.

It didn't help matter that I was, by all rights, the insurance policy. Sure, nobody put it that way, least of all Vert, but it was clear. If something were to happen to Vert, then I was in charge, more or less.

Which freaked me out even more!

Sure, I could delegate things off the Chika, as she likely had more experience with governing stuff, but seriously! That's a lot of responsibility to dump on one guy, one girl? Anyway, irrelevant, as it's a lot of responsibility! Especially from someone like me, who grew up in a completely different system! And it wasn't like Leanbox and the other nations had a bad system, either. With three other nations to move to, and shares as well, it made it very hard for a Goddess to end up acting like a petty tyrant or despot. Not without consequences. That meant a Goddess was, ironically, operating under a public mandate of the will of the people, in a sense.

But that was my outsider's perspective. Which left me drawing a blank on everything else. There was more to this sort of thing than, keeping people happy. That meant jobs, leisure, things to spend money on, goods, food, and a whole laundry list of things that needed to be open to the overwhelming majority of society, if not everyone.

I literally had no idea how to govern! That was never my wheelhouse! Sure, road construction, I could, actually, probably not. Most of Leanbox's roads weren't on the ground, making any skills I had on even that matter fairly useless. Sure, I understood how a Democracy worked, but Leanbox wasn't a Democracy! And just trying to create one wasn't exactly going to work. I've seen how that goes.

It doesn't work. At all. Especially if the place doesn't have much if any history with such systems. If any nation in Gamindustri did, I'd eat a hat.

So if something happened, I'd have no idea what to do. It was another layer of crap on an already messed-up situation. I didn't want any of this. I didn't ask to come here and get embroiled in some weird conspiracy. I missed home. Sure, it felt like it was only a few years away at best before everything was going to fall apart, but it was home.

I pulled my legs against my chest, tightly. Then came a flicker.

NO! Stop!

The light died before I could transform, as I shoved it down. How did this damn thing even work! I could get it to work on command, but more often than not, I would just, transform! For no rhyme or reason.

No, there was a reason. I just didn't want to think about it.

Was I this much of a train wreck? I pulled my knees up to my nose. It wasn't that. I think I was still working my way through my emotions. They hadn't yet cooled down for my eruption. They were still, volatile, and messy. Bottling things up was never good for anyone. You put things in a bottle, and it's just going to build up until things reach a peak point. Then they have nowhere to go but out. And they aren't exactly going to go out easily. It'll be painful and messy.

Something I should already know.

"Histoire?" Chika's voice broke me out of my thoughts, as Chika looked down at a small device sitting on her wrist. Histoire? Who was that? I'd never met anyone by that name. Maybe someone from one of the other nations? "Is there something wrong?"

I peeked my head up from behind my knees. I couldn't hear what was being said on the other end. But I didn't need too, either. Chika's face twisted, as if someone punched her square in the gut, tears already beginning to form on her face. No. No. No! This can't be happening! What went wrong? What happened?

Did that even matter?

I felt my body move, pulling Chika into a hug. A hug she returned, as my own face was wet with tears. It would be a while before either of us moved from our spots, clinging to one another like a drowning man clinging to a raft.

Vert, why did you have to lie to us?