Arc 4 | Chapter 132: Mine to Kill

The Giant of Andir moaned, the sound deafening and vibrating through the world as Emilia sparked out of its reach. Her sparking… still wasn’t great, but whether Payton had unknotted something that had been disrupting her ability to spark or the raid system was taking pity on her, it was significantly better than it had been earlier that night.

That night—many nights ago now, although what had happened in the labyrinths and the manipulations of their sleep schedule by the Risen Guard had definitely skewed Emilia’s understanding of what day it was. Hopefully, there was at least a week or two left before the raid ended, but at this point, it could end tomorrow, and she honestly wouldn’t have been shocked. Disappointed? Sure. Relieved? Most definitely.

Mostly, anyways. Realistically, her heart would ache for the children she was leaving behind, but that was liable to happen, no matter when the raid ended. As for Astra… Well, where previously she had been trying to put herself into the position of Zach’s father—Remy—imagining what it would be like to readjust to the real-world knowing you left a piece of your heart behind, now, Emilia had no idea what to do.

Was it inappropriate to ask an almost-15 year old to meet up in the real world? It was probably inappropriate.

SecOps or The Black Knot showing up instead

inappropriate. It wouldn’t take her long to get out of whatever charges they laid on her, but it would still be a pain and the look Olivier would give her…

Actually, watching Olivier deal with that sort of situation might actually make going through with such insanity worth it, assuming the risk wasn’t worth it—that Astra wasn’t worth it.

A tail slammed into the earth just as Emilia sparked away again. It wasn’t a purposeful attack—not unless the system was augmenting the creature’s mental facilities, anyways—just an accident of clumsy hugeness. Those bulging purple eyes couldn’t quite focus on her—or anything else—and its movements fell short as a result. While most of the monsters of the war hadn’t seemed to particular care for their comrades—although Emilia still maintained that some felt

something

when another of their kind was killed—these things had been particularly bad about taking out their allies for no reason other than clumsiness.

Indeed, as it moved, lumbering steps sending the ground shaking, the few smaller creatures littering the area turned tail and ran—even they knew staying near this thing was a death sentence. Not that being near

her

wouldn’t be that anyways.

She might not have a willbrand at the moment—not that it would have helped her against the giant—but she had smaller skills just as suited for fighting the tiny ones, especially with the augmentation of the system.

It was strange, the system shouldn’t have been able to push her level as low as it felt, yet it felt lower than it had since the war ended—far lower than the level the system had assigned her. There was no way Payton had gotten her level this low, even if the raid really was a day away from ending—which, despite how fucked her sense of time had become, she was almost certain it wasn’t.

Strange, but she wasn’t complaining as {Blood Rain} activated, the toxic blood she had drawn from the Giant of Andir rising into the air before chasing down those smaller creatures. More blood splashed across the world as Emilia scooted out of a haphazard attack sent her way by the giant’s tail, dirt and rocks sent spraying in her general direction.

{Star Shoot ver. Halo} activated again, again, again. It was infinitely more convenient to explode these things from the inside out, but killing it with a thousand smaller attacks would do.

These were a bit too small, however, and as another round of {Star Shoot ver. Halo} cracked through the monster in a constellation of lasers, leaving tiny, bleeding holes through its shell, Emilia loaded up another skill.

{Radial Lance} was better used with a willbrand, the skill augmenting a weapon into a thing of pure destructive power, but it could technically be used on nearly any substance—one of her former teammates had even used it on a person once, within the training session. It hadn’t ended well.

Half a dozen of the larger rocks the monster had sent tumbling her way rose, spinning violently as they were forced into a new form by heat enough that Emilia sparked further away. Rocks twice her size transformed into burning hot spears, their heat sizzling the cool air of her memory as they were sent flying. The aether ripped in their wake, brutal tears that the system struggled to repair.

If this were the real world, Emilia probably wouldn’t have used {Radial Lance}. It was always too brutal an attack for the aethernet, leaves scars across the world that took time to heal.

“Scars I can hunt down and feel out,”

Emilia thought, her brain already itching to go search, making a list of all the places where she could find healed over scars. It seemed right, to go back to those places where she had made scars to practice. They were her marks, scratched over the shape of the universe. They deserved her attention first.

The molten spears collided with the giant, melting foot wide holes in the creature’s torso. It still wasn’t enough, but every little bit helped—every little bit was a piece of its internal structure gone, burned or blasted away.

The monsters of the war had always been difficult to kill—the echos that came after as well. Whatever they were made of—whatever their internal structures were,—they were capable of surviving long after virtually any other creature found on their planet would have died. There were very few animals capable of surviving without heads or hearts, and these things were unfortunately one of them.

Another rock spear split through one of the giant’s eyes, purple liquid exploding out of it. Gooey liquid splattered over the ground. Under it, what greenery had littered the cold, nearly barren ground began to scream and wither. Plants shouldn’t scream, but everything hit by the toxins inside those eyes screamed. Usually, with smaller monsters, it wasn’t such a big deal. It could still kill nearby plants, sure, but humans? It might burn, leave scars across the delicate skin of faces, but it wouldn’t kill.

The liquid of a giant’s eyes was inescapably fatal to humans, killing its victims slowly. It didn’t matter that it was slow to kill. It was instantly fatal in such large amounts, and after the first few times facing giants, they’d learned to avoid eye attack at all costs—or better yet, carefully time their destruction so it wouldn’t hit anyone. That, and that if someone were covered, it was kinder to kill them than let them suffer the death it would bring them.

They had tried finding a way to heal those burns, after they started sizzling through their victim’s bodies. There was none. An inescapable death that would burn holes straight through them. {Radial Lance}, in some ways, had been inspired by that. Tit-for-tat. You burn my friends to death, I’ll return the favour.

Emilia didn’t have to worry about any of that now—there was no one here. No one to get in her way. No one to step under the waterfall of toxic goo. No one to worry about. No one to—

“Emilia!”

Emilia’s head yanked around, searching for the source of the voice—for wherever the stupid door had been located before it vanished, and—

“V!” Emilia was moving, sparking through the battlefield, before she could think better of it.

It could be a trick. It might not be V. It could be a trap. Hadn’t she heard V that first time was well, when the library labyrinth had pulled her under and into a land of nightmares? This could be that, and yet, when her arms finally wrapped around her friend, she refused to believe anything other than that this was him.

“V,” she breathed out into his neck—his shockingly clean neck, her brain supplied before the universe was spinning around them, and they were standing atop a building nearly a kilometre from the giant. Emilia blinked around. This hadn’t been here a minute ago, had it? Then again, she’d been so busy focusing on the giant that perhaps she’d missed the details of the landscape. Those hadn’t mattered, after all. She’d had no intention of moving so far away from her enemy.

“Hey there, beautiful,” the other visitor replied, smiling softly down at her. “Told you I’d see you at the bottom.”

Emilia blinked at him, her mouth opening to ask what he meant, before he was sparking away and leaving her there! WHAT. THE. FUCK!?

“V!” she yelled, moving to follow him back to the battle, which was clearly where he disappeared to, skills she couldn’t make out shattering through the giant and—

V’s smile was warm and beautiful when she landed behind him. “Hey. What’s up?” he had the audacity to ask.

“’

What’s up!?’”

Emilia asked, gaping at him before pointing to the now very dead Giant of Andir. “That was mine to kill!”

The man blinked at her, dumbfounded, which… fair, but also! She’d worked hard to weaken that thing! Then he comes in and offs it with such little effort and—

“Hey, wait. How did you beat that thing?” she asked, looking between the monster’s corpse and her friend—and if she’d ever had any doubt they’d known each other in the war, it was virtually nonexistent now! There was no way he had killed that thing so easily without having been at least tangentially associated with their unit!

Her mind flicked through all the people they’d distributed the skills for killing giants to—not that the skill V had used had looked anything like any of those. Granted, she’d been a ways off, and her vision was still pretty shit, but…

“Hey! Where are we going? And, you didn’t answer me!” she complained as V grabbed her hand and began dragging her towards a door.

A door! A door!

Emilia’s hand tightened around V’s, and then she was dragging him, running for the door. Unfortunately, another flesh hallway awaited them, but Emilia barely acknowledged it as they raced through it. Heartcore—the heartcore was hopefully at the end of this hallway, and aside from taking a few more feet to pull to a stop before the next door, Emilia was just going to be ignoring the flesh hallway and the fact that there were now dozens of holes perforating it, thank you.

That was a coincidence.

There was clearly no way this was the inside of the Giant of Andir.

Impossible—for one thing, the blood dripping through those holes and pooling on the spongy ground wasn’t burning her feet. Monster blood burned, so this was clearly just a fake. That was still gross, of course, and psychologically, if Emilia hadn’t been rushing to get back to the kids or with V, she might have been freaking out more. As it was, it was gross but fine.

Everything was fine.

“Is this place—” V started to ask when they stopped before the door, Emilia immediately working on the simple, if time-consuming, sliding puzzle that seemed to be acting as a lock.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“Don’t say what you’re about to say,” Emilia demanded as the pieces clicked this way and that. Where was the right corner piece? What even was this a picture of?

“Why not?” V asked, the hand she had dropped to work on the lock sliding territorially over her waist.

Apparently, despite having spent more days apart than together at this point, the man was just as comfortably handsy with her as he’d become in their final hours together.

“Because it’s gross, and I know what you’re thinking, and we don’t actually need to say it because you never know who is listening. The platform, the platform maintainer—because let me tell you, I’m pretty sure whoever is managing this raid is peeping in on us”—V hummed in what Emilia assumed was agreement, and she itched to ask him about it, but her mouth kept going and going as she worked, unstoppable, and she was pretty sure something was wrong.

Given the way V blinked at her when the door sprung open and her breathless rant came to a stop mid-sentence, he seemed to be of the same opinion.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, pulling his hand away from where it had been running soothingly over her side to continue tugging him about. “I think I’m overstimulated, and too hyped up. It’ll pass.”

“No need to apologize,” V said, and surprisingly, Emilia actually believed him, her steps freezing as she examined him. He smiled softly back at her, and on a whim, she leaned in, placing a small kiss on his lips. The man shifted closer, like he wanted to deepen the kiss.

They didn’t have time for that.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she sighed as she pulled back, giving his hand a squeeze before continuing dragging him into the heartcore chamber, his soft laughter sending a chill up her spine. “One at a time? Or should we double up?”

“Perhaps we wait to see the heartcore, before deciding?” he suggested, a note of amusement in his voice, which was nice. Emilia was used to people quickly becoming exasperated with her when her brain started to move too fast.

Too many words.

Too many thoughts.

Not enough time.

Everything had to come out.

Clarifications and common sense could wait.

Most people didn’t like that. It was nice that V didn’t seem to mind. Actually, considering the soft way he was watching her when she glanced back at him, it seemed like he might actually like her like this?

The chamber was, thankfully, on the simpler side. There had been no option to change the configuration of the heartcore chamber when she hacked the first challenge, and Emilia had been concerned it would be something like the last one: a challenge in its own right, time-consuming and difficult.

It wasn’t, the heartcore simply being at the top of a tall spire that had about a thousand stairs—or one hundred and twelve, if V’s counting was to be trusted.

“How… are you… not… tired…” Emilia panted as they reached the top.

She never heard V’s answer because like the exhausted, stupid person she was, Emilia leaned over, reaching for something to support her, and touched the heartcore.

And the world went black.