Arc 3 | Chapter 112: Probably Not Meant to be a Toy

Emilia’s eyes snapped to the person stepping out of the shadows after the children, her {Blood Dagger}—the one she had entrusted to Kelly—grasped in their hand. In her arms, Astra tensed, while Emilia was glad Stephy couldn’t see anything from her position.

“⸂Get moving,⸃” the person said, their voice simultaneously tumbling out of their mouth and aether. A rough brown hand reached out to push Gale forward. “⸂You’re too slow.⸃”

Gale tripped, Kelly gasping as his arm slipped from her shoulder and he tumbled forward. The rest of the children turned, eyes wide and horrified as the boy collided with the ground, his mangled arm reaching out as though to stop him. It couldn’t, whatever had been done to it leaving it weak and useless. Several stepped forward, as though to help, but a head shake from Gale stopped them. Most looked about ready to burst into tears. A few were already crying, their shoulders shifting with silent sobs.

“⸂Get him up, or I’ll do it for you!⸃” the man snarled, a painfully wide grin stretching over his features as he stepped forward, not giving the teenager a chance to help Kelly. Instead, he pushed past Gale and pulled his foot back as though to kick the boy.

Emilia was tugging on the knot that would leave Stephy tumbling off her back before any of the children could react. Both the girl’s ass and Astra’s didn’t deserve the pain of being tossed aside yet again, but their butts would recover. One wrong kick, one rib splittering through an organ, and Kelly would bleed out before they could figure out some way to help him.

⸂Emilia!⸃ Gale gasped as Emilia slid between Kelly and the man just moments before his foot collided with the boy’s stomach, her hand catching his foot.

It was an odd angle, the wrong arm reaching around her to grab him, her shoulder twinging painfully. It was worth it, however, even if she felt bad for Gale, given the girl was in splatter range. Aether and blood magic exploded out of the ring Zach had given her. Her connection to the man wasn’t enough to do more than blast his leg off, blood splattering over Gale, but it sure was satisfying.

Gale screamed, stumbling backwards onto her ass. All the children screamed, tiny feet bolting out through the streets. Hopefully they’d stick together, or some would come across Astra and Stephy and stop, but the kids wandering the street was better than them being around to see this.

The man toppled backwards, his own screams of horror echoing through the physical world and aethernet alike. “⸂Wha… wha…⸃”

“I know you,” Emilia snarled, surging over the man, hand clasping onto his face. “You’re the brother who apparently started all this. Big mistake.” Another wave of aether rippled through her and into the man, his head blowing wide across the street.

Gale let out another shriek, feet pushing her backwards until her back collided with a nearby wall. Behind her, Kelly was pushing himself up unevenly on his one good arm, and when Emilia turned towards him, she was surprised to see he wasn’t as phased by what had happened as the others.

⸂Sorry,⸃ he croaked out, chest heaving with effort. Given the state of his arm, he had probably lost a substantial amount of blood before the system had healed it over, huge sections of both his upper and lower arms having been sliced away. ⸂I tried to protect everyone, but—>

The boy’s words cut off as Emilia surged forward and wrapped him in a hug. She wished she could speak to him—could tell him he had done a good job, regardless of the outcome. The boy had tried to protect everyone, something he never should have been forced to do, and he should be proud of his actions, regardless of how well or badly things had gone.

Emilia glanced back at Gale, finding the girl near tears. Her arm opened, and suddenly the teenager was there, sobbing silently into their embrace.

If the world was fair, they could stay like this forever, the children taking as much time as they needed to recover from their ordeal. It wasn’t fair, however, and there were dozens of children running wild in the streets, potentially running into the fight occurring several streets away, or the mystery dot that was—

Shit. It was so close to the homeless kids now, and their group was now a long trail of children following the same path. A moment later, the map refreshed again. To Emilia, it looked like the dots at the end were moving slower, implying that Sawyer and the faster children had decided to leave the stragglers behind. She hoped that wasn’t the case, but if it was…

Emilia pulled out of the hug, tugging out her notebook and scribbling a collection of notes:

“Need find runaways. Stephy and Astra there. Go rest with them.”

Emilia pointed to the road she’d left them in. According to the map, at least half a dozen of the kids had run that way and stopped when they found the girls. Probably a group led by Miira, given the girl had seen the alley she’d emerged from.

“Stephy’s legs broken,”

she continued, tugging the children up with her. She pushed them in the proper direction, scribbling,

“Be back,”

before shooting off towards the closest missing children.

About half the missing children hadn’t gone far, only tucking themselves into the safety of nearby alleys, and as Emilia found them, she was able to pull them out and drag two or three at a time back to the alley she’d left the girls in.

On her third trip, Emilia circled back out onto the main street, to look over the man’s body—the body of her stalker’s brother. The man who had caused the stampede and the deaths of so many people. She wasn’t particularly surprised when she pulled a collection of blood weapons from his body, one of them practically vibrating with power. The weapon created from all the death that had swamped through the city of these children’s childhood, she assumed.

⸂Those are… blood weapons?⸃

Emilia glanced back to find Miira—who had indeed had enough sense to run in the direction she had seen Emilia come from with a number of the children when the fight began—and Benny—who had followed several of the other kids down an alley and stopped them from running far—peering over her.

“Yes. I don’t know where most of them came from, but I’m sure this one is from what he did to your home,”

Emilia wrote, pointing to the strange, blackish loop that radiated destruction. Without using it, Emilia had no clue as to what it could possibly do. Honestly, she’d rather not even keep it on her, but that would risk someone else picking it up—not unlikely, given she could feel its power echoing through the aether.

Hopefully, once she gained access to the system, she’d be able to figure out what it did… Actually, fuck that. If she ran into that Risen Guard again—which was likely, given a few of the kids had run way too close to where he and her stalker still seemed to be fighting—she’d just hand it over to him. It was weighty, and nearly a foot in diameter—not the easiest thing for her to carry—but she stuffed it into her bag, nonetheless, along with all but one of the weapons she picked off the man’s body.

Whatever this thing was, it was bad news. Power was great, but too much power led to bad things, like your core cracking. Personally, she’d had enough of bad consequences for big power, thanks.

⸂That… my parents were— were used to make that?⸃

Emilia gazed up at Miira. They didn’t know for sure that her parents were dead, of course, but the chances that they were…

“I’m sorry,”

she signed, emotion she couldn’t properly convene floating through her hands.

It wasn’t enough, her simple apology. This wasn’t her fault, and yet it was. If she’d let that family kill her and V in that cave, it was unlikely this would have happened. That family would have just left the city, perhaps gone through the labyrinth—because that

must

have been why they were in that city to begin with, right?—and come out somewhere else.

It was just a matter of time until they did something like this somewhere, though. Perhaps they already had, turning Livery into the collateral damage that had brought her wrath down on them—because it had. This man was dead, the main culprit if his brother was to be believed. If her stalker was to be believed, however, that also meant other members of his family could be just as ruthless. They would come for her eventually, and she would be all too willing to kill them for what this man had done in their so-called defence.

Tit-for-tat. If they hunted her for defending herself, why shouldn’t she hunt them for defending a mass murder.

Miira swallowed, eyes blinking wildly as she tried not to cry. Benny wrapped an awkward arm around her, the slightly taller Miira resting her head against the top of his head.

The boy frowned. ⸂What’s that?⸃ he asked, pointing to something a few feet from the man’s exploded head.

Despite the fact that the man was laying in pieces across the street, none of the children had so far expressed much disgust at his mangled corpse, perhaps the result of his blood being the more concerning aspect of his death. All that blood was gone, although Emilia had been unable to find whatever weapon it had coagulated into. Unlike with the other blood weapons she had seen created, there had been no storm of blood after this man’s death, yet the blood had slowly disappeared as she gathered the children.

Emilia moved to the place Benny had pointed out, and indeed, flat against the ground, barely visible in the dim light, was a thin red layer of… blob. That was the only way she could think to describe it, especially when she picked it up and it was

squishy.

Ew.

⸂What is it?⸃ Benny asked when she turned back to them, her nose scrunched up in distaste.

Whatever the new weapon was, it was weird. Its viscosity was… fucked up. The weapon—assuming it even was one—moulded to her hand and fingers when she squeezed it, turning into something almost firm as she handled it. When she stopped moving it, however, it began to slowly melt, attempting to slip over the edges of her hand and forcing her to continuously fiddle with it.

It was sort of satisfying, if also gross, and she vaguely remembered something about a science experiment kids could do at home that made a similar, gelatinous material. She loved science, but had often been more of a

go out and explore

sort of child—the type of child who built perfectly to code treehouses in their spare time. A random experiment with an expected result hadn’t exactly been her scene. That said, squishing the thing was quite soothing. On the other hand, she really needed her hands back.

⸂That’s so cool…⸃ Benny said, eyes growing wide with fascination. His hands flexed, and against her better judgment, Emilia handed it over to him.

“Do not try to use energy on it,”

she wrote firmly into her notebook, holding it out for Miira to relay to the boy. The tone she used was even more stern than the one Emilia herself would have used, and Benny appeared thoroughly chastened as he mumbled about how he wasn’t going to.

Miira looked about as convinced by his words as Emilia was.

“We need something to hold it,”

Benny said, scurrying off to search for something to contain the thing.

Miira nodded, before hesitating and asking about the children they hadn’t gathered yet.

“They’ve run really far,”

Emilia wrote, eyes flicking to the map. A few of their group members had stopped moving further from their location, presumably having tucked themselves into an alleyway or perhaps to knock on someone’s door. Most were still moving through the city. Two were running so fast that Emilia wasn’t sure she’d been able to catch them before they ran into the edge of the city, even with her {Blood Armour} augmenting her movement.

Plus, there were still the homeless children to think about, their group fracturing more and more with each map update, the mysterious dot only minutes from reaching them.

There was so much, and Emilia couldn’t do all of it.

She needed help, and as much as she didn’t want to leave the kids alone again, she knew she needed to.

As quickly as she could, Emilia scribbled out the main problems happening and her plan. Miira didn’t look happy as she read it, but she didn’t complain either.

⸂Are you sure we can trust him?⸃ she asked as they moved back to join the rest of the group.

Out of everyone, Gale appeared the most shaken. Even Stephy and Kelly, injured as they were, appeared to be doing better than her. That was fair. Emilia had generally found that being injured was infinitely better than being covered in blood. As they came closer, it became clear that Gale also happened to still be covered in blood. Odd.

Thankfully, when Benny knelt down to show the other kids the now jarred {Blood Slime}—the blood lingering over Gale’s body seemed to realize it belonged to the strange object, slithering through the air to join it in Benny’s hands. The teenager looked thoroughly put out by the way it had dragged over her skin, rubbing vigorously at her arms, as though she could still feel its phantom shape, and releasing a high-pitched whine.

Miira squatted down in front of her friend, concern written over her face as she conveyed their plan to her and Kelly. Emilia was certain the girl would barely acknowledge them, given how empty her eyes seemed as she stared at Miira.

There wasn’t much Emilia could do for her in so short a period of time, and instead she plopped down in front of Kelly, holding out a blood weapon to him.

He hesitated, staring at the small marble. ⸂Is that… from me?⸃ he finally asked, tongue flicking out of his mouth to wet his lips. It was a strange, off-putting thing, considering she had only seen locals open their mouth to eat so far.

Emilia nodded, offering it to him again. He didn’t have to take it, but it felt right to offer it to him, given parts of his flesh had been sacrificed to create it. After a moment of hesitation, the boy accepted it, rolling the shimmering pink ball between his fingers before wrapping his hand around it, his eyes flicking to his damaged arm.

“Be careful with it,”

Emilia wrote out for him.

“I don’t know what it does.”

She hesitated a moment before asking if he wanted her {Blood Dagger} back as well. Things hadn’t gone that well for him the first time she’d given it to him, but he was—for better or worse—still going to be the one in charge of keeping the younger children safe.

The boy blinked blankly down at the paper, head cocking before he shook himself and nodded, accepting the blade back. He set it in his lap, returning his gaze to the marble designed from his blood. ⸂Be careful.⸃

“You too,”

she signed back, reaching forward to brush a lock of hair behind his ear before pushing herself up.

Kelly shot her an annoyed look, a little flicker of the teenager he was quickly becoming shining through, before he smiled and rolled his eyes.

Emilia turned to go, halting to frown down at Astra, when the child appeared at her side and demanded to be taken along with huge, pouty eyes. Her attempts to convince the child to stay—probably a lost cause, regardless of how convincing she managed to be—were cut off by Gale’s voice, ringing clearly through the din of the children playing with the {Blood Slime}.

⸂You’re going to need all the help you can get.⸃