Arc 7 | Chapter 270: This Fight, Part 1 (in three conflicted parts)

✮ ✮ ✮ Conrad ✮ ✮ ✮

A dozen skills scattered my way, the five assholes blocking the entrance to the next level having sensibly realized that I was by far the most dangerous member of our group. Their attention wasn’t going to help them win. Forsaken seas, even the Zentari cousins—the shitstain purist ones—intruding into the battle over and over again, all while focusing their attention on me, wasn’t going to help these five defend the entrance.

Dumbasses didn’t even have the sense to realize I was fucking with them—using them as yet more target practice while we waited for Emilia and her little syn to catch up. Had they bothered to talk this time? The strange way Hyr’s energy had stilled within Emilia told me something had happened—probably, one of them had finally bothered to confirm consent… hopefully, anyways. The fact that Hyr’s energy had returned to its blatant harassment only a few minutes later?

Yeah, there was no fucking way that they’d discussed the most important thing, not that I’d ever had much faith that Hyr would bring that up anytime soon, and after properly speaking with them while getting their bags from Nur’tha? Well, what little hope I’d had that the little syn would reveal the reality of their connection had disappeared under mutters of

not meant to happen on the ship.

So, unfortunately, I’d have to accept the pair of them at least confirming they were into fucking each other as the best to be had during this trip. It was… annoying. It wasn’t unusual for the synat to be so private about their sights, only revealing details as they became relevant, and even then, only to people they knew would believe. The fact that I had already known bits of sights regarding Emilia—although, until I’d returned from the raid and mentioned my suspicions about her identity to my brother I hadn’t known those sights revolved around her, each of the sights that had been given to various Free Colonies during the war so vague that only a handful of people could connect those dots back to Emilia herself; back to Hyr, as well.

Complicated. Annoying. At the very least, Hyr was a good kid, if still young and inexperienced, especially compared to a Baalphorian woman who had probably spent hundreds of years inside the Virtuosi System during the war. It didn’t matter that the little syn was so powerful they had likely experienced their own life span many times over, fading in and out of sights—

they

were still a child, in so many ways.

Given the way their energy seemed to so easily fall into behaving in a highly sexual manner inside Emilia… Fuck. Before actually having a fucking conversation with Hyr, I’d assumed they actually had some sexual experience, and I suppose they did… it was just all experience bestowed on them by their sight.

Had Emilia ever fucked a virgin? If she had, I’m sure it must have been decades ago.

Hopefully, for all the things that would occur between those two, her fucking up the little syn’s true first time wouldn’t be on the list. Not that that was any of my business! Emilia was an adult, and—

And a vision of her, curled into herself within the raid as my energy forced itself into those Clarity members, shattered through me.

Fuck.

Yeah, okay. It wasn’t my business, but her mental state, for better or worse, somehow was. In all we’d been through—the stories and hopes and secrets we’d shared, that I hoped we’d continue sharing—she had almost immediately become someone important to me. I wouldn’t let her break, for anything, and if that meant I had to suck it up and tell her Hyr was a virgin, for all intents and purposes, I would do it.

The way she would break, if she found out she had done something to Hyr that made them uncomfortable—made them feel the way some asshole had once made her feel, still clearly did at times—I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.

Worse, even if I managed to escape the wrath of the Baalphorians who loved her, there were two terrifying people waiting for me back home who would destroy me if she broke due to my own avoidance of a topic I had just spent the majority of the last day telling them both to actually fucking talk about.

Awkwardly messaging Emilia about virgin syn it was, then.

✮ ✮ ✮ Korrin ✮ ✮ ✮

This

was soooooo much better than being in my cousins’ group. More fun, more wild, and yet somehow still more organized than our original disaster of a group—seriously, who had decided to let Callum be more or less in charge of us? That man couldn’t lead his way down a straight corridor, let alone the maze of hallways and battles of the raid.

Good riddance to all of them. The longer it took to meet back up with my stupid cousins—and thank you, Conrad for immediately taking out each of the dummies who insisted on continuing to chase us—the better.

Well, not

all of them

, technically. I was still with Leerin and Darrian, but they were the good cousins… mostly. Darrian was nice, if just… way too passive. Everyone in the family could tell he wanted to leave—wanted to be free and unbound by the rules our terrible family had set out for so many of us—but he was staying behind for Leerin.

Stupid—he should have left a long time ago. Before the war, probably. I wasn’t alive then, of course, but Mama and Dada occasionally talk about it—about how he should have left at the same time as the Dryden’s son, Simeon.

Why hadn’t he left?

Why hadn’t my parents?

The same reason for both, I think: hope. Each of them loves their family. Mama loves her siblings. Darrian loves Leerin—maybe the rest of us, to some extent.

They stayed, hoping to change things, hoping to convince more to leave with them—with us. Then, the war came. Darrian and Leerin went off to fight—to be war heroes forever conflicted over claiming the glory that belonged to them, bloody and marred by death and loss as it was. My brothers entered school and I came along, and things were complicated further for our parents. The war ended, and things didn’t get any less complicated between deaths and births and trauma all around.

I don’t think my parents made a mistake staying—it’s not like my brothers or I picked up any purist beliefs over the course of our lives. Maybe… it would have been better if we had picked up some of those beliefs.

Not because I wish we had those beliefs—a less straight moral compass—or anything! Sometimes, I might wish I had more in common with the rest of my cousins—and I’m sure how close my brothers are is directly related to how on the outs they’ve always been with our cousins—but because if we’d bent from Mama and Dada’s teachings of tolerance and acceptance, even a little bit, they would have left, would have given up on saving their family from a descent into hatred in order to save their children from the same.

Some people would probably say they fucked us up by staying, that it didn’t matter that we could look at the Free Coloniers—Hyr, lovely and ferocious in their calmness; Conrad, whose ass Darrian kept casting glances at, probably thinking none of us noticed—without a single fleck of hatred entering our hearts. I, in particular, love the Free Colonies, with their cultures and lives so different from the ones in Baalphoria and especially The Penns, where I’ve spent the majority of my life, just as the majority of my cousins have.

I know what people believe of purists: that they think Baalphorians are the best, that irregular deviations corrupt our genetics—unless, of course, they’re non-devs, perfect in their existence, although the fact that the loose organization that is purism increasingly knows of the existence of so many non-devs with additional irregular deviations has definitely caused a break in their opinions on that point, from what I can tell. The truth of the matter is more complicated; there are branches of purism that believe even more stringent requirements are required for someone to be pure, clean, correct, wanted.

For the particular branch my family follows, only those born and raised in The Penns, following their traditions to a fine point, are pure, clean, correct, wanted—allowed. I know that, and have suffered for it, especially in regards to my own freedoms as I edge into my twenties. More than that, however, I know so much more.

Therein lies the problem—the reason why some people, from social workers to activists to many purists themselves, would find issue with my parents remaining in The Penns: we know too much and yet have no loyalty forcing us to keep those secrets. After years of exposure, regardless of how resiliently we have resisted the press of purism into our minds and souls and personalities, my brothers and I—Leerin and Darrian, to a lesser extent, never quite trusted as they are—know too much about the organization that my relatives have entwined all of our lives with, only blocks placed within our minds—blocks that I know can be removed by certain people—and the rarely wavering gaze of other family members keeping those secrets safe.

While I may have never met Emilia Starrberg, I know enough about her—saw and heard enough in her brief exchange with Leerin—to know that she will be extremely interested to learn everything we know.

✮ ✮ ✮ Darrian ✮ ✮ ✮

What a fuckfest.

Between the PVP raid as a whole, the situation with Emilia suddenly popping back into our lives, the adorable, vicious Free Colonier, and now this group blocking the entrance to the next level—which, while not against the rules, definitely wasn’t in the spirit of real-world PVP raids—everything was a disaster.

Some of it was good—I’d definitely missed Emilia so much over the last decade that my heart had felt liable to tear itself in half at times, especially in every moment of self-discovery and frustration, when I’d craved a friend who would listen and judge and advise me with so much love it would make me sick. Other bits were wonderful and frustrating—that was Conrad, of course, beautiful and currently rushing into battle with a fearless grace that would have my cock hardening if I wasn’t careful.

As for everything else? Everything else sucked.

The situation with Leerin? Terrible. The awkwardness of Sorvell and Wyren realizing how much I’d been holding back for years? I definitely could have done without that. This raid and the assholes blocking our way? Fucking pains in the ass, all five of them.

Oh, and how could I forget about the rest of my cousins!? While Korrin and her older twin brothers, Raven and Borien, might have joined us… they were annoying. Pushy and saying

I told you so

—or variations to the same general effect—so many times I was half tempted to killshot all three of them. Well, mostly Korrin, always loud and opinionated, and Raven, with his cutting comments. Borien could stay, if he and Raven weren’t so entwined together that Leerin and I often joked they’d have to share a partner for how little time they spent apart—partially joked, as it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually end up in that sort of situation.

Regardless, they all needed to go!

Something told me they weren’t going to go, every subtle comment I made trying to force them to move on and form a separate trio entirely ignored, save the occasional side eye from Borien.

Then, there were the cousins still intent to chase us through the raid. Fortunately, Conrad wasn’t having it. Where the syn had been content to listen to their slurs and ignore the way the little shits looked at them with scorn and revulsion, Conrad was brutal in his assaults whenever one of them dared show up, whatever skill he was using against them bringing them to their knees before he splattered them with blood-red aether.

Have I mentioned he’s beautiful? He is. It’s terrible and wonderful, and hopefully at least some amount of his teasing during our fight had been grounded in serious intention to get in my pants.

Fucking stars, did I hope he’d be into that. Maybe, for all that this situation was a disaster, a little light would be found at the end?