Thirty-Five
“What happened to them?” Kon asked Ignacio while the two men stood off to the side. The trio of mages were clustered to each other, eyes wide and unseeing as they trembled. Marie had led the former Squires off to the side and was talking slowly to them, touching hands as they whispered back and forth. Ignacio had bloodstained bandages around his forearm and walked with a limp, but otherwise seemed unbothered.
“Bad rift. We would have all died if Benny didn’t intercede, but he waited for us to know the feeling of death before he did so. The guardian was stronger than we thought, it…it was bad,” Ignacio finished. He sat down and looked at Kon with a questioning look, as if he debated to ask, but he finally did.
“How’d you do it? Fight those rifts by yourself? We went as a team and would have all died without help.”
“I had help. Diur and Alice were with me if I needed them. I had a few close calls, but nothing super horrific.” Kon thought about Crucible and the rifts he’d cleared. Without Alice’s healing he’d be a mess of scar tissue, but he couldn't remember wavering. At the end of the day, he couldn’t waver. There had been too much on the line then, if he’d hesitated for even a moment he would have died. Or worse, been the cause of Alice or Diur’s death.
He had been the cause of Alice’s death. That she hadn’t stayed dead was besides the point. Evelyn Bosch had given her life on that planet to let them escape. His path here was littered with graves, the majority of them his enemies, but there were a few allies who hadn’t made it this far.
His moment of reflection was broken by Ignacio’s scoff and shake of his head. The slim young man was always careful with his words, seemingly lifeless unless they talked about his passions. Kon had to reevaluate his awareness as Ignacio looked over them, keen eyes analyzing with a single sweep.
“No, I think you probably had tribulations as severe as our own. Likely worse.” Ignacio froze after the words before he gave a shake of his head and leaned back against a wall.
“We’ll overcome this. The Squires knew what this was about, they had the right mindset. The mages not as much. Scholars for the most part, but even they are strong.”
“And you?” Kon asked after listening to Ignacio.
“Forging requires tempering. We are all being forged, are we not?” Ignacio asked. Kon couldn’t argue with the thought process. Not when his body was slowly changing, rift treasures with slices of reality embedded inside of him while his very bones turned to metal.
“Can’t have you cracking. Anyways, I had my own small tribulation and it brought me a thought,” Kon said and Ignacio leaned in, his interest grabbed easily.
“Since you have brought me over, I am to assume it involves forging? I will remind you that I am not my grandfather, I lack much of his skill and expertise,” Ignacio warned.
“All theory right now and since you’ll be one of us, it makes sense to bring you in now. One of my runes is absorb,” Kon began to break down how he was able to absorb energy and redirect it through formula, bypassing the need for monster cores. Then he explained the backlash and how he’d seen the rigs that Alexandros had used.
“You wish to incorporate their limiters into our armor to reduce the amount of backlash. I’m assuming here that the backlash is caused by dragging rift energy through the body and warping reality?” Ignacio asked. Kon paused and thought about it a second, trying to think about how he felt when he’d touched on the power and his two instances of backlash.
“I don’t think it’s just rift energy. It happened to me when I used thermal energy the first time. I store the energy in my body in that case, all that heat I used was either inside of me, or maybe stored inside of the rune? It’s hard to describe,” Kon said. Ignacio frowned and reached into his pocket to pull out his holopad and began to quickly work on it.
“Maybe the inner suit? No, the exo-suit would be better, but the damage it’ll accumulate,” Ignacio said, mostly to himself. Kon leaned back as the armorer started to work faster and faster, fingers a blur on the pad as he lost himself in his work.
“What did you do to Ignacio?” Benny asked, appearing over his shoulder and staring down at Ignacio who was lost in his own world.
“I asked him about putting in a similar rig that Alexandros used in our suits, if it was possible to help alleviate the backlash anymore. Today I experienced a pretty bad backlash event. Pushed a stream of fire into my Compression field and it drained me in an instant. Powerful attack thought, it turned a stream of fire into a plasma torch. Cut right through the beast’s body with ease,” Kon told him. Benny frowned a bit and rubbed at his chin with armored fingers.
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“I could see how that would work in theory. Rigs are pretty temperamental and fragile though. Similar to cultivator arrays honestly,” Benny froze in mid sentence as he wiped at his face.
“Cutlivator arrays. I don’t know why I never saw it. Hells, I have a bunch of them, and I gifted one to Daniur as a congratulatory present. The rigs are similar, but our own tech. Array masters are expensive, but…it could work,” Benny said and Kon felt left out for a second time as he couldn’t keep track of what Benny was talking about. The old man quickly sat next to Ignacio and began a hurried conversation, leaving Kon to stand there without a clue of what had happened.
“I feel like I did something here, but can’t tell what,” Kon muttered to himself as he went to find Alice. The mages and squire groups had started to merge and talk to each other which Kon thought was a good thing. They had been broken up for a reason and the continuous clique behavior had started to wear on his patience.
“Bad rift?” Kon asked Alice who nodded back.
“The guardian was some type of wasp or something. Had a paralytic poison on its stinger. Got a couple of them and they had to lay there as the fight went on. Primary monster were these lumbering shelled creatures. Strong and tough, but slow and should have been an easy fight,” Alice said.
“Except they were paralyzed and the monsters were walking toward them,” Kon said.
“Benny had to step in, remove the paralytic and kill the rift guardian. It was too fast for any of them to hit. After that the rift was pretty quick. It’s hard, those things wouldn’t be a problem in our armor, but they have to learn to fight without it. Don’t know when you’ll be caught without it,” Alice said, obviously remembering her fight above Crucible. She’d been caught in her sleeping clothes, armor having been destroyed on a prior mission.
“When we leave to fight on Orgo we’ll be fully equipped and won’t have to worry about stuff like that,” Kon said. Alice snorted and shook her head.
“It’s combat. There’s always going to be something else to worry about. It might not be an oversized wasp that paralyzes you and lets its minions eat you, but it’ll be something else. Crazed cultivators, death rays, buried atomic weapons, politics, or even a bad fuel line on your shuttle. Shit happens. Being in a half ton of treasure-alloy armor helps prevent some of it, but never for a moment think you’re invulnerable. That’s when the grave gets dug. It might not get filled right away, but it's dug and waiting for you,” Alice warned and Kon nodded at the gentle reprimand.
“Just…fuck it, I don’t know. You’re getting strong fast, alright. I don’t want to see you in that early grave because of some stupid ego trip. Most of the time it’s a slow accumulation of strength and you grow into your power. I helped build you up, you’re my first Squire, regardless of what damn words or titles we use. It’s easy to be cavalier on some planet when there’s nothing but you and monsters all around you. It’s different when you’re building something like this, for the express purpose of entering a war and turning it,” Alice said.
Kon frowned as he looked at his elder, her still youthful face and demeanor solemn as she looked around at their cadets as they slowly came down from their own fight. This wasn’t like her at all, she was always so confident, ready to fight. To see her cautioning him was a stunning change and Kon couldn’t help but wonder about it.
“You trained us. I don’t know war, never seen it, not really. Few raids and the fight in the tournament, but I know you have. Benny’s seen them all and you’re our trainer. We’re doing the right thing and that’s what matters. You and Benny will get us through this,” Kon told her. He knew he’d said the wrong thing as Alice’s shoulders hunched tighter as she grimaced, mouth screwing up as if tasting something sour and bitter.
“Listen, go and talk to them. Reassure them, they’ll take it better from you than me,” Alice said as she pushed off the wall and stalked away. Kon could only star at her broad back, red hair waving back and forth, and wonder what it was that was going on with her.
Benny and Ignacio were both huddled up and there was nobody else who knew her that he could talk to. Whatever it was that she was struggling with had seemed to rise up with the group’s attack and near death, exacerbated more by Kon’s words.
“Is she scared of being in charge? I know she’s not a coward and loves the actual fight. Is it being responsible for us?” Kon mulled the thought over for a bit before setting it aside. Alice was allowed to have doubts and worries, she was only human after all. If it continued he’d ask Benny when he wasn’t in some deep technical talk.
Kon walked over to the cluster of cadets and talked to them. It wasn’t anything about the rift but the things that made them all human. What holos did they like to watch, or music that they enjoyed. Favorite foods or memories of something funny. Kon told them of when he’d nearly blown himself up trying to kill slimes on the space station that Benny had a contract on. It took a few hours of small talk as the tension slowly broke down and allowed everyone to breath.
They weren’t healed or even settled, but that thick tension dissolved eventually. Ignacio pulled himself away from Benny and launched into some deep technical talk that ended with a joke that nobody could understand aside from Alexandra who howled while everyone stared at her like she was crazy. Which made everyone laugh.
“Not a good day, but we’re still here and we’re still moving forward,” Kon thought, trying to suppress his own grimace at thought. Sooner or later some of these faces wouldn’t be here with them, the budding bonds of brotherhood forever snapped