Knights Apocalyptica

Chapter 15: Home

“I lost control, that’s it,” Erec said as the girl pressed him about what happened to Colin. Damn, why was she so persistent about this?

“You shouldn’t have been able to do that. I know the engineer that worked with the Nitidus family to make his model. We often contract out to her as well; she’s a talented woman. And I know that a Markos II doesn’t have the kind of power to do that damage like that. How high is your Strength?”

Erec winced. That was a rude question. One didn’t go around and start asking after other's Virtues. He might share the details of his with someone like Garin or a trainer, but certainly not someone he barely knew. This girl was starting to rub him the wrong way. She held herself in the same sort of self-possessed way that was all too common in high nobility.

Just in a nosy direction instead of an arrogant prick kind of way, which wasn’t quite as bad but felt damn near equally annoying.

“How high are your Virtues? Why don’t you list them out for me if you want to know mine.” Erec crossed his arms and scowled at her. “If you’re going to go around demanding something like that, you should be more than willing to share yourself.”

“Fine. I will. My three highest Virtues are Psyche, Perception, and Mysticism. In that order.” She didn’t even blink as the words left her lips. Not a second of hesitation.

Erec’s jaw dropped. What is with her? “… Alright, fine. My Strength is E-ranked, Tier 5.” He couldn’t very well keep it to himself when she called his bluff.

She shook her head at that explanation. “Are you lying to me? With that Strength, you wouldn’t have been able to do that to him. And then there’s his helmet—you shouldn’t be able to see with it.”

Erec didn’t respond to that; her questioning if he’d been honest was the nail in the coffin for this conversation. She searched his eyes for something, then drew her lips thin. He wasn’t sure what to make of her. It wasn’t like the way she was speaking was hostile, even if she appeared to be getting annoyed at a breakneck pace.

“I’m asking because I want to understand. If I understand, I can help you.”

“I never asked for your help; we don’t know each other.” I don’t trust her. Why was she so interested in him? Why did she pay attention to the small things when no one else seemed to pick up on them? Was she that perceptive? Did she want to figure him out to use him like a pawn? “How about we go our separate ways, alright? I’m tired. I haven’t much sleep in the last two days, and I want to crawl into my bed and finally fucking sleep.”

“After you answer my questions.” She stood firm; her eyes held a defiant cast.

“Wow, you're no different than Colin. Listen, I get your family holds Goddess knows how much influence, and on any other day, I’d be willing to set aside my distaste and give you the conversation you seem to want. But in this case, I can’t. There are no answers I can give you, and if you don’t believe me, then there’s not much I can do about that. I’m being blunt here because I get the sense that, unlike that prick, you don’t want to be that way.”

At the comparison to Colin, she frowned. Lyotte drew back and looked at the ground. “Fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to come off that way. May I make one request?”

[She isn’t sorry.]

No, she wasn’t. She was frustrated but knew that Erec wasn’t going to bend her way.

“I suppose so,” Erec said. She wanted something from him, and it made him nervous that he couldn’t place what it was or why she wanted it so bad.

“May we start again? Perhaps I’ve been a bit too forward, and perhaps I’ve held my head a little bit higher than I would with an equal... But I really would like to help you. The best way to do that is to… restart this relationship; if you’d be willing to look past our past, then I will too.”

“Yeah. Another time. If there is one, we can start over.” Erec turned as there wasn’t much else to say. When he looked over his shoulder, she was staring with her face scrunched. What game is she playing?

— - ☢ - — - ☼ - — - ☢ - —

It was sometime in the early morning on the surface—if that mattered down in the many floors and tunnels of the underground Kingdom—when Erec reached his home.

Their estate was a small property in Jeswald’s caverns; it was the size of a house a modest merchant or apprentice engineer afforded to rent out and live in. For a noble family, an utterly barren and small residence, but to the Audentia family, it was more than they’d expected. Generally, they felt grateful to have a roof over their head at all.

As Erec creaked the door open, his father, Lac Audentia, busied himself by putting work gear on. He stopped as he beheld the wearied and bruised visage of his son. The Markos II hung on the maintenance rack in the workshop he’d borrowed from the Baron, but underneath it, Erec looked close to as busted. VAL tagged along in a leather bag that Erec took from the workshop, which he summarily tossed on the ground of the house without a word.

“Didja fail?” Lac asked, a hand stroking the sizable beard on his chin. One bushy brow raised as he regarded his son with a consoling expression. “Oh well. You tried. All that matters, Bedwyr is already in the Academy, so I'm sure we'll get along fine,” the lanky man shrugged and returned to securing his boots.

“I didn’t fail.”

“Aint the trial supposed to still be going?”

“Yes.”

“Then how are you here if you’re supposed to be there.” His father shook his head and sighed. “You don’t need to lie to me, boy. I’ll let the Baron know you’re ready to work the bio-caverns again. You’re a skilled hand at it, and he’s told me he appreciates the effort plenty o’ times.” Lac stood up and stretched out, walking over to Erec and setting a hand on his shoulder. “We got plenty of work to do, don’t we?”

“I didn’t fail.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say, son, proud of you for trying.” With that parting gesture, Lac left the house, off to supervise construction on a new bio-cavern.

It was always like that. Where their father expected Bedwyr to come out on top of everything he set a hand at, their father never held a candle of hope for Erec’s chances. If Erec caught him by surprise and found success, it was always a quick pat and a ‘that’a boy.’ Nothing more, nothing less. Was it because he was the second son? The inheritor to nothing as the family only held a title? Did his achievements not matter as much?

It made him miss his mother, the kind of woman who’d start every day with a healthy smile on her face seeing her two boys. She always had a special treat for them at lunch, even with her duties as a Knight.

And then she’d betrayed them. Letting an intelligent thing from beyond a Rift past the walls; fifteen people died, and she fled with the monster she escorted in. Why?

[Hypothesis formed.] VAL hovered out of the leather bag—the red cube pulsed a red light that ran over the home’s surface. [Humanity is being led down a guided evolution path. Conjecture: A race of vast intelligence can interact and bring about these changes by harnessing the anomalous energy generated by Humanity. I would very much like to meet the entities responsible and question the purpose of keeping some useless trait lines in your physiology while removing others. For example: is there a point in retaining tail bones?]

“You’re talking about the Goddess.”

[That has been mentioned before. I’d concluded it to be a mythos perpetuated by man, as is typical to these legends.]

“She’s real.” Erec sat in a chair and leaned back, taking a moment to relax and soak in the peace. Let his dad think whatever he wanted. The Academy hadn’t spoken yet about his admittance, though the situation with Colin left him nervous. His dad dismissing his chances like that drew the worry out further for him, and now the idea refused to leave his head. “She’s the one who cleansed the world in holy flames and prevented the Rifts from destroying us all. In the process, she Blessed us with magic to fight back. Or as you put it, ‘anomalous energy’”

[Query. There cannot be certainty to a divinity. Per their nature, they are beings of faith.]

“No, she very much exists. The cardinal can commune with her and channel her voice; on occasion, she descends to appear before a mighty Knight and issue a quest.” Granted, the last time she’d deigned to come to their Kingdom had been thirty years ago. But, there was a recording of the event. Not that they could capture her well on video, her radiant energy distorted all of their attempts. Still, the physical proof and records existed to document it and a few other previous contacts.

[Understood.] VAL floated back into the bag. [Get some rest, it is well earned.]

Yeah, that was a fair statement. Erec headed to his bed shoved in the corner of a side room that doubled as an office for paperwork; and then drifted off to an easy sleep.

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