Arc 9 | Chapter 429: Worthy of a War (or not)

The door rattled shut behind Vtraní, their steady steps growing softer as they worked their way back down the hall, each step an ache in Olivier’s heart.

How much pain and suffering did someone have to experience to have that much emptiness swirling around them? When Cheska had suggested Vtraní take the chance to escape… their words hadn’t implied that they didn’t want to get away; rather, they just knew it wasn’t an option. Cheska had said the same thing—implied that to escape Fräthk was a near impossible thing, even if she still had some hope within her, every word she’d spoken on the topic filled with an ache of frustration.

Knowing so little of Cheska, Olivier could only guess that the Lüshanian girl was something of a self-sacrificing person. It would have been easy for her to send Vtraní off, intent to use Olivier as her escape from this place—intent to make sure she was the only one he’d be taking along, intent to lessen their chances of being caught when someone else panicked and ran off, or when the people who managed this place noticed too many bodies were gone, or even when Vtraní told someone she was acting some way or another.

Yet, she hadn’t. Instead, she had suggested Vtraní be the one to go, her own words filled with no implication that she expected to come with them. That was sad—the reality that this girl had at least a few remaining embers of hope that she might yet get away, while simultaneously willing to give up her chance to escape so someone else could get away instead.

It wasn’t nearly as sad at the fact that when Vtraní stated there was no escape from this place—this live, this person who kept them captive—they had seemingly felt nothing about that depressing reality.

No regret.

No pain.

No nothing.

It was a simple fact, falling from their mouth to break over any hope Cheska might have of escaping Fräthk—not that she seemed to have let their pessimism affect her. Olivier, on the other hand, had to take it for what it was: a warning. It may have been a warning meant for Cheska, but Olivier had to take it as well. Getting out of Falmíer—possibly Lüshan as a whole—would be difficult for anyone he brought with him. Simply trying might be a death sentence; yet, at the same time, Vtraní’s parting words sat with him: one final implication that if Fräthk was done with him—had no further use for him—his life would be snuffed out quickly.

That made sense, in a perverse way. Olivier had read enough stories of people who didn’t kill their captives soon enough, only for it to come back and bite them later. It was always better to tie up loose ends as quickly as possible, before they could get the jump on you. Perhaps the Baalphorian government would try to get him back, perhaps they wouldn’t. If some random criminal killed him, he doubted his government would start a war because of it. As much as Cheska had said some faction of the Drinarna were part of Fräthk’s plot to take down Gëon, Olivier doubted even that would cause a war between their nations.

More likely, one of two things would happen. Possibly, relations between their nations would fracture, if the corruption of the Lüshanian police force were too deep—if it were something the rest of the Drinarna couldn’t purge from their ranks, the way they had a corrupt faction a few years back. Not much about that situation had ever been made public, but from what Olivier knew—and which Cheska had confirmed—the head of the Drinarna had taken a hard stance against anyone found to be associating with the local criminal groups. Unless something had changed, that man was still head of the Drinarna. In other words, unless the officers who were working alongside the city’s criminals—what had Cheska called the group… the Unáshrà Family?—managed to stage a coup within the Drinarna, their power within the organization wouldn’t be enough for the Baalphorian government to bother moving against the nation as a whole, which a conflict with the Drinarna would effectively require, given they were effectively Lüshan’s government at the moment, their leader more president to the Free Colony than their actual president was…

No, Olivier didn’t see a situation where the faction of the Drinarna who were working for Fräthk somehow took control of the nation’s police force. Instead, the head of the Drinarna would likely work to purge them, just as he had done years ago. Either the Baalphorian government would help with that, intent to avenge their dead or missing non-dev, or they wouldn’t. Realistically, Olivier couldn’t see them starting a war over him if he were already dead. Alive, maybe. Dead, definitely not.

All that amounted to the knowledge that if it were him doing the kidnapping, he would be killing his hypothetical victim quickly, then making sure to deliver their body to the proper embassy—remove all the evidence and hope that no one could track it back to him; better yet, set someone else up to take the fall.

Someone like Gëon, and he

really

needed to get out of here before Fräthk or someone with the ability to make decisions about what was going to happen to him showed. Perhaps they wouldn’t have the sense to get rid of him and try to frame Gëon for his kidnapping and death, and he would instead be left to wait for someone to rescue him. Currently, Olivier wasn’t inclined to take the chance, and as his Censor connected more and more stably with his mind and aetherstores—although, annoyingly, the oil over the nape of his neck was still interfering with his ability to connect with the aethernet and let anyone know where he was—he knew they had to go, now.

Pushing his awareness outward through the room, Olivier began looking for anything that could be a camera or other monitoring device. While he had little confidence he’d be capable of finding more than the most obvious of devices, it was at least something—some hint as to how much time they would have to actually get out of there, once they were moving.

“I’m going to speak to you through a skill, in case anyone is listening,”

he told Cheska, activating a skill that would echo his Censor’s translations of his questions around the girl.

“It isn’t ideal, and you’ll obviously have to speak your answers back to me, but it's better than nothing. Do you know how many people are down here who are in a condition to escape with us?”

It was cold, but realistically, they might not be able to take everyone with them. Anyone old or injured… No, unless there turned out to be people down there who could carry them easily, it was likely they’d have to prioritize whom to take. Later, perhaps, they’d be able to send help for the rest. Most likely, by the time they found anyone who could help, anyone left behind would have already been moved. They could at least try to send help; that, unfortunately, was likely the best they could do.

Once more, Cheska’s dirty bob of blue hair vanished. Really, Olivier should have also told her that they needed to get out of there quickly. It was too late now, though, his connection with his Censor shaky enough that he didn’t want to risk reaching around corners, attempting to use the skill while he couldn’t see Cheska. The girl would return when she returned. In the meantime, Olivier had to figure out how to even get out of here.

In this case, it was fortunate that he had Emilia constantly breathing down his neck, trying to make him take her case: he had always been a hands-on learner, even if he attempts to learn with his hands, in this case, had been spotty, at best.

While it had only been a handful of weeks since she’d first burst into his classroom, and he was already constantly fighting to make more time in the day for all the little things he had to do, part of his free time over the weeks since they’d met had been spent… he couldn’t exactly say

training

, but he had certainly been reading up on combat skills, both for offence and defence. It hadn’t been much, but he had loaded a number of skills into his Censor and tested a few out, trying to determine if there was anything in the usage of them—in the time they took to activate or the amount of aether they needed—that could be used to help in her case.

Olivier wasn’t taking her case, he was just… curious, and he could always forward whatever he learned to whoever did end up taking her case.

Mostly, what he had learned was that using combat skills was difficult—something that felt completely different from the normal, every day skills that… well, most Baalphorians didn’t actually use them. Axelle used them, though, and she had been very into making sure all of her cousins used them when they’d been younger, spending weeks forcing them to get a grasp on several dozen skills that were useful in everyday life. Since she’d begun to work for Halen, she’d gone back to the habit of forcing them to learn skills as well. This, of course, was on top of all the functions she was constantly forcing upon them.

If he got out of here alive, Olivier, unfortunately, was going to have to thank her for at least forcing that much on him; it was highly unlikely he would have any hope of getting out of here without all those hours she’d spent forcing all of them to learn to use skill better than most Baalphorians, who tended to favour machines and robots over skills.

At the same time, Olivier’s experience with so many skills and functions had been all but meaningless in the face of the complicated, aetherstore- and processing-intensive skills that powered, well, criminals.

So… there had also been

that

issue: very few combat skills, even ones for defence, were publicly available. Instead, he’d been forced onto the blackaether, which he accessed regularly, looking for information that might help in cases, and mostly found skills meant for criminals. Originally, he had assumed that their weight had been due to that: the fact that they were being coded by criminals for criminals, leading to a lack of optimization that should surely exist within military and law enforcement skills.

According to Axelle, not so much.

As she had explained it, skills that had been leaked by SecOps and Baalphorian military tended to be even worse. They were heavy and hard to use, resulting in a significant portion of their ranks relying on more physical weapons in conflict. Only a few skills and functions used by The Black Knot had been leaked in recent years—something that Olivier now thought might be due to Emilia potentially having a part in their creation and security—but what Axelle had seen were apparently only a little better than what was available for criminals and regular people on the blackaether.

“I’ve heard that a bunch of hackers have this agreement of sorts?”

Axelle had told him when they’d met to discuss the skills he’d been trying out the last few weeks.

“Things they will and won’t code, and what not? No one seems too much a fan of either the military or SecOps, so they won’t work for them? I think if there was an actual war, they’d help, but no one wants to be creating war skills during peacetime, you know? And then, The Black Knot has a few hackers who work for them—and they tend to pick up problematic hackers, to keep them from working for criminals. You know, even though they have the worst reputation, I think they collect hackers to keep SecOps and the military from getting them? I’ve even heard rumours that they send most off to The Ridge Rind, so no one can use them—all except one, that they’ll never let go of, allegedly.”

The girl had leaned in closer, whispering about how there was a rumour that one of her two favourite hackers was the darling hacker of The Black Knot, but there wasn’t enough proof to confirm it.

Emilia—it was likely Emilia who worked for them, although it wouldn’t surprise Olivier if Halen occasionally worked for them as well.

Perhaps, when they met up again and had a moment to breathe, Olivier would ask the silverstrain about it—confirm how much work she did for The Black Knot and ask why combat skills were so heavy, even when they seemingly did the most basic of things.

For the moment, none of that really mattered. What did matter was that regardless of how little practice he even had using the skills and functions he’d found on the blackaether, he still had them loaded into his Censor. It would be rough and messy—not to mention stupid, even if it was stupider to wait in that cell for death to find him—but Olivier wasn’t completely helpless.

He could do this—get himself and Cheska and anyone else who was willing to fight for their freedom—out of there. Then, when he got out of there, he was going to be enrolling himself in some sort of combat class. There were a few—martial arts classes and clubs where using skills in things like war games was expected. They weren’t exactly common, but they existed, and they were better than nothing—although, asking Emilia or one of the clones for lessons was also an option, or even Halen, who had been funny and charming and attractive and—

And nope. Olivier wasn’t going there. Halen clearly had feelings for Emilia, and his own relationship with the girl was already a ball of complications. There would be no getting close to Halen, only to become his friend and be left to watch these two people who he could so easily see opening his heart to, if only things were different, love each other instead.

That sort of messy situation was best avoided. First, however, he had to get back to them so he could avoid it.