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Arcane Apocalypse ~ 47
🕑 Added 2024-10-11 16:00:16 +0000 UTC********************************************************************************************************************************************************************
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Du1hcPtakfIeSN5kEBOWg1QQOdBSOcBRygqlqpHhIII/edit?usp=sharing
*****
“How-,” Mia started, considering her following words carefully. They were trudging back towards the city, not in too much of a hurry. Mia would have forgotten that she wasn’t just out on a leisurely hike had it not been for the sound of heavy footsteps following after the two girls from a dozen metres back. “How certain are you that he’ll behave?”
”Moderately certain,” Carmilla said with a tense shrug. “He’ll probably play nice while within my view. When he’s not though? I can’t be sure.”
“Stellar,” Mia said sourly, then took a breath and looked apologetically at Carmilla. “Sorry. I’m just … I haven’t seen a corpse before, not one like that anyway. It rankled me, a bit.”
“It’s fine,” Carmilla said, sounding sincere. “While we have the time, I wanted to thank you. For listening to me. You didn’t even question it, just trusted me and that- uhm, I appreciate it.”
“Of course,” Mia said, giving the vampiress a shy smile. Inwardly, she was immensely thankful to Carmilla for stopping her from doing something she would surely come to regret.
Back then, she was entirely ready to shred Lars to little bit sized chunks, but that was before she knew that he was a human. Or, well, sort of? Person, mortal? What was the comprehensive term for everyone who’d been a human a month ago but was not anymore?
Mortals sounds … bad. Paranormal doesn’t quite fit with humans also being magical and shit, sooo what else is there?
Mia shook hear head, pushing that distracting line of thought to the back of her mind. She was thinking of how happy she was that she hadn’t accidentally committed murder. Sure, Lars was a bit iffy in the sanity department, but that wasn’t grounds for throwing him into a magical meat-grinder.
“Do you think he’ll … get better?” Mia whispered, glancing back at the heavyset man. “You said the breaking of that Pack magic broke something in him, right? Does that heal?”
“Perhaps,” Carmilla said, not sounding too worried. “I don’t know much about healing, but I think healing the sort of mental trauma he has would be complicated. Even with magic. That shouldn’t matter to us though, we just need him to tell Zeigler what he wants to know then he can go back to doing whatever … just further away from civilisation.”
“That’s what you want to do with him?” Mia asked, trying not to sound accusatory. She didn’t feel Carmilla had to do anything for Lars, but she had enough social graces to know her question could come off like she was shaming the girl for not doing more for the loony werebear. “Wring him dry for information then let him back out into nature like some wild animal?”
“Yes,” Carmilla said, shrugging in a way that told Mia she wasn’t offended by her words. Mia let out an inaudible sight of relief. “I can’t be arsed to babysit him. He attacked us, even if he is a bit loony, we would have been in our rights to kill him for it. Just like he’d killed that beastkin for attacking him.”
“But you stopped me from doing so,” Mia said, scrunching her face up a bit. “Didn’t you say that was because you didn’t want to kill him if he only killed the beastkin in self-defence?”
“I mean,” Carmilla said, drawing the word out more than it needed to be, looking skittish. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
Mia raised an eyebrow and the taller redhead squirmed under her gaze uncomfortably.
“I’d have preferred to know whether he’d really deserve getting killed, but I wouldn’t have lost much sleep even if I didn’t and we ended up killing him.” Carmilla looked peevish, her gaze jumping between the ground before her feet and Mia’s strange stare like a grasshopper on LSD. “Does that make sense? I mean, he did attack us and I wouldn’t let him harm either of us. If it’s between him and us-“
“We attacked him, Carmilla,” Mia stated, sounding a touch bewildered. Not judging, neither angry, just bewildered at the thought process of the girl. “We tracked him to his home and threw a grenade into his bed.”
“That’s true,” Carmilla allowed, a bit too quick to agree. There was a colossal ‘but’ coming though, Mia could practically hear it already. “But, I refuse to let either of us die because of that. I don’t care if we attacked him first. If he is a threat to our lives, I don’t care whether what I’m doing is right.”
Mia stayed silent for a few lengthy seconds that seemed to make the vampiress more and more distressed. Seeing her shifting, mentally agonising over Mia’s eventual answer, a sense of guilt flooded Mia for not rushing to reassure the girl already.
But could she? Carmilla had just admitted that she would have killed an innocent man —not that Lars specifically was deemed innocent just yet — if he proved to endanger their lives.
Mia chewed on the insides of her cheeks, a flare of irritation bubbling up inside her. It was not aimed at Carmilla, no, it was solely aimed at herself.
I’d do the same … should do the same. Mia thought, jaw set tightly as she snapped her gaze down at the ground. In the end, Mia knew her flimsy morals would not hold up for even a moment if her life was in danger. She knew she would kill to stay alive, but the revulsion of the act of murder didn’t go away just from that.
What if I can’t do it? If my aversion to the mere concept of murder would make me freeze up? What if I died because despite my increasing Will, I am still a fucking cowardly wimp?
Another question floated inside her mind and silenced all others. What if her reluctance to kill would be what caused not her own death, but Carmilla’s?
That initial irritation bubbled over, morphing into an all too familiar self-hate that she thought she’d left behind. It seemed magic, stats, monsters and the System still couldn’t change the fact that she was a coward.
If she felt this bad just thinking about it, how bad would it get if her wimpiness really killed the girl she was starting to develop a pretty sizable crush on?
“Mia, I’m sorry if I said something stupid,” Carmilla said, having worked up the courage to speak up after Mia seemingly gave her the silent treatment. “I- I was- I don’t know. I just want to keep us safe. I can promise not to kill anyone if it bothers yo-“
“Stop!” Mia held up a hand, whirling around and stopping before Carmilla. The vampiress froze up, staring at Mia’s raised index finger at her lips like a deer at headlights. “You did … nothing wrong. I’m not blaming you, or angry at you or anything of the like. I’m just … angry at myself that I can’t promise to do the same for you.”
Carmilla’s eyes flew wide, her mouth opened silently as Mia embarrassedly removed her finger from her lips.
“Really?” Carmilla asked, sounding afraid and for a moment Mia didn’t see the leather-clad gorgeous vampiress before her, but the scrawny half-dead girl begging her to spare her life. “That’s fine! Entirely fine! I can kill them for you, you don’t need to bloody your hands if you don’t want to. It’s perfectly fine by me.”
Carmilly quickly flipped from being afraid of Mia’s rejection of her promise to being eager and almost gleeful.
“It’s not fine,” Mia said, frowning as she kicked herself for being a coward. “I … can’t promise I won’t freeze up, or something like that, but I’ll try to do my best. I’ll try to keep that promise too.”
Carmilla smiled, her lips gaining a gentle curve as she stared at Mia for a moment. “Okay.”
Mia’s face twitched, a complex set of changing emotions all tugging and pulling her features in different ways with none of them quite winning out.
A part of her was just glad that she’d gotten through that social quagmire of a conversation passably well, another part just swooned at Carmilla’s beautiful smile and another yet was sobbing in a corner of her mind, thinking about how horrible of a person she had to be to want to get used to murdering people.
Another part, a pretty large one, was cringing so hard it hurt.
‘I’ll do my best.’ Mia wanted to strangle her past self from five seconds ago. What would her best be good for if she let Carmilla die because her best simply just wasn’t enough?
She wanted to roll into a grave right there and then, or go back in time to make a true promise with the same certainty in each word as Carmilla had.
That’d be a lie. I can’t make a promise I’m not sure I can keep. That was something she’d kept herself to all her life. No promising stuff she couldn’t be certain to deliver on.
The best she could do is to hope her spine would grow somewhat firmer in the near future. Once she’d gotten over her aversion for killing, she could make that promise.
“We should get going,” Mia said, launching into a brisk walk to escape that lethal smile Carmilla was sending her way. Only thanks to her unnatural halvyr instincts did she not instantly run into a tree right behind her and instead managed to whirl around it.
She resisted the urge to kick the damned tree that jumped into her way. Instead acting like it didn’t even happen as she set her pace to be as fast as she could manage without breaking into a jog.
She heard Carmilla join her up, easily catching up with her in just seconds despite having remained behind for a few heartbeats.
“Wanna race back to the treeline?” Carmilla asked, a playful lilt in her voice.
Mia glanced at her, then at the forest before her. It was a thick lower alpine forest with thin, but hardy undergrowth. The main obstacles would be the mass of trunks and the larger rocks on the ground, or the slippery wet dirt on the harsher slopes.
Her heart sped up, her gaze almost instantly recognising the optimal path to race through the forest before her. She was aching to get some distraction anyways, a race might as well be it.
“Sure,” Mia said, a smirk playing on her lips. “On three?”
“Fine by me,” Carmilla said amusedly, and Mia suppressed the urge to give a mischievous smirk in turn.
“Three!” Mia burst into a sprint, her feet sinking into the dirt as she leaned into the launch. A giggle escaped her as Carmilla gave a sound of playful outrage behind her, Gabe had played her exactly like that a few times before she learned that she had to be the one counting down for there to be any sense of fairness to it.
Trees darted by Mia, her pink hair flying in the wind as she jumped over a fallen trunk. Her body wasn’t muscular but under her supple form hid corded muscles moulded by her 11 points of Agility.
She was almost floating, her boots barely touching the ground as she flowed over it like the wind. In contrast, Carmilla raced beside her like a predatory animal, her body moving with a serpentine grace that couldn’t be taught.
Where Mia seemed like an ethereal wisp just gliding over the forest floor, Carmilla was a part of the scenery, looking like she’d been born to prowl these woods.
A thin gully came up, a tiny stream babbling down towards the bottom of the slope. Mia tensed, pushing more power into her stride and then jumped. She whizzed by, flying over the gully like a ghost.
Behind her, Carmilla kicked off the ground harshly, the thrum of her boots on the ground resounding in the surrounding forest as she launched off like a missile.
Then they were back to the race. Mia grinned, the wind in her face giving her a pleasant escape from the scorching heat of the midsummer sun.
Mia knew the vampiress was faster than her, she’d seen Carmilla move in a fight, really move. If she put the same effort into leaving Mia in the dirt, she’d have no hope of even keeping pace with the girl.
Quite unlike how most would have predicted the race going, Carmilla always remained a few metres behind. The silly vampire wasn’t even trying to win, then again Mia loved the thought of just running through the forest in a pair even more than a race. So the redhead was certainly winning something.
All too soon, Mia saw the edge of the forest quickly approaching. Soon, the trees would thin out and their surroundings would transform to gentle slopes covered in fields of golden wheat and towering corn.
Mia slowed her pace reluctantly, not that her smile was diminished as she did. Her breathing was quick and heavy, but not even close to ragged as she slowed down to a leisurely stroll.
Carmilla joined her a few moments later, falling into step beside Mia with an easy grace befitting her heritage. She wasn’t even panting, her cheeks not even the slightest bit flushed from exertion.
Then again, maybe she didn’t have enough of a circulation to allow for that. Mia might have felt peeved at the girl’s apparent superiority over her, but she was too happy at the moment to care.
“That was fun,” Mia said cheerfully. “We should do that again sometime.”
“Mhmmm,” Carmilla said noncommittally, making Mia round on her with a hurt expression. Maybe the girl thought Mia would flip out if she didn’t let her ‘win’? What was that tenseness for? “I mean, sure, right! Let’s do it!”
Mia stared at the girl for a moment, not really sure what to make of her. Carmilla was certainly a strange girl, and unlike what the first impression Mia had of her portrayed her to be.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, you know,” Mia said gently. “I can take a no for an answer.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Carmilla said, looking ashamed of herself. “It’s quite the opposite, in fact. Which is the problem. I just figured out vampires have a … really strong- uhm, sorry for saying it like this, but prey drive. I was … having trouble controlling it.”
“Ohhh,” Mia said, blinking slowly as the many cogs in her head turned. Prey drive was that primal instinct in predators to find, pursue and capture prey. It usually triggered in most predators when they saw something running away from them. That something being me in this case? … I still wouldn’t mind her hunting me down and- “If you think that’s for the best. I understand.”
Mia nodded, biting her tongue before it could once again betray her thoughts. Carmilla was clearly vexed by her apparent lack of control, which Mia felt would have been a nasty thing to make light of by saying something along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t mind you chasing me down and capturing me.’
Furthermore, flirting was … not something she’d much experience with so she’d likely take psychic damage from an attempt at it. She’d just make a fool of hersel-
Mia’s ears twitched and her head snapped to the side. Footsteps, dozens of them and barely audible conversations, the static of radios.
“Soldiers,” Mia said suddenly, recognising some of the voices and picking up on the distinct sound of rifles flapping against the uniform the troopers wore. “Fifteen of them, all on foot. They are-“
“Yes,” Carmilla said, stepping before Mia with her easygoing smile sliding right off of her face. “We could fight them and win. If we’re smart about it-“
“We could also run, or hide to figure out whether they even want to harm us,” Mia said, squinting as she deepened her focus on the distant chatter. They were hundreds of metres away still, both of Mia’s suggestions would be easy to go through with. “I don’t hear any of the five soldiers who were with us. That’s probably a good sign.”
“You’re right,” Carmilla said, her entire demeanour having shifted from anxious beaty mode to predatory vampire mode. Mia couldn’t help but shudder as she watched the transformation happen in a near instant. “The trail of those five is older, almost three hours old, but they exited the forest somewhere around here. Perhaps a bit upwind.”
“So?” Mia asked. “Hide and observe, or run and hide?”
“I want to know what they want at least,” Carmilla said with a frown, glancing at Mia. “I could go alone. Their bullets won’t be much more effective against me than they were against Lars. I’m up to 250% on lifeforce.”
“Speaking of Lars,” Mia said, the colossal bear shifter’s presence having slipped her mind in her joyful sprint through the woods. “Where is he? Did he … ?”
Did he ditch us while we were distracted? Mia thought, looking behind and into the depths of the thick forest. There was no sight of him. Well. Shit.
Comments
Cypha
Author got too much enthralled by their romance plot there...
Devlon Stapleton
Very much a brain dead decision.
Arkeus
That was a bit ridiculous. 'let's play around and forget the mass murderer we have captured' kind of railroad is very, very forced.
