novelraw Chapter 256 255 - The Science of Trust
Chapter 256 255 - The Science of Trust
Emily and Silvia's spar ends with Emily flat on her back once again, this time cradling her right arm to her chest, the bones within fractured clean in two.
"Why are you being so trusting?" Emily asks, sitting up and curling her legs beneath her as the sparks dancing across her skin fizzle out.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Silvia replies with a teasing smirk, dropping out of her combat stance and stepping closer. "Besides, you haven't earned an answer to that question; the last hit was definitely mine."
"Surely you owe it to me for the effort it'll take to heal this." Emily nods towards her arm, setting it down in her lap and starting to weave a healing spell around it.
"Well, I'll admit I got a little ahead of myself there." Silvia drops down cross-legged before her, sitting so close their knees are almost touching. "I was just having too much fun. The time we spend travelling is usually so dull. No one on this ship will give me a good fight. They're all either too weak, too boring, or uninterested in a friendly bout."
She waves a hand through the spell Emily's casting, disturbing it without destroying it, before turning her palm up in a silent offer. Curious, Emily dismisses her mana-weaving, lifting her broken limb and offering it to the vampire while pinning her with a cautious gaze. Silvia takes hold of Emily's wrist gently, using none of the strength that shattered the limb, and uses her free hand to carefully realign the bones.
Once satisfied with the alignment, she lifts her hand to her mouth and bites through the base of her thumb, before turning her hand and letting the blood that flows out pool at the tips of her fingers. Some of the crimson stream solidifies into a thin, razor-sharp blade, which Silvia lowers to Emily's arm, pushing it through skin and subdermal armour with ease before sliding it from elbow to wrist. Blood flows into the wound instead of out, and it closes behind the blade without leaving a mark.
Emily feels the foreign liquid moving with purpose through her flesh, wrapping around her metallic bones and seeping into them, knitting back together the damaged fragments while flooding them with raw vitality. She marvels at the rapid healing, murmuring a quiet thanks while she flexes her hand, testing the repair and reading her machina's feedback on the process. However, after a few moments, she looks up and meets Silvia's eyes with a serious glare.
"I don't think I owe you anything anymore," Silvia says, tilting her head and flashing her fangs, dodging the unspoken question in Emily's gaze. "If you really want to know, you'll have to be more direct."
Emily narrows her eyes, hesitating for a moment. When she goes to open her mouth, and Silvia's smile stretches, Emily feels a faint sense of frustration rising in her chest, as if she's losing some subtle battle she can't quite grasp. Her curiosity burns too hot to ignore, smothering her reluctance beneath gritted teeth.
"You worked out that I already understood your crew and said nothing."
Silvia nods but stays silent.
"You realised I was a dual awakened… and still kept it to yourself."
Emily's leg starts bouncing up and down.
"Hell, you just told me about The Network despite it being in the crew's rules to withhold that information until I can be trusted," Emily continues, her tone completely neutral despite her impatient glare. "Why?"
"And why didn't you ask me this as one of your earned questions when you had the chance?" Silvia asks in lieu of an answer, leaning in closer, her eyes noticeably crinkled with joy.
"It…" Emily frowns, finding the answer on the tip of her tongue despite not wanting to admit it. "Didn't feel right."
Silvia chuckles, suddenly rolling back and twisting, pushing herself to her feet with one hand and holding the other out to Emily in a single, silent, smooth motion.
"And there's your answer: because it felt right."
Emily takes the offered hand, letting Silvia pull her to her feet and in close.
"You're far too interesting a puzzle to treat like any other random mechanic," the vampire whispers into her ear, before breaking contact with a gentle brush of their arms as she walks past her towards the door. "Why would I let my Captain or crew get in the way of unravelling you?"
She disappears from the training room with a single fleeting glance back. The vibrant crimson of Silvia's gaze lingers in Emily's mind as she follows with a sigh, feeling like she lost more than she gained from that exchange.
***
Emily enters the fifth stage private workshop to find Eidecht and Pod already at work. They both notice her entry immediately, but only Pod turns away from his machining to greet her.
"How did it go?" he asks, switching off the lasers of the cutter he's using with a spark of machina.
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"Fine." Emily shrugs, approaching him and glancing at the block of metal he's midway through turning into the familiar form of a rifle body. "She broke my arm."
Pod's gaze instantly snaps to her metal limb, scanning it for damage.
"The other one."
"Ha, yeah, she does that," Eidecht says without looking up from the circuit board she's designing, her laugh a hissing rumble in her throat. "Last time I agreed to entertain her, she cracked half my scales. I assume you've paid a visit to the healing branch?"
"No, she fixed it for me."
Eidecht's head snaps back to face Emily, rotating a near one-eighty, her slitted eyes blown wide in surprise.
"Really? You must've impressed her. I've only ever seen the Vice-Captain gift her regeneration in battle. Normally, she sends away injured sparring partners like damaged goods, disappointed in their performance. What did you do?"
"I kicked her in the face?"
"Yeah, that'll do it." Eidecht nods and turns back to her work.
Emily waves Pod off to return to his personal project and starts working on another attachment for her new arm: an upgraded kinetic railgun. A short while later, as she's routing channels in the skeleton of a mounting chassis for wires, while watching Eidecht work from the corner of her eye, Pod draws both of their attention with a question.
"Hey, Eidecht, why do the rest of the crew refer to us mechanics as time-bombs? I've been called that more than my name since we came on board."
"Because they're ignorant," Eidecht replies with a scoff. "You're only second stage, so you may not have experienced it yet, but as our stages grow, so too does our degree of control over our cortexes, especially during the ascension process if you're able to remain aware. Because of this, a lot of us choose to make changes to how our cortexes work to try and increase our efficiency and remove unneeded processes."
Emily's hands pause, and she glances up to see Pod staring at her across the workshop with a carefully blank expression.
"Sleep's almost always the first to go, but a lot of mechanics fiddle with their empathy and emotional processing to a certain degree as well," Eidecht continues, not noticing, or pretending not to, the uncanny quiet that has settled over the room's other occupants. "Unfortunately, we're not perfect, and just like any standard unawakened race, we often make subconscious changes to the way our minds work based on external stresses. Or let our desires get the best of us. The more you tweak your cortex, the harder it is to see an issue with going further, and that can lead to a certain level of… instability."
Pod's fingers drum lightly against the metal table he's sitting at, and Emily sets down the rotary tool she was using, suddenly very aware of the echoing chorus of her own voice occupying one of her cores.
"Most of us are completely fine, and the universal nickname is completely blown out of proportion, but in known history, the worst slaughters have all been carried out by high-level mechanics."
"All of them?" Emily asks, her face blank but her tone solemn.
"Well, there are a few exceptions," Eidecht responds, much to her relief. "Leiah The Spellblade, one of the first known dual awakened, destroyed her home star system after the ruling power, her own family, found out about her gifts and bound her with magical restraints early in her path to power. She broke free upon her ascension to ninth circle and phase and slaughtered everyone who had a hand in her fate, along with countless others who didn't. She took her own life as the last of her species after shattering her home star."
"She shattered a star?" Pod questions in disbelief.
"She shattered several, and that's nothing," Eidecht chuckles. "A standard ninth level being could do that, let alone a dual awakened. If she really wanted to, Leiah could have done so much worse. Take The Dimensional Terror, for example. They were just a mage, one no one knows the true name of, who ripped a hole in reality, opening a portal to another dimension filled with monsters. They wreaked havoc across two galaxies, extinguishing countless stars before The Martial Alliance put them down for good."
"And yet mechanics are seen as worse?" Emily drums her fingers on the table, dying to gain access to The Network to research the known universe's history.
"Much. The Dimensional Terror was deranged and unique in the size of his following among mages: most don't have another dimension at their beck and call. However, nearly all high-level mechanics have the ability to replicate those numbers given time and resources, and even when they snap, they still retain their intelligence. Just recently, only three centuries ago by the universal calendar, we had yet another ninth stage mechanic break: Xiao Han. He styled himself a mechanical emperor and took over a galaxy near the edge of Guild space before cutting off all contact with the outside universe and culling all organic life to build a mechanical army. When he thought his legion was strong enough, he tried to expand and managed to take out three civilisations and ten galaxies before he was put down."
"Why didn't anyone stop him when he started killing people en masse?" Pod says in confusion. "Surely that was a huge red flag."
"No one knew at first." Eidecht shrugs, seemingly unbothered, not halting her work for even a single second. "A territory within Guild space going dark isn't uncommon, and he was near the outskirts, so no one was paying that much attention. Then, when he started expanding, it was towards Alliance space first, so The Guild was even less inclined to care until he turned his sights on us."
"Crazy…" Pod mutters.
"Ha, get used to it, kid. The universe is a crazy place."
***
A few days later, with several new attachments sitting inside the spatial storages hidden within her left arm, Emily returns to her room. As she turns the corner in the hallway and sees her door, her gaze is immediately drawn to a small parcel, wrapped in blood-red cloth, sitting on the floor in front of it. There's no sign of anyone else in the hallway, so she approaches the parcel and scans it with a wave of machina before touching it, finding a small, complex device inside with no signs of danger.
There's a small, white note tied to the top of the neat bundle, and she flips it as she picks the parcel up.
Enjoy your research.
-S
The crimson words emanate a sharp, familiar presence, carved in looping cursive like strokes from a blade. Emily's eyes widen a fraction, and she slips into her room, releasing a field of static to block all external observation before gently unravelling the tightly bound fabric wrap.
A smooth metal tablet covered in faint cracks falls into her palm as the fabric peels away. Emily's hands find comfortable purchase on either side of it, her fingers slotting into waiting divots with small scanners at the tip of each digit. She sends a light stream of machina into the device, and it springs apart at the cracks, opening up to reveal a glowing, translucent screen with a few words in an unfamiliar language and a small loading bar in the centre.
An excited grin parts Emily's lips as she understands what she's been given: a Terminal.
"Because it felt right…" she mutters under her breath, before collapsing into her bed and pulling up a new page in her system notes to begin deciphering the new language waiting for her.