[Can't Opt Out]

Arc F1.8 | Chapter 23: Not The Sort of Person I Prefer to Kidnap

The man’s nephew was an idiot—his bitch of a sister even more so.What was that woman thinking, sending her child into Falmíer like this? When he’d first heard that his nephew had gone into the Lüshanian capital, despite rumours that was brewing between two of its most powerful crime lords, he had thought his nephew the idiot. It wouldn’t have been the first time one of his niblings had done something stupid, their tiny brains not computing how terrible their was.

Now, of course, knowing that it was his sister who had sent her child into the city? Well, to say the man was now questioning whether every other instance of judging his younger relatives for being dumbasses wasn’t so much due to their own brains failing to have more than a single working brain cell so much as their inability to judge their mother as the abusive bitch she was.

Oh, what he wouldn’t do to drag his niblings away from the woman—away from their whole fucking nation. His older brother could come as well. His niblings could go into therapy— of therapy. They could make a good life, surely? Start their own little assassination and kidnapping squad. It would be good—great, even.

It would not involve kidnapping people like this girl that his nephew had grabbed—some teenager? Maybe a young adult? White as fuck. Someone from the east, then. Baalphorian, Lu Rosian, or Zironian—assuming some irregular deviation hadn’t bleached her skin, anyways. Was that as much of an issue in Lüshan as it was in some other nations, including their own? Not the random genetic spasms that caused children to be born with features that were nothing like their parents’—that happened everywhere—but the prejudice that came with such shifts in features.

Their nation was particularly terrible about hating everyone who didn’t have nearly pitch-black skin—a pity. The man always had enjoyed the contrast of his own beautiful darkness against a pale white. Even better if the white was blushing—hot heat rushing through blood vessels to turns cheeks and necks hot as he moaned under them.

Regardless, either this girl had suffered numerous genetic spasms—she really had no features that hinted at a Lüshanian heritage—or she wasn’t from Lüshan. If it were the former… she would be worthy of a kidnapping. The man always had possessed a drive to swipe up people who were —people who wouldn’t be missed, who weren’t wanted. He wanted them. He would give them a good life.

Ironically, had his nephew asked him to descend into Falmíer on a kidnapping mission, the man might have acquiesced and joined him—fuck knew the city’s crime lords had too many powerful irregulars between them. The man would happily relieve them of a few, especially if the rumours about the one—which was it, Fräthk?—torturing and abusing their most valuable people were true.

Oh, how the man would love to rip that one to shreds. He was so rarely allowed to slice into people—push them to pieces with his abilities. Some crime lord who was all too happy to murder and torture? Oh, he would love killing them so much—and considering rumours were rarely a scratch over the surface of the truth?

Oh—, how he wanted to slip through the cave system and vanish into the city, find this Fräthk person and force the truth out of them. If he were lucky, the man would come away with blood on his hands and dozens of souls trailing him, following him to a new life of freedom.

Unfortunately, his older brother had come to him before he vanished from their home, chasing after his missing nephew, and demanded he go no further than the cave system itself—and even that the older man had admitted What did that even mean, other than that someone had been whispering visions of the future into his brother’s ear?

Annoying. Aggravating. The man wanted to go into the city, if only to push at fate and futures that would ever share with him. He could be trustworthy! He could hold his tongue and his actions, if given a good enough reason!

Were his older brother’s requests that he do this, don’t do that, normally a ? Yes, but didn’t that simply mean that whatever the reason was—whatever they were keeping him from—wouldn’t change his ease of acceptance? His brother said , so the man wouldn’t. Would learning what he was avoiding slipping his fingers into, stepping his feet into, really change his mind? Would it really leave him disregarding his older brother’s opinions and requests for the first time, like, ever?

Wasn’t there a possibility that simply knowing everyone was worried might shift his obedience itself might become motivation enough for him to run where he wasn’t meant to go?

The man felt as though he were on a sharp edge, his heart tied between his brother and this mysterious he wasn’t meant to touch.

—and that one was especially weird, as he hadn't been told not to attend the Seerish festival until the third-to-last one.

Increasingly, the man suspected there was he wasn’t meant to meet—someone who was either far younger than he himself was or who had suddenly learned about the krill'ok'gry and decided to attend.

Someone who was under his feet at this very moment, the string that tied him to this fate he was supposed to be avoiding tugging upon his heart, urging him to move, move, move—move towards his heart.

Maybe, if the person hiding behind the strange rock wall ran, he could chase her into the city? Race towards his destiny and then tell his brother it hadn’t been on purpose? All an accident, big bro! Sorry about that!

The man didn’t think his older brother would believe him—that guy had always been so good at seeing through his lies. Sometimes, his older brother would let him get away with it; other times, not so much. This wasn’t a situation where he thought it a good idea to push—after all, what if he pushed and lied and broke his brother’s trust only to find the older man pressing a blade to his heart? Or worse, to the heart his own was connected to—yearned for?

Someone like him, perhaps, who could only ever listen to the ramblings and machinations of those to whom the aether dared speak, who knew only bits and pieces about the situation their world had found itself in—knew that was coming, knew how many pieces those in power had been playing for millennia. The man had no idea if he were a piece of importance, a pawn, an enemy to the game—some mistake that could topple the entire board, send a million pieces flying askew. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t—only time would tell, and—

And the person was moving—had they noticed him watching them? Possibly, but who knew—it weren’t as though anyone but those closest to him were aware of his abilities, after all. Considering his abilities lived within myths alone, the man doubted whoever was there had actually believed he had been looking at them—he had been, but with his mask covering even his eyes, it would have been difficult to tell.

Regardless, they—another young girl, he thought—were moving and making quite a bit of a racket—and ah~ a distraction, was it? Such things wouldn’t work on him, but—

“What the fuck!” his nephew yelled, turned and—

Yup, there he went.

The man watched his nephew rush off, back the way he’d come—it was easy to assume that whoever was behind the wall of laced rock had been trailing him for a while. That might not be the case, but—

A crash sounded from down the way the pair had vanished. A scream of frustration followed, echoing down the tunnel, and how stupid was the brat? Not only was this cavern a creation of the Lowdouran, and therefore impossible to harm, but even if it weren’t, did the idiot want to die in a cave in?

Rocking back on his heels, the man tucked his hands into his pockets and turned his attention to the random girl his brain-dead nephew had decided to kidnap. Despite his demands, the brat had refused to tell him he had kidnapped this girl—the man would have forced it out of the idiot eventually, but he generally didn’t like forcing his niblings unless absolutely necessary. The girl in question was just now coming awake, her eyes fluttering in confusion before she was gasping and scuttling backwards—or trying to, anyways. As she was close to the wall to begin with, she didn’t go far, her back slamming against the wall.

she yelled in Lüshanian, her accent strange and unwieldy. Definitely Lüshanian then. At least she spoke the language, though? As he spoke no languages from the east other than Seerish—and even that was rusty, after having been effectively forbidden from visiting for almost two decades—they could at least converse in

he said, debating between squatting before the girl—and really, she couldn’t be more than her early thirties, and only if she were a low-dev and had aged exceptionally well, if not, she could very well be in her late teens—and staying where he was. It wasn’t like the girl could hurt him or anything, but he wanted her to trust him enough to get answers. Would she have answers? Who knew. Given his nephew might yet get himself killed chasing after random people in the cave system—he could easily vanish into its twisting tunnels or fall into a hole in his rushing about and the man was going to spend the next few days looking for him—the girl might be the only one with answers.

Big blue eyes blinked at him from under hair so blonde it was almost white, cut into a strange style he had never seen before, a bob of curls framing her face while an imposing bun sat atop her head, askew from being touted about by his nephew. Her knees tucked up. Her fingers gripped into her pants. Her lower lip wobbled.

Terrified, then. Great.

he said, unsure of what to even say. Did he often kidnap people? Yes, but usually, it was on purpose! Either he offered to take people away from bad situations, and they refused or accepted, or he took them from ridiculously bad situations while they were unconscious, , he explained he’d swiped them up. More often than not, whoever he’d taken was more than happy to be taken!

This girl did not, in fact, look happy to have been taken and the man didn’t know how to deal with that.

he tried, frowning when the girl gave a frantic shake of her head and said nothing. Had he not heard her speak in Lüshanian before, he might have wondered if she actually spoke it or not—although, what had she said? Fuck. Hopefully she spoke it and was now being difficult; the alternative? That she had simply learned to tell people to from her by hearing it said by people around her as they were violated in any myriad of ways?

The man hoped his dumbass nephew hadn’t randomly swiped up a sex slave and then refused to tell him about it.

Mumbling about how stupid his nephew was, the man shifted his eyes away from the girl towards the tunnel where his nephew had vanished and—

And suddenly, water from pouring through the world.

It gushed out of the aether itself, erupting from a dozen spots, scattered throughout the small cavern, and pooling over the hard-packed rock and dirt of the tunnel’s floor.

“What—” he started to say, looking back at the girl.

Gone was the scared girl who had been there a moment before. In her place, sharp eyes glared at him, her mouth set in a grim line.

“Fuck you,” the girl said, and , at least, he recognized as Baalphorian—always good to know the most common curses in every language, in the man’s opinion.

He went to open his mouth—to tell the girl that his idiot nephew had been the one to take her and that just wanted to send her on her way. If she wanted out of the cave system, he would happily help remove her from it! He knew the way out and everything!

Unfortunately, the man never got the chance. Fucking Censors and their ability to do weird and amazing shit. What did this girl do? Activate to start summoning bubbles from all the water that was pouring out of the aether.

It took barely three seconds for the cavern to explode with innumerable bubbles, the man swearing and batting at the bubbles, his energy seeping out and—

AND WHY WEREN’T THE BUBBLES DISSIPATING!?

What. The. Fuck!?

The man forced his abilities outwards, suffusing his energy with them, and at least dissipated the bubbles he touched—he didn’t want to send his abilities too far, lest they affect the cavern. Reaching his abilities carefully, slowly out towards the girl, however, he found that she wasn’t where he’d last seen her—unsurprising. The cave system, however, wasn’t meant to allow any sort of tracking ability’s use, and while the man’s abilities allowed him to get around that quirk to some extent, it was still difficult for him to determine where the girl had disappeared to… especially because these bubbles were interfering with his abilities!

Was she still in the room?

Slipped by him towards the cave system’s exit?

Following the trail of his nephew?

Or, down the third path—the one closest to the girl and by far the most dangerous way she could have gone?

Fuck. It was option three, wasn’t it?

His abilities finally flicked against her back as she ran down option number three. Fuck.