IrateRapScallion
patreon
Chapter 104, revised
🕑 Added 2021-01-04 06:06:10 +0000 UTC[Hey everybody, after talking with some people, I realized that I had dropped the ball on the ending of this chapter. There was something I should have included in the chapter and just totally forgot about, so I rewrote the ending from the end of his conversation with Arlette about Rudra onward. If you already read the chapter, you might want to reread the end. If you haven't, then just read normally!]
It took Blake a while to realize that the grey blurry ceiling in his vision was just that, a ceiling, and not some form of terribly bland afterlife. It took him a little longer to realize that this meant he was alive. It took him longer still to realize that he was stark naked.
The shock of it all was enough to make him try to sit up before he could think about what that meant. His body didn’t respond, not even his upper half. Crippling fear gripped him as visions of a life struck with full paralysis flashed through his mind.
No, he realized after a moment of panic. He could feel the touch of something cold against his arm and back, as well as the bands holding his left arm prosthetic in place. With great trepidation, he willed his hand to close, and to his great relief, it slowly did. It just felt like he was moving through the world’s thickest quicksand, the simple act of making a fist now a monumental endeavor.
That was what this was: utter exhaustion. Pain, too, an ache so pervasive that he hadn’t noticed it until now, as it had almost become the new normal. Blake didn’t feel like he’d been hit by a truck, he felt like he’d been hit by a cargo ship carrying freight trains loaded to the brim with trucks.
What the fuck had happened to him?
With a greater will and intent than last time, Blake tried to push his body up even fifteen degrees, but once again gravity proved to be a villain he could not vanquish just yet. He could, however, circumvent it. His bed liquefied and flowed, pulling in cantacrenyx crystals from the nearby wall.
Shifting into Hyper Mode to construct the necessary circuits and pathways, Blake felt a hot fire rip through his inner being. He gasped and dropped out of it immediately, his lungs heaving feebly.
Blake needed his power to move around, as his physical body wasn’t up to the task at the moment, but he needed Hyper Mode to use it best. Without it, just making simple locomotion would take him a week. So, closing his eyes, Blake went under for a second try.
The fire returned, though he found it more bearable now that he was ready for it. Gritting his teeth, he forged ahead, building the circuits and motors, armrests and wheels. Soon enough, he dropped back into normal time with a breath of relief to find himself reclining in a cold, metal powered wheelchair.
But he was still naked.
Steering his wheelchair in a circle using a small joystick on the left armrest—his fake left arm being the only part of his body that seemed to fully work at the moment—he looked around for his suit. Where had he put it? And why had he taken it off in the first place? He couldn’t remember, and that bothered him.
Blake eventually found his suit, or the remnants of it at least, lying in a heap in the far corner of his room. With an internal squawk of protest, he zipped his wheelchair over to take a better look. What he found immediately set him on edge. His suit looked as if it had been ripped apart, the metal clearly torn to pieces with brute force. Had he been attacked?
Quickly looking around his chambers again, this time Blake noticed the door, or what was left of it. Like his suit, the metal had been rent asunder by an unknown adversary, though Blake had a pretty good idea of the culprit. Only one person that he knew of was strong enough to tear through metal that thick. But if Gabriela had done all that... why was he still alive?
Blake needed answers fast, but first he needed clothes and a secure area. To start, he created some undergarments from tucrenyx, using the same microscopic mesh technique that he used every morning. Then, he willed the remnants of his suit to flow across the floor and up his leg. Finally, with a groan, he mentally stepped back into the fire in his soul. As fast as he could manage, he formed the scraps into the armor that he had grown so used to. He could have made it from scratch without the old bits, but the broken pieces had all the needed cantacrenyx crystals in all the right sizes already collected.
Proper crystal allocation remained Blake’s biggest headache when it came to machine creation, even more than a year in. It was a pain in the ass to find the ones he needed for every task, large enough to provide enough power, but small and light enough to fit where he needed it to go. At this point, he somewhat doubted that he would ever find a solution that solved his problem entirely.
His suit properly restored, Blake considered abandoning his newly created mobile chair but decided against it. His arms and head still felt like they couldn’t even lift and support themselves without resting on something. Until his body was back to prime condition, or at least what counted as prime condition after all the shit he’d been through, he would continue to sit and recline. He tilted his backrest back a little more and let out a pleasant sigh. Much better.
A moment later, nobody would be able to tell that something had ever happened to the door to his quarters. He rolled through the repaired doorway to find the other two security doors equally ruined. He fixed those too. Thankfully, no more Hyper Mode was required.
It seemed blindingly obvious now that Gabriela had forced her way into his rooms. Yet somehow, he was still breathing.
Though the state of the doors proved their ineffectiveness against the onslaught of a pissed-off Mexican, he still felt better with feet of metal between him and the outside. Blake retreated to his room to finally figure out some answers. His suit fully booted and interfacing with the server down below, Blake checked the server’s time and date. He couldn’t remember the date from before, so he brought up the logs of his suit and checked the timestamp for when he’d last manually triggered a function in his suit, something he did a good twenty or more times ever day.
Blake gagged at the number he found. FIVE DAYS?!?! He’d been asleep for FIVE DAYS?!?!
Pulling up to a nearby terminal, Blake began cycling through his security camera feeds, trying to see what was going on outside. He started with the fortress itself, checking the hallways, cafeteria, the outside walls...
Everything appeared strangely normal and... intact? People were working, he couldn’t see any damage...
This confused him greatly. With a hint of a grunt escaping his lips, he switched over to his feed in Gabriela’s room. He had a secret camera in the rooms and offices of everybody who lived or worked in the fortress, because of course he did; what was he supposed to do, not keep tabs on the suspicious people living rent-free in his home? That would just be stupid!
The video switched to Gabriela’s room and Blake was shocked to find her there, lying on her bed and staring at the ceiling as if nothing had happened. Then, as he watched, she climbed to her feet... no... her foot? She then proceeded to perform a strange sort of hop-walk to the bathroom across the room and enter it.
Blake didn’t know what to think. The woman also known as “The Monster” seemed to be acting in a very didn’t-just-recently-break-through-all-of-his-defenses-and-attack-him manner. Was his conclusion wrong?
Given that Gabriela had entered her bathroom and he didn’t have cameras in the bathrooms—that was a line even he was unwilling to cross, or had been; perhaps recent events called for that now too—he swapped over to Arlette’s room. There he found the Scyrian mercenary sitting completely still on the hard floor of her room, eyes closed. In her hands, she clutched a small, nondescript rock. Once again, not the sort of behavior Blake would have expected from somebody whose employer had been attacked.
Quickly, he switched over to Sofie’s room, only to find the place empty. He pondered looking for the Earthling but decided against it. It would be too hard to locate her like this, and he had more important things to do.
Over the next few minutes, he checked Samanta’s room, Leo’s office, and the offices of the various departments. Everything looked busy in a normal, nothing-big-had-happened way.
By this point, Blake had no idea what was going on. Part of him wondered if this was some sort of elaborate prank, but pranks didn’t usually involve paralytic drugs or whatever the hell had messed up his body. He began switching between other feeds, looking first around the fortress and then around the city itself.
Normal.
All normal.
Too normal.
He kept looking.
Some minutes later, his doorbell shattered his concentration with loud buzz. Only the complete lack of pep in Blake’s body kept him from jumping in fright. He checked the camera in the hallway outside and found both Arlette and Samanta waiting outside with strange—or perhaps suspicious—looks on their faces.
Briefly, he pondered his options. He could ignore them, chase them away, or speak with them. The first two options might be the safest routes, but only in the short term. He would lose this chance to get answers, and having that information would probably be safer in the long run.
He chose to see what they had to say, but still be very careful about it. First, he opened the door in front of them, letting them into the outer security room, which doubled as a waiting chamber for Leo and the like. As soon as they entered, he closed and sealed the door behind them. Now he could be reasonably sure he would only be dealing with the two of them.
Following that, Blake scooted through the third security door into the inner security room, leaving that door open for a quick retreat if needed. Rolling up to the middle door separating him from the others, he created a thin hole, the width of a finger, poking through the foot-thick metal and backed off to the side. He didn’t need to see them, only hear them, after all.
Blake tried to speak, but all that came out was a weak “ha” that immediately faded into a long, weak hiss of air leaking from his throat. He should have realized this would be an issue. He didn’t have the energy to speak, let alone have a full conversation.
Luckily, his subordinate noticed the hole and the noise quickly.
“Lord Ferros, is that you?” she called into the hole.
He managed a light groan.
“Think your meanings forcefully and just grunt,” Arlette said through the hole, speaking as if she had ample experience with this sort of predicament.
Ah, that was right, he didn’t need to speak real words in Scyria! Slowly taking another breath, he let out a wheeze that Arlette correctly interpreted as “What the fuck happened?”
“What is the last thing you remember?” she asked.
Blake thought back into the past once again. “We came back from the northern mountains,” he wheezed. “After that, it gets fuzzy.”
“Sir, please let me in,” Arlette requested. “The situation is... complicated.”
Blake wasn’t ready to do that yet. “Who attacked me?” he grunted.
For a suspiciously long moment, he received only silence. “Sofie,” his underling finally replied.
His body shuddered as he let out a cough combined with a laugh, the sound weak but still the loudest thing he’d managed so far. “No, seriously.”
“I don’t joke about this sort of thing,” the leader of his security apparatus sternly told him. “You should know that.”
She spoke the truth, he knew. Arlette Demirt was, if anything, too humorless. But even so... Sofie? It boggled his mind. What was it he had been doing when his memory cut out? He tried remembering again, and this time, perhaps because of Arlette’s mention of Sofie, he recalled a bit more. That was right, he’d decided to figure out Sofie’s abilities because of the dragon!
But still... Sofie? Really?
He filled in the hole, unsealed the door, scooted his chair back into his chambers. Then he opened the door and watched through the doorway as the two entered the second chamber. Arlette took one look at him and immediately grimaced, while Sam stared at him with a storm of conflicting emotions in her gaze, her eyes locked on his face and body.
“Oof, you look worse than I thought,” Arlette commented. “Sam, why don’t you get him some food and water while we talk? Just leave it to me, alright?”
Blake liked the sound of food and water. He opened the door so the girl could leave, and she scampered through the opening.
“Sit,” Blake wheezed, trying to keep control of the conversation from falling from his grasp. Sadly, it was hard to do that when all you could do was pathetically wheeze and grunt.
Thankfully, Arlette knew the pecking order and did as he said. That was one of the reasons he was more than willing to overlook her few transgressions and keep her around.
“So, you are not actually claiming that Sofie tore the doors down, are you?” he asked.
Arlette shook her head. “No, that was Gabriela. Sofie’s powers are something like mind control.”
Blake choked on his air and sputtered out a “W-what?!”
Arlette’s already grave expression grew graver. “I’ll get to that in a moment, but I should start from the beginning.”
So, she did. She began with him and Gabriela taking Sofie to a room on the floor below for “tests”, which apparently consisted of buzz saws and spikes and other nasty things. Her description of events became far more detailed from the point where she walked in and the argument started. As she talked, Blake could feel his memory pulling together, bits and pieces slowly congealing into a still fuzzy but mostly complete whole.
“Then you started to scream and everything went downhill from there,” she continued. “It took the combined efforts of Gabriela, Leo, and myself to save you. You’re lucky we managed to even get you in here; Sofie hit some of us as well.
“I knew that we couldn’t have it get out that you were half-dead. We aren’t equipped to handle chaos on the scale that news would cause. That’s why I had us move you up here, where nobody but us and Leo would come. But we had to have Gabriela break down the doors to get inside.”
Blake couldn’t help but find it funny that somebody would break in not to get at him inside, but to get him inside. “And the suit?”
“Sofie’s powers are horrifying,” Arlette said with a visible shiver. “She used it on me and it felt like I was being slowly turned to dust. I was coughing up blood and everything, and that was just from a single moment. You got hit far worse. Blood was pouring from your eye sockets, that’s how bad it became. We needed to know if you were bleeding anywhere else, and your suit wouldn’t come off. And it’s a good thing too. I don’t want to talk about where else you were bleeding, but let’s just say I didn’t think you’d survive the night.”
“I thought you said she used mind control? How does that turn into me bleeding out?”
Arlette’s face darkened. “It’s... she makes it so you can’t do things.”
“Huh?”
“We don’t fully know how it works, but it starts when she says the word ‘don’t’ and tells you not to do something.”
A sudden chill filled him. “But she’s always telling me not to do things.”
“I know,” she nodded gravely. “She used her power on me with the very first thing she ever said to me. Who can say how many times she’s used her powers on you?”
The chill grew colder. “And what happens when I do it anyway?”
“That’s when the bleeding starts. She forbade you from touching her, and then when you did, that’s when it all went to shit.”
“It looks like I owe you my gratitude for saving me,” he sighed.
She shrugged. “I would never get another job if I let you die on my watch.”
Blake sighed. “I didn’t see Sofie in her room,” he noted.
“She-” Arlette started to answer but stopped. She looked at him as if she’d come to some sort of realization.
“What?” Blake demanded, annoyed.
“She ran away. She’s probably out in the countryside somewhere.”
“I see. Well, she’ll come back on her own eventually,” he reasoned. “She has no other place to go, after all.”
Arlette frowned and sighed. “Damn, it hit you too. I was hoping it wouldn’t be like that.”
“What do you mean it hit me too?!” Blake hissed, his body tensing up.
“Think about what you just said, given what you know. Do you really think it’s wise to let somebody who can kill you with just a few words run around your country unaccounted for?”
A spike of alarm shot through him. “Hell no! What was I even thinking?!”
Who in their right mind would leave Sofie of all people unsupervised?! Only Pari would have scared him more!
Blake tried to swivel around to the console he’d used a few minutes ago, fully intent on immediately locating the wayward Earthling, but his left arm refused to budge. It was like his brain couldn’t manipulate the mechanisms of the prosthetic anymore, though he’d done so as naturally as breathing for the last year and more. Confused, he tried to manually move the chair’s motors, only to find himself unable to do that as well. It was like he had some sort of mental block keeping him from using his powers!
Blake felt himself on the edge of a breakdown. If he couldn’t use his powers, he had nothing left! In a panic, he liquefied the metal of the nearby wall. It... worked? His panic subsided, being replaced by confusion.
“That feeling of helplessness is terrifying, isn’t it?” Arlette empathized. “She forbade us all from trying to find her. If you even think about trying to find her, your body locks up. It doesn’t matter what you try to do. As long as the intent is somewhere in your heart, it knows.”
“But I don’t remember her doing that...?” Blake objected, confused.
“It happened after you went unconscious. Now we know that you don’t have to hear it for it to work on you.” She leaned in. “Did you rationalize reasons to not search for her?” she asked knowingly.
He nodded weakly.
“I think I’ve figured out some of how it works,” she said. “It’s like a qeromore seed pod: there are different layers. The first layer is the rationalization. If you aren’t aware of what she did to you, you simply avoid doing it by coming up with excuses why you don’t need to, or just avoiding it altogether. It’s almost like the idea becomes slippery and you can’t grab it. That’s why you didn’t see the obvious need to locate her.
“Once you become aware of the restriction put on you, then you can overcome the slipperiness. But that’s when the second layer comes in. You can try to do the action in question, but you just... can’t. Your body will freeze, your mind will cloud. It’s like hitting a wall.
“Once you know what you can’t do and you find the wall, it’s possible to force yourself through it. Don’t. All that will do is activate the third layer, the punishment. That’s what happened to you when she touched you. And that’s what happened to me when I forced myself through the wall and tried to go after her. I barely managed a single step.”
Arlette’s words sent Blake’s mind spinning. Part of his started thinking of all the possible restrictions he might be unknowingly living with. Another part of him thought through the implications of Sofie’s abilities and what they meant to the big picture. But most of him just felt furious.
To Blake, a person’s self was sacrosanct. He’d always feared something like Alzheimer's more than physical death. The thought of his mind slipping away, the part of him that made him him slowly degrading, and knowing it was happening but having no way to stop it, until eventually there wasn’t even enough of him left to know it was happening anymore...
No, he would take a nice quick car crash, please. What Sofie had done to him was right up on that same level. She’d messed with something that nobody should ever touch, and by all rights, he deserved payback.
And yet... she was now also a tool far too powerful and versatile to throw away. If he could harness her power, how much would he be able to accomplish? Not that she would take such a thing lying down. But even if he just could gain control over when she could use her power, he could feel much safer. There was no way in hell that he was going to let her get within twenty miles of him without some sort of reliable guarantee that she wouldn’t be able to mess with his being in a pique of self-righteous anger. It was that or kill her, something that he wanted to avoid—unless she’d made him want to avoid it?! His skin crawled.
“I don’t know what is real and what is something she’s done to me,” he lamented.
“I know,” Arlette agreed.
“She... she surely didn’t know what she was doing, right?”
“I don’t know anymore,” came the reply. “I’ve decided that there’s no way she knew when I first met her. There’s no reason she would willingly let herself be hunted across Nocend when she could have just stopped it with a few words. But I think it’s possible she realized what she could do at some point along the way.”
“Then why would she be here, in this mess? She could conquer the world with a power like that.”
“Maybe she already is,” Arlette offered. “If you could control people with just words, what person would scare you more than the man who controls metal killing machines from a distance far beyond what words can reach? As soon as she knew of your existence, she made a beeline right for you, and now here she is, living in your castle and ordering you around. She can just let you take over the world. After all, why be the one on the throne when you can be safer pulling the strings behind the scenes?”
Blake blinked. What Arlette said made a sort of sense, but...
“No, she’s too much of a coward for that sort of thing,” he decided. “She knows that any conquest I engaged in would be bloody, and Miss Killing-Is-Bad wouldn’t want to have that on her hands.”
Not that it made a massive difference in Blake’s feelings whether or not she’d known beforehand what she’d done to him. If Sofie had burned down his house, he’d still be plenty pissed at her even if she’d done it entirely by accident.
Arlette hummed in thought. “You have a point,” she conceded. “And she probably could have just made us all forget everything instead of running away like she did at the end, but still... this is Sofie we’re talking about. It’s hard to say for sure.”
“So if we can’t try to find her, then what can we do?” Blake wondered.
“Well, she might show up alongside somebody else,” Arlette began.
She told Blake about Gabriela and Chitra, and how they’d managed to skirt the restrictions. Blake’s mood alternated between cheer that something was being done about this issue and frustration that yet another person had managed to sneak into Otharia against his wishes.
The buzzer rang, signaling Sam returning with some much-needed refreshment.
“I’ll try to come up with something to keep her in check, should she show up in the near future,” he told his employee. “Until then, she is not to be allowed into the fortress under any circumstances.”
“Understood,” Arlette nodded, rising to her feet. “Is there anything else you need from me right now? I am making headway on my ink investigation and I would like to get back to that.”
“Before you go, tell me what you know of Sofie’s... restrictions. Who has them, and on what?”
“What I know is likely only scratching the surface,” she replied.
“Still, it’s a start.”
“She’s hit me with several that I know of, largely related to keeping her alive back when we first met in Zrukhora,” Arlette informed him. “In addition, I am now forbidden from chasing her, hurting her, or trying to find her. It is possible that you, Gabriela, and Leo are also under all three of those restrictions, though only the finding one is confirmed right now. Gabriela also is forbidden from standing on two feet.”
Blake blinked. “Huh?”
“I don’t know, it’s...” She shook her head in frustration. “Sofie’s idea of a non-impactful restriction leaves much to be desired.”
“I need to make a list, or something,” Blake muttered. “I can think of several things she’s done to me just off the top of my head.”
“That would be very helpful,” Arlette nodded. “Anything else, sir?”
“That is all,” he said, and so Arlette walked out, leaving just him, Samanta, and the food. He took a weak sniff and smiled, the scents filling a hole inside him he hadn’t realized was there until now. Using his mechanical arm, he picked up the glass of water and took a sip. The feeling of the liquid coating his throat was enough to bring a tear to his eye.
Taking a small bite of bread and chewing it slowly, he looked over to the girl, who continued to stare at him with indecision. “Thanks, Sam,” he grunted through the pulped bread. “Sorry, but I’m going to need to push your lessons back a little longer.”
Sam just scowled.
“What’s wrong, Sam? You’ve been acting weird since I woke up.”
“Nothing,” she finally said. With that, she retreated from his chambers, almost as if she were running away.
As he took another bite, he idly wondered if she was going through some sort of teenage thing and mentally shrugged. Whatever it was, she’d probably get over it soon enough.
After all this wheezing and grunting and eating, Blake felt absolutely exhausted. There was so much for him to do and catch up on, but he just had nothing left. He managed to get himself back into his bed just before he passed out.
* * *
Blake Myers had a problem. It had been two days since he’d woken from his Sofie-imposed slumber, and he hadn’t gotten any better. If his body was healing at all, then it was doing it much too slowly for him to tell the difference.
Why did Scyrians get to heal at superhuman rates and he didn’t? Blake found this abundantly unfair.
He couldn’t keep existing like this. He needed some sort of healing, something to at least get him back to pre-Sofie levels at least. Something that could let him use Hyper Mode without pain.
The problem was that he had no real way to heal himself. Scyrian medicine was rather crude because it didn’t have to be more than that. People healed quickly from most injuries on their own with minimal outside assistance, and disease was shockingly rare, so few people bothered to enter or advance the medical field.
One option did exist, however, if he could manage to get it. And so, Blake summoned Arlette and put in a call to the Stragmans. Normally, Blake would gladly make the call himself, but he didn’t want to show his weakness, especially not to the Chos. So instead, he had Arlette act as his representative.
Though a mid-level functionary answered the Many connection, it didn’t take long for Akhustal Palebane to appear when Arlette asked for her. The Chos glared at her through the projection, making no effort to hide her annoyance.
“Well? I had assumed that your request was a great emergency, great enough for you to practically invade my land without even contacting me,” she snapped. “What is taking so long? Your time is running short. We move again soon.”
“I apologize for the delay, but there have been some unexpected complications,” Arlette told her. “I must ask, how much of the body is needed for the resurrection to work?”
“You will need at least a full knuckle of an adult finger or anything of similar size,” the Stragman leader told her. “Anything smaller does not work. Is that why you are once again disrupting my day without warning?”
As Arlette began to apologize and explain more, Blake sighed. If any amount of flesh would do, they could have just used the tiny piece of Pari’s toe that he had cut off a while back for study. About half of it still existed, but it was perhaps the size of a grain of rice.
He thought back to the Chos’s original gripes. She has not exaggerated; he had broken most every norm with his actions. But he’d done far more than that, really. He’d dedicated hours and days of thought, research, work, and travel to the task of returning Pari Clansnarl back to the land of the living. He’d nearly died multiple times in pursuit of this goal.
This begged the question... why was he trying to bring Pari back, even at the risk of his life? He wasn’t Sofie; he could live in a world where that insane biological freakazoid child stayed dead. Yes, he’d been eager to meet the being capable of making biotechnology, but that being had turned out to be a very angry and hostile dragon. So why was he putting himself in danger over and over? Why not just cut the deal now and walk away while he was still alive?
Was this another act of Sofie? He wracked his memory for a case when she’d said anything that might cause his behavior, but couldn’t come up with anything at the moment. That didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. And given that she could have done it to him as he slept...
There could be plenty of other reasons, he supposed. Gabriela, for one, seemed just as set on reviving Pari as Sofie did, and he really didn’t want to get on that woman’s bad side again. Then there was the simple fact that he hated losing, and giving up on this, after everything he’d put into it, would be a massive blow to his pride. This was not the first time his muleheaded nature had led him into making poor choices, but he was too muleheaded to change. And maybe, just maybe, he actually wanted to hear that wild child giggling like a tiny madwoman as she sprinted down the halls again.
Or maybe it was time for him to drop this dead end and get back to more productive activities. Taking the loss would hurt his ego, sure, but his most recent brush with death had him reconsidering his willingness to needlessly put himself in danger. If Gabby didn’t like it, she could go do it herself. If Sofie didn’t like it, then maybe she shouldn’t have messed with his mind.
“I said no!” Palebane snarled, bringing Blake back to the conversation at hand. “I do not care how important you believe it to be! Stragma is not and will not be your personal healing service! I agreed to your first request because only you could meet our needs, but there is nothing you can do for us beyond that. I will not have the whole world lining up at our door, begging for our miracles!”
Blake signaled for Arlette to step out of the Many’s view and over to him so he could whisper to her out of the Many’s earshot.
“What are you doing?” the Chos complained.
“My apologies,” Arlette replied, quickly stepping back into frame. “My Lord wishes to know-”
“Lord Ferros is there? Why will he not show himself?” she demanded hotly.
“I’m sorry, but he is unable to speak with you at this time,” Arlette deflected. “However, he wishes to know if you would be willing to alter the original agreement to change the party intended for healing.”
“Absolutely not,” the Stragman shot back. “I have already shown your lord favor which he had barely earned. I overlooked his encroachment upon our lands. I have overlooked his rudeness and disrespect. He needs us, not the other way around! The deal will remain unaltered, or there will be no deal! Do not ask again, or the deal will be off regardless!”
With that, the projection cut off.
“Well, that went well,” Blake grunted.
“I apologize for my failure, sir-” a dismayed Arlette began, but Blake didn’t want to hear it.
“You did nothing wrong,” he wheezed. “I was wrong in my reading of her. Fuck.”
Still, Blake did not give up.
“The person they have who can do this, you said he is being held against his will?”
Arlette tilted her head in thought. “Not exactly. Tehlmar said that he seemed incredibly strong. If he wanted to leave, he probably could. Tehlmar thinks it’s something else keeping him there, like a hostage of some sort.”
“But he’s surely from Earth, right? What if we rescued him and the hostage?”
“Far easier said than done,” she told him. “We don’t know who or where they are, if they even exist. Without better information, any attempt would probably fail, and the repercussions would be bad for us. What’s more, they would change their procedures to make everything we’d learned useless for a second attempt.”
“Hmmmm,” he muttered. “Still... we should talk more about this in the future.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want my fellow Earthlings held prisoner if I can help it. And having somebody around who could heal people would be great. We should try to get what intelligence we can.”
She nodded, though her brow furrowed. “If you say so.”
“I do say-”
Blake felt the buildup just before it happened, just long enough to realize what was coming but not enough to do anything about it. An eruption of agony detonated inside him, the pain running up and down his spine and locking his already-weak body fully immobile.
The world around him began to violently tremble, the metal all around him quaking with greater vigor than any previous episode. He thought he heard yelling and could see Arlette’s mouth opening, but he couldn’t process her words through the excruciating torment ping-ponging around his form.
He felt liquid leaking from his eyes and running down his face, but it didn’t feel like tears.
* * *
Blake awoke to the familiar sight of his chambers. He tried to take a breath and instead let out a pained cough. Everything hurt again. His body actually felt worse than after waking up from his 5-day coma, somehow. At least, this time, he still had his underwear on.
“Oh! You’re awake already,” Gabby said, leaning over him with eyes filled with concern.
“How long...?” he managed to wheeze out.
“Ah, maybe two hours?” she replied. “It took a bit to get you out of your armor and clean off the blood.”
“I can’t keep doing this,” he said both to her and to himself. “I’ll probably die the next time if something doesn’t change.”
Gabriela looked at him with a look that said “I don’t know what you expect can be done about it.” But against her expectations, Blake had an idea, a crazy idea that he’d discarded just a few hours ago as too dangerous and unlikely too succeed. The difference was that Blake realized now that the most dangerous thing he could do was wait. His time was running out unless he took action.
“Pack your stuff,” he told her as his bed shifted into a wheelchair for the second time that day. “And tell Arlette that we’re leaving for the north, just the two of us... please.”
“What, now?” Gabriela asked, her brow creasing. “I don’t think if you should even be moving right now.”
“No time to lose,” he said. “It’s time we had one last visit with a certain giant dragon, wouldn’t you say?”
Comments
Joshua Flowers
Lol, I guess he's desperate enough to try talking to the dragon this time.
Erdos
Thanks
Caanbo
Funny chapter
