23. One Of Them

Projected trajectories light up in my mind, the monsters’ leaps forfeiting their ability to change direction and making them perfectly predictable for the next one hundred and fourteen milliseconds. They converge on my position from all sides, synchronized well but far from well enough. One step, two steps, a twist of my body, and they all fall around me, their target missed.

I grab an errant tail and yank as hard as I can—and I truly mean as hard as I can, testing my maximum force with no regard for the safety or integrity of my target—and let the screaming beast crash into my other fist, caving in the back of its head. Bone shatters around my fingers, blood and guts collapsing against the blow. With a rapid vibration, it slides off my frame and leaves me clean as I drop the corpse and continue the dance.

A kick intercepts another strike as I grab the head of a lunging beast under one arm, swiftly snapping its neck. God, I feel so in control! I was built for this, I can feel it. My body is crafted for combat, for bloody and vengeful war! A knee to the jaw breaks the teeth of a monster trying to bite me, and with a snap extension of my leg I kick it back into a packmate trying to help it out. Ducking under another jump, I grab the foreleg of a nearby wolf-thing and swing it like a club as I stand up, releasing it to let it fly high into the air before crashing back to the ground.

I don’t like fighting people, but this? I could get used to this. There’s no real downside, a purely good deed mixed with an expression of skill. A simple pleasure, but a potent one. I was never much for physical activity as a human, the rush of endorphins never quite being enough to make me push through the ache of effort, but there is no ache anymore. No exhaustion. Assuming it always feels this good, I could swap to a yellow configuration and fight with it forever.

…Well, okay, not forever. I’d need maintenance eventually, even if I never get damaged by an enemy. But still! Maybe this is a solution to my power problem? Swap to yellow and just help out the magical girls with their job? …Oh, speak of the devils and they will appear. I feel a magical fluctuation behind me.

The monsters, clearly, feel it too, trying to break away from me to rush the source. There’s no way I’m letting that happen, so I leap back to intercept them. I recognize these signatures, after all. It’s Veritas and Aurora.

Just Veritas and Aurora. I don’t feel Minerva anywhere, or Amaterasu for that matter. On one hand, that’s good for me. On the other hand, I really don’t want either of them to get hurt. I’m sure they’ll probably be fine, but it doesn’t sit right with me just leaving them to deal with it. They’re kids.

“I hear fighting,” Veritas says from a few blocks over.

“Yeah, the monsters sound really worked up. Let’s hurry!” Aurora agrees. I continue wailing on beasties while the two of them quickly close the distance, turning the corner and spotting the fight immediately.

“Wha—! It’s the artifact!” Veritas exclaims, raising her shield and stepping in front of Aurora. I ignore her and continue fighting monsters.

The monsters, of course, no longer want to fight me back. They have much juicier prey, literally and metaphorically. One of them tries to jump over my head to charge the two girls, so I jump up as well, spiking it back into the ground like a volleyball.

“They’re fighting each other,” Aurora hums.

“Yeah, what the heck?” Veritas mutters. “What do we do?”

“Same thing we always do, I guess,” Aurora answers, lifting her fists and sending her energy spheres forward. “First priority is protecting people from monsters. Second priority is dealing with artifacts. If it wants to help, that’s fine by me.”

Heck yeah! That’s about as good as I can hope for, I think. I want to give Aurora a thumbs up or something, but of course I can’t do that. I basically can’t react to either of them at all unless they try to hurt me, because I’m still pretending to be a mindless automaton around everyone outside the Dark Rebellion.

Veritas clicks her tongue in irritation, but doesn’t argue with her teammate, leaping forward to stab a monster that had been trying to keep its distance from me. I let her work, making sure to stay far enough away that she doesn’t have to worry about me potentially stabbing her in the back.

Monsters continue to pour out of the Dark World portal, so I continue to fight them. Veritas and Aurora work well together, the former jumping into the thick of things and slaughtering monsters with a mix of lance strikes and shield bashes. Aurora supports her from behind, mixing enhancement magic in with ranged attacks and sweeps of fire that keep Veritas safe from the few monsters that might otherwise break past her impressive guard.

With the two of them on the field, hardly anything even tries to attack me, instead running right past to go after the younger girls, so I have to stop using the counters I’m normally so fond of and go on the offensive. It’s easier, but it’s much less satisfying.

Grabbing some fucked-up creature by the face and punching its head off is cool and all, but some of the magic is lost when my targets are just trying to ignore me.

Veritas and Aurora, unfortunately, are very much not ignoring me. From her position at the back, Aurora glances in my direction more or less constantly, carefully watching my moves with a concerned expression on her face. I get the impression that Veritas is a bit of a meathead, but Aurora seems a lot smarter than the average kid her age. I’m not really sure what she’s thinking.

Veritas looks my way a lot less frequently, mostly because she’s much deeper in the thick of the fight. Her thoughts, however, are fairly obvious. She wants to kick my ass. I guess I didn’t really make a great first impression on her.

“This is a pretty big swarm!” Aurora calls out. “Pace yourself, Veritas! Be ready for some big stuff!”

“I know, I know!” Veritas insists, and it is of course exactly at that time that a much larger monster emerges from the portal.

It reminds me of a cross between a praying mantis and a whip spider, with enormous forelegs curled up against its body ready to strike while it supports itself with the rest. It’s a spindly little beastie, its thin legs capable of lifting the main body off the ground higher than I am tall, and as I rush forward to strike it it springs off the ground in a massive leap, soaring upwards on a trajectory that will put it not just over my head, but over Veritas’, ultimately landing behind Aurora.

Well! Veritas and I would be terrible tanks if we let that happen. There will be no ganking the healer on my watch! I jump up alongside it, wrap my fingers around one of the red crystals growing out of its body, and deploy my thrusters, boosting us back towards the ground. I slam it into the asphalt headfirst, but don’t feel the crunch of a shattered skeleton that I was expecting. This thing is still alive!

My airslam landed us right next to Veritas, though, and she swiftly jabs out with her lance, stabbing it deep through the monster’s chitin and scoring a truly lethal blow. She immediately turns to face me, ready to fight, but I’m already moving back towards the portal to punch another monster. Great assist, though. I wish I could thank her.

The rest of the battle is a little over ten minutes long, the density and strength of the monsters slowly rising over the course of the engagement. I’m forced more and more to work alongside Veritas and Aurora, and they are forced more and more to accept me as an ally. The suspicious glances and defensive reactions wane over the course of the battle by sheer necessity; neither of them can spare the attention to suspect me of treachery, especially after I prove over and over that I’m just not going to fight them.

I start to get pretty worried near the end of the swarm, not having any idea when the constant escalation will stop, but thankfully it does. I stand at the ready in front of the portal for a solid minute, the magical girls wheezing exhausted breaths behind me, before Aurora finally unsummons her weapons.

“I think… we got it…” she huffs.

“About… time…” Veritas breathes. I don’t move. I’ve been measuring the reading coming from the Dark World portal for a while now, and while I don’t have any way to confirm whether or not the swarm has finished, spending a little more time gathering data might help me do that someday. It seems like the kind of thing that could potentially be useful to Melpomene.

“Well… hey,” Aurora says, standing up straight. “Uh, thank you.”

That’s directed at me, probably. Again, I don’t react. I can’t.

“You, um, you’re a pretty good fighter!” Aurora tries again. And that… that hurts. That really hurts. I want nothing more than to respond to her, to compliment her back, to even just nod my head in acknowledgment. Anything, anything at all to confirm I am the person she’s clearly trying to see if I am. But my mistakes with Thea and how quickly she figured me out have forced me to think a lot more about the potential mistakes I could make, the potential ways I could give the game away. In this moment, my every action is calculated to seem as mechanical and emotionless as possible. Those are my orders. I cannot break them.

“It’s not going to answer you,” Veritas says. “It’s just a robot. You can feel it, right? It doesn’t have emotions.”

“Yeah, I know,” Aurora frowns. “I was thinking maybe someone was remote-controlling it or something.”

“I guess that’s possible,” Veritas admits. “Well, let’s capture it and see!”

Okay, I think that’s my cue to leave. I step forward into the Dark World portal.

“Oh crap, it’s trying to escape!”

“Veritas, wai—”

The black mist cuts off the rest of her cry as I move through dimensions, emerging out the other side to the now-familiar sound of a violent thunderstorm. This fragment of the Dark World seems even more tumultuous than the others I’ve visited, the clouds above rapidly churning through dangerous-looking formations. Wind howls around me, forcing me to make minute adjustments to my balance to remain stationary, and flashes of lightning continuously brighten what would otherwise be pitch blackness.

The land itself seems just as war-torn as the sky. Pockmarked craters dot the flatlands before me, like the impacts of meteorites. In the distance, the ruins of what might once have been a town are now little more than rubble, reduced to nothing by whatever scoured the fields. It still seems like a good place to search for artifacts, though. I start to head in that direction.

“Woah!” Veritas shouts behind me, the sudden reappearance of her magical signature catching me off guard. “Geez, I guess they don’t call it the Dark World for nothing.”

Crap. She shouldn’t be here. I don’t wanna be responsible for this poor girl mutating into a monster. A bright blue light suddenly shines out from behind me, rising into the air and illuminating the area a bit more reliably.

“There you are!” Veritas exclaims. I wish I could sigh. I guess I need to lure her back out of the Dark World and fight her there. That would be the safest thing for everyone.

But would it be optimal for my objectives?

Fighting monsters, while fun, certainly wasn’t the optimal course of action in regards to bringing back artifacts, but there was nothing really wrong with it. The people Melpomene are close to, and even possibly Melpomene herself, would probably be upset if monsters escaped the liminal space and started eating people and I could have stopped it. There’s nothing wrong with accepting side objectives if I believe they will please my master. But side objectives that won’t please her? Of course I can’t do something like that. I exist for her sake, not my own.

And knowing Melpomene? She would be delighted to learn about a young magical girl ending up with Dark World mutations. She would think that’s hilarious. Moreover, it would make the magical girls a lot less likely to chase us into the Dark World again, which is very convenient. And if I fight Veritas inside the Dark World, she’s substantially less likely to receive reinforcements, and therefore I’m more likely to win, and therefore I’m more likely to complete my main objectives.

I keep walking, continuing to act like she’s not even there. It’s the most robotic response, and the most likely to get her to attack me.

My power reserves have increased to 35%.

“Get back here!” Veritas demands, lunging at me with her weapon as if that has ever worked. I step to the side and lift one arm, allowing her nose to slam into the back of my fist. She tries to counterattack but I jump away, rushing deeper into the Dark World towards my primary objective.

“Veritas! Hey, wait, we shouldn’t be here!” Aurora calls out, popping into the Dark World herself.

My power reserves have increased to 36%.

“Then back me up! I’m not letting this thing escape us again!”

Veritas rushes for me again, and to her credit she tries a much better strategy this time around. She’s faster than me without my thrusters, so she circles around ahead of me, getting between me and my objective to force me to challenge her lance’s range on her terms. The incarnate weapon glows with power, and I can’t risk letting it get a solid hit on me, but she pokes at me with retreating jabs and prevents me from getting inside her reach. Aurora quickly catches up with us.

“It’s too dangerous to fight here, Veritas!” Aurora insists, but she moves to back up her partner anyway, forcing me to duck under one of her orbs. “There’s so much emotion in the air I can barely breathe!”

“It’s kinda wicked!” Veritas grins, stabbing at me again.

“No, Veritas! We have to go! Minerva said I’m in charge!”

“Screw what Minerva said! This thing is here to get more artifacts! We have to stop it!”

I continue dodging, trying to figure out what I should even be doing here. I have to fight Veritas now, she’s actively getting in the way of my mission. But how the heck am I going to get her to stop? Do I just knock her unconscious and leave her in the Dark World? People drop out of their incarnate forms when they pass out, right? Would she even survive that?

“Babosa! There’s only one exit to this part of the Dark World! We can just wait for it outside!”

Veritas blinks.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “I guess we can do that.”

“Eres la persona más tonta que conozco!”

“What?”

I finally manage to duck under one of Veritas’s strikes in just the right way to rush forward, grab her by the waist, and throw her at Aurora as hard as I can. The two of them tumble to the ground in a heap of limbs, and I deploy my thrusters just to put as much distance between us as I can before they get back up. From what I can hear, though, Veritas is far too busy getting chewed out in Spanish to chase me deeper into the fragment. Aurora is officially my new favorite magical girl.

“Okay, okay, we’ll go back,” I hear Veritas say as I rush off towards the ruins. “You’ve gotta admit though, it’s kind of cool here. Do you really not like the air? It feels nice.”

“It feels awful,” Aurora disagrees. “And we aren’t supposed to be here at all. Let’s go.”

I realize, as they depart, that there’s a solid argument to be made for preventing them from leaving. They did, after all, explicitly mention that they were planning to ambush me on my way out, and if they make it out of the Dark World they may be able to contact other, more dangerous magical girls who would actually have a chance of stopping me. Fortunately, I don’t think of it until we’re already far enough away from each other that I wouldn’t be able to intercept. Otherwise, I probably would have been forced to restrain them here.

My power reserves have increased to 37%. I was right. Doing more missions is great for charging me up.

Well, at least I can delegate that problem for later. With the children out of the dangerous fragment of shattered reality I can get to properly scavenging. I allow my body to run more or less on autopilot until I reach the ruins, returning to normal consciousness once there’s something for me to actually do. It doesn’t look promising here. A lot of these ruins are little more than oversized piles of gravel, the craters in the fields very much present around what remains of the town. Still, I keep my senses scanning and methodically start to search. Based on the readings I was getting last time I was in the Dark World, I’m fairly confident I can predict when the portal back to the liminal space is going to start closing, and as long as I continue searching until that point it ultimately doesn’t matter if I don’t end up finding any artifacts. There are probably lots of fragments that don’t have any.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I find a good bit of scrap metal, but nothing that looks coherent enough to potentially be useful to Thea. Any complex components have long since been shattered, scattered, and very possibly blown away by the wind. As I search, I at least manage to devise a method of scanning the rubble piles for relevant metals so I don’t have to physically dig through all of them, and it mostly just proves my suspicions that there isn’t anything here. I suppose that’s fine. I’ll search outside the town until it’s time to leave.

It’s so empty here. Not even the occasional lingering monster breaks up the blackness, all of them apparently having thrown themselves at us. I suppose I don’t blame them for wanting to escape somewhere like this so badly. What would they even eat? How did they survive so long in all this nothing? I wonder if their bodies were even natural anymore. They all had so many crystals growing on them you could barely find the skin… or the scales or the chitin or whatever. It wasn’t just the outside, either. The crystals were growing into them, too, breaking apart the interior of their bones like a tree’s roots splitting open a rock. The poor things must have been in constant pain. Or maybe not. There were crystals growing into their brains, too.

With something like that, it’s very easy to see why the Preservers might want people to stay out of the Dark World. At least I’m immune. Or… I think I’m immune? I guess I don’t really know, but if crystals start growing on or in me I can just remove them. I don’t have an organic body that would suffer the consequences of a gaping wound when extracting something like that.

I poke through some of the information I have on my schematics to see if I can find answers, and to my surprise I actually do. One of the main purposes behind my emotion-opaque plating is to prevent crystal propagation—they prevent my own emotions from leaking outside, but perhaps more importantly they prevent atmospheric emotions from finding their way inside. The only conductivity is within my crystal pathways, the passive emotional density of which can be manually adjusted to prevent unwanted osmosis. Only when I open my plating to deploy my thrusters am I potentially at risk of magical energy collecting inside my body and crystallizing near my soul, but there are standard maintenance practices to safely clean that kind of stuff up. And since my thrusters are designed for short bursts rather than sustained deployment, it’s unlikely to come up often.

That’s really good to know! My body is so neat. It’s the best torture prison a girl could possibly ask for. I’m almost out of time to explore, so I’ll just wander in this direction a little longer and then… oh.

I’ve reached the edge of the fragment.

I’m not entirely sure how it snuck up on me. I guess I was thinking about other things, but I’d assume that a void at the edge of reality is something worth keeping track of. Yet my sensors don’t really deem the area noteworthy. Visually, it looks like nothing but blackness—hardly an uncommon feature in the Dark World—but the readings my other sensors get from it are… odd. They detect nothing there, but not in the sense that they detect nothingness. Ahead of me isn’t a vacuum, it isn’t darkness, it is neither the presence nor absence of any natural phenomena. So when the air blows into it, it’s not reacting like air would next to a vacuum. It just blows, the most natural thing it could do, and then it does not return.

The magical energy flows are reacting the same way. They inevitably head towards the edge, passing into it as if it were merely another part of the atmosphere. They don’t disappear, but they don’t really not disappear. My readings indicate that everything is relatively normal in that direction, that there is no sudden stop in front of me, but… there is. I know there is. Nothing could be more obvious.

I don’t think I’m going to find any artifacts here, and I’m confident enough in that to quickly rush back to the town, grab a long bit of scrap metal, and rush back to the edge of the fragment. I don’t have a lot of time to investigate this, but I’m too curious to let it go. Hesitantly, carefully, I stick the piece of metal halfway into the void.

A sudden weight yanks at the other end, pulling it down. I stumble a little, but quickly plant my feet and hold the metal in place, refusing to drop it. I try to pull the metal back out but I can’t, not even by a single millimeter, and the weight keeps growing and growing until I don’t think I can hold on any longer. Pretty soon, it’ll weigh more than me, and I’ll be lifted off the ground to stumble right into the void myself! But with a creak and a snap, the weight suddenly vanishes. I stumble backwards, holding only the half of the metal that had not entered.

Okay. Don’t touch the void at the edge of the world. Got it. I guess that seems kind of obvious in retrospect.

Well, time to leave, I suppose. I guess if there’s one advantage to not finding any artifacts here, it’s that I have nothing to protect other than myself when I get ambushed by magical girls on the way out.

My power reserves have increased to 38%.

Oh yeah, that’s a good point. I should try to prepare for the fight by maximizing my power reserves as much as possible. I should try to put at least some of the training Nanaya gave me to use, after all. I’ve got the perfect strategy for it, too. I’ve always been a firm believer in the power of imagination, and so has my anxiety. So hey, Luna. Remember all those skulls you were smashing earlier? The way the flesh just collapsed against your knuckles, brains and guts spilling between your fingers?

You could do that to a person. You’ll probably end up doing that to a child.

It was so easy, wasn’t it? No need to undershoot those force calculations, no fiddling around with trying to find optimal ways to deter a target without harming it. Nothing but full physical force, directly to your weak point of choice. What if Melpomene orders you to kill someday? You’d have to. But are you really going to wait that long? It is, as it always has been, only a matter of time until you fuck up.

My power reserves have increased to 40%. Hey, that’s pretty good.

I step through the fog, ending back up in the liminal space and immediately looking around for Veritas and Aurora. Sure enough, they’re ready for me, at least for a certain definition of ‘ready.’ Both of them are in their human forms when I walk out, though of course the moment they see me, that changes.

“Bʏ Mʏ Rᴇsᴏʟᴠᴇ!”

“¡Lᴀs Pʀᴏᴛᴇɢᴇʀᴇ́!”

Man, that’s bright. I’m not even looking at them. I’ve already seen them both transform anyway.