Arc 9 | Chapter 327: This Might Not Come Out

Wandering the ship without much of a plan as they were, it was inevitable that they would eventually crash into some of Olivier’s students—literally, unfortunately.

Even more unfortunate? The fact that the person

who ran into Emilia

was a fucking shit to her about it!

“Bitch! Watch where you’re going!” the boy—and yes, Emilia realized all these kids were both older than her and now firmly into adulthood; most of them still acted like children even during the moments they needed to act the adult—hissed. He had been the one taking the corner too tightly, not bothering to even slow his strides as he rounded it. In the meantime, she was the one covered in his food.

With any luck, the idiot would have a strict food budget and have to go hungry.

“You’re the one walking on the wrong side of the hallway,” Emilia noted, glaring up at him. It was common courtesy to walk on the right in both Baalphoria and most of the surrounding Free Colonies. If she’d been run into by a random Free Colonier from further west, she would have been more understanding. This boy had just been cutting corners. He was also, it seemed, extremely unobservant as he had yet to notice Olivier standing next to her, their arms still linked together—that was a bit of a surprise. Emilia would have guessed him the sort to pull away the moment they ran into someone he knew. Evidently not.

“Whatever,” the boy grumbled—what had his name been again… Stewart, apparently, The Black Knot’s system supplying her with information her own Censor apparently didn’t have. Odd—the guy was definitely a student, and yet… had she ever even really seen him in class? “You owe me new food.”

A request—although, it was really more of a demand—for the cost of the food popped up in Emilia’s vision. Actually, it was probably two or three times the amount the food had cost.

“This seems like too much.”

Sniffing, Stewart said he had added a little for the inconvenience.

“I think it’s more inconvenient that you spilled all over me. Are you going to fix it? {No More Messy} should do it.” Emilia actually didn’t think {No More Messy} or any other publicly available clothes cleaning skill would do it. A quick scan of her clothes and the mess on it showed a high probability it had vitrumi gum in it, and that shit stuck like a bitch to fibres. Only a few good washes were liable to get the stuff out, and honestly, her clothes weren’t nice enough for her to put in the effort.

Still, it was her only set of clothes until tomorrow… hopefully they’d have her lock changed by the morning? Otherwise, she was going to be wandering around naked, or begging clothes off people—men for the bottoms, women or men for the top.

Stewart sniffed again, still not even deigning to look at her companion, you know… his teacher?

Olivier, for his part, seemed content to glower down at his student while she dealt with the situation. Emilia appreciated that; sometimes it was nice to have someone stick up for her, but in this case, it was rather unnecessary. Plus, she’d like to see how far this boy would dig his hole of regret with the things he said and did.

“You ran into me. I’m not fixing your slutty fucking clothes. Now, pay up?”

Emilia hummed and hawed before rejecting the request for pay. “I’ll need to see the receipt, thanks. I think you way overinflated those numbers.”

“Bitch! You calling me a liar!?”

“Yes.”

Stewart’s face turned an impressive shade of red—even redder than the entitled man in the steward’s office, a man who, Emilia had noted, had still been waiting when she and Olivier finished up. “You! Little silverstrain whores should watch their mouths! If you aren’t careful, I might take what you owe me another way.”

“Is that a threat?” Olivier’s voice cut in, so harsh and deadly Emilia was a little surprised it didn’t cut straight into Stewart and leave him a pile of blood and organs on the ship’s floor.

“Protecting your cumdump?” Stewart asked, finally bothering to actually look at Olivier. The speed at which the boy lost his colouring, all blood fleeing his face…

Emilia didn’t bother to catch the boy as he fainted. She could have, of course. He didn’t deserve anything from her.

“Is it normal for so many of your students to be removed from the trip?” she asked as they stared down at his limp body. At least he was now covered in food as well, but what a mess—figuratively and literally.

The lawyer sighed, long-suffering. “I blame you.”

Head whipping towards the older man, her mouth already open to bite back at him that his students being asses

so

wasn’t her fault, only to find the man already watching her, amusement filling his expression.

“Normally, I am much better at purging potential problem students from the trip before it begins. You, however, have been rather distracting.”

“I was so distracting with my annoying personality that you didn’t remember to purge, or so distracting with my brilliance that it dulled the atrocious behaviour of students who would have been purged any other trip?”

“The latter.”

“Well, fuck,” Emilia muttered as Olivier left her side to go speak with a crew member, who must have been flagged down by one of the many people lingering around them, watching the scene. “I don’t know whether to be sorry I’m the reason people like this shit are here, or flattered I’m that distracting,” she muttered to herself. Probably, she should be both.

Hopefully, there weren’t too many students on the trip liable to start trouble. While she had definitely been trying to scare more decorum into the students with what she’d said to Movree—about how negative comments and actions from just one of them could condemn them all—it wasn’t exactly unheard of for vengeance to be taken out on entire groups as a result of a single person. It wasn’t just an issue in the Free Colonies; there were more than enough cases of Baalphorians—and not even just purists—hunting down Free Coloniers because just one had done something bad.

Just a few years ago, there had been Baalphorian-led riots in a border town, close to where Baalphoria transitioned into the barren land that surrounded The Core and separated the Twin Tides. Crocknee was the largest of the border towns north of Kalink, and was home to a lot of Free Colony refugees—mostly people from so far west they had little concern that their authoritarian governments would bother trying to get them back, as opposed to the occasional refugee from closer Free Colonies, who tended to bury themselves within the anonymity of Roasalia and other metropolitan areas.

One refugee living in Crocknee, a Free Colonier from Jinkai, well known for its extreme censorship of anything that could potentially

corrupt the population,

had decided their twenty-something-year-old child viewing explicit content had been too much—that it clashed too heavily with some of the views they had grown up with and still held. They had killed their child and the two friends who had been with him at the time—

bad influences on the community

, according to the Jinkaiden, who was taken into custody shortly after the murders had taken place. SecOps and Black Knot agents were dispatched the moment the son’s Censor went dark, but were too far away to save anyone’s life.

The violence towards Free Coloniers living in the area that had followed had resulted in a two-month-long curfew being issued, The Black Knot bringing in so many agents and skill blockers there had been concerns on multiple fronts. If anything happened elsewhere, the available Black Knot agents would have been low. On the other hand, had someone wanted to wipe out a couple hundred black knot agents, then would have been the time. Sure, there had been skill blockers in place, but those could only do so much; mostly, they blocked the most dangerous and most common of skills that rioters in the city were using, and they had been using a lot.

Those rioters had killed several dozen Free Colonier refugees. Most hadn’t been from Jinkai. Some had been children. Even once the city was locked down, deaths continued and eventually, most of the Free Coloniers in the city moved further into Baalphoria or into other Free Colonies who offered to give them a home, Seer’ik’tine and Dion chief on the list. In the end, those who relocated to other Baalphorian cities had done so with the help of the government, but that had been another huge mess with clashing protests. One group had demanded the government cover the cost and give them homes in other cities, another group had demanded the government have them—and occasionally

all

Free Coloniers—removed from Baalphoria. Some members of the latter had even demanded the government charge those they removed for transport costs, and if they couldn’t pay? Forced labour, obviously!

So stupid, holding the actions of one man against an entire, vaguely assigned group of people. As annoying as it would be for all the Free Coloniers who had been granted the pleasure of witnessing this disaster to judge their entire group because of it, at least they were all associated. Stars! Even to judge all Baalphorians based on this situation would be more acceptable than judging all Free Coloniers, regardless of where they originally hailed from, by the actions of one man hopped out of his mind of too many shots of alcohol and already pissed at Baalphorian culture because some pricks had been a jerk to him in the bar! At least all Baalphorians shared a culture, even if it was more diverse in some areas.

“’re you ‘kay?”

Emilia turned to find a handsome Dionese man—that sort of embroidery was 100% upper class Dionese, not quite Inner Court, but close—smiling down at her. “Me? Yeah. My clothes…?” Emilia grimaced, finally taking in the way her wet fabric was clinging to her.

“May I? Ah… t’will be… core'bility?” the man smiled, the lines around his eyes betraying that like so many Dionese, he was older than most Baalphorians would assume. Emilia would guess he was in his early—maybe even mid—200s, but he looked at least a hundred younger.

“I think it has vitrumi gum in it. Baalphorian skills can’t get that out, but…” Emilia trailed off when the man blinked wildly back at her, his deep brown eyes speckled with lighter flakes of silver. Interesting—that was a rare irregular deviation; so rare it only existed in a small area of Dion, the result of some genetic spasm that had occurred exactly once, each descendant of that original carrier hoarded by the crown with terrifying efficiency. Even more interesting then; why was he dressed as though he wasn’t a member of the Inner Court?

Better question: why didn’t he seem to know who she was?

“Ji nair buroko,” Emilia told him, her Censor scrambling to find a translation for

vitrumi gum

in Dionese and coming up blank. Not exactly surprising—hardly anyone else used weird ingredients in their food the way Baalphorians did, certainly not Dion.

Still, the man’s eyes lit up at the revelation she could speak Dionese, the two of them launching into a discussion of vitrumi gum and whether anything similar to it existed in Dion. The closest they landed on was some sort of plant extract used to thicken sauces—most Dionese sauces were either loose or laden with sugar—which the core ability the man had been planning to use did work on.

“Mi~ nai,” Emilia finally agreed, giving the man—whose name she really needed to ask—a smile and holding her arms out dramatically. In the corner of her eye, she could see Olivier watching her as he continued discussing the situation with a crew member as well as Grenner, who had appeared to discuss having Stewart returned to Baalphoria once he woke. The fact that no one had bothered to do more than confirm the boy was still alive as he lay prone on the hallway floor? Yeah, no one wanted him there.

More people had gathered as she and the Dionese man discussed her clothing and the viability of his core ability actually removing the stains, many of them now watching the pair of them in favour of staring at the dumbass sprawled behind her.

Somewhere in the back of her head, Hurinren was telling her she was being particularly stupid.

“This man could be trying to harm you,”

the phantom voice whispered, his Baalphorian as clipped and harsh as it always was when he deigned to speak the language. Usually, her lotyung spoke the strict Dionese of the Inner Court, leading to an odd dichotomy with Yujao’s general refusal to speak in anything but street slang unless absolutely necessary. The only time Hurinren spoke Baalphorian was when he actually wanted her to listen.

Emilia wasn’t good at listening, especially to pushy, grumpy men like her lotyung. It would be fine… probably.

The man’s silver speckled eyes were relaxed as he let his energy wind around her, brushing over her skin in a soft, silver mist that left her shuddering, the entire world going hazy behind the fog that enveloped her. In the distance, Olivier’s voice called her name—not quite a yell, but certainly tight and concerned and maybe—just maybe!—she should have warned him before letting a strange man wrap his energy around her?