Extended Business Trip (Arknights/Youjo Senki [Manga])

After passing away in my second life due to what I could only surmise was a car bomb, I had been a little surprised to find myself immediately reincarnated once more.

After all, in our first meeting he complained about all the effort he went to reincarnating us. A ridiculous complaint, as he was the one who built the system that led him there, picked the specific model too, only to complain about lack of consumer interest. In our subsequent meetings he would gloat that he didn't need me, because violence and warfare had indeed succeeded in igniting humanity's reliance on him.

And yet at the end of it I woke up as a baby again, without a word from him. Had he finally grown a sense of shame after his failed hypothesis of 'LITTLE GIRL + WAR ORPHAN + MAGIC + CONFLICT = PIETY' or had he thrown in the towel after putting me through hell, only for one of his little buddies to reincarnate me again?

I didn't have to wonder for long, because only a few months in and I realised my situation was uncomfortably familiar. By the time I was a year old, I was ninety-percent sure it was another experiment. Whether my second death was Being X flipping the chessboard like a child to try again with small changes, or whether he had failed to predict the explosion that killed me and this was the closest he could get to a redo, it was just yet again another piece of evidence that he had no claim to being an omnipotent, omniscient God.

To explain, my third world was both mundane and fantastical. From the perspective of my first life, there were plenty of things to find familiarity in.

People had mobile phones. The gendarmes back in my hometown would patrol the streets with little earpieces worn.

Colour televisions were everywhere, even in my early youth, so long as your definition of ‘everywhere’ discounted the impoverished district I grew up in.

Globalisation reached a stage where multinational companies were an everyday occurrence. Even in my conservative, dinky little hometown of Wolumonde, you could find a Cambrian selling faux-fur coats.

Technology and culture developed to the point that being a livestream host was a legitimate profession these days. The internet existing said plenty on its own.

But for all the superficial resemblances to the world of my first life, it was unequivocally not the same.

On the world of Terra, civilisation revolved around a substance called Originium. All the familiar technologies I previously mentioned were powered by power plants running on Originite Prime, a processed, high-yield form of Originium. Originium was nigh ubiquitous, found all over the land, and cultures around the world had developed since antiquity around its use. Most modern technologies were reliant on Originium and its derivatives, whether through crucial components or simply for power.

The catch was that modern research had identified Originium exposure as the causative agent behind Oripathy, a cancer-like wasting disease that had the added bonus of being infectious. Despite that, there was little to no chance of moving away from its use. Originium was essential in keeping our nomadic cities moving, which were a necessity because Terra had natural disasters every Tuesday.

Even if that weren't true, Originium was simply too cheap, too energy rich, and too plentiful to stop using.

Only poor people caught Oripathy, anyway.

Originium propped up the magic too, which existed like in my second life. What was unalike was that, once again, Originium products were crucial to powering, amplifying, or otherwise enhancing that magic. It was so important that magic itself was referred to as Originium Arts.

In fact, for all the modern, corporate trappings, Terra was decidedly more fantastical than the worlds of either of my previous lives. For starters, there were no humans in the traditional sense. Only various flavours of beastkin, demonkind, and other assorted fantasy races. My next door neighbour was a vampire.

There was even a small-statured race of smiths and engineers who lived in a kingdom beneath the ground. I’d say what that reminded me of, but that word was a racial slur here.

I myself had been born an Elafia, some sort of deer-person, and sported a small pair of antlers. It was a little strange, given that I seemed to recall that only male deer had those, but I was no animal expert. It was what it was.

Also, ‘small’ was a relative term. My antlers still made putting on a t-shirt an exercise in manoeuvrability.

At least I was fairly tall.

My name, Tanja, had obviously carried over from my second life, so I wouldn’t take it for granted that I could reach the top shelf now.

There was a time when I had worried malnutrition might smother any chances of that in the crib. Wolumonde, the nomadic town I grew up in, had been an impoverished one, neglected for more glamorous neighbours by the local aristocrat who ruled them all. And I lived on the worse side of town. The orphanage I grew up in was in the slums, right next to Zwölftontechnik Street, where they forced all the Oripathy sufferers to live before the war.

We didn’t have it as bad as the disenfranchised Infected, but winters were still too cold, especially with how closely Wolumonde stayed to the Winterwisp Mountains, and we had few enough blankets that we had to share. Dinner on every night of the year but one was boiled onions with stale bread bought at a discount from what didn’t sell on Viktualien Street.

It was a sight better than not eating at all, but I had been worried about what that diet would do to my growth. After all, I’d never been an Elafia before, and didn’t know what nutrients one needed. The ladies at the orphanage had done their best, but it was a second childhood lived out in deprivation.

When I was born, it had just been me and my mother. A beautiful woman with ivory white horns and sad blue eyes. We moved from place to place, me swaddled in a coarse blanket, and her hiding beneath a dull green shawl.

From time to time she would speak to me about how my father was fighting for the nation right now, and that when it was over he’d find us and bring us back home. He was a mighty count, she would whisper to me, and he’d win the day soon enough.

I would be very surprised if she expected me to actually understand any of that given that I was an infant, but Leithanien and Imperial were mutually intelligible enough for me to piece it together with repetition.

When the war ended, people all around us had been making merry, all smiles and relief, and my mother tried to look the part. She never quite managed.

One night, she brought me to a decrepit three story building. Apparently my father had been on the wrong side of the war, and bad men were looking for us now. But when things were safe, and it would be no time at all, she promised, my mother would return for me.

In the end I lived there for the next twelve years, and she never did return. Not that I really resented her for that.

While I grew up in the orphanage, I learned more about the war of my infancy. The previous ruler had apparently been some kind of evil wizard. Our current rulers, the Twin Empresses, had taken umbrage with his human experimentation, and overthrew him with the support of the Electors. That was fair enough, honestly. I, myself, had some less than positive experiences with mad scientists, and couldn’t imagine living with one as my monarch.

Unfortunately, all signs pointed to my father being one of his loyalists. The thing about supporting mad tyrants is that when they’re overthrown you catch a lot of the flak too.

The violence in Leithania had not stopped with the Twin Empresses' victory. It simply spilled over from soldiers to civilians, and the people who had been tormented by the former monarch poured out all their anger on everybody related to him. Great manhunts had been conducted for the Witch King's relatives, his supporters, and their relatives as well.

Any hope I might have held of my mother getting me out of there died with that knowledge. It would have to be me.

We had all seen more than enough of the poor sods over on Zwölftontechnikstrasse. As someone who had gone hungry before, I could say with authority that starvation was a bad way to go, but slowly turning into an Originium crystal from the inside out sounded an order of magnitude worse.

Not me. That would not be me. And so after cursing Being X more than a few times for my lot in life, I continued what I had already been doing anyway. I studied, and demonstrated excellence as best I could.

When I reached my teens I applied for a university scholarship in a proper nomadic city. They accepted me, and I left Wolumonde for good. A few years later, I found a job at a prestigious service firm, before eventually getting an offer for an even better role in Lungmen, one of Yan’s nomadic cities.

Leithania had been comfortable enough. Despite some of the similarities, Leithania wasn’t the fantasy equivalent of the Empire, exactly, and the cuisine was similarly different. Or maybe it was simply the benefit of being dozens of years ahead in development, despite this being the nominal eleventh century. I suppose I would never know.

At any rate, the food had been all right, and the entertainment was fine too. I’d take Leithanian opera over Noh any day.

Unfortunately, a few years back, whatever surviving loyalists to the previous monarch began stirring up trouble again, and in response, some of the old manhunts recommenced. Not wanting to tempt fate, I thus decided to move halfway across the world.

And wouldn’t you have it, I was accepted into the Lungmen branch of one of the four biggest professional service firms in the world.

To be frank, I had been hoping to move a little further east for nostalgia’s sake. Between the names and the fact that they had shinobi, the Far East was undoubtedly Terra’s version of Japan. Sadly, they were going through some Nanbokuchou thing right now, which I wanted to stay well clear of.

The position in Lungmen also paid better.

That had ultimately decided things for me. Besides, there were plenty of examples of cultural cross-pollination. A consequence of Lungmen’s Madam Governor being Lady Fumizuki, no doubt.

You could find izakaya here and there in the alleyways of downtown Lungmen, and there were plenty of authentic restaurants. Despite the name, Uncle Leung’s, down the street from MountainDash Logistics, served some incredible shimesaba. I didn’t even really like sashimi, but I had eaten there twice.

I could get a taste of home in Lungmen, if Japan could still be called that, while making a lot of money. That sounded like the perfect place to me.

Plus, I had been to Hong Kong in my first life. I liked it enough. How much worse could it be on wheels?

That was how I found myself living in Lungmen for the next few years.

I’d never donated in my first life, except for tax incentives, but the orphanage had funded my schooling when they realised my precociousness. Over the years, while I climbed the ranks of my company, I sent money back home as a form of repayment. As a wealthy businesswoman, I wouldn’t begrudge giving more money than they had invested in me.

At any rate I ended up keeping in contact, so if by some chance my birth mother survived, she would be able to find me. I kept the name she gave me, was the youngest woman to ever make junior partner in my company, and I was the spitting image of what I remembered of her.

And well, if somebody else went looking instead, I was all the way over in Lungmen, and the L.G.D. were very good at their job.

Not that I was in Lungmen right this moment. In fact, I wasn’t even in Yan.

As previously mentioned, I had made junior partner. With Terra being so prone to natural disasters, travel wasn’t as convenient as it had been on Earth, and a consequence of that was that business trips were a slightly bigger deal.

Apparently I was the only one who could be trusted to get this one right.

That was why it was looking like I'd be spending Christmas in Chernobog of all places. Which was where I was now. Standing in my hotel room. Staring out the window into the drab streets of the city.

As much as it had supposedly developed over the years, the industrialisation did no favours for the appearance of this derelict.

It was also uncomfortably Russy. How could a place that had never developed Communism look so disturbingly communist?

If it hadn’t been for the deal we were brokering with one of the local mining companies, I would never have willingly stepped foot here.

I ran a hand over my face and huffed.

At least the food was all right. It felt like I circled back to that point when it came to a lot of problems, actually. Was this a lingering occupational hazard from my second life?

A knock on the door cut that thought short.

“Coming!” I said.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I had no habit of walking around hotel rooms without clothes on, so I immediately made for the door. Hotel rooms weren't a sauna or an onsen, after all, and if it felt like one, they always came with air conditioning these days.

On the other side of the door was an unhappy-looking Ursine girl with my room service. Wonderful.

"Thank you," I said with a nod.

"Enjoy your drink," she responded with a strange look, as I shut the door behind me.

If time flowed linearly between dimensions, Serebryakov would be in her forties by now. The others might even be old enough to be grandparents.

As was tradition for my birthday, I raised my wine glass in a toast.

The hot chocolate swayed beautifully under my room light.

Technically this tradition had only begun because the orphanage gave us hot chocolate for Christmas which was a few days from my birthday, and it wasn’t so much my date of birth as the day my mother hid me there, but it was close enough. The wooden mugs had been swapped out for a proper wine glass both because the angles made the chocolate smell better, and because it was more respectable for a toast.

I closed my eyes.

Wherever you are, my battle-crazy men, I hope you’re staying out of trouble.

Back in Leithania, some might have considered it gauche and a sign of poor taste to drink hot chocolate out of… well, a wine glass, but I had grown up in poverty. Again. I couldn’t count the number of times I had to deal with chocolate cravings growing up.

Was that something to be ashamed of? The past was just a spice that made my current salary all the sweeter. I was of some means now, and all the cheap chocolate that I craved as a child was within my grasp. Any of my childhood desires I was capable of buying in bulk now, thanks to my hard work and determination.

I mentioned it in one of my letters to the orphanage aunties and apparently ‘Erwachseneneinkauf’ had even caught on with the other orphans. Good for them. Their work ethic had already been pretty good, but being able to verbalise the dream could only help them succeed.

This was the beauty of a modern economy.

Anybody with half a brain and the grit to put in the work could reach the top, even if they grew up eating slop and wearing dresses made of thick curtain cloth.

I kicked back and turned on the television.

"Currently, the Military Police have already surrounded the thugs who had taken Vaschuk Prospect," said the news anchor. "As you can see, this senseless violence is about to be put to an end. Please do not panic. Stay indoors, and await another victory for Chernobog…"

I felt my ears twitch forward in alarm. It just had to be now, while I was in this shithole of a city.

My face went tight with a frown. Was this going to affect my work?

I just hoped that tonight's meeting would go smoothly, and I could go back to enjoying my Lungmen Dollars in their city of origin.

I had only finished my glass of chocolate when the building across from me exploded.

 

To be more accurate, an explosion had been launched at the building, and a spider web of fractures spread immediately across my window.

What part of this was another victory for Chernobog?!

I dove under the table and flipped it to shield me from the window. For once, I appreciated this hotel's spartan aesthetic, because the tables in Lungmen wouldn't have been solid steel.

I lay flat on the ground and scanned for a safer location to move to.

What was that? I hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. It was just another depressing Chernobog day before some maniac lit up the building. Was this connected to the riots on the news? And why the core city municipal government office? Why would anybody attack there? It was all urban planners and sewerage managers. No Ursine aristocrat would find themselves caught dead there, and the City Hall was just down the street!

My ears swivelled madly to hear any incoming danger, picking up only the screams from the adjacent hotel floors, before I fought off the instinct to listen and covered them with my hands. If this was a random attack and they hit the hotel too, the last thing I wanted was to rupture my eardrums. It was a miracle that the glass windows even held. Must have been whatever they used to tint them. The city only looked uglier because of that, but I was beyond caring about the view right now.

Fearfully, I prepared for another attack, but nothing happened. After a minute or so of tense waiting, I slumped onto my bottom with a ragged sigh.

If the hotel hadn’t been bombed yet, then it probably wouldn’t be for now. There was no rational reason to delay the next attack, save for some kind of mind game, but I wouldn't allow my judgement to be dictated by paranoia. The police would be heading here soon, and the Ursus Military Police were nothing if not brutally efficient. Whoever this culprit was, they were about to have concerns beyond which Ursine affront to architecture to firebomb.

Still lying flat on my belly, I removed my hands from my head and crawled around my makeshift shelter towards the window. My face being the closest part of me to the floor-to-ceiling window, I would be in a spot of trouble if anything caused the glass to shatter inwards, but that was a risk I was willing to take for now.

When I wormed past the empty glass on the carpet, I took the opportunity to toss it into another room. At least it would be one less loose object if a shockwave passed through here later.

Suddenly, I realised that the television was still on. Nearly drowned out by the ongoing cries of distress, the news anchor on television continued to speak.

"Breaking news. A number of arrests have been made in connection with the riots on the city outskirts in what is a rapidly concluding situation. We report that the Military Police have the situation under control and urge all citizens of Ursus to stay indoors, and…"

I tuned her out. Propaganda was a social control apparatus that all states used to some degree or other. It was something I was used to peering beneath, and I held no strong feelings about it in general. Had even posed in a corset and awful dress for propaganda, once. I would never forget Special Major Hildebrandt’s hands.

Having said that, there was something unquantifiably unpleasant about being fed particularly blatant examples of it. Perhaps because it felt like they were treating me like an idiot. Perhaps because heavy-handed examples seemed to be a hallmark of communists and other tin-pot regimes, since they could only survive by obscuring the failings of their own governance. Either or.

This was as blatant as it got. My hotel was located on Central Main Street, in the wealthy core city. It was about as far from the docked outer districts as you could go. And yet…

And yet, what met my eyes when I looked out the window were armed rioters in identical masks and hooded white coats, in the process of blockading the road. They definitely hadn’t been there earlier. Had they been hidden among the crowd until it was time to don their disguises? But amongst the prosperous pedestrians on Central Main, they would have stood out like a sore thumb.

Beyond the obvious rioting, there was something about them that betrayed their desperation. To be blunt, they reeked of poverty. Elafia didn't have the most incredible eyesight, but even from the fifth floor, I could tell. Some of the rioters were stick-thin. Some wore ragged clothing beneath the hoods. Some walked with an uneven, limping gait.

These were not people that belonged here in the central business district. If this huge crowd of poor people were now here in the core city, that meant that they had come at least halfway across Chernobog. Why hadn't the Ursus Military Police noticed or stopped them?

…What exactly was this riot about, exactly? I hadn’t held much interest when I thought it was just a few trouble-making delinquents, but it was obvious from the moment that explosion went off that this was a bigger deal than I'd thought. Some of the masked rioters were smashing the windows of the municipal government office now, I noticed. Was this some sort of Occupy Wall Street movement? Eat the rich, and the like?

I stilled. Against my better judgement, I pressed an ear against the shattered glass.

“Down with Ursus! Down with the Tsar! Fire and vengeance, reunion’s not far!”

By all accounts the current Tsar was a peaceful moderate who pushed for a number of social safety nets. I could understand the conservative war hawks chomping at the bit, but what was there not to like about him if you were poor? Were they blaming him for not fixing all their problems for them?

…It couldn’t be that this was some sort of Commie uprising, could it?!

No, no, don’t jump at shadows, Tanja. There was never even a manifesto. At least as far as I knew. I hadn’t kept up with grassroots world news too rigorously beyond what was relevant to my job, unfortunately. It had been a lot of work getting to where I was, and my role required a broad enough knowledge base as it was. Of all times to be regretting the hyper focus on my career…

The rioters had just begun climbing onto cars and setting more trees on fire when the Military Police finally arrived. In their trucks, the MPs broke past the half-built barricades with wild abandon. I watched quietly as the team of burly Ursine Guards alighted their vehicles and crashed into the masked rioters with the force of a sledgehammer.

The masks stood no chance, as expected. Against the well-disciplined and well-equipped warriors of the Ursus Military Police, the masked rabble rousers were tossed about like so much garbage, and treated about as well. The beating was brutal and without mercy. More than one of the attackers would not be getting up again, which was about what you could expect after attacking a government building in the Empire of Ursus, of all places.

So why did I still feel so uneasy?

With time, the answer became apparent. These Guards were the only MPs coming. I didn’t know where the other police were, but if they hadn’t arrived after an incident like this in the centre of the city, I could only assume that they had encountered trouble elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the rioters seemed endless.

It was like a never-ending tide. When one person was beaten down, another took their place, and their replacements weren’t about to run out either. Everywhere I could see were more rioters. If I looked up the road to my right, even more seemed to be streaming in. These rioters were converging on this location from all across the district.

The Military Police were going to lose.

I worried at my lower lip. In situations like these, the safest thing to do was to stay indoors. But from what I could see, the rioters would soon control the entire district. When those blockades went up, between the physical barriers and their sheer numbers, any MP reinforcements would be fighting an uphill battle to reach the people in the building across the road.

Rationally, there was a good chance the rioters would leave us alone, given that we had nothing to do with whatever their grievance was. As long as we had enough food to last, it wouldn’t be too great an ordeal to simply wait for order to be restored.

But did I really want to entrust myself to the type of unruly mob that thought that bombing a government building was a reasonable decision?

I agonised over my options, but soon the choice was made for me. Marching down Central Main Street was a flood of white and black. A huge group of masked rioters. But unlike the mob fighting down below, amongst the incoming crowd were people who moved like military veterans. There was something in their gait that they shared with the survivors of the Rhine Front. Worse yet, these newcomers seemed to be armed with actual military equipment. Uniform models of swords, crossbows, riot shields and what looked like Originium launchers.

I realised what that earlier explosion had been. I wasn’t so familiar with the military equipment of this world, hadn’t cared for twenty years. But if one of those mortars had taken out the front of that building, what could all these others do?

It was beyond worrying. Had these people raided a storehouse, or did they have stronger backing than expected?

I was beginning to realise that perhaps the waters of this city ran deeper than they seemed. To my understanding, Ursus’ Third Army was stationed close by. Did these rioters simply not fear for their lives, or were they confident the Ursine military wouldn't be an issue somehow?

Whatever the case, the Military Police fighting down there were completely done for. They were completely outnumbered and couldn’t win against their current opponents, let alone the more dangerous fighters coming in from the east.

This riot had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even from here! Whatever the outcome of this battle, I wanted no part of it. I’d leave before the masks finished locking down the area and make my way to wherever the bulk of the police forces were. At the very least, I wanted to keep away from the incoming soldiers whose motives I still didn't know.

I scanned the room for what I needed to take with me. I could leave all my luggage. Nothing I had here couldn’t be replaced with a bit of money. Instead, I gathered up my documentation, and put on a pair of running shoes.

Only sparing a moment to lock the door behind me, I left my hotel room and made for the stairs. In the emergency stairwell, I came across others who had left their hotel rooms.

Taking six steps at a time in a way that would have felt awkward in my second life, floors blurred by me as I bolted for the ground floor. After the final stairwell landing, I hurtled down the typically drab Ursine hallway, passing by portrait after portrait of current and previous Tsars.

I had followed the bellhop down this very hallway when I first arrived here, so I knew it led to the western exit. Around me were frightened hotel staff, and at least a few panicked guests who seemed to have the same idea as me. More third parties who were unlucky enough to be caught in Chernobog during all this. I didn’t know if they had made the same calculations, but I was in no mood to care. There wasn't much I could or wanted to do for them, so I spared them only a passing glance. The side foyer was just around the next corner. From down here, I could hear the roar of the pandemonium on the streets.

In line with some of Chernobog’s awful aesthetics, the walls of the lobby would be almost entirely windowless, so there would be some protection from gazes outside. It was to be the last bit of relative safety that I would have for a while, before I stepped out into the chaos.

I slowed down and carefully approached the turn, hoping nobody too unfriendly waited around the corner. To my surprise, in the lobby was the man who, in another timeline, might have been my verbal sparring partner for tonight.

"Director Veselov?" I asked.

The well-dressed Ursus almost jumped out of his skin before a look of recognition passed through his eyes.

"Miss Müller!”

Müller wasn't my birth surname. Nobody was sure what it was because my mother's note only mentioned my given name. Considering the circumstances of my birth, I sure as hell didn't want to find out, either. When children at the orphanage passed a certain age without being adopted, the aunties at the orphanage would kindly assign us one. I didn't have much of a preference, so they gave me the most common one in town.

I was used to it enough that I answered to it by reflex now.

Clutching a briefcase to his chest and gaping at me was the middle-aged Ursus I was supposed to be meeting tonight: Sasha Veselov. He wasn’t from Chernobog either. Arktik Oridzhinium was a centuries-old mining firm, owned by the Ursus Imperial Family. Having slept on the development of Chernobog for decades now, AO had finally decided to make a move a few weeks ago. Their negotiations with the Boris Group had ended in a major joint project based out of Chernobog itself, so the headquarters in Saint Gryphersburg had dispatched one of their directors to oversee the project.

The firm I worked for, Coopers & Harding, had a presence across most of the developed world, but due to a variety of historical factors, we didn't have much of a foothold in Ursus. The higher ups were hoping that the new mining project could be an inroad into the market, and after a lot of office politics, it was determined that this would be assigned to the Lungmen Branch due to the physical proximity to Chernobog. That was how I found myself flown into the city yesterday.

Now Sasha Veselov was standing there, wondering what he should do. I could understand the feeling. Just an hour ago, I was occupying myself with how to wheedle the man into paying for services the project didn't really need. Now, I was just desperate to get to whichever district the bulk of the Military Police were operating out of. I imagined he was much the same.

"I must admit, this was not how I thought I'd be spending this day," I said. Veselov chuckled nervously.

"No, I imagine not. Just a few minutes ago I was worrying about which vintage to have tonight.”

“Oh?” I smiled. “More worried about the wine than the conversation partner?”

"You belittle yourself, Miss Müller! Imagine if I entertained a rising star like yourself with mamrać," he japed, smiling in a way that must have been vaguely charming even on a middle-aged man.

I made an exaggerated grimace. "I didn't think you could find that Kazimierzian swill within Ursine borders," I joked back, hoping to ease the nerves.

It might not have worked with a Chernobog native, but out west, in Saint Gryphersburg, they were still resentful about their dozen failures to annex the nation of horse folk. As I learned in all three of my lives, there really was nothing like a touch of casual racism for building solidarity with strangers.

"Fu! Their petty horsemen knights cannot defeat us on an open field, so they ply our poor with piss," Veselov huffed.

Privately, I didn't think mamrać was so bad. Proof of that was that you could, in fact, find it within Ursine borders. Mamrać was some kind of fortified apple wine, unique to this world as far as I knew, but was easy enough on the way down. Sylwia from accounting had gifted me some chocolate mamrać for Christmas once, being from Kazimierz herself. I remember heading back to my apartment later that night, and rather enjoying the bottle with the traditional fried chicken Christmas dinner I picked up on the way home.

And his point about open combat was not strictly true. Cyryl Nearl had bloodied Ursus so badly in the last war that Kazimierz went on to reconquer historical territory.

"The military might of Ursus is well known," I agreed instead. "I'm sure this rabble will be cleared up soon enough, but for now, shall we relocate ourselves?"

That took some of the wind out of the director. His smile faded a little, but he nodded in agreement.

"Of course, Miss Müller. Where were you headed?"

"There's a well-equipped group of rioters coming in from the east. We'd best leave before they arrive."

Veselov nodded grimly.

"Let's hope they don't make things too difficult for us," he muttered.

When we entered the foyer, I felt a little foolish. Some of the hotel staff had already begun barricading the only entrance. Young Ursi were moving desks and chairs in front of the door. Of course they were. With the explosion, and then the fighting, why would anybody on the ground floor do otherwise?

I approached the young man who seemed to be in charge.

“Excuse me. We’re trying to get out. Please let us leave,” I said.

The staff member shook his head.

“We have orders to barricade the doors. Please return to your rooms and wait until order has been restored.”

“There are other guests leaving through the main lobby,” I argued. At least they seemed to have been heading that way. Noticing the stubborn set of his jaw, I tried a different tack. “The police outside are being beaten back, and there’s a huge armed mob heading down the street. They’ll be here any minute. We don’t want to be trapped here when they arrive.”

The young man hesitated.

“That’s all the more reason to remain here. We’ll be safer inside the hotel.”

“I don’t want to be locked in,” I insisted.

“Young man, we have friends that we’ve promised to rendezvous with,” said Veselov. I didn’t know if it was true, but I wasn’t about to gainsay him. “It will only take a moment to let us out, and you’ll have the entrance barricaded again.”

“He’s right. Nobody is trying to break the door down right now,” I pointed out. “This should be our decision to make.”

The staff member looked between us for a moment, but eventually he nodded.

“You’ll have to be quick. Iosef, Bogdan, help me shift this cupboard.”

The two Ursi only took a moment to comply, having overheard our exchange. To the side, a clerk couldn’t help her hands shaking with fright.

"Are you sure this is wise?" she asked. "Shouldn't we just wait until things settle down?"

"It might be best for you to do exactly that," I said. "We'll take our chances."

I wasn't sure I wanted a bigger crowd, anyhow. I was lucky enough to bump into Veselov. If nothing else, going through something like this together was sure to build a rapport. But if we were trying to leave the area without drawing too much attention to ourselves, it would be better to avoid moving as a crowd.

With the help of the three Ursi, the barricade was moved just enough to open the door a crack, and I was able to squeeze through into the alleyway beyond. Director Veselov followed behind me. It was anarchy outside. The masked rioters had begun to vandalise the streets. Between the molotovs being thrown around and the trees ignited in the earlier mortar attack, I could smell the smoke and burning from all the way over here.

The Ursus MPs must have still been fighting rioters in the distance, but they were buried behind a sea of people. What I could see were other members of the hooded mob breaking open shop windows and looting things. That was a little chilling. I was reasonably sure that none of the thievery or vandalism they were committing had much to do with their political message. I felt bad for the shop owners, but such was the fate of inanimate storefronts when a rowdy mob really wanted to show the government that they meant business.

At least there were no such stores in the alleyway where Veselov and I stood.

"I suppose we're making a run for it," I said. The sooner we left this area the better.

"At least we've got a chance," replied Veselov. "Let's take this corner. It will take us parallel to Central Main Street."

I nodded. We began trotting down the narrower street, staying close to the wall. On a normal day, this service street was probably used by local businesses and offices for deliveries and garbage collection. Here and there along the walls were abandoned trucks, often surrounded by their cargo of crates and boxes, sometimes next to a still-open garage door. One garage was filled with boxes labelled with the only word in Cyrillic I recognised, 'coffee'. We were probably passing behind a café or coffee store.

The thought of coffee made for a strange, but familiar contrast with the smell of smoke. The combination of the two scents was oddly nostalgic.

Ah well. We continued down the shaded street mostly without trouble, save for the occasional truck we had to circle around.

The comparative differences in brightness meant that whenever we passed an intersection, we had a clear view of Central Main Street, at least where more trucks hadn’t been parked at each alley’s mouth. The ubiquity of these trucks was leading me to believe that this was how all these rioters had gathered here. It was simple enough to hide men in the back instead of cargo, and there was nothing strange about delivery trucks driving into the core city.

At least the number of them seemed to be decreasing as we jogged along. It was a promising sign that we were heading the right way.

The further west we ran, the more civilians we started to see, people fleeing from the chaos in the vicinity of the mortar attack. Many of them looked like office workers who had no idea what was happening. I wondered if any of them had been from that government office.

Some of the others seemed to have been pedestrians or shoppers before the attack, based on their casual clothing. The occasional glimpse of dressed up young women whenever we passed another intersection, run ragged from trying to escape. Sometimes of parents carrying their crying children, or dragging them along where they could. There were also the brawls. Here and there I saw young civilian men fighting against the rioters.

I suppose the patriots of Ursus hadn’t been able to help themselves. In my opinion, if they were smart they would have avoided antagonising the rioters at all costs. Even as a disorganised mob, the rioters had far greater coordination and unity of purpose than any hypothetical ad-hoc coalition of shoppers and office workers. That hot-headed patriotism would cost them.

On the other hand, at least the young Ursi men were a good distraction, in case any of the masks felt like harassing perfectly uninvolved bystanders. It did make me wonder how on earth there were so many of them. I had been running for two or three minutes now, and these hooded mask wearers still seemed to be everywhere. They were even ahead of us. Were more of those empty trucks parked further up? I hoped we weren't still in the epicentre of all this, or else moving west would just run us into more reinforcements. If the better choice turned out to be holing up in the hotel, I was going to kick myself. At least we hadn't met any of them on this street yet.

"So where are you meeting those friends of yours?" I asked without looking back at Veselov.

"A little white lie," he said between puffs. "I wanted to make the choice easier on the boy."

Honestly, if they had refused, I was planning to just jump out from the second floor. I wasn’t in great shape, but humans seemed a lot tougher in this world, perhaps owing to the mysterious animal parts.

As we hurried past an intersection we heard a shrill scream in the distance. I paused only for a moment before I continued running.

“Shouldn’t we see what that was?” Veselov hesitantly. What was it about screaming women that made burly men so irrational?

“If you want to assist your countrymen, we can offer what aid we can when we reach an evacuation point,” I said. Whatever that sound was, did he really think we’d be of any help there? I doubted either of us were medical arts practitioners, and if it was a fight we’d be running into we’d stand even less of a chance. “For now it’s most important that we help ourselves—”

I was rounding another large truck when something barrelled into me from the side. I felt myself being rammed painfully into the wall before my vision swam. While one side of me burned, a large hand gripped my shoulder on the other side and slammed my back against the concrete.

“Helping yourselves, huh? Looks like we’ve found us a rat and his little soderzhanka,” said the blurry woman who attacked me.

A… A mistress ?! Even through the pain I could feel my indignation rising. Did this little tart have any idea how hard I worked for my money?

I tried to muster a response when two more thugs darted towards me and pinned me on either side. To my indignation, the woman began rifling through my pockets.

Nearby, a small crowd of their friends were pulling Veselov by the hair and belting him in the face.

“What do we have here?” One of them was looking through Veselov’s wallet.

“He with the government?” asked the one holding his hair.

“I-I’m not, I’m just a director for a mining company,” Veselov hacked out.

For some reason the air gained a dangerous edge.

“Oh? A director! We humble peasants are honoured by your presence, Gospoda Veselov,” the thug laughed, pulling Veselov’s head back.

“And it looks like he’s from Sankt Grypherburg too,“ added the one holding the wallet.

“This one’s from Lungmen.” One of my own captors gestured to me.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m just here to work out a business deal with Director Veselov. I have nothing to do with whatever you’re protesting.”

Why were they looking at me like that?

“Nothing to do with us…” the woman from earlier muttered. “This is a very nice blazer. Maynis & Linda?”

I immediately understood.

“You can have it of course,” I offered with an ingratiating smile. Trying to butter her up, I added, “I think it would look better on you than me.”

The masked thugs laughed, but it was a malicious, bitter thing.

I laughed along nervously.

“Of course, you can also have everything in my wallet,” I said, before thinking better of it. “But I would much appreciate it if you left me with my ID.”

The punch to my face was as unexpected to me as it was unreasonable. My vision swam, again, as I felt a tooth loosen.

What the hell?! There was no need to resort to violence!

“You hear that, my friends?” The woman began throwing hooks into my stomach. “A high! And mighty! Businesswoman from Lungmen! Thinks we want the scraps off her table! All while she and this Veselov get rich from sucking every last drop of blood from us Infected and sending us to die in the mines.”

Infected? As I gasped for breath through watering eyes, I gave them a closer look. It was hard to tell through all the clothing, but a few had their sleeves rolled up, revealing forearms speckled with black crystals.

“I don’t know anything about that,” I said weakly. I completely objected to this blame. It was their government! What did Ursine policies on Oripathy sufferers have to do with me? Nobody had ever approached me with such a job offer!

In the background, the masked Infected were stomping on Director Veselov now. Hey, he’s going to die at this rate. I still need that man, you lunatics!

“Please let us go,” I tried. Or at least let me go. I had never been good at begging, but I gave it my best shot.

I swallowed thickly. I couldn’t see their expressions through the masks, but judging by their body language, it didn’t seem to be working.

“Her expression seems to be saying that it has nothing to do with her,” said the thug to my right.

Somehow, I could tell the woman was sneering through her mask.

“That’s all right. We’ll make it something to do with you,” she said.

The next hook to my stomach struck me so hard in the gut that I doubled over, even with both my arms restrained. I gagged, and then hacked, and was about to try pleading again when I noticed all the blood.

My blouse was turning red with it, and jutting out through a jagged tear was a luminescent shard of black crystal.

“Welcome to our brotherhood, sister,” she laughed.

When I came back to my senses, I was standing in inch-deep blood, and my attackers were steaming corpses.

 

A few years back I found myself at a certain crossroads. It was one that most good students in a developed nation would have to face. Namely, I was deciding where to take my studies, and perhaps, ultimately my career.

While it was not a choice afforded to me as Tanya Degretyav, the Imperial orphan with a 'God-given talent for magic', I had experienced it once before as a young Japanese boy.

In my first life, the choice came later than for some. There wasn't much in the way of elective studies in high school, so until I was sixteen or seventeen, life involved keeping my head down and frantically studying what I was told to, six days a week. They only abolished compulsory Saturday classes a few years after I graduated. Most of my childhood was a linear gauntlet of tests and examinations, but the choice did eventually come.

I had been a little bewildered. My sole objective up until that point was obtaining good grades and doing what I was told, so the sudden abundance of options had seemed overwhelming. I did as my parents and high school career counsellor suggested and aimed for the business faculty in a suitably prestigious school. As it turned out, the prestige was more important for my resume than the specific degree I obtained, but the business faculty did introduce me to the Chicago School of Economics.

I won't go into the details here, but suffice to say that I entered my third life with a greater understanding of the world around me, and I wasn't bewildered this time around.

I hadn't turned thirteen yet when I was accepted into university. A consequence of living amongst elves and vampires was that, compared to Japan, there were fewer ironclad rules about what age was appropriate for what. Common sense restrictions still abounded, of course, but not when it came to harmless fields such as study. As long as I demonstrated that I had the maturity and the aptitude, any university was happy enough to hand out a scholarship irrespective of my age, and that included the University of Rudolphina.

Naturally, neither maturity nor aptitude had been in question for me, so in the end it was a question of which discipline to choose.

Ideally, I wanted to make a lot of money doing something I was already good at. Job satisfaction would have been a nice bonus, but as long as I was well compensated I didn't care what I was doing. I just wanted to live well.

In my last days at the orphanage, on a cramped bunk on the third floor, I therefore found myself going through my skill set, highlighting which could be leveraged for the highest remuneration.

The first was Originium Arts. Well, strictly speaking, it wasn't Originium Arts that I was proficient in. I had simply been an adequately skilled magician once, and that was enough. While Arts couldn't be considered a one-to-one parallel to the magic I remembered using, they shared the general concept of directing energy and instructions into a medium for encoding and assisted computation. This naturally meant that they shared many of the constituent skills required to utilise them. An understanding of the natural sciences, the ability to visualise, complex mental calculations, the aptitude for directing metaphysical energies—all of these had been honed in high stress environments where I was under time pressure to deliver.

If I could do it while Being X conspired to have me shot out of the sky, I reasoned, I could perform doubly well when it was just a bossy project manager. Combined with the aptitude that this body was discovered to have with the Arts, it could have been an easy life as an Originium Arts technician.

The other area was, of course, my experience in management.

My life as a salaryman had endowed me with plenty of familiarity with balance sheets, and even more experience in project planning and project management. I worked efficiently, kept things within budget, communicated effectively with all stakeholders, and ensured things proceeded according to schedule.

Leadership and team coordination were areas I was an old hand in as well. When I turned thirty-one, I joined my company's HR department. I learned there how to best manage and allocate our organisation's FTEs, even with free riders and troublemakers obstructing my duty.

As for more direct management experiences, life as the head of the 203rd Imperial Flight Mage Battalion had familiarised me with the skill, and then my short time as deputy commander of Kampfgruppe Seven had applied it to a larger cohort. My experiences with the Imperial Army had also unfortunately given me plentiful experience in how to deal with superiors who expected impossible results with only meagre resources. That, too, was an invaluable management skill.

Either area would have served me well, and for a while I was truly torn.

On the one hand, I didn't want to be pushed in front of a train again. My first death had come at the hands of an irrational and erratic drug addict, after all. Working with others would always pose the risk of unpredictable outliers, and the more humans I came into contact with, the higher that risk would be. It was simple mathematics, and unlike in my second life, I wouldn't be allowed to execute them. Even sending them to die in a bunker was illegal, and while I might be able to get away with murder, I would not break the law as a matter of principle.

On the other hand, as much trouble as those outliers could cause, they were by definition few and far between. Off the top of my head, I could think of the aforementioned drug abuser, an American lunatic fighting for the Russies, and a pack of sad, petty, self-proclaimed deities. It would be a coward's choice to let a few rotten apples spoil working with others as a whole, and I had gained a lot of confidence in mentoring rookies. Visha, Grantz, Ponytail—all little puppies that I raised into wolves. I wouldn't have minded raising a few more in the corporate battlefield.

In the end, after much agonising, the decision had been made to enter the General Finance stream at my new university. The considerations had been multifaceted and complex, but the two deciding factors had been simple enough.

The first was that while the median salary of Arts Technicians was higher than those in finance, for those at the top of their respective fields, financial officers were far better paid.

This was true enough in Leithania, but held even truer outside of my mother nation. Knowing already that I wanted to put some distance between myself and potential trouble from Loyalists, choosing a life in business over Arts would only further divorce myself from the image of 'the daughter of a Leithanian aristocrat that happily supported the insane Witch King'. The harder I was to recognise, the better.

The second… was that the combination of 'little girl + war orphan + magic + conflict' was looking uncomfortably familiar, so I wanted to head that off as much as possible.

It was therefore that after her initial testing, Tanja Müller never touched an Arts Unit more complex than an electric kettle again. Originium Arts was a complex field of applied science and metaphysical visualisation techniques. People trained and specialised for years upon years to utilise complex Originium Arts, and while I imagined I would be good at it, I had no illusions about actually being a qualified Arts Technician.

All this to say that I was beyond surprised when I came out of my daze, only to realise I'd cast several thermal formulae, using for the foci what I could only assume were the crystallised Originium in my assailants themselves.

I really didn't have the knowledge or skill to do such a thing. Or at least I hadn't known before this moment that I did.

Was such a thing even possible? I had no idea, because as mentioned, I was not a qualified Arts Technician.

Had I been brainwashed by Being X again? After all, he and his posse had proven to only ever be blunt instruments. 'Tanja needs to struggle to find faith. Oh, Tanja isn't struggling enough? Let's have a lunatic stab her, and then we'll give her a solution that brainwashes her.' The dual-core Elenium Type-95 Operation Orb allowed me to perform similarly impossible feats, and the price was barely-remembered religious blackouts.

I would have known for sure had he finally appeared. Said something to me. Had at least one of his buddies appeared. Nobody did.

I grunted, and applied pressure to my wound.

No, even if I remembered nothing, it looked like what happened was that I lashed out in panic. My reaction had likely been all me. I could hardly complain about the threat being neutralised, but a part of me was irked that it hadn't been a calculated decision. I made impromptu decisions when I was a Flight Mage, of course, but beneath each of those was a careful consideration. This had simply been animal instinct.

For all that I had lost none of the knowledge of my previous lives, there had been things I did lose with each death. I had to learn to speak again. I had to learn to walk again. Bayonet routines that had once been second nature were once again an ill fit for me. All things that had once come easily were turned into tests of focus and recollection. It was like the wood had marks pencilled in, so I knew precisely where to chisel, but the grooves themselves hadn't yet been carved.

That had been fine with me, really. Even on the stage of Being X's self-directed drama, I was determined to prove that there was a place for a peace-loving and motivated businessman. I would never abandon my self-esteem or principles. All the more if the firearms in this world were held in monopoly by his church of all things. That blatant provocation had only galvanised my peaceable intentions.

I was going to walk my own path, unreliant on him.

As Tanya, he railroaded me into the military with a guaranteed conscription, and then his goon forced the Type-95 onto me. Otherwise, as a staunch pacifist, I would never have stepped foot in something as offensively wasteful as war, let alone lay waste to so many human resources. After all, within each poor sap that I killed lay the potential to bring us a step closer to a modernised, enlightened world. Even while doing what it took to survive the military, the Rhine, and then all the subsequent hells on earth, I was always determinedly seeking a non-combat role in the rear.

Since he seemed intent on staying out of sight this time, I jumped headfirst into civilised, civilian work. I lived and breathed for study, followed the rules to the letter, through my efforts moved to somewhere safer, and maximised my efficiency in my new company. Always staying faithful to the idea of enriching both myself and society through innovation and dedicated labour. Every moment that I prospered under my ideals was a slap in Being X's face with the righteousness of the free market economy, and my rise was a meteoric one indeed. If only he had had the temper to listen to sense, this satisfaction could have been his from the start.

I wouldn't ever be broken by his little tantrum, I swore.

So how had it come to this?!

I grimaced. Then I grimaced a second time when a spark of pain lanced through my gut. Everything was wet and hurting.

I should never have stepped foot in Ursus. Little good came of Rus, in any world.

I needed medical attention, and urgently. Leaning a shoulder against a wall and stifling a pained hiss, I examined my wound.

Shit.

I tried to recall what I could about first aid. What was this again? A stomach wound? The liver? …I'd have noticed a lung injury, I would think.

It was probably too high to be the large intestine. And the object that would bleed me out if I removed it… I tried not to think about it, but this stone was probably Originium.

The realisation would have turned my blood cold if I wasn't already freezing all over.

I took off my scarf and made a crude doughnut around the object. Then I removed my blazer and used it to lash the doughnut tight into my stomach, applying pressure around the wound as best I could. That… would have to do for now.

…I still wasn't entirely convinced that this wasn't Being X's doing. After all, even if some things in life were a coincidence, how could being reborn in a world of magic a second time be one? Especially as a war orphan. And a little girl. As far as I knew, that was pretty rare.

I squinted.

Was this some kind of houchi play, where I was supposed to feel humiliated at the neglect? Or was he still embarrassed about that car bomb?

I hissed and propped an elbow against the concrete.

Really? Nothing? No dramatic white space and bright clouds nonsense?

There were clouds gathering in the sky, but they were dark and stormy, and my consciousness was firmly stuck in my body.

I wondered what the chances were that this was simple, mundane misfortune.

Time was running out. I tried to get off the wall and had to stifle another cry of pain.

This was not even close to my first experience with penetrative injuries, but somehow things felt worse than ever.

Was it because of the girth of the object? The crystal was narrow, but it was still about twenty millimetres in diameter. That was a larger hole than any of the optical spells had ever punched in me, and displaced more flesh than any knife wound I'd suffered, but I'd been injured so much worse even in my first sortie over Norden.

It was only by pushing off the wall with my head, using the strength of my neck, that I was finally walking upright. Stumbling forward, I took a few quick, shallow breaths to clear my head.

I glanced at the carnage.

Gingerly dropping to my knees, I stripped a mostly intact hoodie from the closest corpse—the woman who stabbed me. First of all, it was getting cold without my blazer. Second of all, until I reached the police, an attempt at a disguise could only help me survive. With only a little hesitation, I removed the mask from her separated head. Hm. She was younger than me.

Rifling through her pockets found me a general Arts Unit as well as a packet of cigarettes. I tsked. What a little delinquent. After some hesitation, I took both of them. As long as the recipient lit these far away from me, I wouldn't mind trading them away. As for the Arts Unit, it was just in case.

To my left… Director Veselov… He was still breathing.

I rose to my feet, and biting down the scream that threatened to escape me, I dragged him around the corner before releasing him behind a bin. If he had spinal trauma, or head injuries, this might have worsened them, but if I left him amongst the pieces of the Infected, he would be a dead man come the next group.

Still might be, regardless.

That was the best I could do for him. It was already quite cooperative of me to drag him around the corner with this gut wound. For a moment, an old, vicious part of me whispered that he could not take offence to being abandoned if he were dead.

I quashed it. It was probably the smell of iron and burning flesh that was bringing that mindset back. Between the blood loss and the earlier concussion, I wasn't in the right headspace to be making split-second decisions, so I stuck to the plan a more cogent Tanja had developed. I moved west.

I needed to leave before the smell attracted their friends, and I was in dire need of medical attention.

The trek was a slog. What had once seemed like a long, but manageable jog, had turned into an endless ordeal. Everything was awful, prolonged, wet agony.

It felt awful.

I couldn't help but wonder again. It was strange. The injuries I survived in Moskva made this wound look like a scratch. The sortie that earned me my alias was even worse.

Was it because this body never built up its pain tolerance, or did the Analgesic Spell make that much of a difference? The spell had never made things painless, exactly, but maybe I was underplaying its effectiveness if this was abdominal trauma without it.

I forced myself to take another step. And another. Again and again, my feet fell upon the utilitarian concrete, as I continued my exodus west. As my mood worsened, so too did the skies. It looked like a storm was coming. Once more, I couldn't help but wonder if that band of devils had a hand in this. The grey skies certainly fit Being X's taste for the dramatic.

As I considered how waterproof the hood of my stolen jumper might be, I realised that one of my antlers had been chipped. Thank everything that I couldn't feel my horns. The last thing I wanted was the pain of a broken bone on top of everything else.

I continued to make my way down the increasingly dark and foggy street.

The more time passed, the worse the chaos got. I heard more and more screaming, both before and behind me.

More bystanders attacked for the quality of their clothes? For not being Infected? It felt like the whole city was screaming out.

I grunted and limped around another fucking truck. Peered through its windows. No key.

The truck behind the coffee shop had had a key. Hadn't thought to take it because we were trying to be discreet. Might not have been stabbed if we had.

The blood that covered my front had long gone cool. I suspected that I might have been lying still on the ground by now if the humans of Terra hadn't been so much more robust.

How long had I been walking now? Ten minutes? Twenty?

I checked my watch. Seven.

There was a small plaza ahead that interrupted the service street. As I approached, I could smell the scent of burning hair again. That was not a good sign.

I ignored the pain in my gut—more proof that humans could get used to anything—and carefully peered around the corner. The mist had grown thick and ominous, but I welcomed anything that might help conceal me.

There was no longer any question about where that smell emanated from; there were flames everywhere, and even through the mist I saw small piles of corpses. The mob of Infected had lost all reason and attacked Ursine civilians. Apparently I had been limping so slowly that I missed all the chaos. Either that or this particular group was especially insane.

I looked on, dumbfounded, at the scene. Even through the fog, I was sure some were women and children. This was hardly my first burning city, but I couldn't help but be taken aback. Were they trying to kill every un-Infected in the city?

The bourgeoisie-led Jacobin Terror had inspired the Red Terror, in which the persecuted were ironically the bourgeoisie. Between their bourgeoisie targets and political dissenters, the Bolsheviks had slain over a hundred thousand people, but that had only been managed by swindling the uneducated masses into providing overwhelming support.

These lunatics could never manage that, so what could their end goal possibly be?

I scanned the plaza while I listened carefully. I was still surrounded by atrocities and violence, if the wailing I could hear beneath the conflagration's roar was indication, but the plaza itself was fortuitously empty of the living. Just fire and corpses here.

I let out a ragged breath. With the way Ursus liked to keep their Infected numbers down, there wasn't enough manpower to sweep the nation in revolution. No matter how much senseless violence they peddled today, it would all be over the moment the Ursine military moved in. For all of their failures in recent decades—the failure to take Kazimierz, the Russo-Japanese War's Terran counterpart, and then Ursus' own civil war—the Ursus military was not to be trifled with. Everybody knew that. How could these terrorists not?

I put the thought out of my mind. It wasn't my problem. I doubted the answer would change what I had to do.

My fingers found the Arts Unit I had taken from that woman. I had to admit that I was tempted.

Generally speaking, it was beyond inadvisable to use a general Arts Unit without knowing what you were doing. On the other hand, it seemed that either Arts came naturally to me, or people were greatly exaggerating its complexity. If I could already cast thermal formulae with raw Originium, then with the encoding support of Arts Units to skip calculation steps…

Flight magic would still be out of the question—there would be no computing that in my head—but a protective shell only required a single point of reference. Even without the auxiliary calculations programmed into a computational orb, wasn't it possible that I could cast it? Was I willing to try?

I weighed the risks and outcomes in my head, and the analysis said no. Using a looted Arts Unit to cast Arts on myself, without training or practice, was simply tempting fate. As today proved once more, I wasn't a lucky person. The fact that it seemed like it would be easy was just another red flag. My hand left my pocket.

Instead, after making one final sweep of the plaza for rioters, I limped out of cover towards the ruins of a bookstore, in front of which sat a tour bus. It was tall and would hide my form as I made my way around, which would do just fine for now.

To be honest, I was growing desperate. If after all this time I only managed to reach an area the rioters had already swept through, how much further back must the MP garrison be? Originally I had worried about taking off the hoodie before the police saw me, but that was beginning to seem worryingly needless.

Under my stolen mask, I glanced back down the way I came. If I went back to the hotel, would I find better care, or just a more comfortable grave? What were the chances of a doctor in the hotel, if it hadn't been overrun by these lunatics?

No, my only chance of survival was moving forwards. I continued onwards, tracing the sides of the plaza, ears constantly in motion beneath the hood to apprise me of any newcomers to the area. But I made it to the other side just fine, and continued down another service street.

Was I going to die again? Here?

If only I had my computational orb, I could have used the flight formula to get out of here.

No, if only I had hired a bodyguard before coming to this shithole.

The Executive Officer who headed the Lungmen branch kept a Kazimierzan tourney knight as his bodyguard, which I had always considered a quirk of his enthusiasm for knightsports. Nobody else had bodyguards, after all. After today, however, I was beginning to see the appeal.

If I was on the salary of a senior partner, I could hire a whole squad of bodyguards indefinitely, but one guard would be better than nothing.

The dizziness had gotten bad enough that I had to focus not to stumble, even as I stubbornly ignored the further encroaching cold, and the numbness of my hands. At some point the skies had turned black, and overcast. Dying from hypothermia in the rain was looking more and more likely.

I grit my teeth and continued up the road.

When I got back to Lungmen I was going to look into hiring a Columbian veteran, or nice Goliath mercenary to take arrows for me.

Trading specialisations in a free economy was the basis of human civilisation. If focusing on being a productive employee meant that I couldn't fight as well, then I would simply pay somebody to do it for me. Never again would I rely on ghosts, devils, or prayers.

Never again would— Oh, there was a key in that truck.

Mastering my lightheadedness, I clambered into the driver's seat. Fuel seemed fine. I turned the key. Engine was starting up.

It seemed like things were finally looking up for me. So it was just bad luck after all. I would have chuckled if it didn't hurt to. The worst day of my life, and it was all just a coincidence.

The air-conditioner was already set to turn on with the engine, and the growing warmth in the truck cabin was driving away the bone-deep cold.

I didn't really want to draw too much attention to myself by driving, but I had already lost too much blood. It was already a wonder that I had survived this long. The shard must have missed any arteries, but I was still bleeding regardless. I needed to cover more ground and find medical assistance already. The truck could be my only hope, I concluded grimly.

After I fastened the seatbelt, careful to avoid my injury, I touched the Arts Unit in my pocket again.

From what I understood of Originium Arts, casting on an object like the truck would be safer than on my body. If I was being honest with myself, though, the reason I was willing to try it now was simply because I was more desperate.

I cast a defensive shell anchored on the truck's position, and lo and behold, it worked without tearing the vehicle apart. I rolled down a window and tossed a coin from the dashboard tray. When it reached where I knew the shell was, it bounced off of it as expected. I nodded with weary satisfaction. Hopefully I wouldn't have to cast it on myself when I left this truck, but at least I now knew that I could.

With everything ready, I began driving down the street. Even if I died in this thing, at least I would die warm. With one hand I flicked through frequencies on the radio for anything useful. Surely at this juncture the Ursine authorities would have given up on saving face?

The results were too disappointing to mention. Perhaps it had been no coincidence that Russia was the birthplace of Communism.

I should have been driving slower. The mist made everything hard to see. But it also made my new truck hard to see, so I gambled on not crashing into a building and went fast enough to kill any rioters who got in the way.

I focused on keeping the defensive shell up, and keeping the steering wheel straight.

I was cold, but it was so warm in here…

…

My eyes shot open when I was flung painfully towards the windshield, caught only by my seatbelt. I cursed and doubled over in agony as whatever did this jostled the shard in me.

"Get fucked, Imperial dogs!"

"Пошли нa хуй!"

"Fuck you! Fuck you!"

What the hell was going on?

Dazedly, I looked up through the window and what I saw made my stomach drop. My truck was sitting between two halves of a barricade because the truck had punched right through. My defensive shell was down, I realised.

Before my eyes, hollering rioters flooded through the breach and began brawling with the police on the other side, and scattered on the ground were the broken bodies of a few more Ursine Guards. My truck had probably hit them, I realised.

Oh no. No, no, no.

I quickly put the truck into reverse and tried to escape. The rioters parted around me with great cheer and continued to assail the gap I made.

"Elafia sisterrrr! Whooooo!" I heard one of them scream as I made a three-point-turn and hightailed out of there.

---

A/N: Houchi Play (放置プレイ) is a type of emotional SM roleplay where you ignore and neglect the sub for a long period of time.

 

No, no… What was I going to do now?

As I drove, I pulled the hoodie off of me and tossed it out the window. The mask quickly followed.

Where was I going to go now?

Was I to just keep driving and hope to find another police holdout? But the one I had accidentally breached looked like they were barely holding on, anyhow.

Even if I hadn't just rammed a hole in their barricade, I would never have gotten past the fighting to get the medical attention I needed.

Was the whole city just overrun by these crazy Infected now?

I gasped.

Shit! I shouldn't have thrown away the hoodie and the mask!

If this city had fallen to these masked bandits, then the MPs had bigger things to worry about. How could they spare the men to chase me down?

It would have been better to keep wearing the disguise.

I considered turning back to retrieve them, but I didn't relish getting back into the cold, not while I was getting increasingly dizzy. I was sweating profusely too, which would be just awful in the wind. Instead, I curved my beaten-up truck into yet another small street in the hopes that nobody would see me. There had been another barricade in the way, as well as a complement of masked guards, but I didn't let that stop me.

I spun up another defensive shell, which shattered in a rain of light. My truck was probably in worse shape than ever, but the roadblock shattered too, along with everyone in the way. I was a pacifist at heart, and I abhorred the wastefulness of killing, but these scumbags attacked me first.

The sky was getting darker and darker, and it was starting to thunder ominously. My limbs were starting to shake. It was getting so cold. How much was the blood loss, and how much was the weather? It was winter, so it was hard to be sure, but I was potentially badly short on time, and I had no reliable options. A scream threatened to escape me. I knew, I knew I should have stayed away from these fucking Russies!

What was I supposed to do now? I was struggling just to keep my eyes open. That part was definitely blood loss. Even if I was willing to risk healing myself with magic, I didn't know what went into medical formulae at all, let alone how medical professions cast their Arts on Terra.

I took a shaky breath. What was my plan again? Where was I driving to, anyway?

I pressed my foot down hard on the gas, even though I didn't know where to go.

But if I did know where to go, I would want to go there fast, I surmised, so I pressed my foot down hard on the gas.

I drove and drove, weaving through the city, hitting some things, sometimes people. My truck was in the same shape as me by now, but I didn't care.

Smashing through my fifth barricade, I broke through into some sad-looking park. I had to do some swerving to avoid the trees, but it was easier than flying.

If I was a Chernobog hospital, where would I be?

When I broke through a copse and saw more of those Infected exchanging Arts with someone, my heart skipped a beat.

Was it the police? Even a battlefield Medic would help.

Not bothering to slow down, I hardened the front of my shell into an active barrier. Police were supposed to prioritise civilians, but they didn't always. Right, and I wasn't in Lungmen either. This was Chernobog. As a foreigner, it wouldn't hurt to grease the wheels a little by lending a helping hand.

The hooded idiots were so busy hollering and chasing the MPs out onto the road that they didn't even notice me until I was upon them.

I blinked groggily. The sixth or seventh rioter I hit was the one to finally bring down my defensive shell. He bounced off it and slammed into a friend with a crack. The eighth, ninth and whatever had rebounded off my bumper onto the asphalt and were run over by the wheels as I spun my shell back up. I immediately regretted it as the bumpiness hurt my stomach, but there was no option but to keep going. Flames passed harmlessly over the surface of my shell as I continued to drive through.

I was already in a foul mood from the pain. When I spotted some white-haired brat looking like he was having much too much fun at my expense, I curved the truck around magic attacks and aimed for him. I had only just knocked the little hoodlum into a street light when I sensed a projectile shatter my shell.

A fleeting spark of wakefulness shot through me.

Enemy sniper?!

It had come from my eleven, I was sure, so I snaked the truck down the street, and more collapsed than climbed into the passenger seat.

…What the—? Who were those people?

That wasn't the police. But, some of them were wearing Star of Life armbands, so good enough! I was going to convince them to help me and then I'd be saved.

Mind made up, I drove in a haphazard zig-zag towards them.

"Move! It's coming this way!" shouted a man.

"I'm a friendly!" I tried to yell, but I was having trouble getting it out.

Instead, I let the truck sandwich another rioter between its bumper and a building, and after fiddling with the handle I fell out of the door.

"Civilian! She's bleeding," said a blonde knightess.

"I can pay you," I wheezed, casting a new shell around myself.

" I'll do it," said a Vulpo wearing a Medic armband.

Two Guards dragged me around the corner while their Snipers provided covering fire, and the nice Vulpo followed. My defensive shell shattered again, regardless.

"The Commies are sniping at us," I explained. "Where's the artillery?"

"Is she still casting?"

"She's showing signs of haemorrhagic shock."

"Into this building, now!" exclaimed Bearded Man. He looked like Adam Jensen, from that niche PS3 game I played.

"Dim Needle, put her down here."

I missed some of the conversation, but tuned back in when the foxgirl tried to strip me. I never understood the appeal, personally, but I let her do as she wanted.

"This is an Originium Shard!" said the Medic.

"I need the Originium Shard to stop my bleeding," I explained.

They removed it despite my protests and put it in a bag. The Medic used her Arts to stop my bleeding, which explained why they took my shard. I didn't feel much better, but I wasn't going to die now, she explained.

There was some discussion of what to do with me, so I told them, very clearly, that I could pay them. I said it again, just in case. The woman who stabbed me earlier hadn't understood.

"Take me with you. I can pay you," I said again.

I wasn't exactly rich, but I had money. I had money because I was saving up money for something.

I blinked, and then I realised I was being piggybacked. I didn't know why I kept missing conversations.

"We'll protect you. Can you cast your Arts again?" asked a young Cautus.

"What Arts?" I asked.

"The Shield Arts," she explained gently.

I thought about it. What Shield Arts?

"She's still starved of oxygen. Give her some time," the Vulpo clinician said.

My mind raced at the speed of light. Of course. I had been casting an Arts inspired by my defensive shell, earlier.

"If you can get me out of here, I can do so," I said resolutely. "I've cast it just now."

"How far can it cover?" asked Jensen. Right, it wasn't visible right now. "Is it designed for single targets?"

"Of course," I said. "But I can expand my defensive shell to cover more. It just weakens it."

"She can cover a small group then," a man in a face shield said. "Medic hurt her foot, and I'm not in the best shape right now, so we'll bunch up with her."

"Dim Needle, can you keep carrying her?" asked the young Cautus.

My ride nodded. I forgot I was being piggybacked.

Face Shield turned to me.

"Please keep your shield up as much as you can, Miss…?"

I stared. —Oh.

"Ah. My apologies for the late introduction. I'm Tanja Müller, from the Lungmen branch of Coopers & Harding."

I tried reaching for my business cards, but I couldn't do so without falling off.

"It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm the Doctor, and we're Rhodes Island, apparently a pharmaceutical company. This is Amiya, our CEO." The Cautus girl smiled at me. I loved CEOs. "And these are… Err... The rest of the introductions will have to wait until later."

Smart. Time was of the essence right now.

He turned to the knightess, who nodded respectfully.

"I'm Nearl, Doctor. I'll stick with you in case Miss Müller's shield breaks."

Wait… Pharmaceutical company? So who were all these fighters then, their security contractors?

This was some protection that Miss Amiya hired.

I didn't know how many were still fighting outside, but there were over a dozen people just in this room. Many of them moved like well-seasoned veterans.

I'd heard that competition between Columbian companies could be cut-throat, but hiring a whole mercenary platoon was something else.

I couldn't help but wonder what kind of mess I had gotten involved in.

At least they seemed happy to bring me along for my shield. My earlier choice of protector was the Ursus Military Police, who would at least pay lip service to protecting civilian foreigners, but I could do transactional relationships too. If I was being honest, it was my preference. The mutual benefits of clear-cut give and take were simply more reassuring.

The mercenaries hastily signalled each other, before a number of them dashed out the door, opposite to the one we entered from.

I'd noticed for a while now, but these defensive shells were taking a lot less out of me than I might have expected, considering my stab wound. A lot of the energy was being provided by the Arts Unit itself, so I was only expending what reserves were required to direct it. Was it going to run out of energy soon? I realised I couldn't read the interface. I hoped it would work until we reached safety.

Hm. And I had been noticing the haze over my thoughts for a while now—so it was probably only moderate blood loss—but I was managing to cast my shells fine. As long as I kept this defensive shell up, they wouldn't dump me on the streets somewhere. And even if they did, my bleeding had been closed up, so I wasn't going to keel over any minute.

"All right, let's go," the Doctor said, and with that my group filed quickly out the same exit as the earlier scouts.

Outside, it was just another drab Chernobog street, but cars were on fire here and there, as well as the odd tree. Maybe I was feeling giddy, but the fires felt a little festive. Very Christmas-like. It was fantastic.

Ow. The jostling from my ride's footfalls was hurting my gut, so I clung more tightly to reduce the shaking. It helped with the freezing cold of the wind too.

Ahead of us, the Guards and Vanguards were already making short work of the opposition. A few Infected Casters managed to slip attacks our way, but they passed harmlessly over my shell like water over a boulder.

To be honest, after the mayhem from earlier, my greater challenge was staying conscious. The sniper fire hadn't returned, so without the urgency it was harder to remain awake.

After a few turns, we made it past a large warehouse, and then around more dull apartment buildings. There was only light resistance in the form of those masked Infected. It had only taken the first few exchanges for me to learn that this mercenary group was leagues ahead of the Infected rabble. Considering how impoverished the Infected had to be, it stood to reason that the westbound group I'd spotted from my hotel room were the outliers instead.

"The pressure seems to have eased," said Nearl. "Have they retreated?"

Wait, Nearl like the family of Kazimierzan war heroes? From my ride's back, I shot our rearguard a glance. So this was one of Kazimierz's famed pegasi.

"Their commander was the thousandth victim of Ursine driving this month," said the severe Perro with the whip. Dobermann. "He's probably headed for the hospital, if Reunion haven't burned them all down."

"The police are guarding them as part of the evacuation process. I was helping them do so earlier," Nearl said. "I doubt the Imperial Guards will let Reunion through."

Nearl's demeanour reminded me of von Edelreich, somewhat. Lt. Colonel Deborah von Edelreich had been the officer leading Romel's Hauptquartier-Kompanie. In her twenties, she was already one of the Reich's five aces of aces, and for her kill count she was bestowed the alias 'Sword of Light'.

This Nearl was much less harried, probably because this Doctor didn't have Romel's penchant for charging the enemy frontlines, but through the fighting she reminded me of von Edelreich's gallant, unthinking desire to protect others. Or children of the Reich, at least. Truly selfless people could be blinding in their brilliance, sometimes. While I had no desire to follow in their foolhardy steps, I was more than happy to give them due respect, especially if I was their beneficiary.

Although given the Light Arts she had displayed so far, perhaps von Edelreich's alias better belonged with Nearl.

"Reunion have their own Medics," said Medic. What naming sense. "I hope we don't meet that boy again."

The conversation stalled for a moment when there was more contact with the enemy further ahead, but the commander named Ace had it in hand. We never even got to see the fighting.

I let my heavy eyelids drop, just for a moment, and rested my face against my ride's hair.

Lavender, coffee, and smoke. Hmm.

I faded into the scent.

***

"...meaning that there's no escaping the Catastrophe now," someone said. "Not for Chernobog itself, at least."

Catastrophe?

Through pure discipline, I forced my eyes open and then squinted.

I was outside… No wonder it was so cold. Ah, and now I was registering the smell of burning rubber. A lot of people in techwear and paramilitary equipment were running somewhere, and I was being carried by one of them. Her hands were wrapped tightly around my buttocks, actually, because I probably would have fallen off otherwise.

Right, the pharmaceutical company. And they hadn't thrown me to the roadside when I stopped casting my Arts. I could still hear distant screaming. Thank goodness for the soft-hearted.

"There's another group of Reunion up ahead, but it isn't far until the rendezvous point," someone said.

"We're making good time," said Nearl from behind me.

From up ahead, Dobermann jogged back towards us.

"One of the southern exits is just ahead," she said. "Instead of the usual, we'll be taking turns descending by VTOL, which will ferry us to our way out of here."

"Has there been any word from the recon team?" asked Miss Amiya.

Dobermann's brows creased, and she shook her head. A delayed rendezvous was hardly surprising, considering how many Reunion members we fought to get this far. Well, they fought, I suppose.

Miss Amiya's expression lightened a little when she saw me watching.

"You're awake. Are you feeling better, Miss Müller?"

I smiled politely and nodded my head.

"You can rest assured that I'll contribute a fair share to whatever you're paying these mercenaries."

For some reason her eyes widened a fraction in blank bemusement, before some sort of realisation passed across her face.

"We're not mercs," Dim Needle said from beneath me. To be honest I'd forgotten about her again. Glancing down I saw a black rapier at her waist. A more creative name than Medic, at least.

"Everybody here is an Operator employed with Rhodes Island," Miss Amiya said. A hint of a smile had formed.

My eyes passed over Dobermann, Nearl, and then Ace in the distance.

"They're very highly trained," I praised. "The Doctor said you were a pharmaceutical company, so I didn't realise you diversified into private military work as well."

"Ah, we really are mostly just a pharmaceutical company," Medic chimed in, "but our specialisation is the treatment of Oripathy. The nature of our work… means that sometimes we go where public safety is poor, or even to dangerous conflict zones."

"You specialise in Oripathy?"

"We support the Infected wherever they might be, however we can," said Miss Amiya. "Some of the best treatments for Oripathy available were pioneered by Rhodes Island, and we hope to one day find a cure. The Doctor used to research just that."

The Doctor puffed up a little.

"A messy, but worthy line of work," I said with some admiration. Many local governments were willing to pay a pretty penny to offload the Oripathy question onto somebody else. Offering treatment was more dangerous than simply developing the drugs, but I could respect those who dealt in high-risk ventures. So long as they could chew what they bit off. So far, I had seen no reason to doubt Rhodes Island's ability to do so.

It was inevitable that I saw Miss Amiya in a new light. Clearly there was more to her than just the soft-spoken girl. It wouldn't be my first time meeting a frighteningly competent teen in this world, so I made a note not to underestimate her.

"Miss Müller?"

I turned.

Medic half-raised a hand and looked at me hesitantly. "How much do you remember about how you got here?"

For a moment I didn't comprehend, but then I remembered. My stomach sank.

How could I have forgotten?

"We can diagnose you when we're back at our headquarters," Dobermann said not unkindly. "We're not heading to Lungmen, but we can let you off at our next stop after testing, and you can find transport back from there."

"If the results aren't favourable we can offer a prognosis and treatment plan too," Medic added.

"That sounds… excellent. I can definitely pay," I managed to get out. "Do you… Do you know what my chances are?"

Medic's ears twitched. She shook her head. "We can't answer that reliably until we've tested you."

I suspected that they could, but she was equivocating for my sake. I grit my teeth and refused to make a scene. I still had the pride not to throw a tantrum in front of a group of fellow professionals.

"Even if you can't pay upfront, we can work something out," Miss Amiya added.

I closed my eyes. Absolutely not a simple teenager if she was already setting up the field to later take advantage of my fragile mental state. A skilled diplomat knew when to push and when to pull, and Miss Amiya had just been subtle enough to avoid alerting a less experienced negotiator.

I was grateful to them for saving my life. That did not mean I wouldn't take care to stop my negotiating position from weakening further. On the contrary.

The walk through the last of the outer district residential area was made in silence. The merce—the security team seemed like a straightforward lot, so they were probably being considerate of me. As for the executives, Miss Amiya and the enigmatic Doctor, their intentions I was less sure of.

I wasn't a huge fan of this sort of psychological sparring. There had been plenty enough in C&H, especially the higher up the rungs I climbed. Londinium was occupied by Kazdel during my early days at the company, enervating our head office. Our infighting had only grown worse since.

The jockeying for influence was why I was in Chernobog, in fact. Getting a foothold into the Ursine markets would have checked the growing ascendancy of the Columbian branch.

Soon we were reaching the perimeter of the agglomerate Chernobog city. Some of the Reunion groups we met along the way even let us through after it was clear we weren't Ursine military. I suppose any army could suffer uneven discipline, let alone a terrorist insurgency such as this.

"How is your stomach feeling?" my piggybacker quietly asked me. It was perhaps the first thing I heard the taciturn woman say since we left the building they treated me in.

"Better. Thank you for carrying me."

I wondered if she was going to say anything else, but we allowed ourselves to lull back into silence.

As we left the central regions of the docked subcity, the mixed residential-commercial zone gave way to shipping warehouses, industrial facilities, and other businesses built around the southern port.

It had been a while since we had last encountered further opposition. Out here it was just empty streets, although here and there I noticed the signs of a work day half abandoned. Crates or tools left lying here or there, sometimes a forklift left out in the open with its cargo still loaded.

Dobermann had run off ahead to rejoin the team she was responsible for, while Nearl stayed to protect our party. I glanced up at the sky. What was it they said about a Catastrophe again?

I didn't need to ask, because Miss Amiya commented on the same thing.

"The Catastrophe is coming soon. I hope most of the civilians were able to safely evacuate."

"They were well underway when I left to rejoin you," Nearl said. "Many of them should have already left Chernobog."

My eyes returned to the skies. So this storm was a Catastrophe. With the way predictive technologies and methodologies had advanced over the years, I'd never seen one before. I imagined most people hadn't.

That made the situation all the more odd. This close to the edge of the city, it was clear as day that Chernobog's megatreads were stationary. Whatever conspiracies were behind this, the result was that this city was about to be hit with disaster.

If it hadn't been for Rhodes Island, I would have been left for dead, if my blood loss didn't claim me first. We all knew it. Miss Amiya simply brought attention to the bargaining chip. There was no explicit agreement between us, but ignoring this life debt would lose me a lot of face, and in a place like Lungmen, that was more than enough ammunition for my rivals.

"I would have been in a lot of trouble if I hadn't met you," I said, to make it clear that I would play ball. "I intend to repay this debt."

The Doctor seemed to regard me curiously, while Miss Amiya shook her head.

"Helping people is what we should do," she said politely.

My smile was sardonic.

"You have my admiration, Miss Amiya."

The embarrassment on her face was convincing and well acted. This girl would make a terrifying opponent, I thought, but it was better to work with competent partners than imbeciles.

Finally, at the end of the street was the edge of Chernobog. Built into the side of the district walls themselves were the air docks, as well as the massive freight elevators that every modern nomadic city boasted. The dock that I entered the city from had been bustling and noisy, audible even from the airport that I had alighted into. This one was abandoned.

Miss Amiya trailed behind us as we approached. When I turned back she was gazing back into the city. I could understand the sentiment. If the missing Recon Team possessed the skills I saw demonstrated by the rest of this company, I, too, would be unwilling to lose them. When the market for labour was in excess demand, there was nothing worse than bleeding expertise due to turnover. Nearl and Medic gave her worried looks.

"Scout is a true veteran of the Kazdel war," Nearl said. "His team will not have fallen without worthy cause."

Miss Amiya nodded. "I believe in them."

When we entered the interior of the southern wall through an industrial entrance, it was silent save for the hum of machinery. It looked like an empty warehouse or factory complex, with more abandoned industrial vehicles. A few cranes stood idle in the distance, while a small fleet of half-loaded freight trucks lay unattended.

Across the loading bay from us, where the plexiglass windows stood, were figures in Rhodes Island colours. One of them waved at us.

"That's Dobermann's team," Medic said with better cheer.

When they were sure we had seen them, they began walking left into the next room, leading the way. As we passed by the windows, Medic stopped to watch in awe. Far down below on the untouched tundra, dozens of landships of different sizes were moving away from us, some so small they could barely be seen from here, and others as large as small suburbs.

"Are these the civilians that managed to escape?" the Doctor asked.

I'd never seen so many landships in one place. Day to day, it was easy to forget the majesty of human accomplishment that landships and nomadic settlements represented. From within, you could scarcely tell them apart from ordinary cities.

"There aren't enough of them," Miss Amiya whispered.

Nearl hummed thoughtfully. "More of the civilians might have left from the west. At least two of the hospitals were in the western subcities."

"I hope so."

We continued along the side of the room until we approached the door our guides disappeared into. Dobermann waited within with a small group of uniformed Rhodes Island personnel.

From Dim Needle's back, I glanced around the room. Filled with surveillance feeds, it appeared to be one of the control centres for the port facilities.

"You're here, Amiya," Dobermann said. "Team Ace is securing the perimeter while my team are keeping their eyes on the security footage. The VTOLs are down the stairs just through here."

Dobermann gestured at a doorway, beyond which I spied a steel staircase.

"We'll be taking turns being ferried, so you and the Doctor will be extracted first."

"The wounded should go first," Miss Amiya said. I couldn't agree more. Get me out of here!

"Our wounded operators are already aboard. The first flights are just waiting on you," said Dobermann.

After a moment of hesitation, Miss Amiya nodded.

"I'll take command of your team and ensure their safe extraction, Amiya," said Nearl.

With that, it was time to depart.

Miss Amiya took the lead, walking briskly down the stairs, while the Doctor followed, looking curiously about the hangar. Medic came along with us to help with the wounded aboard the VTOLs.

"Come on, it's this way."

My ride out of the city was a lot rougher than the one I came in on, but I was appreciative of the helicopter's ruggedness. We entered one of the four vehicles through the rear door. A number of injured personnel were already strapped into stretchers along the sides of the cargo bay.

Dim Needle gently placed me onto a stretcher. I was strapped down next to a young woman who looked like she had been burned, but I turned my focus back to Dim Needle. To the disappointment of my curious side, the face beneath the goggles and scarf wasn't much clearer from the front.

"This has been some eighteenth birthday," I muttered. Abandonment day. Same thing.

Miss Amiya's ears twitched.

"So it's your birthday too…" she said.

I lazily glanced her way.

"Maybe our next one will be better, Miss Amiya."

She smiled, but it wasn't a happy thing.

While my abdomen was checked over by Medic, the rear door began to close. If my ears weren't deceiving me, the other helicopters were preparing for liftoff as well.

Soon after I heard the engines start up, we lifted off. The flight lasted less than two minutes before we landed. When it came time to disembark, I realised we were on an internal helipad of a much larger vehicle. A ground vehicle, because a quick glance upwards was enough to determine that we were deep within Chernobog's looming shadow.

When we were transferred to a medical bay within the larger vehicle, I heard the VTOLs take off again, presumably to ferry the rest of the personnel over. The minutes passed by as I sat there amongst those both worse and less injured than me, alone with my thoughts. Unlike the helicopters that carried me here, the medical bay had a view outside.

It wasn't long before we took off, the large treads of the small landship speeding us across the icy tundra, away from Chernobog.

We had only been moving for five minutes when the sky began to fall on Chernobog. Stones as large as city blocks began to devastate the motionless nomadic city.

Around me, gasps of shock and horror filled the medical bay.

Well, there goes the mining proposal, I thought.

I never wanted to come to this shitty city again.

 

"S-so I said… hic… Sonzai Ekkusumé! If I had a rifle, I-I'd shoot you right between the eyes."

My life was over. My life was over.

My life was over. My life was over.

'Miss Müller?' said the young healer. 'I'm afraid I have some bad news.'

"W-whoaaa~" slurred the Feline draped around my breasts. "You sure showed that S-Son's Eye guy who's boss! No... hic... surrender!"

"Iwis, for whosoever tholes for aught larger than herself is, parfay, a hero," lamented Pallas.

I didn't know what this Forte lady was saying, but I toasted her anyway. "Exactly! Prost!"

"If I was… hic… If I was you, T-Tanja, I woulda given him the old one-two!" said the Durin hugging my other arm.

"Believe me! If I could hit devils, I-I woulda done more than that!" I said. "I'd have c-crushed…! Hic…! And seen his sheep driven before me!"

I waved a fist. Damn you, Being X!

"You're so intense, T-Tanja," marvelled my new Feline friend. "Even Louisa isn't that… hic… that intense."

Durin threw her empty beer can at the television.

"Another!" she roared.

The door slammed open.

"Francine!" screeched the newcomer. "She's supposed to be on observation!"

Francine's eyes widened and she smiled.

"Louisa! Just in time!" she crowed. "We've got peanuts!"

Louisa—no, Dr. Louisa, she was the one who diagnosed me—exhaled slowly and rubbed her brow.

"I know you've had a rough day, Miss Müller, but I would give your injuries some time before partaking in ethanol. I came here to tell you that Dr. Kal'tsit is leaving for Lungmen tomorrow. She says that if you'd like to return, travelling with her might be your only chance to enter the city. By the time the Rhodes Island landship arrives, we suspect they will have enacted a strict lockdown."

Huh? Lungmen?

I blinked.

"I thought we w-weren't heading to Lungmen," I said. It was the closest city, but there had been no such plans.

Dr. Louisa nodded politely.

"Some circumstances have arisen. Dr. Kal'tsit can explain tomorrow. In the meantime, I've had somebody set an alarm by your bedside." She paused. "I must ask you to return to your room in the medical ward. We've closed up your injuries, but you aren't entirely out of the clear."

"G-got it," I said with a nod. Drinking was pretty bad for wounds. I guess.

Suddenly Dr. Louisa's mild expression twisted into a glare.

"And you…!"

I winced as poor Francine was tugged out of her seat by the ear.

"Owowowowowow! Louisa, i-it's going to come off!" she cried.

"What were you thinking?! Not only do you have work tomorrow and training in the afternoon, but to drag a patient into this too?!"

As Dr. Louisa manhandled Francine, Durin and Pallas could only look on in wide-eyed horror. I imagined I looked much the same.

Right. Never annoy your doctor.

"W-we were trying to cheer her up!"

"Hah… You just… I'll deal with you later." She turned to me. "Miss Müller?"

"Y-yes?"

"Can you walk? I'll escort you back to your ward."

I looked at my new companions, but they wouldn't meet my eyes.

Traitors!

In the end I allowed Dr. Louisa to help me stumble out of the room. I probably wouldn't have managed without her.

"Honestly, that girl…!" she muttered. Here, I wisely decided to keep my mouth shut.

The hallways of Rhodes Island were wider and better decorated than those of the landship we arrived on. The floors themselves were more impressive, with sharp prints of their company logo set at regular intervals beneath glass tiles.

It was a pretty fancy place for Infected to live. Back in Lungmen, they'd be living in a ghetto.

"I'm sorry about what happened to you. My adoptive parents were from Chernobog."

Huh?

I raised my eyes.

"My foster father hurt his arm in the riots," she said quietly. "They only just managed to get out safely."

I frowned.

"I'm… hic… sorry to hear that," I said. "Are y-you close?"

"…Not particularly, but they treated me well."

I guess that was how I felt about the aunties at the orphanage too.

"It's not the end of the road, you know?"

"Hic…! Pardon me?"

"The Oripathy." Dr. Louisa kept her eyes straight ahead. "I've got it too. Many of us do. There are still paths open to us. We're more than just the illness."

Yes, I could be a miner in an Ursine death camp, a counterfeit purse merchant in a Lungmen slum, an exploited cotton farmer in Columbia, or a petty shopkeeper in some Leithanian quarantine zone. So many options, I thought glumly.

Better yet, I could be an employee on this landship that regularly drove towardsdanger.

"It doesn't seem t-that way to me," I finally said.

The rest of the walk back was made in silence.

Before she left, Dr. Louisa showed me the display for the alarm clock.

"It's set to seven hours from now. Dr. Kal'tsit will be departing at 7AM sharp, so you'll have a little over half an hour to wash up before she comes to find you."

"Thank you, doctor."

"Sleep well, Miss Müller." She nodded at me and left the room.

I stared silently at the dark ceiling. The alcohol made it easy to drift off.

***

When I woke up, the hospital ward was still dark, save for the dim light coming from the hallway outside. It was too early in the morning for most to be awake, so my room was quiet except for the hum of the medical equipment. The air was cool when I reached out from beneath the covers to scratch my ear.

I didn't really need to be here. Their medical casters had closed my stomach up just fine after the surgery, and laying in a hospital bed wasn't going to help my— my Oripathy. I was otherwise fine. My gut was a little sore, which I'd been told was the regenerated muscle, but I wasn't even hungover, I noticed.

They had me stay here, apparently to ensure I wouldn't be readmitted as soon as I was discharged, but I wondered if maybe they'd considered me at risk of doing something drastic. Perhaps others in my situation had done so before. As I'd learnt, many of the staff in this company were fellow Oripathy patients, so attempting self-harm for catching it would have been rather rude.

My gaze wandered about the room.

There was a small television mounted onto the wall near the door. A few other monitors were dotted around the room showing various medical data feeds, one of which I could see from where I lay. The last thing I wanted to do right now was stare too closely at a reminder of my illness, so I ignored it.

I sighed and gingerly stretched on my hospital bed.

At least the mattress was soft and smooth. I shifted to get more comfortable, as the floral-scented sheets felt like silk on my legs, lasered smooth for convenience. It was nice, and made the place feel pleasant despite the clinical equipment. Not as good as home, but I wouldn't be calling that apartment home much longer, whatever my decision.

I checked the time. 5:00AM. Still a little while until the alarm by my bedside was set to go off. I fiddled with the unfamiliar machine until that alarm was cancelled, and then crawled out of the bed. There was a small bathroom attached to the private patient room, so I put on the slippers they provided me and shambled over.

When the door was locked and my clothes were off, I took a long look at myself in the mirror. Despite the life-changing Oripathy, I looked otherwise the same as this time yesterday, save for some bruises beneath my sternum. They had been affected by the Arts used to treat my stab wound, and were already turning green with decomposed haemoglobin.

Dr. Louisa told me that I could expect to see black Originium markings form at the site of the wound over the next few weeks. There was no stopping the progression of Oripathy, not with the best drugs in the world, but it could be slowed. As long as I took my prescribed medicine, it wouldn't advance beyond that stage for a long while. With a shirt on, it would look like nothing had changed, but I was now marked regardless.

I sighed and went into the shower.

After fiddling with the control for a while, I managed to nudge the water into a comfortable temperature.

I allowed the warm spray to hit me in the face while I thought about what to do.

Paths open to the Infected…

Yesterday, in the hours I'd been waiting on my lab results, I was given the chance to chat with the other patients and staff. All of them had been sympathetic, and more than a few staff members hinted at the possibility of recruitment. Apparently Rhodes Island was willing to hire all sorts, in exchange for treatment. Considering they were a prospective employer, it was inevitable that we discussed Rhodes Island's culture and history. To my surprise, Rhodes Island had only been around for a scant two years.

They had thousands of staff, a mobile headquarters, and an impressive security team that boasted veteran fighters who fought with zeal and fervour. None of that came easily, nor cheaply. It was obvious that a lot of capital had gone into starting this company.

Some might consider this a case of a philanthropist concerned with doing good, but after hearing the details, I was less sure that was all. If that was the whole story, there was hardly a need to plant your youngest heir within the charity itself. Even sweaty and dressed in urban warfare equipment, I would be hard-pressed not to recognise the heiress to one of Columbia's biggest players.

A brief chat with some of the medical staff indicated that the security group was far larger than just those I'd seen in Chernobog. Still small in relative terms compared to the company as a whole, and certainly tiny compared to a national military, but still large in absolute terms, and well equipped. It wouldn't have been strange to consider them a dangerous paramilitary force. And nobody kept employees that served no purpose.

I frowned as I unwrapped a new bar of soap.

Well, that wasn't strictly true. Back in Japan there had been plenty of companies that were committed to keeping employees for life, but those could only keep to such a stagnating, backwards policy due to their age, size, and government support. That wasn't feasible or logical in a company as young as this one.

And while it was a welcome surprise to me personally, I was surprised to discover the affordability of their pharmaceuticals, even to people living in decentralised backwaters. These weren't just cheap generics, although they manufactured those too, but also some of the cutting-edge medicines they developed themselves. Stranger still, if some of the medical staff were to be believed, they were only distributing through private channels because the company was 'too small to handle the attention stepping into the public market would bring'.

While they certainly sold medical technology as well, by all accounts Rhodes Island was deeply involved in the development of Oripathy medicine. How was Rhodes Island funding its research if not by making drugs publicly available? Considering the poverty-heavy demographics of the Infected, price gouging only those who could afford it could never be enough.

While I'd never worked with pharmaceutical companies in my history with C&H, the Terran business model was largely the same as Earth's. Following the scoping and capital evaluations, there was a large outflow of resources during the R&D phase, in order to create a product that was cheap to manufacture. The returns came from the period in which the developer held the patents, where the price was fixed at a point that maintained a delicate balance between 'cheap enough to remain competitive' and 'expensive enough to recoup the research expenses'.

Whether it was to governments shouldering the price through subsidies, or to the patients themselves in societies with fewer social safety nets, the result was the same. Anybody who wanted to recoup their development costs would be selling their drugs at a marked-up price until the patent period was over, unless they either wanted to go bankrupt, or money wasn't a concern.

And these people weren't even selling them publicly, let alone at a proper price. If funding for the research wasn't a concern, then why? How? The unlucky rich could contract Oripathy, but was I supposed to believe Rhodes Island ran entirely on donations?

As I rinsed the suds off my body, more gingerly when it came to my tender abdomen, I thought through the facts again.

In the end, I suspected it went back to what their private army signified. Medic told me that Rhodes Island maintained their security force because they treated Oripathy patients in areas with poorer public safety.

Plenty of local rulers would be willing to pay top dollar to outsource the messiness of 'Infected management services', and hiring leading experts like Rhodes Island made for great optics. A frustrated Infected populace was less likely to react with hostility to Rhodes Island's own Infected medical staff, and the security force was there to dissuade those who might be inclined regardless. If things got out of hand, the Rhodes Island operatives could do worse than just dissuade, and whatever casualties, it was 'just Infected' to the rulers, anyway.

And if a generous benefactor happened to require a few violent favours, what was more convenient than plausibly deniable connections with a small private army that had a legitimate, humanitarian reason to go anywhere?

If I was correct, that was the reason for their appearance in Chernobog, regardless of the official story. There was coincidence, and then there was coincidence, and it wasn't every day that a group like Reunion took over a city.

As appealing as Rhodes Island seemed to be at a glance, whatever game it was playing was too high-risk for my tastes, even in a non-combatant role. Political purges didn't tend to differentiate, after all.

Of course, I knew better than to test young geniuses like Miss Amiya, but underestimating people was ever a shortcoming of those in power. I didn't want to be there if they eventually butted heads with their shady patrons.

Wherever I decided on, Rhodes Island would not be it.

Feeling refreshed, I stepped out of the shower. I glanced at the mirror again.

In my last life, I wore my hair long. It wasn't my preference, but simply the studious maintenance of military standard appearance. While Special Major Hildebrandt was insistent on certain types of brushes, and even sent her half-sister von Edelreich as a delivery girl, all it really called for was properly-combed long hair.

'In order to promote an awareness of gender differences, female officers below the age of conscription must maintain shoulder-length hair or longer.'

In the era before flight mages, the only female officers were the ceremonially commissioned imperial princesses, and other young girls of the aristocracy. There were countless holdover regulations that only made sense in that context.

It wasn't all bad. Sometimes this worked in my favour; for example, the requirement of special lodging. But then sometimes it led to the ridiculousness of sporting long hair in the trenches of the Rhine.

As a result, I'd long made peace with certain expectations of femininity, and in this life my preference was to wear a ponytail. It cultivated a certain image of approachable professionalism, and to be honest I liked the way it swished.

I still mostly considered myself a man, but who said a man couldn't be an elite businesswoman?

I turned my head side to side and frowned. My antler was still chipped, which ruined some of the effect. I wasn't due for a new pair until late winter, either.

There wasn't much I could do about that, though, so I moved on and began drying myself.

I considered putting the patient wear back on—not a backless gown, thankfully, but a cotton jacket and trousers—but decided that there wasn't much point. I'd have to change out of these soon enough, anyhow. The towel was left neatly folded atop the counter, and the already folded patient wear atop that.

I opened the door and stepped into a room with Dr. Kal'tsit inside. I shot a glance at the clock. She was early.

"Miss Müller. How are we feeling?"

I might have felt more comfortable if this was a bathhouse, and she was naked too, but the situation left me feeling a little self-conscious.

"Like I'd like to put some clothes on."

"That's fair," she said. "Would you like me to step outside?"

I gave my head a furious scratch, but quickly shook my head.

"It's fine, thank you."

She politely turned around anyway, so I hurried over to the bedside and tore open the clean plastic packaging to get to the clothes inside. I hurriedly stepped into the new underwear, and then reached into the closet for my bra. The clothes I'd come in had been kindly washed and dried, but there was no saving my blouse.

Instead, I reached into the packaging again and pulled a nondescript T-shirt on, before stepping into my suit pants. As an afterthought, I put my jacket on properly. The air conditioning kept the ward warm, but we might be stepping outside.

After slipping out of my hospital slippers and into my high heels, I was presentable.

"Thank you," I said when I was done.

Dr. Kal'tsit gave me a once-over, and nodded.

"It's going to be cold in the hangar. Did Dr. Francine explain the circumstances to you?"

I frowned.

"I don't think so, no."

It was possible that she'd done so after the drinking had begun and I'd just forgotten, but I was hardly going to tell Dr. Kal'tsit that.

The good doctor massaged her brows. Ah, the pain of unruly subordinates. I knew it all too well.

After a moment, Dr. Kal'tsit fixed me with a sober look and explained.

"Waves of refugees from Chernobog have been moving towards Lungmen. We have reason to suspect that Reunion will attempt to repeat their success in Chernobog by infiltrating them."

I couldn't help my frown.

"Lungmen is not a jumped-up backwater like Chernobog," I said, a little irritated.

The city had been very good to me. Although that was unlikely to continue with my new condition, comparing it to Chernobog of all places?

"The reports from Rhodes Island's operators were concerning. Teams of well-trained personnel within Reunion, undoubtedly ex-military, and at least three particularly highly dangerous individuals. An assassin, as well as a marksman and medic pair that you encountered."

I must have been wearing a blank look on my face, because Dr. Kal'tsit elaborated.

"It wouldn't have been obvious to a civilian like you, but together, the marksman and medic pair proved to be remarkably formidable commanders."

Dr. Kal'tsit tilted her head in thought.

"I suppose this may seem like a farce to the woman who ran one of them down with a truck and escaped unscathed, but this evaluation came from trustworthy combat veterans."

Oh, this was starting to sound familiar.

It was a little difficult to believe that anybody so supposedly dangerous had been defeated by a delirious businesswoman in a civilian vehicle. If any of the 203rd had let that happen, I would have gotten in the truck and run them over a second time.

Rather than try to convince me further, the doctor simply shook her head.

"Nevermind. We should have some time before anything happens. It won't be too late to change your decision after some time in Lungmen to gather your thoughts. You will be coming, correct?"

I nodded.

"I appreciate the ride," I said.

Dr. Kal'tsit nodded impassively.

"I'm heading to Lungmen to speak with the governor. Hopefully he'll come to a different conclusion than you did."

I wasn't sure what to say, but that turned out to be fine, because Dr. Kal'tsit made for the door and gestured for me to follow.

"Are you ready to leave?"

A quick pat of my left breast reassured me of my ID documents, so there was really nothing else left to take.

The walk to the helipad was made in silence, but plenty of Rhodes Island staff were already working. I had been too distracted with my own thoughts to notice yesterday, but the personnel were really quite diverse.

A Goliath engineer here, an Archosaurian over there.

Come to think of it, I had been drinking with a Durin yesterday, hadn't I?

When we entered the hangar, there was a young woman fiddling with a helicopter.

"Closure."

The so-named Closure turned around with a hop.

"Kal'tsit!" she beamed. "And who's this?"

"The young woman from Lungmen that Amiya rescued in Chernobog," Dr. Kal'tsit said, with a wave in my vague direction.

Closure stood with arms akimbo and eyed me up and down.

"Is this another one of those ducklings for your 'Abduction and Conversion Procedures for Infected Prisoners'?"

"It's 'Acquisition and Cultivation Procedures for Infected Personnel', Closure," Dr. Kal'tsit said humourlessly. "And no, Miss Müller is just sharing a ride with me."

Closure eyed Dr. Kal'tsit with an exaggerated rise of the brow. With a shrug, she turned around and presented the rear door of the helicopter with a grandiose flourish.

"Well, whatever. Behold, the newly refuelled 'Bad Guy', ready for all your flying needs! Wow! Incredible!"

Dr. Kal'tsit huffed. "Are we ready for takeoff?"

"Dylan's just waiting ahead," Closure confirmed.

"We'll leave now then," Dr. Kal'tsit decided. Without another word, she stepped into the helicopter.

"Thank you, Miss Closure," I quickly added as I followed her in.

"Did you hear that, Kal'tsit?!" she exclaimed. "I'm a 'Miss Closure', now!"

The helicopter door shut in her face.

"Let's go now, Dylan," Dr. Kal'tsit said through the door to the cockpit.

Not long afterwards, the VTOL began to take off.

I did wish I'd gotten a chance to say goodbye to my new drinking companions. It was very kind of them to try cheering me up. Rhodes Island would be heading to Lungmen too, but I doubted I'd ever see any of them again.

***

Something I hadn't noticed when ferried out of Chernobog was that this VTOL was pressurised. Why? Who would bother on a low altitude aircraft?

"We'll be arriving in Lungmen shortly," said Dr. Kal'tsit.

"Thank you," I said.

I suppose it was time to decide on a course of action. As much as I enjoyed my stay in Lungmen, there wouldn't be much of a place for me now.

Oripathy was largely a poor person's disease. Catching it excluded you from most job markets, and if you were poor already, many of the jobs available put you at much greater risk of Oripathy.

Having said that, accidents did happen, and the rare wealthy person could catch it too. But in Lungmen, as I imagined in most places, the resulting lifestyle couldn't be more different.

While nobody liked the Infected, in the end, people made exception for family. The unfortunate rich man who found himself with Oripathy was likely to see his relatives set him up in luxury. Unlike the poverty surrounding him, he could be expected to be tended to by servants in protective equipment, and Infected hired for cheap. Life as a princeling of the slums would continue until he was cut off from that wealth, or he died.

I was an orphan, and had nobody both willing and able to do that for me, nor did I have assets that could last me a lifetime.

While my salary classified me as 'wealthy', that was an indicator of my potential income. I still had to work in order to be worth anything, and that was just not going to happen now that I was an Infected. My mentor, Qiying, was a pragmatic man, and nobody would tolerate an Infected in their head office. Even if Qiying was willing to overlook it on behalf of my competence, my rivals, not to mention his, would not.

And while Lungmen didn't explicitly forbid the Infected from workforce participation, the jobs that were actually available to me were slim pickings if I didn't want to struggle with poverty.

So if not Lungmen, then where?

I suppose my best choice was to go home to Leithania. To distance themselves from the previous regime, Leithania under the Twin Empresses was adamant about treating the Infected like humans. Infected still weren't equal; the state was careful about where they lived, and in the end it would always be a poverty trap. I could claw myself into middle class at best. But at least it was a life free of danger and unreasonable exploitation.

I eyed Dr. Kal'tsit.

Yes, Leithania was the right choice. As mentioned, Rhodes Island distributed its best medicine affordably, and hadn't billed me much for their care. The Leithanian branch of C&H was ostensibly cooperating with my Lungmen branch, so ideally I could transfer to one of their minor offices. Whatever effective demotion I could work out, at least I wouldn't lose my employee veterancy.

Alternatively, if I was forced to leave the company, I could start up a small business in Wolumonde. I was originally saving up for a better apartment in Lungmen. While those funds weren't enough to retire on, I could buy a small storefront in the quarantine zone with enough start-up capital to get things moving. Perhaps I could get registered as an accountant. Oripathy wouldn't get you out of paying taxes in Leithania. Or I could provide wealth management advice. Having to pay for Oripathy treatments would just complicate retirement plans, after all.

It was nothing like the life I was aiming for, but it would be enough to pay for my treatment.

There was always the risk of the Witch King Loyalists finding me but, well, there were more realistic risks I had to contend with these days.

"Have you considered what you'll do going forward?" asked Dr. Kal'tsit. "It's going to be a harsh life, now that you're on the other side of the wall. We at Rhodes Island do what we do for the Infected, if you would like to join. We are always looking for talented personnel, and you would have a place where you could live without discrimination."

It wasn't exactly a trap. Although I was almost certain they were being funded as a political catspaw, the sad reality was that Rhodes Island was still a better lot than most Infected were handed.

Still, I had no interest in entering the company, but it would be impolite to so thoroughly burn bridges while they were giving me a free ride.

Everyone was being awfully persistent, though. Don't tell me I really was an Arts genius, and they wanted to train me for their private army?

I stilled. Was that part of the 'Acquisition and Cultivation Procedures for Infected Personnel'?

I sold my talents, not my body!

"I don't know," I lied. "Everything has changed so fast."

The enigmatic doctor hummed to herself.

"Rhodes Island will dock herself at Lungmen soon, if all goes well in my negotiation. You'll have time to decide."

Having come to a decision on what I'd do now, I suspected I would be on a flight back to Leithania by the time Rhodes Island arrived, but I nodded at Dr. Kal'tsit anyway.

When the VTOL began to descend, the pressurised rear door started to open up. The wind began blowing in, but it wasn't too cold.

It was still dark outside, but that was a function of the rain rather than the time.

Even from this low in the air, I could see the bright neon lights of Lungmen shining through the haze. It was funny. Even in weather like this, the low altitude of Lungmen's preferred circuit meant that it was warmer than it had any right to be.

If I ended up back in Wolumonde, near the Winterwisp mountains, I would be lucky to feel this warm on a sunny spring day.

When we landed, the rear door unfurled as a ramp onto the wet concrete of the hangar. Two masked Lungmen Guards were already awaiting us below.

"This way, please," one said curtly.

Dr. Kal'tsit did say that they were expecting her.

We were led into a spartan but civilian hallway, before I was gestured down another path. I suppose Dr. Kal'tsit must have communicated my circumstances in advance.

The walk to the processing office was quiet. My LGD escort hadn't said a thing. The curt one had gone with Dr. Kal'tsit, but it was hard to tell if this one was any friendlier. I suppose that was the point of the masks. Not all officers wore these, certainly not the ones I was used to seeing downtown, but I suppose they were either trying to intimidate Dr. Kal'tsit, or they were otherwise afraid of being Infected.

That was fair enough. Apparently person-to-person transmission of Oripathy was close to impossible in regular interactions, but that was true of lepers and AIDS patients as well, and I wouldn't want to get too close to them either.

The process for registering myself as a new Oripathy patient was thorough and arduous. When she realised I was a local, the Feline case worker was sympathetic, in an awkward, unsure way, but the process had still been excruciating in its level of detail. She went through my last recorded stage of Oripathy and Originium blood content—yes, it had been tested within the last month—and then went through everything from my place of birth to my criminal record.

Applications for a change of residence were going to be much the same thing, she warned, and I would have to leave my current zone of residence within the month. Thank everything I was planning to take the first flight out to Leithania tonight. Doing all that work, just to move into a slightly less pretty rooftop slum was not my idea of a good time.

My LGD chaperone had watched me the whole time, but that was all right. It was their job to be suspicious.

After obtaining my digital Oripathy certificate, I was finally able to leave. At least I didn't have to announce my Oripathy when hailing a taxi. There were plenty of places that would refuse service to any Infected.

"Where to, Siu Ze?" the driver asked as I stepped out of the rain.

I hadn't really decided, I realised.

"I'm heading Uptown," I said after a moment, and rattled off an address.

"Ah, the C&H building? Running late for work?" he asked with a smile, leaving the curb to turn into the traffic.

"Not quite. Do you take many passengers that way?"

"Not many, exactly," he said. "But it's a hard place to forget."

I suppose it would be. The street was designed to be imposing, and the corporate headquarters there much the same.

It didn't take long until we were on the highway. The lights of the traffic signs were a blur through the rain and windows.

The driver hummed. "Looks like taking the Blue Spire Link might be a bust."

I looked up at the holographic traffic indicators. Ah, congestion. Probably truck drivers making their deliveries, given that the rush to get to work was long over by this time of day.

That was probably not going to be an issue wherever I ultimately moved to.

"I'll take the West Dragon Highway, instead. Should be quicker," he said, changing lanes.

"Thank you."

I was almost going to miss this. Almost.

I thought about what I was going to do. One thing I was sure about was that I didn't want to be here if Reunion attacked. While I had full confidence in the LGD, an attack was an attack, and I imagined that Lungmen wouldn't be too kind to its Infected population after something like that. I'd rather not get caught up in a pogrom.

I was going to get my work affairs in order—whether that meant leaving the company or a transfer, I was yet to see—and depending on that, buy a ticket to somewhere in Leithania. If my ultimate destination was Wolumonde, I would probably pick the first nomadic city in the north, and then take a bus home.

As for my belongings and my apartment, thankfully there were plenty of things you could delegate to agents around here.

Soon enough, the taxi driver pulled over at the drop-off stands in front of the office.

"You take care now," he said.

"You too, uncle."

I paid with a swipe of my phone, and stepped out of the car, back into the wet.

With a hand over my brow to stop the rain, I beheld the towering skyscraper.

Coopers & Harding was a centuries-old Victorian firm that had truly grown in prominence during the 50s. Of course, it was only centuries-old if you counted the constituent ancestor firms of the merger, but that didn't sound quite as impressive to some of our aristocratic clientele. It was an ironic position to take, considering many of their lineage trees, but I was happy enough to describe it however would land us more clients.

The company had ridden the Victorian expansion to prosperity, and then declined along with it. When Kazdel occupied Londinium, the true head office fell out of prominence, while the branches, actually subsidiaries for tax purposes, began to compete.

Thankfully, the Leithanian branch wasn't too hostile to the Lungmen branch. At least, it wouldn't be too difficult for my mentor Qiying to pull some strings on the other side. I just wasn't sure about his willingness, now that I didn't have much to offer.

Still, if worst came to worst, and I was forced to leave the company, at least I'd see Wolumonde again. I didn't have the fondest memories of it, but I would like to revisit the orphanage. After all, I'd like to see where all my donated money had been going.

I stepped through the foyer, and ignored everybody inside. The conversation would just be awkward, anyhow. Qiying's message said he wouldn't be in a meeting for another forty minutes or so, so it was perfect timing.

When my elevator came, a swipe of my pass granted me access to the highest floor. Nobody else got in on the trip up, so I was undisturbed as I used the mirror to brush raindrops out of my hair.

The elevator doors opened to an opulent hallway.

A pond sat in the middle of the otherwise tiled floor, bordered by moss, small plants, and rocks. The centrepiece was a large garden stone, or artificial mountain as they called them in Yan, shaped like the karst-mountains the nation was known for.

The whole thing was arranged to evoke the imagery of a great natural lake below a misty mountain range.

Honestly I was kind of numb to it by now, but I pulled out my phone and took a photo regardless. I suppose it was something I could brag about later on.

I wasn't really looking forward to breaking the news of my Oripathy, but it wouldn't do to dawdle further. A few turns here and there, and I reached a small waiting room.

Before I could even ask anything, his assistant sent me in.

Stepping into the office, I found Qiying wearing a victorious expression, tending to that massive ginseng ficus bonsai of his.

"And she returns," he said with an upwards nod. "When I heard about what happened in Chernobog, I was honestly worried. Whatever would I do without my vicious little junior?"

When he stood, he did so with a spin, and leaned back smoothly against the window.

"But then I saw your message earlier, and I knew that the heavens were on my side."

He shot me a grin.

"Wanna do a line?"

I grimaced. I hadn't expected him to be so cheerful about my return.

"No thank you, Qiying. I…"

"Haha, I'm just messing with you. I know how uptight you get about drugs, Tanja. Tea, then."

Qiying reached under his desk and produced a gourd-shaped thermos and two small tea cups.

I fidgeted. "Qiying? I…"

Qiying didn't seem to hear me, pouring me a cup with an easy smile.

"What happened in Chernobog was out of anyone's control, so forget about the deal." He cocked a brow. "I told you that Wang was the one who put his weight behind the proposal anyway, right?"

"I— Yes, you did, Qiying."

"You should have seen the look on his face when I talked Old Liang into sending you there instead of his little cocksucker apprentice."

In retrospect, I would have greatly preferred that.

"That little slut kept talking like you died in Chernobog, you know?"

"Haha…"

"It's why I told you not to stress before you left. Deal goes well, that's good for us. Deal goes bad, too bad for Wang. Either way, we win, right?" Qiying held out my cup of tea.

I accepted with both hands and took a polite sip.

The well-dressed Lung was a large part of how I managed to climb the ranks so quickly.

I had demonstrated countless times that I was the right person for the job, but I wasn't in the habit of shying away from the truth. It would have taken years longer to climb the ranks if Qiying hadn't propped me up as his answer to Henderson Wang's own protégé.

Hopefully he'd help me land a new position before he found a new answer.

"Listen, the truth is—"

"Just wait until I tell him you're back. I can't wait to see that smug dickhead's face during the board meeting later."

Qiying smirked at me, and swept his hand through the air like he was showing me some great panorama.

"One day you'll get to see it yourself, Wang's famous look of constipation when things don't go his way."

"Qiying, I caught Oripathy!"

The air froze. You could hear a pin drop.

"…What?"

I swallowed thickly.

"In Chernobog I was accosted by members of an Infected terror group. They infected me with Oripathy."

Qiying's mouth was moving, but he seemed to struggle to find the words.

"No. No, no… if you're Infected then how are you supposed to get on the C-Suite, huh?!"

I wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't expected him to be this upset about it.

But before I could get a word in, he swept everything on his desk to the floor with a crash.

"What about my plans, huh?!"

I watched splinters fly as he lifted his chair above his head and shattered it on his beloved bonsai.

"I…"

"Fuck!"

After the third swing, he tossed the chair aside and started destroying the ornaments instead.

That vase was two hundred thousand dollars…

"Fuck! Shit! Fuck! Shit! Fucking shit fucker shit! Fucking diu nei lou dau ge sei tsat, fuck!"

I stood frozen in shock as my mentor continued to go through the stages of a mental breakdown. Qiying was an abrasive guy, but I'd never seen him lose his cool like this before.

He turned around and seized the calligraphy scroll on the wall, tearing it to shreds, before moving onto the decorative bamboo plants. Before long, all the pot plants in the office had been snapped in twain.

When I saw what he did next, I almost went to stop him. His legs trembled as he struggled to lift his favourite bonsai, but lift it he did, and then he slammed it into a sandalwood divider.

The pieces went everywhere. Some of the soil spilled onto my shoes.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Ham gaa tsaan, Wang, you motherfucking lan dak tsik piece of shit! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!"

The screaming continued for another minute.

Qiying supported himself on his zitan wood desk, panting raggedly. I stood rooted to the floor as he eventually recovered and brushed his gelled hair back.

"And of course, you have my thoughts and prayers in this trying time, Tanja. Rest assured, Coopers & Harding won't hang you out to dry."

Nothing about what I'd seen left me feeling at all assured…

I frowned. If I wanted my favour, it'd be better to improve his mood first, I decided.

"It was a group called Rhodes Island that saved me," I said. I cleared my throat. "It was their operatives that carried me out of Chernobog, and their medical advancements that stabilised me."

Qiying was still panting, but didn't interrupt me, so I continued.

"From everything I've seen, Rhodes Island is an astonishingly capable startup, and they've only been around for two years. If we can get in early before they've already established lasting partnerships, we could stand to reap significant returns."

I paused for a moment, and added in a small voice,

"The youngest daughter of the Brynley Group appears to be stationed there to audit their movements."

My mentor fixed me with a sharp look.

"Tell me more."

While I had no doubt Rhodes Island was also a cutting-edge pharmaceutical company, I expected a lot of their income came from their other identity. I was hesitant to come right out and say it, but Rhodes Island was probably a wetwork outfit, occasionally for hire, but funded by a patron too. Almost certainly the Brynley group.

I leaned in and whispered to Qiying what I knew about their structure, operations—both pharmaceutical and suspected—as well as the assets I'd seen them boast. Finally, I told him of their field tactician Doctor, the enigmatic Dr. Kal'tsit, and most significantly, Miss Amiya.

No patron wanted a black-ops unit that they couldn't control. Rhodes Island was walking a tightrope between being dangerous enough to use, dangerous enough not to cross, but also not being too dangerous to permit. Any fourteen-year-old Cautus who could not only thread such a needle, but command the fervent loyalty of her operatives had, as they said in Yan, 'unlimited potential'.

When I was done, Qiying's expression was thoughtful. Now was my chance!

"S-so… I was thinking that I could introduce them to you." After all, if they ever had that falling out with the Brynley group, I'd be in Leithania somewhere. It was going to be somebody else's problem. "I've just forwarded you Dr. Kal'tsit's details. You could see if they'd be interested in some of our services long-term, or if perhaps they'd be willing to accept some investment."

"Hmm."

Qiying sat down on his desk and began that annoying tapping thing he did when he was thinking.

He was biting!

"Anyhow, I was thinking that you could help transfer me to a branch office in Leithania and…"

"Okay, you've convinced me." Qiying dusted his hands. "You said they extended an invitation to you, right? I'm going to get in contact with this Kal'tsit, and appoint you as our liaison."

Good, I somehow managed to— …Wait, what?

"I'm going to…?"

"It might not be quite what they expected when they invited you to live on their landship for treatment, but I think we can work something out."

…Had I oversold them?

"You know, you've always had a great eye for people, Tanja." Qiying slicked his hair back. "Almost as good as mine. If you say that this Amiya girl is a good horse, then I trust that she's a good horse. Get us, me and you, a foot in Rhodes Island's door. Butter them up. Spread their legs wide open."

"B-but, my transfer—"

Qiying snorted.

"I know I can be all business, but people aren't pot plants. After having you by my side all these years, you think I'd let you take a demotion in all but name and waste your ambition away in some sleepy Leithanian shithole?"

"No, but I never meant—"

"Don't think I don't see what you're trying to do by bringing Rhodes Island up. You'll get your wish. And none of that polite refusal nonsense either, you know I hate that shit." He hummed for a moment. "I might have to get a bit creative, but you'll be keeping your salary too."

No, no, I never meant that I wanted— I'd be keeping my salary?

"In return, I expect some results. Risk analysis, financials, logistics, legal hair-splitting, I already know you can do it all, so make yourself indispensable to them while they're still growing. And if you can get them amenable to selling us some of that 'special medicine' they're peddling, all the better. The enemy of my enemy, and all that, and some of those arseholes in the Columbian HQ could do with a fall off a balcony."

Before I could sort my thoughts out, Qiying waved his hand.

"All right, all right, now get out of my office. I still need to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do now."

With that, I was dismissed.

I found myself standing numbly by the curbside, contemplating the human condition.

---

EDIT: Italics auto-formatting adding random spaces.

 

Note: So, next chapter's only half done, but I figure I may as well put a pin in publishing anything else for this story for the moment. The anime airs a week from now, while the official Episode 10 translations are dropping, like, tomorrow. The anime covers the Chernobog incident in greater detail than in-game, while Episode 10 covers the Londinium occupation and resistance, so both will probably mean a bunch of rewriting.




I figured I may as well repost Chapter 6 now and work out what I have to do later.

---

In my hands I held a box that contained my personal belongings. I didn't keep much in my office: a pot plant, my framed credentials, a stack of business cards, and the designer office chair I was standing next to.

A pair of pedestrians walked past, staring at me as they went. I suppose I must have looked like I'd just been laid off. That might have been better than the reality, honestly.

While I think I could have argued for the continued use of my office, realistically nobody would want to see me roaming around and contaminating their headquarters, nor would I have much reason to be in Lungmen in the future. Who knew where the Rhodes Island landship would take me? That was why I was standing here on the curb with all my things.

A few minutes ago, I called for a VanVanGO to pick me up. They were a cheap provider of moving services, and offered transport services as well. Most of my plans for the future had just been upended in Qiying's office, so I wasn't sure what I'd be doing afterwards, but at least the items at the top of my to-do list hadn’t changed. I was still an Infected whose listed address was outside the accepted blocks. Getting my affairs in Lungmen sorted was no less necessary than before.

Just as I was contemplating sacrificing my dignity by sitting on the chair, my ride pulled up in the drop-off zone. A middle-aged man hopped out from the driver’s seat. One Mr. Qin, according to his ID. It must have been difficult to mistake me for anybody else, since I was the only person on the road standing with a designer chair. I was the only one here with any chair, really. Without a word, he opened up the back of his van and picked it up.

"Thank you," I said.

"M'sai haak hei," he replied with a grunt.

I got in the back while he strapped the chair in, before slamming the back doors shut.

The interior of his van was surprisingly clean and comfortable. He'd obviously put effort into keeping his vehicle to company standards. I'd picked VanVanGO because I had the chair with me, but the business model had me expecting something grungier. It even smelt clean. The air-conditioning was on, so I would have noticed if it was musty. Well-maintained indeed.

Had I known they were so professional, I might have used their services when I previously changed addresses.

When he got in the driver's seat we immediately took off.

I considered making small talk. People were quite talkative in this city, and in my time here I'd learnt that idle chit-chat often greased the wheels. The man seemed like the taciturn type though, so I decided against it. I had things to think about, anyway.

While I didn't doubt my abilities, I had no real experience working with a group like Rhodes Island. Was a lot of creative accounting required to account for their assassination jobs, or was that impact kept away from the operations of their front company? I was ambivalent about the idea of getting myself involved in that. On the one hand, knowing too much would potentially get me killed. On the other hand, it was obviously better to see a purge coming, which would be difficult to do if I had my head in the sand.

It was something I would have to decide on soon.

Thanks to my continued employment with C&H, I had more or less unrestricted access to their ERP systems. While I was cleaning out my office, I transferred an encrypted copy of everything we had on Rhodes Island in our databases.

From the way the RI staff had downplayed their prominence, I wasn't sure I'd been expecting to find anything at all, but a quick search had them popping up all over the world. A few mentions of them in northern Leithania, more than a few humanitarian activities in Victoria, a number of times in Columbia, including the contract for a major disaster management incident in Ironforge City...

If you were paying attention, they were everywhere. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, taking the words of a black-ops unit at face value. Then again, Operator Durin seemed like the carefree type, so who was to say that she knew the full extent of her company’s business activities. As for Pallas, she was already a few cups in when I met her.

When we arrived at my apartment building's parking lot, the driver unloaded my chair with practised efficiency. Considering that people used VanVanGo services to move entire apartments worth of furniture, he must have done this thousands of times.

"Thank you. I can take it from here," I said.

It was just an elevator ride up, after all.

The man shrugged.

"If you're sure."

He pulled out a pad and asked me to sign off. I did so and he got back into his van and drove off without another word. When I was alone in the carpark, I placed my box onto the chair and pushed it towards one of the many elevators. My building was a few dozen stories high, so it would never have functioned with just a few.

The elevator car arrived in short order, and I stepped in and swiped my keycard. Were it not for the window, the ride was so smooth you’d never know you were moving. It was about what you could expect in a building with rent as high as this one.

The various underground levels passed by the window until we finally reached the ground floor. Rising into the sky, I was met with a familiar view of Lungmen. This high up, it was possible to see the afternoon sun beginning to dip behind the cityscape. It was hard to believe that most of the day was over already.

When I stepped out into the hallway, it was empty as usual. There were only two apartments on my floor, and in all my time I’d never seen anybody else. Sometimes I wondered if the other room was even inhabited. I’d been working late nights ever since I moved in here, and the sound-proofing was very good, so it was honestly hard to say.

In another life I might have introduced myself to follow propriety, but not this one. I suppose now I would never know.

I pushed my chair, still laden with my few belongings, across the hallway’s plush carpet to my door. Another swipe of my keycard and I was pushing into my apartment. I’d cordoned off the floor around the entrance as a reminder of where my ‘genkan’ was supposed to be; I was careful not to wheel my chair into the cleaner, barefoot area. The wheels of the chair would have to be thoroughly cleaned first. At least if I was still planning on living here. Instead, there it would sit until I figured out where I was moving to.

Something that I never asked Dr. Kal’tsit was exactly what my housing situation would look like if I took her up on her offer. In my defence, I never thought I’d be taking her up on it. Strictly speaking, I still wasn’t. I was just going to be there as a guest. A liaison. In all the same danger in the case of a total purge, but with much less reason for Miss Amiya to be concerned with my well-being.

…Was it better to just join Rhodes Island after all? No, no, but my salary…

Well, I’d know soon enough. Not that soon, though. This time of the week, Qiying wouldn’t be free to make that call to Dr. Kal’tsit for a while yet.

Speaking of, I'd missed the chance for any food before our flight here. I turned on the lights and walked into the kitchen. When I left for Chernobog I had expected to be gone for about a week. I didn't expect to find any leftover delivery in the fridge, but I did find some egg yolk chocolate. I idly gnawed on it while my other hand scrolled through a delivery app. What food options could I expect on Rhodes Island? If the offerings were dire enough, it was hard to say whether or not I would simply give up the money and move home to Leithania.

After the app confirmed my order—some shrimp bonnets, and rice noodle rolls in sauce—I got to packing. The ultimate destination of my belongings didn’t change my need to clear out the apartment.

My clothes went into a large suitcase; it wasn’t hard to fit them all in. The suits I wore to work went in first. Blazers marketed to women didn't have quite so much padding, which made them a simpler affair to fold without creasing, and between the gaps went the trousers and blouses.

That was already the bulk of my clothing, really, and there was still plenty of space inside. Rarely, work required that I attend an event for networking and the like, so I did have a few nice outfits: one casual blazer, a few trousers, a pair of jeans, an expensive cardigan, and a cocktail dress that I'd gotten a single use out of. They went in without much fuss either, as there was plenty of room in the suitcase to be had once they were folded or rolled as appropriate.

Next went a few pairs of cotton tracksuits, not that I did much exercising in them. It was what I wore at home. I didn't spend much time at home, especially over the last two years, so I might not even have had these tracksuits if it wasn't for my reluctance to parade around in a state of undress. My apartment was my apartment, but that was no excuse for behaving like a sloven.

All that was left of my clothes were my undergarments. After stuffing the gaps with my panties and brassieres, that was my clothing done. Perhaps it might have horrified a few of the girls at the office, but the number of clothes I had was actually trending upwards. I didn't have those jeans last year, for example. This was more clothes than I could ever remember having. Well, that was a lie, but it was more than I'd had for the last thirty years at least.

With all of the folding out of the way, I was almost done packing. I’d pack my toiletries later, but my spare towels could go in first. As for my electronics, all I really had was my phone charger, which I’d be using for now. Most of my free spending went into food and drink, and I did all my work on company hardware.

As for the furniture, a rental apartment was never going to be my final home, so I had sought out one that came pre-furnished. The furniture itself was staying right where it was.

I flapped open the vacuumable moving bag that I'd used during the move here. My spare bedsheets and pillows went in. A quick vacuum later and they were compact and ready for travel. The mattress they sometimes sat upon belonged to me too, but that one I'd be leaving to the movers.

Besides the things I’d be using until I moved, I was more or less ready to leave. I doubted all of that had taken more than ten minutes, but practice made perfect. This wasn't even my first move this year, although given the date, it would probably be my last.

A few minutes later my order arrived, which I took my time eating. There was no rush, after all. The shrimp bonnets were made consistently well at this store. People around here considered that a mark of a skilled chef. I wasn’t sure I believed that, but they sure were nice to eat.

When I was done, I put the empty boxes into the bin and began getting the garbage bags sorted. The landlord would send a cleaning crew in after I left, but there was no harm in cleaning up after myself.

Once I was back from putting the garbage out, I jumped into my bathroom for a long shower and then a longer bath. Very soon, Lungmen’s water situation wouldn’t be of any consequence to me, so it made sense to enjoy myself while I could. While I was sitting around in the tub, potentially nicer than any other I'd experience ever again depending on my luck, I considered the rest of my tentative to-do list.

Getting a few books on the workings of Originium Arts would probably be high on that list.

Years ago, when I chose to study Finance, that sealed off my future in Arts.

I spent a lot of time using magic as Tanya von Degretyav. It didn’t take long after my education began at the orphanage for me to see the overlap with Arts casting. While in broad terms it might have sounded nice to put that relevant experience to use, unfortunately it wasn’t that straightforward.

Piloting a jet also required spatial awareness and the ability to steer a wheel, but you couldn’t simply put a drag racer in a fighter jet and expect him to do well. Probably. Living in Tokyo, I never did end up buying a car.

What my basic schooling told me about Arts was that I was looking at years of focused study before being able to cast anything complex. While some children were born with a natural, and sometimes inconvenient, ability to cast specific types of Arts, that kind of talent had never materialised within me. Neither did I seem to have a natural understanding of Arts in general.

Under that premise, pursuing Arts wasn’t rationally in my best interest. Time spent studying Arts was time that I couldn’t spend on climbing the corporate ladder, and three years of study was a lot of time. Being insistent on learning Arts as a hobby simply because I’d already spent so much time using magic on the battlefield was Sunk Cost Fallacy at its worst.

Finding the bathwater growing a little tepid, I allowed some of it to drain and turned the hot water tap back on before returning to my thoughts.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have taken that assumption with a grain of salt. In Leithania, Originium Arts and music were inextricably tied. I suspected that coloured the way the fundamentals of casting Arts were thought about, and more importantly, taught.

Rhythm, melody, harmony, form—I grew up under the impression that the theory of casting was quite alien from an Imperial mage’s point of view, but perhaps I’d simply been unable to see through the musical metaphor to the similarities. After all, I’d never done anything more musically complex than play the recorder in my primary school classes.

If I was being charitable with myself, it was perhaps unreasonable to expect me to realise the Leithanian bias when I lived in the orphanage. The world of every poor orphan was small, with little access to knowledge beyond what her caretakers could provide. But by the time I was in university, I had already left the proverbial well, and really should have re-examined my assumptions.

My only defence was that I was really, very busy.

At any rate, I still had the general-purpose Arts unit I'd confiscated from the girl that started all this. While my memory of my ordeal in Chernobog was spotty at best, I could distinctly recall casting a few dozen defensive shells, while bleeding out and only half-conscious no less. When I got out of the bath, I was going to look for some e-books on the matter.

The water splashed quietly as I shifted. I wondered when I'd look down and start to see signs of my Oripathy.

Living on the Rhodes Island landship would do one good thing for my chances at longevity: as long as I wasn’t killed first, there were few better places for Oripathy treatment.

Once I’d had my fill of Lungmen’s water reserves, I left my bathroom to find a text message from Dr. Kal’tsit. A little earlier than expected, Qiying made good on his words.



Unknown Contact

XXXX XXXX

This is Kal’tsit. Mr. Li has extended your services to Rhodes Island.

We should speak.



At the bottom of the message was an RSVP for a booking somewhere in the downtown outskirts. Well, it wasn’t like I had much else to do until I hammered out the details with Rhodes Island.

‘I know the area,’ I replied. ‘I’ll be there shortly.’

***

I stepped out of the taxicab into a familiar street. Poorly lit except for the neon signs of bars and clubs, this lower end nightlife district was the next block over from my first home in Lungmen.

On the nights that I hadn't slept at my desk in the office, I’d sometimes pass by the curry finball stalls on the way home. They wouldn’t be seeing much business right now, but these streets would be filled with partygoers soon enough.

The address that Dr. Kal’tsit sent was on the block just across from here. I trotted up a short staircase into a small park. Unlike the street I’d alighted on, the lighting was much brighter here. At regular intervals, tall lamps illuminated the greenery with clean white light. I suppose with all the trees around, the perception of safety in the park was something the local council was more conscious of.

The street I stepped out onto was quieter. Less neon here, and more hole-in-the-wall bars and restaurants.

I stood at a distance with complicated feelings.

Was this it? The place I was looking at seemed particularly dingy looking.

It didn’t look open, either.

On the other hand, it wasn’t nearly as dingy as I expected for a place that served the Oripathy afflicted.

Rather than some slum restaurant for lepers, it was shabby in the way that was as if somebody had decided to run a restaurant out of their windowless apartment, and hadn’t put too much thought into how that looked to potential customers.

Doubly hesitant, I was making sure I had the right place when a well-dressed young couple entered ahead of me.

It was the right place.

Bracing myself, I opened the door.

After I stepped carefully inside, I realised that contrary to its exterior, the decor was surprisingly tasteful.

Decorative bamboo here and there, some artwork, and soft lighting that paired well with mirrors. The tables themselves were partitioned by screens for some degree of privacy.

While I was admiring the interior decoration, one of the staff noticed me and approached.

“A friend is expecting me,” I preempted with a smile. “She has a table under the name Kal’tsit.”

“This way, please.”

To my mild surprise, the waiter led me up some stairs into a softly lit hallway. He stopped at one of the doors and knocked politely.

“Come in,” called a familiar voice from inside.

The waiter opened the door for me with a friendly smile.

“I’ll be back shortly for your order.”

Conscious that Dr. Kal’tsit had only ever seen me at my worst, I endeavoured to keep my stride casual and confident as I made my way over to the table. The mirror I’d noticed earlier was one-way, it turned out, because our room had an overlooking view of the restaurant.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” I said.

“No, I just got here,” Dr. Kal’tsit said absently as she looked over the menu.

After another quick glance around the room, I took my seat.

“We can speak freely,” she said. “This establishment values the privacy of its clients. Is this your first time here?”

I nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at me.

“It’s a nice place,” I said. “I’m surprised such a nice place serves the Infected.”

Left unsaid was my question about whether the staff were similarly Infected. Back in the Rhodes Island clinic, Dr. Louisa had handed me a friendly informational brochure on what I needed to know about Oripathy. Knowing what I did now about the transmission of Oripathy, there was almost no chance of infection regardless of the health of the cooking staff.

How ironic then, that even knowing better, and as somebody already suffering from Oripathy, I still felt some hesitance at eating food prepared by an Infected.

Dr. Kal’tsit looked away from the menu to stare at me. I tried not to flush.

“I didn’t mean any offence.”

“You’re not the only Infected in your tax bracket,” she said simply. “Mr. Li made quite the offer.”

“Qiying’s decision surprised me,” I admitted.

Her gaze returned to the menu and she flipped the page.

“It’s not the first time we’ve hosted Infected staff from other companies, but they aren’t usually quite so well paid. At least not without hazard pay.”

I injected an amiable smile into my tone. “I’ve always believed in maximising the value that I bring to others.” Or at least those others who were involved in my getting paid. I wasn’t a charity.

“Then you must bring quite a lot of value indeed.” Dr. Kal’tsit hummed.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in.” She turned to me. “Well, we can continue after we’ve ordered. The sashimi here is quite popular. Mr. Li mentioned that you liked Far Eastern cuisine.”

I did, but regular food, not sashimi. If I was going to shell out so much money, my preference was something Gaulish. At least then the food would be seasoned properly.

“I love sashimi,” I said with a smile. “Have you had it before?”

Dr. Kal’tsit’s expression didn’t change even a little as she hummed.

“I’ve tried all manner of cuisine in my time.”

That would probably have sounded more impressive if she wasn’t a Feline in her twenties.

I didn’t care enough to comment, however. Personally, I was just happy I wouldn’t have to order for her.

It was annoying when the other party picked a venue out of consideration for you. If they weren’t familiar with the cuisine themselves, it could turn awkward if you suggested a dish they didn’t end up enjoying.

I gave a quick glance at the stony-faced woman and quickly decided against a multi-course menu item that we’d have to share.

“I think I’ll have the ootoro set,” I said. It was expensive, but the rest of the menu wasn’t too much cheaper. At least the fat of the ootoro would add some taste.

Dr. Kal’tsit looked up at the waiter who was waiting patiently at our table.

“I’ll have the horse mackerel set, and my companion will have the ootoro.” She looked over at me. “Is sake fine?”

I nodded with a smile. They probably served my preferred red wine here, but I wasn’t about to decline her suggestion at what was in essence a job interview.

Rhodes Island wasn’t going to be paying me, but if Qiying was confident in keeping me on the payroll, then Rhodes Island was sure to be providing us with more than just my treatment. I didn’t know what that was, nor was I sure I wanted to know, but it was better to keep them happy to continue providing it by being the model guest worker.

After the staff member left with our orders, we made small talk about the Far Eastern cuisine available in Lungmen until the same waiter returned with our food.

I eyed my thick slabs of tuna belly.

I considered mixing some wasabi into the soy sauce. Wasabi on its own was too sharp for me, so I preferred its fragrance dulled. It was a breach of etiquette, but I didn’t mind coming off as a bit of a lower class boor.

On the other hand, while waiting for our food, I’d already made the mistake of coming off as quite familiar with Far Eastern food. If I ‘unknowingly’ breached etiquette here, I could risk coming off as a loudmouth who knew far less than they thought they did.

Could I chance it? Thus far the doctor had turned out to be quite familiar with the practice of eating Far Eastern cuisine.

Better to err on the side of etiquette, I finally decided.

Without much ceremony, I dabbed some wasabi onto a piece of ootoro before generously swishing it in the soy sauce. Hmm. Buttery, salty, and expensive.

“Mr. Li praised you to the moon.” Oh, was it time to talk business? “Make no mistake, we accept anybody who can contribute, be they engineer or dishwasher, but I would like to hear it from you yourself.”

Dr. Kal'tsit dabbed some grated ginger onto a piece of aji and brought it past her lips.

It wasn't until she'd slowly and gracefully chewed through all of it that she continued to speak.

“What is it that you offer, and what do you hope for during your time with us?”

I was a little thrown off balance. My impression of her was a dry woman less prone to dramatics than this.

“You must have seen my resume,” I said. Despite his flippant bearing and penchant for drugs, I’d learnt over the years that Qiying was scrupulous in everything he did. If he was offering my services to Rhodes Island for compensation, my credentials would have been the first thing he sent her.

Dr. Kal’tsit fixed me with an inscrutable look.

“Beyond the resume,” she said.

I thought about it. While Terra's culture did have some primitive trappings, their premier nations were no less advanced than 21st century Japan. Unlike in the Reich, I was not about to wow anybody with my knowledge of warfare, nor my modern knowledge of business.

I looked her in the eye and replied in my most professional and capable-sounding tone.

“I have great belief in my ability to learn and adapt. Whatever else you get up to, I have utmost confidence that I can add value to your official operations.”

“Official?” she asked.

Ah. Was I being a little too direct? But it was better that she suspected off the bat that I already knew what she was involved in, and so did my superiors. It would abort any panicked attempts to silence me if I ever stumbled across their wet work, and would also hint that if I had an unfortunate accident, C&H would know who to investigate.

Besides, we both knew under what circumstances I first came into contact with Rhodes Island. Better not to treat each other like idiots by dancing around the subject, and hint instead that I'd already put the puzzle together.

“I suppose this brings me to what I hope to get out of my time with you. Coopers & Harding Lungmen has an extensive database. Some things are hidden only so long as nobody bothers to look.” I cleared my throat and steepled my fingers. “I’d like to make it clear that I am first and foremost a pacifist. While I have no strong feelings about what Rhodes Island is really up to, I only work to contribute to peace and the progress of civilisation for fair remuneration.”

After hours of thought, that was my decision.

I’d keep my eyes and ears open for signs of things going wrong, but otherwise I was going to stay out of their business. Whether they were running their usual black ops, or they were trying to rebel against their Columbian masters, I refused to play a direct role.

“Rhodes Island exists to help the Infected, wherever they might be,” Dr. Kal’tsit said placidly.

“As long as that’s the case, I’ll do my best to assist you in whatever you may need,” I said equally calmly.

We stared at each other in silence, food forgotten.

“I didn’t think your group had reason to pay such attention to us,” she said coolly.

Her doubt was perfectly understandable. As far as the public knew, the Lungmen branch of C&H had no reason to be watching Columbia. The country was on the other side of the world, and had their own branch of C&H. For those out of the know, Columbian matters were well taken care of by C&H Columbia.

No company wanted their internal troubles going public, after all. I had my own agenda, however.

“Infighting is the bane of mankind, isn’t it? We’ve been looking in directions we never used to,” I admitted. “The Kazdellian occupation of Londinium changed a great many things.”

While Victoria was a declining power, the Victorian markets would never have been shaken to this degree if not for the occupation of its capital. The volatility of the markets combined with the inability for its aristocratic backers to enter the city had effectively destroyed any faith in the Londinium headquarters to lead.

If it wasn’t for that, the Columbian branch would never have grown so impudent, and we would hardly be so wary of them.

A lot of people didn’t like the Sarkaz. The idea of a unified Sarkaz race that the nation of Kazdel presented was even less welcome. That’s why it was baffling to me that some Victorian nobles had just welcomed Kazdel’s military right into their capital.

It was never a great idea to invite a foreign army into your country to attack your domestic rivals, but I suppose Victoria’s Grand Dukes didn’t have the Ming Dynasty as an example to learn from. Maybe the long time Sarkaz warriors spent as wandering mercenaries after each fall of Kazdel had given the Victorians the impression that Kazdel’s national military was equally controllable.

The wrong impression, evidently.

“And what are you planning on doing about it?” she asked.

Obviously she wasn’t asking about my thoughts as an individual this time. She knew now that C&H were aware of Rhodes Island's origins. Dr. Kal'tsit was asking after my company’s stance on her group, sounding out where exactly we stood.

Unfortunately, I had no idea what Qiying was thinking beyond a general ‘keep an eye on them and see if you can’t convince them to neutralise a few Columbians’, so I was going to have to keep it vague.

“I think you’ll find that we belong to the ‘a friend of a friend’ camp,” I said.

There. If Rhodes Island was trying to break free of the Brinsleys, then she could interpret that as an offer for cooperation. If Rhodes Island’s leadership were loyal to the Brinsley Chairman, well, the man had a lot of enemies, so my statement still wouldn’t have sounded out of place.

Either way, that was a problem out of my hands and onto Qiying’s lap.

Dr. Kal’tsit stared at me, still expressionless after everything. After years in Lungmen’s business culture, I was accustomed to a more welcoming and amicable mien. Fortunately, although you would never guess by looking at me, I had decades of experience under my belt.

Dr. Kal’tsit wasn’t even close to the first poker-faced stoic I’d had to deal with. I understood her type perfectly.

After a moment, she returned to her meal.

“Pacifism, you said? Not many Infected live peacefully in this world,” she said.

It was a little tactless of her, but the reminder was no less true.

“I hope I beat the odds then.”

She brought a sake cup to her lips for a sip.

“You would have better odds by working with Rhodes Island.”

Ah, the ‘Acquisition and Cultivation Procedures for Infected Personnel’ again? If she was taking my views on pacifism seriously, did that mean I was being scouted for my business acumen?

I sat a little straighter in my seat.

Unless they paid rates comparable to my salary, I wasn’t interested for now, but it was always nice having my talents recognised. While I vastly preferred tangible benefits over recognition, that wasn’t to say that commendations weren’t pleasant in their own right. It was just that they could often be spoiled by somebody using them to weasel out of properly rewarding you.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about that with her.

“I’m open to future cooperation,” I said, turning her down without closing off all avenues for future employment.

Perhaps if they considered me a potential future talent, they’d try a little harder to protect my life if things ever turned violent.

After a little thought, I added with some flattery, “And with Rhodes Island’s incredible research, I hope to have a long future ahead of me indeed.”

Unsure of what else to say, I took a sip of sake, and then placed another piece of fish into my mouth. Sure enough, Dr. Kal’tsit took the chance to reply.

“Whatever else we do, Rhodes Island is committed first and foremost to aiding the Infected.”

I suppose their executives picked a front operation that they felt at least some degree of investment in. For one thing, it was probably easier to keep up the act about something you cared about. If that something was also a perfect cover, then that was two birds with one stone.

It also helped that a large number of their personnel were suffering from Oripathy. It would be embarrassing if one of their black ops failed because employees in their front company held a strike.

That was as good enough a reason as any to stay motivated.

After a short conversation about the rise and fall of nations, no doubt veiled references to Columbia, we returned to lighter topics for the rest of the night.

When it was time to pay the bill, Dr. Kal'tsit generously offered to foot it. Well, if she insisted, I was hardly going to refuse.

All in all it was a pleasant enough business dinner. I figured that I would be leaving the city soon, but if life ever brought me back to Lungmen, I could see what other fine dining options were open to the Infected.

When I got back to my apartment, I wasted some more of Lungmen's water reserves with another shower and bath before finally crawling into bed.

I was lying beneath my sheets when I realised I had forgotten to ask about the accommodations at Rhodes Island.

---

A/N:
Kal’tsit: "We're talking about Theresis, right?"