A cage of blackness reached through the front room of the dilapidated house, threatening to clamp down on the young person and the child tucked into their neck. It wasn’t going to reach them—Emilia knew that, even before her microsparking brought her back to the room where she and the other man had left his companions. She could feel it, was the thing—this energy surged through the person holding the child, readying to shattered out and break apart the core ability bearing down on them.
They wouldn’t get a chance. Emilia wouldn’t let them exert themself like this. They were sick! They needed to rest!
Also! Who was attacking not only a sick person holding a child, but doing so the moment they burst into a building as well!?
Emilia’s own defensive skills, which had been preloaded near constantly as she searched for Olivier, exploded out of her as she returned to the front room. Within her Censor, a scattering of information was seeped from the aether, telling it where to place each precise dot of aether pulled from her own body—from the aetherstores that pressed throughout her body.
There were dozens of spots, big and small. A spot behind her heart; another tucked behind her second-lowest rib, on the right side. The arc of her left foot had an oddly large one, while oddly long ones glided along the waves of the delicate veins on each of her forearms. Those last ones were where she usually pulled her aether from for combat skills. They weren’t the biggest, but she’d primarily learned how to fight in Dion, and in nations that used their cores, the ability to force energy directly from fists and feet, from elbows and foreheads slamming into unsuspecting assailants, was often considered a stepping stone to full core mastery.
Emilia, of course, had only been allowed to learn the basics of all this. If she’d asked, the Blood Rain General likely would have taught her how to use her core, but they’d know that neither the Baalphorian government nor the Censor she would eventually have installed into her would like it.
Still, she had spent months training with Hurinren. During that time, she had not only overheard all the instruction he was receiving on core usage, but also sparred with him. Years later, before her first trip to Dion with her Censor, Emilia had spent weeks coding skills that she could use to fight him. Her lotyung would always be more skilled in many of the things their teacher taught them, and although Emilia had tried her best to learn from the clones and supplement Hurinren’s year-round training, she wasn’t stupid.
In many things, Hurinren would always be better than her. Teenage her had been convinced she could create skills to match him—things that would be a skill version of all the techniques the Blood Rain General had spent years teaching him, mere spats of time teaching her. To some extent, it had worked. Emilia had returned to Dion able to use skills that leaked from her body during physical combat, emulating the skills Hurinren used on her in return. Hurinren, however, had still been too good. It hadn’t bothered Emilia too much, and on her next trip, she’d come bearing more skills, seeking to beat him. Somewhere along the way, she’d started being able to beat him occasionally, when they were using the Blood Rain General’s rules. Some time after that, the old man had stopped caring about the rules of
proper Dionese sparing
, and when they went near-all-out against one another—they didn’t actually want to kill each other, despite what certain people claimed—they were relatively well-matched.
So much experience had come out of those lessons and fights, some good, some not so much. Even half a lifetime later, Emilia still couldn’t decide if her tendency to use the aetherstores in her forearms was good or bad. Mostly, it didn’t matter—it wasn’t like she couldn’t use the other ones, and if anything, leaving the bigger of her aetherstores untouched meant leaving more in reserve, while she’d noticed that Free Coloniers who could read where energy and aether was coming from often missed her bigger aetherstores or assumed she couldn’t use them, allowing her to take them by surprise when BOOM! Massively powerful skill being pulled out of other aetherstores that sat within her.
What was a little more inconvenient was the fact that she tended to, uh… motion, when activating skills. Part of it was because so many of the abilities the Blood Rain General had taught Hurinren started out as abilities that required physical movement. The wave of a hand acting as a catalyst to get energy moving, so a burst of it could explode from a hand—that sort of thing! It made sense, especially since core abilities took longer to learn! Skills worked as long as the person had practiced it enough—a few dozen times, for most people, so they’d get a taste for it in their body and mind—and had enough aether to offer up to it, as well as the mental capacity for their Censor to do all the calculations. Censors did most of its calculations in the background, but it still put stress on the brain, and Load Levels—which effected how much cognitive load a person’s brain could handle—played a big part in how fast it could do so, as well as how much it could do before its owner’s brain ran out of steam.
Other years of training, most core users would learn how to use core abilities without the physical movements, although Emilia had seen many turn to movements for skills they rarely used. Hurinren didn’t need to move his body for anything these days, although Emilia knew he did for many of his most powerful skills, simply so fewer people would realize he was turning out to be even more terrifying than their teacher.
So no, Emilia definitely didn’t need to dramatically wave her hand in front of her as sent up a defensive skill. She still did, shimmering purple ripping from the aether to create a finely meshed net that strained all power from the intruder’s attack. She also didn’t need to swipe her hand downwards as she captured the person in turn, nor brush it delicately towards the wall she sent them slamming into. Emilia, however, had always been a dramatic person, so she did these anyways. Did it make her look badass or cringy? Probably one or both. It didn’t much bother her.
“Who the fuck are you?”
she asked, her Censor informing her that the man who had been leading her to the tunnel entrance had scurried out of the doorway behind her to his companions. It also noted that the sick person’s energy had settled—good. Using their energy definitely wouldn’t help them get better. If anything, considering how sick they were, it might very well cause them to die on the spot.
“I think I should be asking you that,”
the woman she had pinned against the wall spit out, blood splattering over the floor. Emilia didn’t think she’d slammed her hard enough to cause internal damage, but who really knew… or cared. Not her.
“I feel like the person bursting into buildings and immediately attacking random people should be the one explaining themself,”
Emilia pointed out, silently cursing the universe for somehow having ended up in a building that was about to be attacked. While generally, she was always willing to help—far, far too willing, in most people’s opinions—she really didn’t have time for this! At the same time, she wasn’t the sort of person who could just leave these people to be robbed or killed by some random criminal.
At the very least, the woman didn’t seem to be after her—it would have been far worse if she’d caused these three to be attacked. Still, random attack? Or an attack on these specific people?
Scoffing, the woman told her that they weren’t
random people.
Well, okay then. Targeted attack on at least one of the people behind her—Lüshanian was the sort of language where more context was needed to determine if
one
or
all
of the people behind her
weren’t random.
Fortunately…
“Stop. I’ll go with you. Just leave them alone,”
the atrociously sick sounding person croaked. They were so sick, in fact, that while the sound of a person’s voice definitely wasn’t a guarantee as to their gender, Emilia couldn’t even guess at what gender they might be. Fucking stars. How much had they been coughing and vomiting to end up sounding like that? Their throat sounded so messed up that it might be permanently damaged!
“Picked up some strays while you ran, little bug? Oh~ and another little bug for us to take?”
the woman laughed, her eyes all predatory glee as she stared at the sick person—and given the angle of their eyes, perhaps the child as well.
Yeah. No. For all Emilia knew, the sick person was a terrible human being—although she doubted it, considering she was pretty sure they had been the one arguing that their group help her find the tunnel entrance, and they’d just volunteered to go with this lady if she left the rest of them alone. The sick person might deserve to be dragged away by this woman. Knowing nothing about the situation, she had no idea who was in the right about that. What she did know was that there was no way this woman was taking the kid.
Absolutely not.
“There are no little bugs here for you to take,”
Emilia interjected, microsparking in between the woman and the group. With how many junk skills she was throwing out, it would be difficult, but not impossible, for the woman to attack them. Even with the recent upgrades, Censors weren’t powerful enough to send out enough junk skills to completely block most core abilities, nor more powerful skills. They were still a layer of protection, however. Definitely, it would slow down this woman’s attempts at attacking, at least until her core figured out how to get through the junk skills.
For someone like that man from before, though? Emilia wasn’t sure junk skills would stop him for more than a few seconds. There had just been something about him that told her he was tuned into the aether in a way that made him more dangerous than most people.
With any luck, she’d never have the opportunity to find out. Given the way this day—or perhaps the entire trip—was going, Emilia wasn’t sure if luck was on her side at the moment.
When the woman’s eyes shifted back to her, an eerie shade of blue, so light they were almost white, a memory flashed through her mind. Not something of this woman, but someone who looked similar to her, his dying eyes the same empty shade as hers, the cruel smile he had worn before Wander struck him down nearly identical to the one she wore now.
Back when she’d helped take down the trafficking group, there had been so many faces, all blurring together as she tried to get the people she found in that shithole to safety. All their voices blurred together as well, those voices and faces having to be pulled apart into something sensible by the clones so it could be handed over to the Drinarna. The clones had asked if she wanted to remember more of the specifics. She hadn’t, so they’d left her memories blurry in her brain.
Now, she wished she had the full memories—wished she’d had the forethought to realize that she was the sort of person to forever be finding herself in trouble. It didn’t even come as a surprise that she’d somehow happened across some person related to one of the people she’d had a hand in killing back then. What was surprising, was the semblance of a memory itching at the back of her brain.
There had been something—some passing words, whispered between the people who had been shifting between those dreary cells in the hours she’d spent there before escaping.
Something… something about
little bugs.
Such words weren’t common in Lüshan, as far as she knew. If they were, she’d never heard them before those cells, hadn’t heard them again until they slipped from this woman’s mouth.
It was possible they were just words, spoken in a single family or amongst criminals.
It was also possible they were words used to refer to valuable people—after all, it had only been those amongst the trafficking victims with the most valuable irregular deviations who were referred to as
little bugs,
as far she could tell. People more valuable than her, with only her silverstrain evident, while she had pulled her non-dev status deep inside her and forced herself to embody the empty-headed slut people often assumed her to be.
If this person behind her was a
little bug
, did that mean they were valuable? Dangerous? Then again, this woman had seemingly referred to the child as a
little bug
as well, and from what Emilia could see—
No.
No.
Fuck.
Her Censor had caught it; removed it from her logs temporarily so as to not panic her. Emilia wasn’t going to panic over this, but also…
Behind her, the child had peeked out from the sick person’s neck, their lavender eyes gazing at her back—gazing towards the woman who looked ready to snap out and rip the rest of them to shreds, all for that child.
All for the little lavender code and the power tucked inside them.
Arc 9 | Chapter 391: Little Bugs
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