Arc 7 | Chapter 265: Another Round

“Another round?” Emilia asked, already dealing out for another game of kyra.

“Aren’t you in the middle of a PVP raid? Should you really be fucking around with us while your teammates drag your deadweight around with them?”

Emilia glanced up at Sorvell from her hand. While she’d initially put up a halfhearted fight when Wyren had begged her to join them for a round or two, she was having fun and didn’t see any reason to stop. “They aren’t with me right now. Also, kyra.” Slapping a card down on the table, she swiped up the trick and placed them in her hopefully soon-to-be growing pile.

Wyren swore—it was rare to call kyra on the first trick. Hanalea didn’t look concerned. Sorvell raised an eyebrow.

“So you’re just… chilling with us in here while you’re standing around, defenceless?” he asked, barely glancing at his hand before putting down another card.

“I doubt she’s just standing there without even a skill active to…” Wyren trailed off as he took in her expression, which was mostly one of contemplation. “Seriously? What if someone attacks?”

Shrugging, Emilia set down a low-value card for Hanalea to take as she won the trick. “Hyr said I’d be safe here, so I didn’t bother. Even if they turn out to be wrong, we’re only on the first level, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Hyr? You couldn’t be bothered to see your old friends, but you made new friends?” Sorvell grumbled, leaning back and scowling at her.

When she’d first been coerced into joining her three friends and former teammates in the virtual world, telling Hanalea she had a little while free to chat and then discovering the trio had all shown up to interrogate her, she’d asked the man why his avatar was so dishevelled. He had been a little grumpy ever since, because apparently it was due to a lost bet. Rather than his usual fastidious appearance, his deep red hair was shaggy, looking as though it had been haphazardly cut in battle. It also featured far more grey than the last time she’d seen him, but that wasn’t so surprising; his brother, older by over three decades, had been going grey by the time the war started as well. Sorvell’s clothes were similarly sliced up, while the white scars scattered over his rosy brown skin seemed more pronounced than it had been even at the end of the war.

“I have made plenty of new friends,” she agreed, telling them that Hyr and Conrad were two very new Free Colonier friends.

“qur syn har’b,” Wyren noted, putting down a card in seeming error as he assessed her. “I didn’t think you believed in the synat’s abilities much.”

“Emmie was always meant to believe, according to my mistress,” Hanalea noted, snickering as she gathered up this trick as well. “She always knew it would just be a matter of time.” The Mitine Dyn ex-pat looked up at her, her light-brown, nearly white eyes boring into Emilia. “You should request a clone visit me. If I know, I will be obligated to inform my mistress, her the Sever, and I do not believe you want the Sever to know you now believe.”

“Uh… okay?” Emilia supposed that if she were going to believe in the synat’s abilities, she was going to have to believe in the fortune-telling abilities of the Sever and Mitine Dyn’s Glorious Trio. “I will? Is after we leave here fine?”

Hanalea nodded as she placed another card, emptying her hand. “Neither the Sever nor my mistress wear their temporary Censors often. Our meetings are almost always prearranged. If they contacted me now, it would be fate ordained.”

Emilia wasn’t really sure how the Sever or the Glorious Trio’s fortune-telling worked, Mitine Dyn having always been far more secretive than even the synat during the war. Now, relationships between Baalphoria and the southern Free Colony were strained at best, due to the return of diplomatic relations between Mitine Dyn and Chinsata after the war ended.

There had been a whole thing, early in the war, where multiple Free Colonies had refused to cooperate with any group associated with several Free Colonies, including Chinsata. There was a small possibility that her own, early war run-in with slavers from Chinsata had encouraged several of her teammates to position their own Free Colonies on the side of

no allies of Chinsata in the Alliance

, although she had personally never agreed with effectively blackmailing Free Colonies like Mitine Dyn into breaking ties with Chinsata.

Was Chinsata a terrible place? Sure, but the fact that Mitine Dyn had almost immediately returned to having peaceful relations following the war was why the blackmail was silly. There had been no consequences laid out in any of the paperwork that let Mitine Dyn and a dozen other Free Colonies in similarly precarious positions into the Alliance, no reason for them to not immediately turn around and renew those severed connections.

In theory, she knew some of the people behind the blackmail—which had effectively amounted to telling various Free Colonies that if they didn’t cut certain diplomatic ties they would be left to deal with the war on their own—had assumed that places like Chinsata would refuse to renew connections with Free Colonies who had

betrayed

them. In some cases, that had happened. In others, it hadn’t. The war had been brutal, and it was difficult to begrudge anyone putting the survival of their home first.

Even if they kicked Mitine Dyn out of what was left of the Alliance now—even if there had been firmly defined consequences for immediately returning to pre-war relations—they still had access to the willbrands that had been created for their soldiers during the war. They still had temporary Censors and ties of friendship between their soldiers and people from elsewhere.

If Mitine Dyn were attacked, would she and the rest of their unit really leave their Mitine Dyn teammates to perish, even if the Free Colony was actively supporting Chinsata now? Probably not—not unless their friends themselves suddenly supported Chinsata, with its culture of slavery and abuse.

Well, regardless, Emilia didn’t really want the eyes of a Free Colony that supported that sort of thing, passively or not, on her. Erasing Hanalea’s memories of her admitting she now trusted a syn’s sight it was, then!

[

Loren:

Seriously? You believe in the synat’s abilities now? What changed?

]

Emilia was just going to ignore the Hyrat clone’s comment for the moment—she could deal with him later, as long as he actually went to visit Hanalea shortly. Honestly, she probably needed to do up an official report for The Black Knot on the whole

believing in the synat now

thing.

“I have a feeling it’ll eventually get back to the Sever that I believe now,” she pointed out, cringing as she awkwardly had to create a group message of almost everyone Hanalea knew to tell them not to tell her—or the few other Mitine Dyn members of their unit—about her newfound belief in synat abilities. This was definitely not how she’d expected to end up messaging most of her former teammates—luckily, Hanalea was strange and mostly kept to interacting with members of their unit—and along with a separate message to V—who knew when that man would randomly run into someone—she quickly fired off another few messages telling everyone she’d explain what was happening more clearly at another point.

When? She had no idea, but eventually.

Fortunately, she had some good friends, and Rafe, Simeon and Olivier almost immediately jumped in to field the random questions people were rapidly shooting her way. Rafe, helpfully, had briefly met Hyr inside the OIC System, and Simeon had chatted with them off and on while they’d been getting their willbrands.

Well… as long as they had it handled.

“You’ll have to remember to tell Helix, when he’s out of no privacy land,” Sorvell noted, dealing out another round for them.

“Is he messaging no one?”

“Well…”

“He apparently messaged Axelle a few days ago,” Wyren told her, explaining that Axelle—one of Olivier’s cousins who had always loved hacking—had let them know that

something big

was apparently going down in the episode that would air later that night. “I think because Axelle is a lawyer, there was a bit of leeway for privacy? Not the sort Helix can exploit too much, but enough that he was able to use it to warn everyone.”

“Warn?” Emilia asked, quickly sending her Censor searching through her messages and coming up with a vague message from Axelle about the show. It had been buried in a bunch of talk about Above the Clouds—being a fan of hacking meant Axelle was a fan of watching Helix on the show, obviously—and since Emilia still intended to eventually watch it, she’d been avoiding reading too many spoilers from the various teammates who were watching it religiously. Axelle’s message… yeah, there was definitely an air of warning in it. “Ominous.”

“Definitely,” the table agreed in unison as they began another trick.

“So~” Emilia began, glancing over at Wyren and—

“No.”

“Why not? You said you’ve heard good things about Hyr! Can’t you share even a little, itty bit of the gossip with me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

The qur’s dark brown eyes flicked up at her just in time for the round to reach him. Once again, he put down a card that probably shouldn’t have been played just then.

“Dude,” Sorvell complained, reaching out to smack Wyren with his cards. “We play this game every week! How do you still suck so much?”

“Kyra,” Hanalea said over Wyren’s complaints that the game was stupid, and they should play something better.

“We are

not

playing Jo Rong again,” Sorvell said firmly.

“Why not?” Emilia asked, popping a collection of virtual snacks into her mouth as she opened one real-world eye, half her vision remaining in the virtual world while she surveyed her surroundings.

As much as she trusted Hyr, it seemed prudent to at least occasionally check that she wasn’t being surrounded by the insane group that had been stalking them through the level. There was no one around, and the map indicated just about everyone was converging on where Hyr had tracked the massive group. How did she know that they’d made it to the group, when the dots had no indicators? Vibes and faith. Hyr had made in there, and now they were playing with the group.

“We already have a hard enough time getting a fourth to play kyra with us, but when the Jo Rong tiles come out?” Sorvell groaned, telling her half the time people just fucked right off and refused to come back for months. “They don’t even give us a chance to suggest kyra or something else. Then we just end up having to play ryth’ra or going off to raid. So not as fun.”

Emilia liked Jo Rong, although she could understand why most people wouldn’t want to commit to playing the long and complicated game—seriously, a single game could last well over a year. Then again, considering how people were fine living in the same raid for weeks at a time, returning for years to their favourites… Maybe people didn’t mind raids because they were more active, whereas Jo Rong was an old school war simulation game, played with tiles and maps and statistics?

Later, she would perhaps volunteer to play a game with her friends, but not now—she didn’t want to commit to anything and her messages were increasingly filling up with people wanting to chat and make plans to see her. Well… at least her concerns about her friends ignoring her were all but unfounded? The few people who she knew were going to be a problem—including Axelle—still weren’t messaging her, but pretty much everyone else was.

It was sweet, if also intimidating. Apparently, she was likely spending her school break catching up with old friends.

“Why won't you tell me about Hyr~?” she whined, turning her attention back to Wyren.

“If the syn Bur wishes to speak of themself, they will tell you,” Wyren said, levelling her with a critical look. Unlike Hyr, whose features were far lighter than most northerner’s, Wyren was all northerner, with their large frame and dark features. “Do not bully them.”

Emilia laughed—she just couldn’t help it. “If anything, I think they’re bullying me.” All their little touches. The way their energy reached through her, teasing and arousing in that way that was definitely intentional without actually coming across as intentional?

Yeah. Hyr was definitely bullying her. It was fun, and rather deserved—punishment for bullying her own sexual conquests all her life and—

Wait. Didn’t that mean that she was the sexual conquest? Weird. Not to be a sexual conquest—people were always trying to get with her, intent to see what it would be like to be with a silverstrain. Rather… Hyr was just so much different than most of the people who’d ever tried to get with her? Almost everyone went with more of an aggressive,

shoot your shot

approach, whereas Hyr was just sort of… what even were they doing?

“What sort of bullying?” Sorvell asked darkly, all protective older brother energy suddenly, a consequence of knowing the man since she was a child, their families old friends.

“Hm? Oh, nothing bad. Mostly, they've just been using their energy to keep me grounded?”

“Seriously?” Wyren asked, eyes wide in a way that was more than a little concerning, at the same time that Sorvell asked, “How?”

Fuck. This conversation was devolving in a thousand directions, and their playing was getting worse, Hanalea the only one able to focus and basically stealing all their cards.

“We’re all gonna lose,” Sorvell grumbled, reaching across the table to snatch her snacks, despite his own ability to summon snacks into existence.

“Yes, you are,” Hanalea agreed. “I do hope you are all ready to pay up when I destroy you.” Another card left her hand, and how had she even managed a double kyra this hand?

Yeah. They were all fucked.