Chapter 68 - Seeds.
The training course lay in front of the bench along its whole length, and Aren opened a bottle of water and took a couple of swallows, then set it aside and propped his elbows on his knees to watch the training already under way.
Eveline was picking up speed fast, holding steady on her lightsurf and working her way between the obstacles with skill, while Rexy flew alongside without falling behind in the least.
Mechanisms fired along her path and threw up obstacles out of nowhere, so that Eveline had to break away within a second and lose speed.
Once she had come through several such traps, she saw one of the dummy crystals that competitors were meant to collect for points. Eveline bent forward and accelerated at once, closing on the crystal faster and faster, until she finally seized it and immediately dodged the next trap.
She leveled out her flight and carried on with a smirk, fitting the crystal into a purpose-made holder on her belt.
Then a massive body slammed into her from the side, knocking her off the lightsurf and the crystal out of her holder. Eveline went down and rolled across the ground, while the falling crystal was caught by Artus on his sun hunter, a large winged beast with golden plumage and a breastplate of sun steel, the same one he had just run her down with.
Eveline raised her head with difficulty, and a worried Rexy flew over to her.
"Artus, don't you think you could go at least a little easier on her?" said Olen, coming up on his desert whirlwing, a lean six-limbed creature with copper scales and two pairs of membranous wings.
"Let her get used to it. They will handle her far more roughly at the competition. We have to forge her into a fully prepared competitor," Artus answered.
Olen looked from Artus to Eveline, who had rolled onto her back with her arms out to the sides and her eyes fixed on the sky.
"...I think you'll finish her off before the competition even starts..." he said.
Artus lowered his head toward Eveline, then landed his flier, jumped down from it and came over to her.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Huh?..."
"I said, are you all right?"
"Ah... yeah... just a bit dizzy..." she answered, still looking at the sky.
Artus breathed out through his nose and turned to Olen, who had come down as well.
"I'm starting to think we rushed into this idea of ours," he said, while Olen walked up to him.
Olen for his part planted his hands on his belt and looked over Eveline where she lay.
"What number is this attempt now?" he asked.
"The seventh."
"Mhm."
Aren went on watching from a distance, still on the bench, wondering what the three of them were saying to each other.
"Ah, found you at last!" came Deron's voice from off to the side.
Aren turned around and looked in surprise at Deron, who stood beside a dark-skinned man in an elegant suit of deep blue.
"Lieutenant Deron," he said, and got to his feet at once.
"Deron will do," he answered with a smile, and laid a hand on the other man's shoulder.
"And this is a good friend of mine from Aeris-Lund — Uro."
The man stepped forward and held his hand out to Aren.
"So this is what you look like, the wanderer from Waldruhm. Glad to meet you in person."
Aren shook his hand, still studying the man's appearance in surprise.
"Is everything all right?" Uro asked.
"Y-yes... it's just that I've never seen people... with skin like that."
Uro laughed a little and let his hand go.
"It seems this is your first journey outside the kingdom, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"May I?" Uro asked, indicating the bench.
"Huh?... Y-yes, of course!" Aren answered, and stepped aside at once, letting the two men through to the bench.
Sitting down together, all of them turned to the pair training in the distance, while Aren glanced at Uro again out of the corner of his eye.
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"I see their training is in full swing," said Deron.
"And who are those two lads?" Uro asked.
"Cadets out of Solum. Lucia sent them here to keep an eye on Aren," Deron answered.
"So that's how it is..."
Uro turned to Aren without warning, and Aren looked away sharply.
"So tell me, Aren, how do you find Helios?"
"Er... well..." Aren began.
"Uro, I told you everything already... about what happened," said Deron from the other side.
"I know, but I'm more interested in his impressions of the country as such. The technology, the culture..."
"Well... everything here is astonishing... I've never come across technology like this before. Everything here runs on photocyte crystals and the magic of light..."
"That's certainly true. Helios is unique in having built a powerful state whose technology and daily life rest on its own magic. No other country is capable of using photocytes the way this people uses them. And besides, these crystals can only be mined here," said Uro.
"But why?" Aren asked.
"Scholars hold to the theory that it's because of the Sacred Lake. Since it already shaped what formed around the Radiant Forest, it stands to reason that it shaped the minerals underground as well. And it is borne out by the fact that every major deposit lies right up against the Radiant Forest."
"Which is why our industrial cities, Heliopolis among them, sit right against the Radiant Forest," Deron added.
Aren lowered his eyes to his laced fingers in thought.
"All of this is so interesting..." he murmured.
"Oh yes. And on top of photocytes they use other crystals here as well. Some of them can even show an image of what is happening somewhere else," said Uro.
"What?... seriously?" Aren asked, turning to him.
"Yep. And you'll see them during the competition, as it happens. They activate crystals like that right above the stands so the spectators can see what's going on across the whole course."
Deron listened to the two of them with a smile, his eyes on Eveline where she stood with Artus and Olen far ahead.
"Ah, looks like the next attempt is coming up," he said.
Aren and Uro looked ahead.
The silence held for a while as they watched Eveline and Rexy head for the start.
"Do you think she'll manage to reach the podium?" Aren asked.
"If I didn't know Eveline, I'd say she has no chance at all. Only... she's a stubborn girl... and she never gives up... so it's a hard question to answer. All that's left to us is to hope for luck," said Uro.
"She will manage it," said Deron, and both of them turned.
"I can feel it. This time... my girl is going to win in a way nobody can imagine."
Meanwhile there was a knock at the door of a grand mansion, and a maid opened it and found Sergeant Alpina Blair on the threshold.
"M-Miss Blair?... I wasn't told you were coming... are you all right?" she asked.
"Hello, Eila. Yes, I'm fine. Are my parents home?"
"Yes, Lord and Lady Blair are in the garden just now. Please, come in and leave your bags here. I'll carry them myself."
"Thank you," Alpina said, and came into the house, left her things with Eila and headed for the far end of it to go out into the garden.
Some time later she was sitting at the table with her parents and her two younger brothers.
Alpina did not tell them what had actually happened in the desert, since Lucia had given the order to say nothing. So she had to lie, and put all of it down to a clash with the Erz.
Her younger brothers were ten and fourteen. The youngest was named Kael and the middle one Elar.
"And how long will your recovery here last?" her father, Olerius, asked.
"I don't know, the physician said it all depends on my condition. I have to send a report every week," Alpina answered.
"It's a good thing Archon Lucia sent you here. We're glad you're back and can recover with your family, safe," her mother, Helenia, said, taking her hand.
"Tell me, are the Erz really so horrible that they have a third eye on their forehead?" Kael asked.
"Of course not, I told you, Kael. Those are all tall tales," Elar said.
Alpina smiled, looking at her youngest brother.
"No, they don't have a third eye. But they're very unpleasant in their own right," Alpina said.
Lucia came into the laboratory, where Dex stood with his arms crossed in front of an enormous glass vessel, inside which pulsed the living biomass that had been separated from Alpina during the operation.
Lucia stopped level with his right shoulder and looked at the same thing.
"I hope you're ready for bad news," said Dex.
"Speak," Lucia said.
"Well, firstly, I'm an engineer, not a specialist in... organics..." he began, rubbing the back of his head.
"Secondly, I've run several analyses, and this filth has a nature that nothing in the archives I dug up can describe. At the very least, I don't have the technology or the instruments to study something like this."
"So you're helpless here?" Lucia asked.
"Entirely. Things like this are usually the specialty of Fene-Krest or Valkar..."
Lucia set her fingers together and turned his words over, while a thin tendril of the mass reached out toward her and pressed against the glass.
"How is it still keeping itself alive?" she asked.
"Like I said, I've got nothing that could help me find that out."
"You're an engineer, so build something that could help."
Dex let out a breath and set his hands on his belt.
"It's all far simpler in words, especially for someone who knows nothing about engineering," said Dex.
"Did you really learn nothing at all?"
"...there is something I noticed. But it's only a theory of mine," he said, then went over to the vessel, crouched down and put a hand against the glass.
The biomass rushed to his hand at once and stuck flat against the other side of the glass.
"When I was taking samples, this thing was lifeless. Or rather, that's what I thought. At one point it seemed to wake up and tried to touch me straight away, and thank goodness my assistants managed to pull me back in time. Then we froze the mass and dropped it into this vessel. I cut off a small piece and studied it in a suit, and noticed it was still trying to get to my body."
"So this filth wants to merge with someone," said Lucia.
"That's how it looks."
Dex got up and stepped back until he drew level with Lucia.
"The report said the cocoon of that monster was made of the same flesh, and that there were human faces in among all that mass," he said.
"Yes. When it attacked, it began merging with the fliers and the riders on their backs. Alpina was one of them," Lucia answered.
"Speaking of her... how is she?"
"She looked worn out, which is no surprise, and after the foreign biomass was separated out she was left with burns."
"Mm... and there was nothing else?" Dex asked.
"No. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, no reason... it just looks... contagious... but I imagine a mess like that wouldn't leave symptoms you couldn't see, so there's nothing to worry about."
Lucia glanced at Dex out of the corner of her eye, then turned and headed for the exit.
"Assemble whatever instruments you need and send me a report by the end of the week," she said as she went, and Dex turned after her in indignation, only to find the door already locked.
"Fuck me," he muttered.
That same night, with the whole family already in bed, Alpina stood in front of the bathroom mirror, looking over her healing burns.
Something caught her eye, and she brought her face closer to the mirror, drawing her eyelid aside to look at the eye red with capillaries.
Then one of the capillaries crawled off to the side like a worm, which sent her recoiling in horror and knocked a cup with a toothbrush off the basin.
Her heart hammered in her chest and her sight blurred for a moment, while her hands shook.
"What the..." she muttered, feeling the cold sweat run down her temple.
She held still like that for a minute, then stepped slowly forward until she was in front of the mirror again and looked at the eye.
This time everything was normal, but her heart did not settle straight away, so she braced her hands on the edges of the basin and lowered her head.
I guess I'm losing it... she thought with a chuckle.