[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.8 | Chapter 25: Those Places We Aren’t Meant to Step

It wasn’t until Olivier’s name popped up on his Censor that Halen realized something tight had been filling his chest since the moment the man’s vitals had gone dark. There had been panic, sure. There had been him spewing his drink all over Rafe—and had he ever apologized for that?Rafe replied, his hand shifting through the air as they waited for Simeon to finish reaching both the clones’ recon skill and Emilia’s suggested recon-like skill sequence through the area they’d come to. he added, forwarding Halen a copy of his memories of the moment.

Diligently, Halen watched it, examining himself and seeing all the telltale signs of strain and stress in his expression, in the way he moved. At the time, he had assumed the overwhelm that had flooded through him was due simply to the reality that Emilia was potentially in danger: her body itself, from whatever had harmed Olivier; her heart, as she clearly liked the man; her very soul, given the lawyer was considered her last, desperate chance at beating her charges.

Now, as his heart settled and the relay Olivier had created between the two of them and Emilia popped up, the lawyer’s Censor popping in with a few questions about functions and skills—things Olivier had thought while moving through the city and using several of his and Emilia’s functions for the first time—Halen realized that it hadn’t been Emilia alone he was worried for. It hadn’t simply been a fast friendship with Olivier—a lingering possibility of becoming closer friends, once the man was back in Baalphoria—leading him to worry for the lawyer either.

Instead, there had been this bubble of tension, slowly expanding within his chest. Every moment Olivier was gone—was potentially dead—had led to that bubble expanding, expanding, always expanding until he’d felt liable to pop and somehow hadn’t even realized it.

It was strange, to say the least, to have this overwhelming concern for a man he barely knew, to have not even realized that concern was there, to realize that just having Olivier’s name back on his Censor would ease so much of that strain—he’d known Olivier was alive through Mikhail long before Olivier’s Censor had come back onaether.

[Halen:]

Halen stared down at the message, sent off on his xphern to Emilia in perfectly acceptable Baalphorian—who knew messaging on a xphern was more finicky than through a Censor, the thing patently rejecting his normally sloppy slang? The girl he loved hadn’t responded yet, but he hadn’t expected her to.

When she left to try and get to Xavier through some sort of path she’d —Halen didn’t believe her—in the , Emilia had only told him and Mikhail... and by extension the Crisharian man. In no world would she be telling the triplets until she was further on her trek, as this was the sort of thing that would lead all three to leave everyone behind and surge after her. While she hadn’t had a chance to fully explain she didn’t want anyone down in those dungeons, Halen could read between her words—he had almost a decade and a half of practice in plucking at the threads of the girl’s thoughts, after all; more, if one were to consider the decades he’d spent inside the Virtuosi System, tugging at her mind’s creations.

Between Emilia’s words on the subject of the dungeon was the implication that with the place was . It was unclear was wrong, but for something to be so wrong that Emilia wasn’t demanding people get down there so they could record data for her but instead telling them to stay away? Halen wasn’t sure what to do with that, other than think back to his most recent visit to the Grey Sands, when he’d had the last of his piercings done.

The fact that Grey Sander diaspora were so hated had made finding someone willing to do his piercings somewhat difficult, but he’d eventually found someone, far to the south—so far south the town’s sands almost touched Chinsata, only a stretch of empty land travelled only by scavengers and criminals and vicious animals separating the small city from the slavers of the south. The sun had born down on them, vendors selling fast-melting treats and sunblock—always more sunblock, everyone’s pitch-black skin cracking under the oppression of poverty and the abuse of the sun.

It had been a strange place, so far south its culture had been barely recognizable as to someone who had only ever seen the culture of the northern towns that pressed against the Bay of Jibur or that existed within the womb of the basin—the very literal translation of the Gray Sander name for the central section of the Cyrenix Desert: In the north, the southernmost section of Cyrenix Desert was often referred to as the : the lifeblood of the womb—at least, that was what it translated as in the more common dialects of Grey Sander.

As he had visited that southern town of the Grey Sands to have numerous piercings done since graduating, Halen had learned a significant amount of their dialect as well. Although there were a few affluent families, their sprawling estates dotted around the oasis the town had been built around, the majority of town was both poor and decidedly less hostile towards Grey Sander diaspora than the rest of the territory. Apparently, there was an old story about how would be . As a result, it wasn’t uncommon for residents to actively encourage their young to attend schools in Baalphoria as well as to marry Baalphorians.

As his own skin was far darker than the majority of Grey Sanders, and instead closer to the residents of this town, his piercer had suggested that his own family might have hailed from the area, generations earlier. Unfortunately, both sides of Halen’s family had long ago lost track of the stories of their origins. It was an interesting thing to consider, regardless, and the residents of the town had generally been more than happy to host him for short bursts of time, speaking their dialect to him despite his inability to understand most of what they said.

Now, he understood bits and pieces, and he also understood that the was considered to be both cursed and blessed by the aether. might translate as in common Grey Sander the more highbrow dialect—although that translation was more… subdued and romantic, leaning more into ideas of or rather than blood—but in the local dialect? In the local dialect, it translated as .

Some of the locals claimed the reason Chinsata was so corrupt was they lived upon the , while others said that it was due to the land that so many of the city’s residents were born with irregular deviations and Dyadism—and really, they did have a shockingly high percentage of residents who had experienced genetic spasms, especially for a community that an Ex-300 community. Really, as far as Halen had been able to tell, the D-Level distribution of the town was about average—a 1:1:1:17 split between ex-300s, sub-50s, sub-30s, and everyone else. Yet, it seemed less common for someone to have something about them than for them to be completely .

The highest of estimates guessed that for the majority of the continent, 1 in 10 people experienced a genetic spasm, but usually it resulted in no noticeable irregular deviation, with only about 1 in 500 people having noticeable irregular deviation, most leaning into benign, physical differences, like having features and colouring that wouldn’t be possible naturally.

From what he’d seen, about 90% of that town’s population had some sort of irregular deviation, and most were far more impressive than a shift in skin tone or eye colour or an uncommon height, and while a significant amount were hereditary, many were the result of genetic spasms.

Regardless, the few times Emilia had insisted they go down into those dungeons, Halen’s mind had been pulled back to staring out across the sands towards Chinsata. The river of sand had felt so impossibly and all at once. Something with it had been wrong, but it had felt as though he would need to stretch his leg forward and step upon it himself in order to determine the source of that wrongness was.

Even before a man had stepped up beside him, dark hands tucked into the pockets of his loose grey pants, to gaze across the sweltering sands, leaking wobbly heat into the world, Halen had known he shouldn’t step foot out there. was out there, and in no world should he be getting close to it.

the man had said, plucking a stick of what Halen would eventually learn was hashath from his pocket and lighting it up. The man—a member of one of the few affluent families in the city—had offered a stick to Halen. Considering how high he’d felt after just breathing in the fumes of the stuff, Halen remained glad he’d refused. the man, who had never introduced himself by anything, Grey Sander etiquette demanding Halen not think of him by even the name he had heard other people call him because that was not a name he had been given for use himself, had continued, breathing out the hashath.

Even before the man had finally spoken again, Halen had wondered if he had seen anything within the haze of the drugs, the sad look in the man’s eyes—a blue so light they seemed to glow white from within—burning itself into his mind. The man had stared out over the sands for a long time, his long black arm occasionally rising to take another puff, the sleeve of his loose white tunic sliding up to his elbow each time.

the man had finally said, just as Halen was wondering if he should waddle off—this had been post piercing and he had still been rather sore—

Those blue eyes had shifted, catching in the setting sun and boring into Halen with an intensity he had rarely seen outside of Simeon or Baylor… or Emilia, that one time she’d actually been quite intent to kill him.

the man had continued, Halen unable to look away from his intensity, the world falling away as a man he did not known, did not trust, gave him a prophecy that had dug its way under his skin and into his bones itself,

Then! The fucker had wandered off! Rude, and Halen didn’t know what to do with of that—didn’t even know who to talk about it with. Codeth would look at him like he was crazy. Coral was already worried that his trips to the southern edge of the Grey Sands were doing weird things to his brain. Emilia would want to go investigate, and while he was curious about the place and that man’s words… no—the same way that Emilia didn’t want anyone down in that dungeon, Halen didn’t want Emilia poking about at the

That left no one for him to even discuss the weird feeling with—although, maybe Baylor would be interested? While the middle triplet had never been on Halen’s list of potential people to talk about this with… maybe he could be?

Baylor loved myths, so maybe he knew something more about the ? At the very least, he would be interested that a random man of power—although, everyone Halen had talked to had been rather vague on power the man actually held—had wandered up to him and given him a prophecy while high on the only drugs Emilia and her friends refused to ever take due to that single bad trip, from around the time Halen had transferred to their school. That was part of why he’d refused the hit: he knew how insane people high on the stuff could get.

The xphern he had been staring down at buzzed with a message from Emilia as Simeon’s various recon skills cut off, all the information from them flickering over Halen’s vision, his Censor automatically starting to catalogue everything—not that Simeon and Rafe’s Censors wouldn’t also be doing so. In the background, Leerin and Janie were standing around, doing nothing. For Leerin, that was both expected and unexpected—she could both be impossibly quiet and annoyingly whiny. As for Janie… something was up with her. Rafe thought that she regretted coming. Halen was inclined to agree.

The message Emilia sent was short—a simple, —and a photo of the path she was following. It was squishy and dark and Halen didn’t like it, the balloon of tension he had for her growing tighter within his chest. Olivier might be found, his vitals once again lighting up Halen’s vision as he contemplated what to say to the man, but Emilia was still gone, her vitals implying she was dead and Halen didn’t like it.

If something happened to Emilia… Halen wasn’t sure he’d be able to survive such a thing.