ALL NOVEL 18. Weapon of Criobani
Otter looked at that weird helmet, wondering what the hell it could possibly be designed for. What was big enough to wear something like that? Were there giants in this game? Giants didn’t seem fair.
Well, it was a dead giant now. No way it could be submerged in mud for any length of time and still be alive. Meaning, as soon as she excavated this corpse, it was free loot. Universal rule of all video games. If you died, your stuff became someone else’s stuff. Unless there was some kind of keep inventory mechanic. But those were dumb. Competitive looting, that was where the real fun was at.
Otter scrubbed away at the mud the best she could with her hand. The helmet was fancy. It wasn’t just some battered piece of junk you’d expect to find lost in a swamp. There were runes etched into it, and as she changed her angle of view, she could see the light of her Thread of the Scourge reflecting back in different colours along them.
How was she even going to get this thing out of the mud? She was probably going to need a shovel. Which meant going back to the cabin. Maybe she could recruit Rua into helping her dig whatever this was out. She was strong, for such a tiny thing.
The light was fading, the sun going down. Otter didn’t want to be in the creepy death swamp at night. Which meant that, at best, she was going to go home, both sexually and loot frustrated, and have to try to sleep through the night like a kid waiting for Santa. And it was already hard enough to sleep through the night with that stupid chair.
Well, maybe it’d be better to see if the effort was worth it first. She couldn’t pull the full suit of whatever this was out of the mud – not yet anyway – but maybe she didn’t need to get the whole thing.
She tried to lift the helmet clear of the rest of the body, but it refused to budge. Pushing it didn’t work either. After some careful thought, she fully embraced the mud and put both arms around the helm and began to twist. There was some resistance, and then with a pained groan from somewhere inside her stomach, she finally forced it to turn a few bare centimetres. The steel made a sharp squeal as she did.
Bolstered by some actual progress, Otter gave it another twist, slowly working the helm loose like a screw. Once she got a rhythm going, it was easy.
“Loot, loot, gonna get me some loot,” she sang. “Loot, loot, steal this armour suit.”
“What are you doing?”
Otter let out a yelp and fell ass backwards into the mud, causing a splash and getting herself even more covered in absolute swampy filth.
She looked up, and sure enough, there was Rua standing over her, hands on hips, and an amused expression on her face.
“I’d hate you if I wasn’t planning on seducing you later tonight,” Otter muttered.
“What was that?”
She almost made a joke about something nicer she might’ve said, before bringing herself up short and remembering not to give Rua a sudden headache.
“Never you mind. What’re you doing out here?”
“Looking for you. I have a... what did Sami call it? A 'menu.' I had a headache from before, and I was trying to ease it with a mental relaxation technique along with your hand massage thing, and it appeared. I was trying to figure it out, and your Sami was able to speak to me with one of those windows. She told me you were looting something, and I got worried, for good reason. Do you even know what you’re playing with right now?”
So, Sami really was trying to talk to Rua behind her back. Just what she needed.
“No clue, but I figure it must be valuable. And I am a greedy little goblin-person.”
“I don’t know what a goblin is. But then, I don’t understand half the words you say sometimes.”
“Yeah, well, the English language is dumb and constantly evolving. Wait until I start speaking in memes and emotes.”
“I have no idea what that means, but you’re speaking Silayan.”
“Am not. Poggers, yeet, ex dee, skibidi, rizz. I bet you don’t have any of those words in Silayan.”
“You have me there. That sounded like you just had a seizure.”
“Honestly, it feels like I just had a seizure. Help me up?”
Rua tapped her nose in thought, and then shook her head. “No. You’re covered in filth. I don’t have any extra clothes, and I am not running around naked while washing our clothes.”
“Mmm, naked laundry. We’ve all been there.”
“I can assure you, I haven’t.”
“Really?”
“It’s called ‘planning ahead.’ It’s a basic life skill.”
“Life skills? What’re those?”
Rua gave a theatrical sigh. “Why did I let you into my house again?”
“Because I am a mighty hunter!” She pointed to the leashed lobster-thing. “I have secured us food!”
“I guess that earns you another night in my bed.” Rua blushed. “I mean, under my roof.”
“Aha! That’s a Freudian slip if I ever heard one!”
“More gibberish. Come on, we need to get home. Asheborn’s marsh isn’t safe come night, not even in the Ebb.”
“But my loot!” Otter gave her very best pout.
“Leave it. It’s a Criobani weapon. Not only will it not work for you, but if any self-respecting Silayan sees you with it, they’ll attack you on sight. Maybe even the Mikovians, too.”
Rua picked up the lobster-thing, and gathered the mushrooms and moss-scrapings as well as she could with all the mud, while Otter struggled to get her feet back under her. She slipped a few times, but luckily didn’t fall back in, each time narrowly catching herself before she ended ass-first back in the mud.
“Can I at least look at it?” Otter said. “I almost got the helmet off.”
“You’re only going to find a dead body inside.”
“Dead bodies mean possible stuff!”
Rua rolled her eyes. “Fine, but be quick. We can’t be here much longer.”
Otter made a squeal of happiness, and almost went right back to singing her looting song, but after a sharp look from Rua, realized maybe it was best to stay at least a little quiet in the dangerous death swamp with night encroaching.
She went right back to unscrewing the helmet off the suit of armour. With the heavy lifting part of it already done, getting the rest of it done was easy. When the helm finally came loose, she unceremoniously dumped it to the side, and leaned over to look inside, summoning a Thread of the Scourge to provide light.
“Huh.”
What was inside was not what she expected.
Inside was a body all right. But the pale, nude figure inside showed no signs of decay. And if anything, from the way her breast moved slightly in time, it sure looked like she was breathing.
“Is it me, or does this corpse look a little… fresh?”
Rua hissed, and pushed Otter aside, drawing a knife. Otter reacted by instinct, entangling the drawn blade with her Thread and drawing it to the side as Rua stabbed down. The knife scraped against the steel of the armour instead of stabbing into vulnerable flesh.
Rua looked down at the Thread with a frown, and then peered into the armour.
“If she lives, we can’t allow it to continue.”
“Seems rude. Any reason for that?”
“Because she’s a Vexurian. She could kill us both. With ease.”
That made Otter’s eyebrows raise. There was something out there that could kill Rua easily? That put things into perspective.
Rua wasn’t trying another attempt to stab this ‘Vexurian.’ Otter didn’t believe for one second that she’d win in a contest of brute strength with her. The fact that Rua wasn’t ripping her way free of the Thread and getting right back to stabbing was more an indication of respect than of being bound from acting.
Otter leaned over, looking into the armour again. She twisted her hand and sent a thought to her Thread, causing it to release Rua’s knife. Lowering the glowing Thread into the armour, she tried to get a sense of what she was seeing.
The naked woman inside – was she really naked if she was inside a suit of metal armour? – was much smaller than the suit itself. Her whole body probably took up just the torso section, and she was bound inside with straps of a white cloth that had runes painted in blood over them. She was a redhead, and a proper ginger at that, looking to be covered in a smattering of freckles from head to toe from what Otter could see. Her hair was long and wild, curled and matted from the moisture, but otherwise preserved.
“What’s with these Vexarians?”
“Vexurians. They’re elite units out of the Criobani Empire. This one’s probably a leftover from their last invasion, before the Mikovians helped push them out.”
“What’s so scary about them?”
“They’re mindless killing machines. Slavebound to their armour.”
Otter reached inside, and pulled the woman’s hair aside. There was a collar around her neck, a black circle of metal, bound with more of those blood-soaked cloths.
“Slavebound,” Otter said. “Meaning, what? She has no will?”
“She and whatever her Pact is act as a fuel source for the armour. She’s stuck inside. If she leaves the armour, she dies. If we try to free her, she dies. No one’s certain how it works, but the theory is that the slavebinding is linked to the Vexurian’s life force. Remove it, and it’s like they hemorrhage their lifeforce without anything else to feed it into and work as a circuit.”
Something in Otter’s stomach felt a little sick. “Do… do they volunteer for this? Or are they actually slaves?”
“Slaves. During the war, the Criobani were looking for ways to tweak what they were doing. Alter it so it’d work with the Silayan Dreamer’s Pacts. They put some of our people in those things. It never worked. They all died, screaming in pain, whenever it turned on.”
“How is she still alive?”
“I don’t know. We drove them into the sea ten years ago. It might be her Pact keeping her alive somehow. Or maybe the armour is. It doesn’t matter. If she wakes up, she’ll kill us both.”
Otter stared down at that face. She looked so peaceful in her sleep. Otter didn’t need a second face burned into her memory, another person she murdered because of choices outside her control.
“We can’t just kill her. She didn’t ask for this.”
There was no anger in Rua’s voice. Just a resignation. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing with Criobani blood belongs on the islands.”
Otter whirled on Rua, staring into her eyes. Her two heterochromatic eyes. One blue, one green.
“Child of Criobani,” Otter said. “That’s what the Dreamer called you. Half-breed. She said that, too. And with how squirrelly you are about your eyes. If I peel back this lady’s eyelids, what am I going to see, Rua? Blue, or green?”
“It’s getting dark. We need to leave.”
“I’m not leaving until I get answers. So, you can go home, to safety, but I’m either getting answers now, or I’m sticking with the victim in the armour that can’t defend herself.”
Rua had the good grace to look guilty. “Green. Her eyes will be green. Silayans only have blue eyes. The only way you can get eyes like mine is if one of your parents is one of ours, and the other is one of them.”
“So, what? Some Criobani soldier raped your mother? Victim of war?”
“No. Worse.” Rua sucked in a breath. “My father was pelanoa. My mother was a Criobani soldier. My father defected to the enemy, betrayed the Islands and allowed the occupation to happen.”
Part of Otter wanted to press for more details. To get the whole story, because there was definitely more to it than that. But it was a wound in Rua, and there was nothing to be gained from digging into it. Instead, she tried a different tactic.
“Killing her won’t get rid of the Criobani blood in your veins,” Otter said.
Rua took a step back, as if struck, but otherwise said nothing.
“We have to help her.”
Rua held her knife out, handle-first. “This is the only help we can offer.”
“No, it’s not.”
And Otter triggered her Thread of Fate.
