Arc 9 | Chapter 435: The Not-a-Rock Rescue Mission is of the Utmost Importance

Levi had no idea

why

, but he had to get

his

not-a-rock back—and it was

his

. Was it weird that he thought of this odd thing that he’d found only a little while ago as

his

? Absolutely. Didn’t matter. The little fucking not-a-rock was

his

, and how dare someone take it from him!?

Fortunately, it didn’t seem like the person who had taken it from him—and fuck had the woman been so insistent that she wanted it!?—had noticed him trailing her yet. Idiot. Levi had no idea what that thing was, but why would the chick assume he couldn’t feel how important it was? Clearly it was important enough that she’d risked her life ripping it away from Levi, so why shouldn’t it be important to him as well?

Even now, leaning against the wall of a tunnel a little ways off from where the woman who had stolen his not-a-rock was taking a moment to rest, fingers shifting over her xphern before she was swearing about how they were still in a transmission dead zone, Levi could feel his not-a-rock calling to him. From the moment he had picked it up, it had felt important—connected to him in a way he hadn’t been able to explain. When he’d handed it over to Simeon, he’d been able to tolerate the other boy examining it, but he’d still felt an insatiable need to grab it back up before his future slipped away from him.

It was insane. Luckily enough, he was used to being one of the more insane members of their friend group, and when he’d mentioned this to Simeon and Darrian, they’d simply smiled like it was the most normal thing in the world. Simeon had promised to return it—which he had!—while Darrian had pressed a kiss to his forehead! It was so sweet! Of course, then his sister had ruined it and made a joke about him being in love with his not-a-rock—which he wasn’t! At the same time…

Levi missed Coral. Coral might have been able to help him figure out what was up with his attachment to the not-a-rock, which yes, he realized was insane, thank you. Most people didn’t pick up random, if also interesting and pretty, not-rocks and become so instantly attached to them. While he knew some Dyads could be obsessive like that—stars knew Simeon was touchy about anyone touching his willbrand experiments without permission—Levi had never been that way. If anything, he was usually rather rough with everything he owned or touched—that was part of why Simeon was

very

against him in particular touching his willbrands without permission.

At his core, Levi was what he was: an agent of chaos and destruction who rarely thought before he did anything. Case in point: his running off and not even bringing backup or telling anyone what had happened. He was pretty sure a few people had noticed him running off after his not-a-rock-napper, but who really knew. It would be fine… probably.

Either way, he wasn’t leaving without his not-a-rock, and no one else deserved to be dragged into his mission, especially not when Emilia still needed help!

Still, hopefully Darrian wasn’t worrying too much. Out of all their friends, Levi was aware that only a few of them would actually care enough to worry about him, especially given this was sort of self-inflicted—it had been his fault his not-a-rock had been taken, after all! If only he’d been holding on to it better, then—

The not-a-rock-napper began to move, the dot that his Censor had created on its internal map of the cave system beginning to move. Luckily, for as much as their parents were worried about him and his sister taking over the Baxter branch, they’d still received all the training they would ever need, and only an idiot didn’t immediately mark the people they were fighting with little balls of aether, so they could keep track of them if they got away.

Well… maybe

idiots

was a bit too mean.

Only idiots with aetherstores as huge as his were

was probably more accurate, Levi’s aetherstores some of the largest that had ever been recorded outside of a non-dev. With their size, Levi didn’t worry too much about the ongoing stress of having more than a few iterations of the tracking skill running. Some of the bodies were still back where he’d left his friends—who had gotten moving again, the tracker he’d placed on Darrian starting to flicker as whatever the cave system was made of began interfering with the skill, just like it did the aethernet, and apparently xpherns as well. More of the attackers he’d hit with trackers were moving through the cave, flickering in and out as they wound their way through the cave system, sometimes solo, sometimes in small groups

It was good to know that the skill wouldn’t completely fizzle out if he were out of range—he’d need to find his friends again eventually, and who knew if something more than the cave system was interfering with their relays, even if that’s what they were all assuming was the problem. The skill was also helping him create a more complete map of the cave system, even if the flickering was causing gaps. If he had to release all his skills and run while primarily relying on the map to navigate, he’d be good, more or less.

Still, he wasn’t an idiot, no matter what everyone was always saying. Sure, he was reckless, but only when it wasn’t important. Would most of his friends argue his not-a-rock rescue mission was in no way important? Absolutely. Levi would disagree—it was of the upmost importance. He still wasn’t an idiot, and in the time his mark had paused—something had told Levi he should wait until the woman got wherever she was going to take his not-a-rock back—Levi had pulled more and more gear from the aether.

Hopefully, none of the more complicated gear would be needed—he’d only need most of the equipment if his access to skills was completely fucked. Still,

not an idiot

, and he wasn’t getting stuck in this fucking place because he hadn’t wanted to carry around a little extra gear and then got stuck in a situation where he couldn’t use his Censor to create it, and seriously, if Leerin’s own insistence that the gear was too uncomfortable to walk in got Darrian hurt…

Mostly, in Levi’s estimation, the gear was a little annoying because it clinked as he moved, leaving him to keep a deafening skill pulled close around his entire body, rather than just his feet, as he moved. Honestly, that was probably the most tiresome thing about trailing after this random not-a-rock-napper: he had to spread a deafening skill over most of the ground, so any rocks he disrupted wouldn’t cause the chick to realize she was being trailed.

Luckily, the woman didn’t seem to have the sort of aether awareness some Free Coloniers had—if she did, she would have noticed Levi and all the skills he had wrapped around himself long ago. That luck might not hold forever, though. Eventually, when she met up with the rest of their attackers—and who the fuck knew who else might be waiting wherever they were headed—

someone

was bound to feel him. So, Levi also had dozens of defensive skills loaded up, ready to explode out of him.

Really, he was going to owe Hurinren and Yujao for taking the time to help him train, that extra dose of training with Free Coloniers—especially one as chaotic as Yujao—was definitely a boon to his confidence. The training with the clones and his family members helped as well, of course, but there was just something about the Dionese men that was… different. It wasn’t even just that they were Free Coloniers, nor Yujao’s chaos matching his own. Instead, it was more that there was a brutality to them that

could

exist within black knots, but was generally pushed down within the training that members of The Black Knot’s ruling families received.

Baylor could pull out that brutality when needed. No one encouraged it, knowing that one day he might snap. Most of their family members could be cold and calculating—could kill without remorse. It wasn’t the same as what Hurinren and Yujao were capable of, and fortunately, soon after they’d first met during their teens, they’d both agreed to let him train with them whenever he wanted—which, he usually did, only the difficulty of getting to and from Dion stopping him from spending more time there than he already did.

Still, many an illegal trip to Dion had been made so he could train with them—so illegal that he had only really ever told Emilia, so she could cover his tracks and let the men know he was coming. They’d slip him into the Inner Court, slip him out. A few other people knew he visited, but not many.

Part of it was simply that, once again, Levi

wasn’t stupid!

While he couldn’t put his finger on

exactly

what was happening, he’d had a feeling since he was younger that

something

was wrong within The Black Knot—or maybe the Baalphorian government. It was more, he supposed, a question of whether it was the

older clones

alone who were working against The Black Knot higher ups, or if they were working on behalf of the government. Levi had no idea, but for a long time, he’d felt like

something

was coming.

In an organization as old as theirs, things moved slowly, and it really wouldn’t surprise him if nothing came of this feeling for decades—maybe even centuries. Eventually, something would snap. Before even meeting Emilia, he had felt this way. Before anyone realized how broken Baylor or Finn or Cyan were, their existence causing a shift within the mentality that clones were clones and there was no escape from their fate. Now, with tensions pushing tighter with each passing incident, with Malcolm effectively proving that Emilia’s presence in all their hearts was an issue they had no fix for, Levi knew it was true: at some point in the future, The Black Knot would crack, and their side would need every ounce of power and secrecy they could get.

So, he secretly trained with Hurinren and Yujao. So, he crossed the line between their sides of the class and occasionally asked Halen to help him create skills that were more suited to his style of coding than Emilia’s. Of course, Emilia knew this—there was no way he’d ever keep anything like this from her, knowing that she was a potential catalyst in the situation, a potential mark when it exploded. Fortunately, as much as Halen seemed to find him to be the most exhausting person in existence, Levi—again—wasn’t stupid!

Had he been told that he was stupid so many times over the years that he now had a bit of a complex about it? Probably. It didn’t exactly bother him—if anything, people thinking him an utter waste of brain space worked for him, allowing him the ability to brush aside claims that he wasn’t so empty-headed and might actually have a dangerous and calculating side. At the same time, it didn’t exactly

not

bother him, mostly because it wasn’t like he had purposefully cultivated an identity of stupidity; rather, people just assumed it because he was constantly not thinking through his actions when they didn’t matter.

When they did matter, he knew how to be stupid intentionally, when to reveal the truth of how his mind was spinning. With Halen, he had effectively kidnapped him—dragged him away from the prying eyes of the OIC and demanded he turn off his Censor’s monitoring. The great thing about Halen was he wasn’t an idiot either, and while someone else might have assumed Levi was going to kill them, Halen hadn’t. It probably helped that Halen was powerful enough that Levi wasn’t even sure he

could

kill him—not back then, anyways. Still, a short conversation later about how he needed someone other than Emilia to occasionally create skills for him and his suspicions that something weird was happening within The Black Knot, and Halen had agreed to design skills and functions for him sometimes.

Levi had no doubt that over the decades, his training with Hurinren and Yujao and other Free Coloniers, as well as the skills Halen—and Emilia as well—created solely for him, would leak into the world. Much like how Simeon wouldn’t keep his willbrand experiments hidden during a crisis, neither would Levi keep any part of what he knew hidden at the potential cost of one of his friends’ lives. The point wasn’t to keep it all a secret, but rather to give him all the more options on how to be a monster. They were all monsters, hiding skills from Emilia and Halen within themselves, cataloguing everything they could learn from any person who fell into their path.

The point, in the end, was to stuff so much within themselves that whenever those skills and all the training they had forced into themselves were needed, no one would ever see it coming.

Certainly, Levi doubted that anyone would expect for him to pause, some instinct pulling him back in warning. There was a predator nearby—that hypothetical person who would be able to tell that he was there simply by all the skills vibrating out of and in to him.

Hand slipping into a pocket, Levi grabbed one of the pills he’d brought along with him as an emergency measure. Not the best of options, but…

No—there was no

but

.

Popping the pill into his mouth, the world went dark, and Levi’s stepped continued on, as silent as before, but for entirely different reasons.