The lights inside the WICKED outpost still worked even after everything that happened.
Well, most of them did.
Two flickered on and off in the main corridor along with the irregular hum of something damaged but not dead, throwing the space into alternating light and darkness every few seconds.
The rest were steady still, showering the bunker with an eerie, sterile, blue-white lighting that had been chosen for function and ended up producing something closer to a medical ward made for mad science.
The corridor was long and wide, lined with equipment against the walls in rows — terminals, processing units, storage systems, things with no unknown names that blinked quiet indicator lights in blue and amber.
The floors were smooth pale tiles, modern in their finish. The smell had changed. Whatever the bunker had smelled like before — sterile solution, sanitizing alcohol, machine heat, the antiseptic of a space used for lab work — had been replaced by something like copper, or opened flesh. The warm heaviness of a room where a great many people had stopped living in a short period of time.
The bodies were everywhere.
Some were intact but most weren't.
They lay across terminals and over equipment and along the corridor floor. One had gone through a glass partition and taken most of it with him. Another had folded where he was, both halves settling neatly apart. The corridor's drainage channels, made for laboratory runoff, were doing the work they'd been built to do.
A groan came from somewhere deeper in the facility.
Then from the opposite direction, small steps, moving through a room that had been butchered and was now deadly quiet.
The sound felt wrong against the backdrop of the flickering blue-white lights and the hum of machines that didn't stop. It was too casual, like a person taking an evening walk through somewhere that happened to look like... this.
The nearest light flickered off.
Two blood red eyes appeared in the dark where it had been. They caught the light from further down the corridor, and the figure they belonged to stepped forward into the reach of the next working light.
The Arbiter looked down at the document in his hand.
There was blood on his sleeve. Not much — he'd been precise, mostly, or as precise as the situation had allowed — but some. He didn't look at it. He turned a page.
"No luck again, huh?" He whispered. Then, "Is there even something important locked up here?"
......
It became like this because they'd attacked him immediately.
He'd come down earlier through the concealment working the straightforward way.
He opened a point in the ground above with True Sphere and dropped through, landing in the central corridor with both hands visible and no immediate hostile intent.
He'd had some idea of walking in, seeing what there was to see, and asking questions of whoever looked like they were in charge — and somehow expected it to work.
Well, that hadn't worked out.
The response had been common sense and organized enough, which told him the facility had protocols and the protocols had been drilled. Weapons from multiple directions, abilities activating before he'd finished landing. It was, objectively, a well-executed response.
But it hadn't mattered.
What came next was violence, and it had been quick and thorough and he'd done it without thinking too hard, which was the only way to do it when it was this.
Now it was quiet.
He turned another page and kept walking.
They're criminals, he thought, for the fourth time since the slaughter ended. They're part of a three-hundred-year criminal organization with continental ambitions and atrocities and they attacked me first, which —
He flipped another page, not realizing he was slowly crumpling the paper in his hand as his grip tightened.
They were criminals...
He sighed despite himself.
It was lighter on his still questionable conscience to think of it that way. The distinction somehow mattered to him, though he couldn't have fully explain why, given that he'd killed people before and made peace with it before and didn't believe in the kind of moral absolutism that would have made this categorically different from those times.
But killing several hundred people was different from the ones before. Several hundred was a room count, a corridor count, a facility-wide tally that his mind kept reaching for and that he kept redirecting away from because there was nothing useful in sitting with the number.
He'd taken the Arbiter mandate knowing mass murder was highly likely part of it.
He'd walked here in a formal uniform in the middle of the afternoon knowing what finding this place meant.
He'd known.
Even as an Archetype, he was still a moral agent — someone capable of moral acts — and he thought this would be easier. He told himself he was ready to bear whatever sins came with his position, that nothing would shake him anymore.
As it turned out, nothing was ever that simple, and he doubted it'd get any easier than this.
"Criminals..." He said this one out loud, and turned to a side room.
......
This one was clearly a research space.
Terminals along three walls, a central worktable with equipment he didn't recognize bolted to its surface, documents in physical and projected form overlapping each other. The blue lighting in here was still somehow intact, which made the contrast with what had happened to the two people on the floor more pronounced than he would have chosen.
He stepped around them and went to the nearest terminal.
The interface was unfamiliar but not impenetrable. He pulled the documents toward him and scanned through them.
Supply manifests, personnel logs, operational reports of a strange code — more a system of intentional omissions. He read through the omissions and found them more interesting than what surrounded them.
He moved to the next terminal.
"This whole place's weirdly aesthetic," he muttered with a whistle, looking up briefly at the facility around him.
The bunker was genuinely well-designed. The blue lighting that made everything look like it had been considered surely added to that. It reminded him of something he didn't have a direct reference for, just a feeling of recognition that arrived without an explanation attached.
"So very sci-fi."
He picked up a random document from the worktable.
Safety Protocols of —
And then nothing. The line ended. The next field was blank. The page after that was blank. The three pages after that were blank, and he fanned through them slowly, and they were all blank, and then the document ended.
He held it.
"That's an odd place for a gap."
By itself it was dismissible. Documents got corrupted, pages got separated, filing systems failed. But his Calculation Domain had already flagged the document's physical properties — the blank pages weren't blank because they'd been left that way, they were blank because whatever had been on them had been willfully removed.
Someone had not forgotten to fill those pages.
Rather, someone had decided those pages shouldn't be readable.
Safety protocols of — what.
He was still holding it when he heard a cough. He looked up and saw a... dwarf, against the base of the far wall, mostly hidden behind an overturned equipment rack that had fallen across him.
He'd pulled himself partially upright, or had been trying to, and it had cost him — his arms were shaking and his face clearly showed that he was running on time he didn't have.
His legs were gone below the mid-thigh, both of them, clean and cauterized by the Incision, which meant he wasn't bleeding out so much as just finishing.
He was looking at Lymur with the fiercest, purest rage Lymur had ever seen.
A brief flash of pity crossed Lymur's face as he saw the dwarf's sorry state, but he quickly let it pass.
"It would've been easier to pretend you were dead," he said.
The dwarf looked at him for a moment.
Then he started talking.
The words that came out were not words Lymur had expected.
"You're a gods-damned disease walking around — "
"Go rot! Go rot in whatever hole made you, you soulless corpse — "
"I hope whatever made you regrets it every single day — "
"You think you're righteous? I've met beasts with more conscience — "
"You're not justice. You're not anything...! I curse the ground you walk on. I curse your sleep. I curse every good thing that tries to come to you—"
"Die screaming. Die screaming and know it meant nothing—"
The dwarf shouted all of that in less than a minute, blood gurgling in his throat as he vomited what looked like a chunk of his internal organs. Lymur stood there with the blank document in his hand and listened to all of it.
The dwarf's voice dropped, then stopped. He vomited blood one more time, and then he was dead.
Lymur looked at him for a moment longer.
"Freaking weirdo," Lymur said as he shivered with all the curses directed at him.
He looked at the document in his hand. Then back at the dwarf, one last time. He set the document in his coat and turned back to the room.
There were more terminals to check and more documents to go through. In the rooms he hadn't thoroughly checked yet, there were probably things that the blank pages were connected to.
···---⚜---···
Sunrise over a floating city was an entirely different experience from sunrise on the ground.
On the surface, dawn arrived horizontally — light coming in at an angle, sliding along the earth, touching things gradually.
Up here, above the cloud line, the sun came up underneath the city first, painting the underside of the floating platform in shades of amber and rose that had nowhere to go but up, so they went up, diffusing through the gaps between buildings and along the bridges and across the open courtyards until the whole city seemed to generate the light rather than receive it. The fog that clung to the lower edges of the platform caught and held it, glowing faintly, and for the first twenty minutes of every clear morning Xyrus looked like something that had come from a dream.
Lymur walked through the front gate into all of it.
The gate guard saw him coming and straightened immediately, one hand going to his chest in a salute. Lymur responded with a nod that was genuine and kept walking.
The few people already moving through the academy at this hour — early-rising students with books under their arms, a professor crossing from the administrative building with a cup of coffee — looked at him and then looked again.
He was used to being looked at. He was not entirely used to being looked at like this, with that kind of uncertainty that was somewhere between concern and the instinct to step back.
He knew what they were seeing.
The uniform was still immaculate in its cut and its fit. The cape also hung correctly. His hair was where it was supposed to be and his face was, as far as he could tell, exactly as it always was.
The dried blood on the fabric of his clothes was another matter.
Not a lot. Nothing that obvious. But it was there — like something that had dried — darker than the black of the jacket in some light. Anyone could see it on the sleeves and along the bottom of the white cape, especially in the morning light, which really wasn't helping.
He looked at the students as he passed them, and they looked at him, and nobody said anything, and he tried to return his attention to where he was going.
Good morning to y'all, too.
He crossed into the bridge that connected the humanities building to the main hall. It was a narrow thing, open on both sides to the air, with the city dropping away below and the early light coming in at low angle. There was nobody else on it.
But then Lymur stopped walking.
He stood there for a moment with his hands in his pockets, looking at the far end of the bridge. Then he sighed, and turned around to face the completely empty air behind him.
"Don't you think it's about time you came out?" he said to nothing in particular.
A pause and the air moved.
"I had a feeling you knew the entire time."
Alea's voice arrived first before she herself did. She was in her Lance uniform, which meant she'd been in the forest too, or nearby, and she was looking at him, both calm and annoyed at having been caught.
"Why didn't you call out to me earlier?"
"Didn't want to interrupt," Lymur replied. He turned back toward the far end of the bridge and started walking again, hands still in his pockets. "Whatever it was you were up to."
She fell into step beside him, which needed a couple of quick strides to manage. Lymur's legs were frustratingly long. "The council sent me."
"I figured as much." He glanced at her sideways. "Is this to test me?"
"I can't exactly disclose that, can I?"
"Hm." He looked ahead. "It's strange that they'd send you, though. Stalking isn't really your forte. That's more — " he thought about it, "— Aya-like."
"I wasn't stalking — " Her voice came out louder than she'd intended and she stopped, collected herself, and tried again at a softer volume. "I wasn't stalking you." A breath. "I had orders. Follow you, observe how you handled the situation, report back."
"Sure, sure."
"That is categorically different from stalking."
"It really does sound like stalking, though."
"Lymur — "
"Ahahahaha~!"
He started moving faster and faster.
"Hey!"
She noticed just a bit too late, and suddenly they were half-running across the bridge, which was awkward and especially undignified for the both of them.
Somehow it felt like his fault, especially since he was laughing like that while speeding off. She caught up to him at the far door, and what happened next wasn't exactly a chase, but it really kind of was.
It went on for a couple minutes, cut through parts of three different buildings, and ended with both of them in a courtyard on the east side of the academy, enjoying the morning way more than they should've been.
The sun had cleared the top of the eastern buildings by then, coming in low and gold across the courtyard stones. Most of the academy was still quiet. A bird was doing something in the garden at the courtyard's edge.
They walked slowly, side by side, their brief little chase already fading into the morning like it never really mattered.
Alea spoke first.
"So I, uh." She stopped, then started again. "I noticed something."
"Hm?"
She seemed to be choosing her words with more care than usual, which he noticed. Alea was not typically a person who chose words carefully, not when it came to friends. She was a person who said what she meant and relied on her own judgment about whether the timing was right.
"Well — it seemed like more than once you hesitated." She paused. "Your kind of hesitation is strange because it came after and not before." She slowed, and he was a half-step ahead of her when she stopped entirely. He stopped too, a second later. "You haven't come to terms with the killing yet, have you?"
He turned to look at her.
His expression was what it usually was in public — calm, hard to read, like he was keeping something in. But there was something at the corner of one eye. A small thing, there and gone.
"Sure I have," he said. "You must've been mistaken."
"Oh yeah?" They started walking again, slower. "I doubt it. I'm very perceptive. Even among the Lances, I'd say — "
"I'm fine, Alea!"
It came out louder than he'd meant it to. It wasn't exactly shouting, per se, but loud enough to feel off in the quiet of the early morning courtyard, for the soft morning light, the birds, all of it.
He realized the second he said it and stopped.
"Hey." His voice was back to normal. "Yeah. Uhm." He looked at a point somewhere between them and the garden. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like — I can take care of myself, okay? I just." He stopped. "I'm totally fine."
'I'm fine' stayed in the air between them, and neither of them really believed it.
Alea looked at him, but he wouldn't meet her eyes. Her face was a mix of things — concern, a bit of annoyance, and something else that she didn't say out loud. He wasn't in the headspace to hear it anyway.
"Well," she said. "If you say so."
He nodded once, still not quite looking at her.
"Whatever, then." She adjusted the strap of her uniform at the shoulder. "Just report to the council as soon as you're done with your business here."
She turned and walked off, hands clasped behind her back. Her posture was straight, like she was holding herself together on purpose.
She's not mad, is she? He watched her go. She's —
"Are you mad?"
She stopped.
"No. I most certainly am not."
He looked at the back of her head. "Figures. It seemed a bit too petty even for you."
"Whatever, Lymur!"
She vanished, and then the courtyard was empty again. Just him, the bird in the garden, and the soft gold light stretching across the stones.
He stood there.
What did I —
He replayed the last couple minutes, the way he did when he wasn't sure, and didn't come away with anything clean. He'd snapped at her when she was trying to say something. Then he called it petty when she went quiet. She said she wasn't mad — and that part was true, he could tell—but she still left. And the way she left felt like something he couldn't quite figure out.
He stayed in the courtyard for a moment longer.