Meltral
"Have you always been so harsh when you retaliate?"
Thairon took a napkin, wiping his lips, and leaned back. "What do you know about Arlex Royal Academy?"
"What everyone else knows. The top educational institution in the Kingdom, home of many inventions and so on." She parroted what she had seen through various sources.
"It is also a small-scale replica of the Kingdom's political scene. The student council president is the king, the council members are the high-ranking nobles, and other positions are filled accordingly," he explained. Naturally, his oldest brother was the king, while their cousin, his mother's nephew, was the vice-president.
He laid his elbows on the table, remembering the bad old days. "Everything is decided through negotiations, compromises, threats, and bullying."
"I always found it dumb, still do, and never participated."
"I have a feeling they did not just let you be," she said, her smile becoming strained.
"I was the best in academics. It all came so easy to me, the science part at least. When you are that good, you inevitably gain followers, so to speak. Mostly other people interested in science like me."
He did not accept any kind of following. They did not get the
"Whenever I faced a problem with other students, I went to the teachers. Much later, I learned they had standing orders to let the students deal with their own problems. If you were getting bullied, you had to deal with that on your own."
"I was working on a new computer chip. One of the student council members had my lab thrashed, and when the teachers did nothing, I acted."
She leaned forward, standing close enough that he could smell her perfume. "This is going to be bloody, isn't it?"
"I didn't kill anyone," he shrugged, "but there were plenty of broken bones and blood, yes."
"When the student council was in session, I gassed the room with an odorless anesthetic. I gathered all the members, tied them up, and beat them black and blue. The one that had my lab destroyed, the vice president, had this really rare guitar that I broke to splinters on his skull."
"How old were you?" He had carved a bloody path through the number one tourism city of the Kingdom without leaving any evidence behind. She wondered if there were similar events kept silent.
"Fourteen."
She whistled.
"No one ever bothered me again while I was in the academy. I began to understand that some problems required more than diplomacy to solve."
"You are right," she agreed. Reaching into her purse, she rummaged through, pulling out a worn-out business card.
"Here."
He raised an eyebrow at the card.
Madame Lena's Self-Control Classes. Master Yourself for a Better Future.
"My sister had anger problems too. We sent her to these classes. They really helped. Just in case you consider it," she said, holding her hands up.
"Thanks," he said, pocketing the card. Maybe he would give it a chance.
"How is military life going now?" He had seen the news but wanted to hear it from her.
She smiled, leaning back to stretch, slouching in the chair comfortably. "The best it ever was. Without having to worry that a rupture might pop out any second, life has been great."
"You are welcome."
"So, the royal academy. Are you a noble or something?" She knew only the nobles and the royalty were allowed to join the academy. Unless you had rich parents willing to buy a place for you.
"Or something. I never cared about my status and never brought it up." The number of people who knew he was a prince was low. Those who could recognize him now, even less.
"You must have graduated at the top of your class," she said. School should be easy for the man who had created technological wonders only found in fiction.
Provided he didn't quit because it was a waste of time for him.
"I left the academy before my final year. It was a waste of time, and I managed to secure funds for my research. I would have left earlier but my parents threatened to cut my funding if I did not graduate."
She chuckled, shaking her head when Thairon raised an eyebrow.
"I noticed you never really talk about your parents." He had already met her mother, but she didn't even hear the names of his parents.
His lips tightened, his nose wrinkling faintly. "My mother had grand designs. Each of her sons would play a part. I was never interested in her games, and we had a falling out. It was a mess."
"The irreparable kind?" Rather, sometimes repairing a relationship wasn't worth the cost.
"They held the research funding over my head for years. I am not going to forgive or forget that. They are unlikely to give up their ambitions, and I will never play ball with them."
"Boy, that's tough. I had my mother at least."
Both fell silent, turning their attention to the food. Her idea of a breakfast was lavish. Puffy pan breads, cheeses, jams, two different kinds of eggs, and even a light broth.
He was about to comment on her tastes when his bracelet and her phone rang at the same time. They read the notifications, heads snapping up to gaze at each other. They turned to the tree in the middle of the ten-floor mall, rising from the ground to the top.
A rupture was about to open in two minutes, right in front of the all-golden tree.
Tomoe sprang to her feet. She slammed a fist on the fire alert. All the movement in the mall ceased for a moment before the people ran for the exits.
"I thought your system was supposed to warn us days in advance," she whispered, standing at a corner, away from the flood of civilians.
"This rupture isn't opening from the other side, but from our own," he explained.
She blinked twice, remembering his words on how ruptures were formed. "There is no energy burst."
"There is. The fractures broke into a higher dimension. It's bleeding a constant stream of zero-point energy into the rupture."
"How the heck did that happen?"
"No idea," he said, going through the readings his satellites took. It was impossible for a fracture to reach into higher dimensions without an outside influence.
"Damn it. I don't even have a weapon on me."
"I do, but we have greater problems. If that fracture isn't closed, the rupture won't close either. It will keep growing forever."
Her eyes widened. Even with their rudimentary understanding of the ruptures, one staying open and growing forever was the end-of-the-world kind of an event. "Can you close it?"
"Yes," he said. Nax was already blanketing the cameras. Once everyone was out, he would bring in the Gravity Lance to force shut the fracture into the higher dimension.
"Here it comes," she muttered, seeing the fabric of space begin to shatter. Thairon's bracelet flashed. Two silver bands, one with a blue line and the other with a red line going along its length, appeared. He wrapped them around his other wrist. His body shimmered, and she felt her mind go hazy.
Then, he slapped a bracelet on her wrist, and it passed.
"Your little memory scrambler?"
He nodded. There were still civilians evacuating the mall, and the RIC would be here soon. He did not want to be caught.
His bracelet flashed again, dropping a rotary gun on his hand that he was quick to hand over to her. She wrapped her hand around the trigger handle on the top of the weapon, marveling at how light it was.
The fracture came, forming faster than the last time she had witnessed it in Hatsuzumi. What would arrive through, if something ever would? She had no choice but to wait to see. She raised the weapon, fingers on the trigger, left hand reaching for the forward grip.
She drowned out the panicking civilians, waiting for any sign of a hostile arrival. Her heart hammered in her chest. The anticipation kept building. She thought the other side might be empty but did not drop her guard.
It proved to be the correct choice.
An APC-sized bug strolled out. She raised the rotary gun, inspecting each part of the creature in quick order. Small, column-like legs covered by thick, green carapace connected to a smooth body layered with more carapace.
Its head was relatively small, making it a difficult target. Two antennas, two red, bleary eyes, and two holes where a human's nose would be. She waited to see if it would attack. Not every non-human was some mindless monster that would attack on sight.
This one was, apparently. It reared up with an ear-scratching screech and charged at her.
She pulled the trigger without hesitation. The barrels whirled to a blur, and the monster's body ceased to exist. The bright, white-blue bolts incinerated the carapace, cooking the flesh until it burst like a bubble. Green, steaming viscera splattered over a wide area, leaving behind only the legs.
She blinked, blindsided by the ease with which the weapon destroyed the monster.
A swarm followed.
Bugs with sizes ranging from critters to the APC-sized behemoths surged out of the rupture. She had not taken her hand off from the trigger. The firepower pushed the tide back hard. The initial part of the swarm had only managed to leave the rupture due to the sheer number of bodies.
Alarmed by the rupture and the monsters, the citizens evacuated the mall in record time. She was glad for all those emergency exits.
The dome overhead, which allowed sunlight to reach the golden tree, was broken. Robots flew down, carrying a device that matched the largest bugs to crawl out of the rupture. They landed on her flank, away but still in full view of the rupture.
Thairon stood before the machine, fingers dancing on the holographic screen. The square machine, which had two prongs at the top pointing at the gate, whirled to life.
She kept firing, locked on the rupture. The human-sized robots pulled the weapons strapped to their backs and joined her.
"Hey, the weapon fire is turning purple." Purple hues began to snap into existence inside the power source. Just the same, the stream of bolts that looked like a single beam exuded a slight purple color.
"The plasma is getting hotter. It's just extra firepower; nothing to worry about."
"Great," she muttered, waiting for the device to do its job.
The rupture suddenly bent inwards at the edges. As Thairon had predicted, the rupture widened to three times its size in an instant. The concentrated fire split into three lines to cover the increase in enemy numbers.
"How long?"
"Two minutes."
"The rupture will widen again in that time," she warned. She had counted less than two minutes into the incursion when it expanded. If the rupture grew three times once more, they could be overrun before the machine was ready. The bugs were already pushing further ahead.
They needed more firepower.
Her worries were answered with three more robots dropping from the ceiling, each carrying two rotary guns.
She wished it were this simple all the time.
The whining sound from the machine became more high-pitched each second until she could not hear it anymore. Only the sound of the rotating barrels and the dying grunts of the bugs were heard.
One minute fifty-two seconds later, the rupture increased in size again. The firepower split once more to cover the widening front line. However, the rupture did not stabilize momentarily like it had before. The edges kept growing, forcing the robots to cover more area. It gave the bugs the chance to move the front line closer to them.
Seconds later, the prongs fired a transparent beam at the rupture. The crumbling fabric of space froze and began to shrink at a slow but steady pace.
Done with the machine, Thairon pulled a shotgun. The wide, square barrel fired a plasma screen that grew in size, turning waves of bugs to ash with a flash.
"Having fun?" he shouted over the sound of the weapon fire.
"Having fun?!" she repeated back with more fire than what she was hitting the bugs with.
"Yes."
She took a deep breath, realizing she was actually enjoying the moment. "I am."
"I could marry you for these weapons, you know," she shouted back, smiling for the first time as she faced a rupture.
His snort could barely be heard through all the noise. "That is incredibly shallow."
"I don't know. I think it is a pretty good reason. You can give me an arsenal of these as a dowry." She might not have chosen military life out of duty, but it had grown on her. It excited her once the action and the danger were over and she realized she had survived.
Except when it was too much and she had a nervous breakdown.
"You guys still practice dowry in Hatsuzumi?"
"Not really." It was an outdated tradition that no one took seriously anymore. Even the nobles had all but abandoned the idea.
Her weapon died out suddenly, the blue, cylindrical part in the middle running empty. Thairon threw the shotgun to her and brought out another weapon from who knows where. It was larger, built like a rocket launcher. He fired three globes back to back. It created kill zones on the ground, melting the bugs as they walked over the white, liquid hazard.
"When is it going to shut down?" she asked. The RIC would be here any minute. Explaining the situation with Thairon here would be all the more difficult.
"It is about to. Just keep firing."
True to his words, once the rupture had shrunk to its first size, it snapped shut. The fabric of reality bisected the bugs mid-transit, leaving half the corpses in the middle of the mall, and the rear half on whatever hellish planet they crawled out of.
She turned to Thairon. "Quick, you have to leave. RIC Quick Response Force will be here any second. I'll handle the mess, just go," she said, not even giving him the time to answer.
Thairon nodded after a second, retrieving his weapons. Two robots held the device from the sides, taking off, followed by the rest. One of them wrapped around him, flying him out of the dome.
He was gone in seconds, only leaving behind corpses.
She heard the footsteps before Silene's voice called to her. "Tomoe?"
The QRF spread, surrounding the corpses lying over steaming green sludge.
"Did you do all of this?" she asked, trailing off at the end. The smell of rotten eggs assaulted her nostrils, and she was quick to tighten her mask.
"I had help," she admitted, thinking about how to get out of this situation.
"From who?"
"Would you believe me if I said I can't remember?"
Silene blinked repeatedly.