LIGHTNOVELONLINE Arc 3 | Chapter 86: Secrets for Another Day
V sparkled like a man refreshed, which Emilia found absolutely fascinating. She’d come across a few men, over her many decades and one-night stands, who seemed to be rejuvenated after having sex, but they were few and far between. Roll over and try to nap was more the norm, outside of sub-30s, who seemed to have a penchant for not needing to nap after orgasming.
“What’s that look for?” the other visitor asked as he pulled his borrowed/stolen sweater over his face. One eyebrow cocked as Emilia gave him a funny look as he fussed with his clothing. For a man who didn’t seem to find issue with being a filthy mess, V also appeared to have some finicky needs for his clothing, meticulously rolling up each sleeve with barely a glance at the fabric. Perfect movement. Perfect folds.
“I was wondering if anyone every studied whether sub-30s were more likely to have a lively after orgasming gene,” she said blandly, fighting down a smirk when V all but gaped at her.
“Wh-who says I’m sub-30?” he almost didn’t stammer. Almost.
Apparently, her brief pondering about V’s D-level being higher than average, blackaether raids being an escape for him, had been incorrect.
Emilia shrugged. “I wasn’t actually thinking about you, but thanks for confirming your D-level. I was just thinking about how tired men get after sex. You don’t seem to get tired at all.” Even the night before, after their experience in the labyrinth had left them exhausted, the two of them had rolled around in bed chatting and laughing late into the night.
Granted, they had mysteriously passed out more than a few times during their trek, but still! They should have been tired! Stress! Sex! Fights and trauma and killing people! Yet, neither of them had been particularly tired. Even now, Emilia felt almost rejuvenated. She didn’t generally grow tired enough to nap after sex—not unless it was a particularly spirited session—but it was a little weird how she felt energized, right?
V blinked back as she continued to watch him and think over their current liveliness. “I’ll tell you some other day.”
“So… not a gene thing?”
The man hesitated a moment before admitting he had no idea if there were any genes involved in keeping him awake. There was, however, something more specific that he leveraged, but he wasn’t currently sharing.
“Some other day inside the raid, or the real world?” Emilia asked, bobbing beside V as he continued fiddling with his clothing. His eyes slid over her, and unlike most people—who often looked upon her hyperactive, bouncing self with disdain and a desire to make her cease—V looked almost fond of her fidgeting.
“Real world, probably, unless it becomes relevant here,” he said, reaching for their bags and shouldering them both. “Shall we?” he asked, motioning down the dark hall that awaited them.
“Yeah,” she sighed, mulling over V’s words as they trudged forward.
“Something that’s not relevant here?”
Emilia tossed ideas about what could make something only relevant in the real world through her head. There were tons of things that definitely weren’t relevant here. Politics, for one. As much as she’d explained bits of her country’s complicated political issues to both her Risen Guard babysitter and Rin, she could have done without. Foods that weren’t available here were useless to think or talk about, unless she really wanted to compare things. Her Censor wasn’t worth anything here, although she supposed that once she got access to the system she was liable to compare the two control devices.
Okay, so maybe she couldn’t actually come up with any good ideas about things that were only relevant to her world. It was hard! Almost everything had an equivalent or place where it would—or at least potentially could—come up in conversation.
That was only part of why V’s refusal to explain what was keeping him so peppy under wraps was odd. The fact that it was possibly affecting her as well was the other. If whatever he was doing could be used here, and could be shared with others, why not talk about it?
V’s hand, which had naturally wrapped itself around hers as they slowly made their way down the tunnel, tightened slightly, the man’s steps slowing in the darkness. The other visitor had let his glowing energy dissipate a short ways into the tunnel, not wanting to waste more energy than necessary. Emilia had no idea how low his energy might already be, after keeping the world lit during both the climb and their coupling.
Emilia peeked around him, wondering if something had put him on edge. She neither heard nor saw anything but black silence. “V?” she asked quietly, voice barely above a whisper.
The man’s hand squeezed hers again. “It’s nothing,” V assured her, voice sounding so reassuring that Emilia didn’t think she should believe him.
She squeezed his hand back as she kept her thoughts about his trustworthiness to herself. Somewhat surprisingly, overall, she trusted the man. If he didn’t think she needed the details about whatever had given him pause, she was inclined to believe him—even if she also wished he’d speed up a bit. She was just so done with walking—with moving in general. It was rather ironic, considering she’d always loved moving. Sports, physical hobbies, training for combat—she liked that sort of thing. Apparently, she only loved it when her body was speed running through recovery.
She probably could have gone without learning that her genes played that much of a role in her enjoyment of strenuous activities. Not that it should have surprised her. It was a lot like her realization that climbing was hard as fuck without her genes backing her up. With her body now acting against her, she could appreciate the terrible pain of movement and recovery—although perhaps not fully. There was a big difference between knowing she could escape and run back to her pretty fucking perfect body, leaving this broken, painful one behind. If she couldn’t escape this body, if that option were completely cut off from her…
Emilia shuddered slightly at the thought of being stuck in a body this weak. The thought turned her stomach, just as the fact that it turned her stomach made her heart clench. This body was the reality for so many people in Baalphoria and the Free Colonies. There was no escaping it for them, and they would also be dragged down by mental limits as well.
Yes, they wouldn’t have felt what they were missing, but they would know well enough the difference between themselves and the elites. The difference between a non-dev and a 10D was a lot, let alone an ex-300.
It was no wonder people freaked, when their worlds and avatars of escape were wiped from the aethernet. It was a no wonder people turned to the blackaether, searching for some way to be just a little more.
“Do you smell that?” Emilia asked, nose wrinkling as something foul wound its way to her nose. She wanted to plug it, but wasn’t sure that was a good idea.
“Yes…” V breathed out, voice sounded strained as he likely tried to breathe in as little of the stench as he could.
Their steps halted as they took a moment to listen, only their slow, shallow breath filling the silence.
“I don’t recognize the scent,” Emilia noted as she took stock of how her body felt.
They’d learned how to check over their body’s vitals without Censors when she was a kid, from a book swiped from Rafe’s library. Their family’s library had been small, the “books” actually decorative tablets that lined the walls and were resistant to most forms of interference and theft. They’d even survived The Flaming, and the one time Emilia knew someone—a distant relative who thought the main branch of the family was hoarding their knowledge—had tried to steal one, they’d lost their hand for their trouble.
The books they’d read in that room, tucked into corners and reading about things they definitely shouldn’t have been, trying those things out on one another?
Emilia would shake her head at her younger self, were she still not so noisy and ill-behaved. They were lucky the only one who’d ever found out about it, outside herself, Rafe and his siblings, had been his cousin. That girl, of course, was always a nuisance, and had blackmailed them with the information until Malcolm was old enough to protect them from his mothers’ wrath.
Not that she, or more importantly Rafe, had realized that his elder brother was willing to protect them at the time. Those secrets hadn’t been meant for their eyes, was the problem, and had Rafe’s mothers learned they’d read those books…
Well, needless to say, her and Rafe’s lives would have been much different. It would have helped if Malcolm had just told them he wasn’t about to easily let his mothers have them, but that guy had always been so difficult to understand. It really hadn’t been until they were older, in the years after her legal case, where she and Rafe had finally come to understand the older man. She’d never be as close to Malcolm as she was to his younger brothers, at least partially due to him being nearly a decade older than them, but where she had once assumed he would leave her to die without a second thought, she now knew he would be the first of his siblings that she would call for something more… low-key.
Malcolm would threaten people for her, kill them if necessary. Rafe and his younger brother were liable to kill first and ask questions later—at least, Rafe was. Emilia had no idea what his twin brother was like these days, the two of them having fallen so far apart in the last few years, despite him having been the person she had originally kept the most contact with.
Once, he had been the easiest of his siblings to understand. Malcolm had been an impregnable fortress of older sibling, while Rafe had been stone faced and grumpy, seemingly hating her while continuing to tag along on all her adventures. Rafe’s twin, the youngest and now most powerful of his family’s children, had been easy to understand—had been one of her best friends, until suddenly, he hadn’t been.
“You should slow your breathing,” Emilia breathed out at V, wishing she had her Censor so she could forward him more specific information about how to control his breathing to keep at least some of the mystery fumes out. Of course, if she had a Censor, she’d also have her skills and could just activate {Burst of Fresh} to cleanse whatever was in the air out of their breathing space. It didn’t catch all contaminants, but it generally did a pretty awesome job of it.
“I don’t think that’ll help…” V muttered as pulled them forward as quickly as he dared, his stepping foot brushing over the rough terrain in an attempt to not topple into any gaping holes and accidentally kill them.
Emilia wanted to agree that it probably wouldn’t help, but the chance that it could was worth the effort in controlling her breathing. Talking would negate those potential effects, however, and she simply snapped her mouth shut and continued breathing, her muscles tensed slightly, lest she needed to zip forward to catch V if he passed out.
V sucked in a breath—which was very much not what she had recommended he do. At first, she thought he was about to pass out, and the breath was a final note before unconsciousness or death came.
Then, she saw the light.
“Light~” she didn’t quite squeal. She wanted to walk faster—get out of this place before they died of stars knew what. When she moved to step past V, to zoom her way through the dark and into the light, the man tugged her almost violently back. “Wha—?” she started to ask, eyes widening when V shushed her, his free hand rising up to find her mouth and clamp down over it.
Screaming or kicking the man seemed excessive, and she had just spent some time contemplating that she trusted him, so, doing so would also be rude. Emilia didn’t really appreciate being forcibly silenced, however.
It took several long moments of them simply standing there, breathing in the hopefully not poisonous scent of mould and burnt sugar, before Emilia heard what her friend had.
Talking.
Someone was talking, their voice carrying like a whisper through the tunnel.
