Arc X.1 | Chapter 510: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 22

Conrad—he was going to continue thinking of himself as

Conrad,

despite the decision to choose the name having been spur of the moment and based entirely upon his real name contained the sound -

con

—was having a pretty good time on this impromptu vacation. Really, when he had decided to head to Baalphoria after meeting Emilia within the raid, he hadn’t known what to expect. They had some things in common—some growing suspicions on a couple of subjects—sure, but really, it was that immediate connection that he hadn’t quite been able to explain that had dragged him to Baalphoria, regardless of the risk.

From the moment he had laid eyes on the silverstrain girl, it had felt as though some part of her was

his,

some part of himself

hers.

It wasn’t romantic, but it was there and strange and every moment they had spent apart both within the raid and without felt a little

odd

—a little

wrong.

It also felt oddly familiar—like an ancient memory he could no longer remember through words or images but his body remembered nonetheless.

So, that was strange, and the odd feeling he had gotten from Colrathi Kiro before he ended the raid—that feeling that they were silently demanding he join the raid with his family when he definitely hadn’t wanted to—was impossible to shake.

Somehow, it felt as though Colrathi Kiro had

known

he needed to be inside the raid—had

known

he would meet Emilia there, and as much as he’d always believed in the

will of the aether

more than most, this was up there in the strange department.

Granted, Conrad had a long trail of

strange things

trailing him. Normally, however, those things were of his own making, not accidents of meeting inside raids because he hadn’t been able to escape his annoying family’s demands he join them. That raid hadn’t been somewhere he wanted to be—and don’t get him wrong, he enjoyed raids! Usually, he preferred raids that were fully populated by real souls, however, so he didn’t need to care about

killing

them—raid heroes would just pop back into their bodies, after all. As proven by their various massacres throughout the raid, most members of his family, save his youngest niece and older brother, didn’t really care about killing

unfeeling AIs

.

Then again, most members of his family were the sorts of people willing to cut down anyone who got in their war. He was that way as well, but these days… Well, the people who got in his way these days often had what was coming to them—always had, for the most part.

A long line of abusers lay piled behind him, alongside people who had gotten between him snuffing out those toxic lives. Ironic that his own sister was a horrible human being, the only thing holding him back from killing her the fact that doing so would likely cause a civil war. It was coming, but his brother didn’t want to push the issue.

“I have offered to have all those children moved elsewhere,”

his brother had said, nearly forty years, when Conrad had accidentally witnessed the things his sister was making her children do for her—the danger she was putting them in for nothing but her own greed.

“None of them have accepted my offer. There is only so much we can do for children who do not see the abuse being inflicted on them for what it is.”

Considering that removing their nieces and nephews would have likely ended in both of them having to leave their home nation as well, neither he nor his older brother had been inclined to push the issue—after all, the oldest of their niblings had made it clear that they would put up a fight if they attempted to

remove them from their mother’s care for their own good.

Their niblings would have caused problems and returned to their mother’s abuse, no matter what they did. At least if he and his brother remained in their general vicinity, they could maintain some control of their family and nation—offer protection where they could.

This, of course, had all been before the war. It had been a while since Conrad had spent more that smatterings of time with most of their niblings, and honestly, he hadn’t realized how traumatized Oria was, nor how rebellious the youngest of his nieces was—to say nothing of Tobias having been so brokenly subservient, while Kostas was so desperate for the affection of a woman who had accepted being his

mother

with nothing but hatred and resentment in her heart.

Mostly, he now wanted to get at least a few of them out—get them into the hands of people who would actually care for them.

“She offered to help me…”

Oria had said after the raid ended, the girl staring dazedly into space as a doctor assessed her, making sure the raid hadn’t affected her mind the way it had her mother and brother. Gone was the entitled little girl his eldest niece had often been, someone broken by war sitting in her place.

Outside, more of his niblings had sat, chatting amongst themselves about the raid and how two of them were lucky to have been ejected from the raid by Emilia so early—his other brother as well, although none of them were seeing their deaths as a blessing that had kept them safe from the manipulations of the heartcores. No, instead they seemed to be taking their deaths as some sort of curse—after all, dead and out of the game, they hadn’t been around to make sure the rest of their family had been safe.

“I would have been able to see what those heartcores were doing to them, if I’d been there.”

“Yeah, right, you have the observational skills of a fish.”

“Fish have great instincts.”

“Better instincts than you.”

“Yeah, you get lost going to a store downstairs. No instincts at all.”

A fight had briefly threatened to break out, Conrad only listening passively through the temporary Censor he had yet to take off—recording everything that was happening was important, even if wearing one outside of accessing one of the Virtuosi Rigs that had been smuggled into the nation over the last few decades as illegal. It wasn’t like the laws come touch him; so, why would he care? Also, he’d wanted the ability to spark off, lest his family decide to turn their ire on him—they had, but never to the extent that he actually needed to leave.

As the argument brewed, however, he had smashed his energy down on his niblings, not wanting them to make the situation worse. They hadn’t been happy, but at least they had shut up for a little bit as they waited for their various assessments, Conrad going back to considering what Oria had said—considering if trying to get her out of the nation and to someone who could help her was reasonable.

There were a few former teammates he could send her to. Had G.H. not been in the middle of some sort of crisis—apparently, some Baalphorian girl had stolen something valuable from him, and as if that weren’t bad enough, some of his enemies had figured out she had it and were mobilizing to try and steal it from her. G.H. had said something about them mobilizing lavender codes, which wasn’t great. Could the guy still keep his niece safe while also helping her pick through her trauma despite his current crisis? Yes, but Conrad didn’t really want to put more on the man—he was already busy with some sort of

exotic fruit crisis because someone won’t do her paperwork

… which… Conrad didn’t even know. Mostly, running an international criminal enterprise seemed like

a lot

of work?

Also, why did an international fruit smuggling ring even

have

paperwork? Wasn’t that just asking for someone to find the paperwork and track things back to G.H.’s mystery fruit supplier? It all seemed complicated and not for him, personally, even if the drinks and desserts made out of those fruit were delicious.

Cool fingers brushed against Conrad’s forehead, his gaze refocusing on the real world—and really, when was the last time he had felt safe enough to let his mind wander so fully? Generally, only his brother and G.H. could give him that amount of safety. Mostly, as he peered up into Darrian’s clear-blue eyes, the younger man smiling softly down at him and asking if everything was alright inside his head, Conrad assumed it was Hyr’s presence that was allowing him to relax so completely—that kid was a monster, after all—although certainly, the pretty Baalphorian boy helped.

There was just something about Darrian that was calming, and much as it had been with Emilia, there was an immediate connection between them, although in this case, there was no lingering feeling of familiarity. There was some sort of sexual tension, definitely, but there was something else as well—a bubble of possibility, perhaps?

If whatever friendship he had so instantly found with Emilia had felt like an inevitable fall, whatever might blossom between himself and Darrian felt like a cliff, standing by the Zereth Sea, just as blue as the man’s eyes—a jump the universe was waiting for him to take.

Shrugging, Conrad told him that everything was

more or less alright.

“Things at home were complicated when I left, is all,” he said, rocking back on his heels and glancing around. Nothing was different in the little transition room from the last time he looked—unsurprising, as it had only been a few seconds. “Why?” he asked, clarifying that he was wondering how Darrian had come to realize his thoughts were wandering.

A small smile tugged at the Baalphorian’s lips as he let the hand that he had been idly fiddling through Conrad’s hair fall. Almost immediately, Conrad mourned the loss of contact. Physical contact had never really been part of his family dynamic. His older brother would hug him sometimes, and he had always enjoyed watching his niblings when they were babies and toddlers, their small bodies claiming space on his with the entitlement and confidence of children who had yet to know how cold the world really was.

His want of physical connection was something he struggled to claim for himself, and every moment of touch with Emilia had left him wishing for more. At multiple points during the raid, he had carried her about, refusing to put her down not only because leaving her had made his heart feel liable to crack, but because he was enjoying the sensation of her soft in his arms.

It was nothing compared to her arms in the real world, and the few times she had wrapped him in a hug or nudged his shoulder with hers, all he had wanted was to ask for more, the words and want heavy on his tongue and it was ridiculous.

There had been times in his life where he had fearlessly wandered into dens of criminals—both those defined as such by laws and they themselves, and those who were politicians and

people of power

who used that power to fund their abuses—and demanded what he wanted. He had risked wars asking for what he wanted and then taking it, regardless of having been told no. He stole, cheated, killed, and yet, he couldn’t ask for a hug—couldn’t beg for the physical connection he had been lacking since the day he was born because his older brother had only been able to give him so much, and the love of an elder brother was only so much compared to the disdain and neglect of a parent.

A pang went through his heart at that, as his mind fell back to the hatred his sister had for a handful of her children—for the way she neglected even those she claimed to love because Oria needed help, and yet all his sister was doing was enabling her and drawing her more into a state of broken entitlement.

Fingers brushed over his forehead once again, the smallest of physical contact that had him burning for more, not realizing until Darrian’s eyes were crinkling in mirth that he had risen onto his toes in order to gain more connection.

Well, that was a little embarrassing, especially as he was the older one!

Then again, he’d already figured out that both Emilia and Darrian were Division 30 members—what was the way Baalphorians put it? Anonymous members? Private members? Secret members? Well, the words didn’t matter—their privacy was simply something to keep in mind so he didn’t accidentally make that knowledge public. What did matter? The amount of abuse members of Division 30 had inflicted on themselves during the war, spending so much time within the time skew of their training system that it was rumoured most no longer knew exactly how old their minds were.

His own unit had spent quite a bit of time within their customized version of the training system—most of them had such odd abilities that Sil had needed to program in a handful of new functions and abilities just for them. It was doubtful that the millennia or so he had spent within the system was anything compared to what Emilia and Darrian had under them—after all, his unit was powerful, but for as good of a skill designer as Sil was, for how good some of their members were at creating new ways to take down their enemies, most of the more devastating skills and the best strategies for fighting every variety of monster had come out of Division 30.

Each member, he imagined, must hold millennia upon millennia inside them—so much time that, eventually, they had ceased to feel time flow, had ceased to feel themselves age. Every time he saw those he knew to be members speak, he thought them something strange—some strange human with the abilities of a god and the mind of a child, all stuffed into one package.

Being something strange himself, it wasn’t bad, but it was something that had led him to struggle to make and keep friends—really, the friends he had made in his team during the war continued to be precious to him as a result of how few he had. Even with how strained things had been with Niles since before the war ended, Conrad would still burn the world down for him, weirdly purist thoughts born of trauma or not.

That

—his ability to accept that trauma did weird things to a person’s mind, along with his knowledge that all those eons within the training system fucked with a person’s mind—was the main reason he was mostly choosing to ignore Darrian’s cousin.

Leerin Zentari

wasn’t his problem to deal with, and while he would tell her to shove it if she said something horrific in his presence—especially if she said anything bad to Hyr, that child truly being

a child,

regardless of how much time the aether had given them through visions—he wouldn’t be calling her out for her more passive comments either.

“You just have a look,” Darrian laughed when Conrad finally managed to pull his attention back to him for more than a few seconds at a time—although, really, with how fast his mind was currently spinning, they’d only been standing there together for a few minutes. “It’s the same look Emmie gets, when her mind is spinning—Olivier as well.”

The other man’s head tilted in thought before he was rattling off a few other names. Some Conrad recognized as other Division 30 members, while he thought another was the other de la Rue family non-dev—the one who wasn’t public, but whom his own unit’s commander had known since he was a child, being passed off to Olivier de la Rue, Halen Mhrina, and Emilia along with so many other Lüshanians who would go on to become well-known members of Division 30.

“I wasn’t aware I had a thinking look,” Conrad noted, thinking back to a thousand moments of being lost in thought while people were talking to him. There was a chance he had messed up a handful of missions because no one could tell when he was daydreaming.

Darrian—who had apparently taken him rising onto his toes to press into his hand as a sign that he wanted him to play with his hair, which, fuck yeah—simply laughed and said that he was sure most people couldn’t tell. “I grew up surrounded by low- and non-devs, you know? Around Dyads and people with odd genetic conditions that aren’t even considered irregular deviations. I don’t know about the rest of my childhood friends, but I know I learned from watching them, and there are signs. They’re small, but they are there.”

His fingers scratched into Conrad’s head and fuck if he wasn’t going to melt—might fall into the man and beg him to never let him go. That was insane—insane and too fast. Conrad had already made fast friends—obsessive friends—with Emilia and Hyr.

He needed to slow down.

They had a few days—weeks, considering they were still intending to head into the Virtuosi System to practice working together, and fuck if he wasn’t grateful for the fact that Emilia had made sure his CS would be perfectly capable of getting around

any

of the system’s attempts to monitor his Virtuosi Hours. The ship’s system could still monitor the time he spent within its own system, of course—she’d informed them that she’d have to

see if she could do something about that once they were on the ship

—but it would ignore any time before their came onboard. After all those weeks training back at Emilia’s school, then learning to sign along with Hyr at her friend’s studio, Conrad would be rather upset for the system to cut off his Darrian time.

Didn’t the system know that a few months, stuffed into a single day, was nothing but a light dusting of time? It wasn’t centuries, packed into the human mind until it felt liable to split. It wasn’t millennia, leaving those who lived so long to melt into a puddle of a person, capable of being a god, a child, a broken soul all at once.

All that was to say, there was no need to rush. There was time, even if there was a tick in the air—a lingering feeling in the occasional glance Hyr sent him—that said that

something

was coming.

Conrad didn’t think it was a good something.