Arc F1.10 | Chapter 4: Our Life Mission is Simply to Protect One Another

The information coming in from the drop group’s fight was… weird—that was the only way Halen could describe it. Mostly, it was coming in from BJ, who had been left back with Sorvell, the pair of them serving as supports along with Valor.

As much as BJ wasn’t a trained medic, he was still the drop group’s primary source of emergency medical treatment, while Sorvell had repeatedly proven himself extremely capable in getting people out of the line of fire quickly.

None of them had told Emilia or Leerin about how close Darrian had come to being killed earlier. For Leerin… well, the situation with the bone puller had endeared the girl to him a tiny bit—not a lot! But a tiny bit. As a result, he neither wanted to upset her when there was nothing they could do to help the drop group nor deal with her when she inevitably freaked out. So, silence there. Thankfully, everyone else was of the same mind, and while they’d needed to spin a bit of a tamed-down story to tell her, in order to explain what had caused everyone’s vitals to go absolutely crazy…

Honestly, Halen wasn’t entirely convinced Leerin didn’t realize they were lying to her. If she did, the girl wasn’t pushing the issue, and the fact that she’d decided to just accept their story, possibly realizing that they had her best interests in mind—not to mention their own sanity—further endeared her to him. In no world could Halen imagine the two of them anything more than reluctant allies; still, he imagined that, were they to end up on a mission like this again, he’d be better able to ignore her whining.

Halen was not going to comment on the reality that he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Leerin would go right back to being her whiny self once they were once again safe.

As for Emilia… she just didn’t need to know. There was similarly nothing that she could have done to get to the drop group, in order to keep them safer. As time went by, however, and the drop group got closer and closer to the group she had left in order to get to Xavier, reality was crashing down on the situation. From this point on, if anyone was seriously injured, Emilia would have to live with the fact that, had she not left her group, she would have been there.

Halen wasn’t sure the girl he loved would ever be able to escape such a reality—one where someone she loved was killed because she had chosen protecting the innocence of a child she didn’t know over getting to her friends as quickly as possible. Few of them would blame her for choosing to attempt to get to the kid; Emilia would inevitably blame herself.

Hence! He was not going to be telling her anything about the terrifying people that any of them were facing or finding themselves tentatively aligned with.

At the same time, regardless of whether he could do anything or not, Halen couldn’t stop himself from watching the drop group’s fight with a close eye—it was both fascinating and there was actually very little for him to do at the moment.

Somehow, Simeon had immediately become friends with their new bone puller ally. It was strange—Simeon had never seemed to sort to make new friends—but… whatever? If they were friends, there was less chance that the woman would turn on them… hopefully.

Halen was still keeping a ton of defensive skills prepped, in case the woman was lying. He didn’t think she was; he wasn’t taking any chances.

Currently, Simeon and Euphenial were working on checking over the system that managed the xphern transmission network, Halen occasionally offering his opinion and translating messages they were getting from Seer’ik’tine on the system.

Thankfully, Vrin Devano had gone to Seer’ik’tine with Miles. While the hacker had vanished for a while, no one quite sure on where he’d wound up and too busy with other things to bother looking for him, the guy had actually been doing something useful: tracking down someone who—allegedly—managed the xphern transmission network in the city-state, all so that, if they got close to the system’s heart in Lüshan, they’d have someone nearby who might know how to get it back up.

It was something of a slow thing, as the systems in Seer’ik’tine and Lüshan weren’t identical, either in how they worked or the programming languages they used, and communication was challenging, but they were getting there… maybe. Mostly, they wanted to know what had caused the xphern transmission network to go down before deciding whether to bring it back up or not. Presumably, use of the system by local xphern exchange numbers had been blocked, but according to the Seerish woman Vrin Devano had found, there were a few reasons why only local numbers had gone down.

“Anyone who actually wants to take the system down properly knows to take it down at multiple junctions,” someone on the Seerish side had stated, and Halen was split between assuming it was Vrin Devano messaging through the xphern, rather than relay, and thinking that he might have tracked down someone with hacker tendencies to help him. If it was the latter… well, Halen might be going along with Vrin Devano’s claims that the person he had found actually worked for Seer’ik’tine’s Communication Bureau, but he had his doubts, and if he later found out this Coop’ali was actually a criminal, he would not be surprised.

Somehow, it felt as though they would be leaving this mission with a handful of connections to criminals—and yes, he knew that through Yujao they had already had connections to a Dionese crime lord, while Emilia had some perpetually under-defined connections to at least one Grey Sander separatist group. Previously, this had been something distant to him and his friends. Now, it all seemed more real—more palpable, and also, what was Janie doing?

Also!? What the fuck was happening with the vitals of the people the drop group were fighting? Why did it seem as though their DNA was degrading in real-time?

Pushing thoughts of Janie aside—the girl was still cowering by the door but had suddenly begun releasing a keening sound that Leerin had blessedly cut off as soon as she started—Halen focused in on the vitals of both the drop group and their opponents. For a moment, he thought that perhaps the genetic degradation might be a result of Curtisal’s abilities—which were fascinating and horrifying, all at once—but it seemed as though the majority of their opponents were suffering a quick mutilation of their genetics.

Thankfully, it didn’t seem to be affecting anyone in the drop group—it would have really sucked to realize they were all about to die from some sort of exposure to radiation, and Halen wasn’t positive that’s what was happening, but it was similar enough that he couldn’t help but think of it like that. Something was hitting the drop group’s opponents and setting them on the path to a quick death—although, not too quick.

While BJ’s observations of the battle weren’t perfect, Taelor had shared one of the clones’ skills, meant for monitoring opponents and prisoners, with him. As a result, Halen could see far more than was normal, but it wasn’t quite as much as he would have liked—and yes, another item had been added to his to-do list. The number of skills he wanted to create or modifying for The Black Knot were piling up.

Regardless, the data made it clear that the DNA of a number of their opponents was being weird and that, given time, most would die from cancer or radiation sickness. It wouldn’t be an immediate thing; at the same time, most of them were definitely feeling the effects of what had been done to them, presumably by the girl the drop group had picked up, Westrial.

No wonder she hadn’t been inclined to use her abilities on anyone—and thank fuck she hadn’t used her abilities on Baylor or anyone else when they first met. Medicine was pretty advanced; Halen was pretty sure even the best medical treatment wouldn’t save most of the people she had hit with her abilities. They could run, try to receive treatment; it would do nothing for them. They would die, and it probably wouldn’t be a pleasant death.

Halen was also almost positive that, if she wanted, the girl could turn her abilities up—force the genetics of those she touched with her abilities to become instantly deformed things, their muscles and tissue expanding into giant, fast-growing tumours. It would be horrific and quick, and a small part of Halen wondered why she wasn’t killing them more obviously—she might be helping to weaken their opponents, but at the same time, she was giving them more of a chance to fight back.

The girl was just that, however: a girl—a teenager, who, according to the information he’d gotten from the drop group, didn’t like using her abilities, and that seemed fair. There was killing someone outright—and the girl was also moving through the chaotic crowd, trailing Darrian and striking his old willbrand through skulls as easily as he was sending his fists slamming through chests—and then there was condemning people to a horrific death. It would be slow, or it would be monstrous. Without testing, it was impossible to say if there were other options. In this case, the girl was probably fine inflicting the slow death on them, as everyone down there was going to be killed anyways.

What Westrial was doing, from what Halen could tell through data and occasional flashes of scenes as he continued translating messages for Simeon and Euphenial and Coop’ali, was similar to what Curtisal was doing: infecting their opponents with a small, inescapable spectre of wrongness. Curtisal had given everyone with willbrands or prosthetics or even piercings an impossible-to-escape fear. Westrial’s abilities were clearly leaving an echo of wrongness within those she touched with her abilities.

In one person, Halen could see that their eye had been affected. They rubbed at it over and over again, and maybe there were spots of darkness now filling it as cancerous tissue expanded. Some people were breathing harder, and it wasn’t only from exertion; instead, their lung tissue was falling apart—hardening and flaking and doing fuck knew what because that was the terror of radiation: everyone’s body reacted to it differently.

Everyone’s cells split and erred in unique ways, urged on by their genetics and the way they lived their lives. Halen wanted to sit the girl down—and while he hadn’t been completely positive she was the one doing it at the beginning, now, he could now see her eyes catching on people in the moments before another surge of errors ruptured through their bodies—and ask her about her abilities.

Was she purposefully doing one thing or another to her victims? Was it entirely random? How hard was it to control the strength of her abilities? Did she specifically target eyes, lungs, skin? One person now seemed to have radiation burns, and considering how no one in the drop group or the amongst Fräthk’s people seemed to have realizes what she was doing, it would have been surprising if she’d purposefully caused that—it would call attention to her, after all.

How much control did she even have of her abilities? Clearly, she could target specific people, but this was the sort of irregular deviation that would be extremely difficult to train safely—and this had to be an irregular deviation because while skills and abilities could theoretically utilize radiation, there was an international moratorium on creating or training them.

Did the girl know that her irregular deviation, regardless of whether she used it or not, made her a criminal? Made her someone that a number of nations, who had been touched by the destructive power of radiation-based attacks, would kill, regardless of her age? No wonder she had been living on the streets, keeping herself tucked into filth, when to be found would likely mean a life of servitude or confinement—a life cut short because there was no way to control or contain someone with an ability like this.

As long as that girl drew breath and had a connection to her meridians, she was a danger and she needed to be protected.

“Make sure Westrial doesn’t get lost,” Halen said to Baylor, just as Simeon was calling him over—he and Euphenial had figured out why the xphern transmission network was down; now, they had to decide whether to bring it back up or not. “We do not want someone like Fräthk, or even the Drini, getting that girl.”

“You think she’s doing this, too?” Baylor replied, and of course Baylor, with his battle sense, would be the one down there to notice what was happening, regardless of the way Halen was censoring the reality of the situation from what everyone else was getting of BJ’s reports. BJ himself had realized that something was wrong, but when told to not worry about it, the other boy had done exactly that.

It said a lot that, regardless of the animosity that had existed between their groups only months ago, everyone was easily trusting him. It was nice. With any luck, it wouldn’t fizzle out the moment they landed back in Baalphoria.

“Most likely,” Halen replied, summarizing his theory about a radiation-based irregular deviation to the middle triplet—and since when had they become the sort of people who had actual, proper conversations? “I can’t tell if she’s holding back, has little control of her output, or what. That sort of power isn’t the sort of thing we want anyone but us to have.”

“Should we have that sort of power?”

“Probably not, but I trust all of us to never make that girl use her abilities without a good fucking reason. Someone else might force her to use it for greed and terror, while a number of nations will simply kill her.”

A growl of rage shattered through his and Baylor’s relay—a clear message that in no world would anyone be forcing his friend to use her abilities for anything so terrible, nor cutting her life short. Really, Halen wondered if that teenager knew how lucky she was, to have accidentally found herself friends with Baylor and the rest of them. Other people might have just killed her—erased her abilities from the world in order to make sure they were never used. They would kill themselves, making sure she and every other monstrous person they removed from this city was safe and cared for.