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Arc F1.8 | Chapter 28: Seriously? Can’t Killing Us Wait Until We’re Out of Here, At Least?

Polianna was beautiful as she moved, all confidence and strength, her clothes hugged tight to her gorgeous curves. Slashes of power erupted out of her, seeking out each of the locals who had decided to attack them.Coral smiled to herself as she let her abilities follow her girlfriend along. That wasn’t all she was doing, of course. Luckily, one of the clones who had managed to get into the city with them—Zyphell Hyrat, who was stationed in another Lüshanian city but had taken the train to reach them and arrived shortly before Polianna had finally bullied her way into Falmíer—had been trailing the pair of them, prepared to erect defensive skills around them as needed.

It wasn’t needed, but appreciated—although she never let her own defensive abilities drop, it meant that Coral could focus more of her attention on stretching her abilities over the area, searching for threats, after all. Of course, after so many years of combat classes and aiding Halen in his prank war, Coral was perfectly confident in her ability to read the emotions of everyone within the scope of her abilities, defend herself, defend at least a few allies, all at once—not that Polianna needed her help at the moment. Still, Coral kept more defensive skills prepped in the back of her mind, ready to explode out of her and wrap her girlfriend in a warm embrace if needed.

A scream ruptured through the world—Polianna stabbing her willbrand through someone. A second later, the spear-form she favoured was spiralling through the air, whizzing past Coral and sending her curls into a flurry of movement. A gurgle sounded behind her as the willbrand slammed through the skull of someone who had been sneaking out of the shadows behind Coral and Zyphell. Coral didn’t bother looking back—she’d already known the woman was there, after all, Polianna already having told her not to bother with the predator attempting to sneak up behind them. Zyphell, unused to the terror of the children who had been raised amidst the chaos of Emilia and Halen’s prank war, swallowed, the sound registering within Coral along with the clone’s emotions.

“We made sure all of our age group’s classes, as well as a few above and below us, also took some combat classes,” Coral told the clone, who like all clones was already aware of her ability to read emotions and glean the thoughts that came from them, although, unless the clone were someone close to Emilia—someone to be trusted without end—they were never told the full scope of what she could accomplish with her empathy alone.

Within the relay Polianna had set up with Malcolm, Loren, and Grenner, Coral knew the feedback she was receiving from the clone was laying itself out, letting each know that this clone was likely in league with . Not a good thing, and while Coral would have preferred to focus on the Lüshanians in the surrounding buildings, each soul a potential threat to their group, to Olivier’s stupid students, and to the clones who had remained with them, Coral knew full well how much of an overarching threat and those who had aligned themselves with their mysterious agenda could be.

In no world did she want to accidentally risk missing that one of their supposed clone allies might suddenly betray them, intent to remove people thought bad influences on The Black Knot while they had the chance. It would be quite easy for them to claim no fault in the death of one of the Baalphorian children, who had entered Falmíer and purposefully gotten themselves involved in some sort of war between government and criminal factions, after all.

No thank you—Coral was not going to find herself or any of her friends and allies dead at the hands of some clone who had decided they were threats to The Black Knot. Not today. Not ever.

A chorus of curses floated through the relay as more feedback from another of the clones who had joined them came through, also clearly aligned with Thankfully, Halen was also aware that there were multiple factions of The Black Knot and had been sure to program her various functions in order to account for such situations. The information had come from Emilia, who had told him about the factions soon after Halen had begun working on the functions that aided Coral in managing her Dyadism, although Coral suspected her friend had already suspected the situation within The Black Knot wasn’t as cut and dry as many people assumed it to be—a single layer of devotion to the government, or perhaps their current head. Things were never so simple.

This particular situation had been Coral’s first experience with the funny way Halen and Emilia dealt with one another, always claiming they . Reality was so much different: they always collaborated, it was simply that it was For normal people, that would have meant , because in the end, most people didn’t stick their noses and dirty fingers into a million a year.

Halen and Emilia were doing important things; hence, easily became

They were idiots, but Coral loved them both. She was closer to Halen, of course, and she rather thought Codeth right when he said Emilia was nice in small doses, but her best friend loved Emilia, so of course Coral would love her as well. In many ways, she was closer with the other girl than Halen himself because her poor, awkward friend needed someone to slip positive, not-prank-war-related stories to her. It worked, Coral thought, thinking back to the occasional smile that would stretch across Emilia’s face when she heard some story or another of Halen—stories of him being awkward and sweet, mostly because Halen needed Emilia to like the real him, and Coral’s friend was nothing but an awkward boy with the sweetest of hearts.

Regardless, Emilia was the one who had the most experience designing functions that helped Dyads; hence, Halen had almost immediately gone to her for help. In the beginning, Coral didn’t think Emilia had believed the full extent of her abilities, but she’d gotten there—become a believer. Then, Emilia had needed to tell them about the factions that split the clones in half.

Emilia had said, awkwardly adding on that while some of were well known, it was also assumed they were trying to spread their influence into younger generations as well.

Coral could remember asking, trying to get a read on Emilia as Halen tinkered with the function in the background. The silverstrain had been difficult to read, but mostly… she’d just seemed sad for her friends—for the clones who weren’t and were therefore considered by some of as worthless wastes of space who should be killed.

With a shrug, Emilia had said she wasn’t really sure. the girl had guessed, and it really was a guess, as far as Coral had ever been able to tell. For some reason that seemed to be able to understand, hated clones who weren’t the perfect little soldiers. All of them understood the changes love for Emilia had forced through the organization—although Coral thought some people overestimated the amount of love some of the older members of the Laprise and Baxter families had for her or their friend group as a whole—but since officially joining The Black Knot, Malcolm had been looking into cases where clones who were had been killed.

Clones who were had been dying in higher numbers for as long as The Black Knot had records, and a lot of those deaths were sketchy. Sometimes, those clones were simply sent off on the most dangerous of missions at higher rates; other times, their deaths were so suspicious, the investigations into their deaths so surface level, it was easy to assume that strange was happening—easy to assume that had existed for a long time, striking down clones they viewed as flawed as often as needed, manufacturing their deaths through assignments liable to get them killed or simply sliding a knife across their throats themselves.

A flicker of malevolence struck through Coral, her mind latching on to the mind the emotion had surged through, murky and painless and gone. Loathing something fierce rippled through Coral, the heat of phantom blood sliding down her throat—a reflection from the clone her abilities had been swarming through, holding their mind still so Grenner could slit their throat before they did something to…

A bubble of fury popped within Coral as her functions backtracked through the clone in question’s thoughts, finding that they had intended to use a skill to trip Polianna, who had summoned her willbrand back to her and was in the midst of fighting off a collection of Lüshanians who seemed rather unimpressed with how the situation in the city was going.

“Fuck… did Fushal die?” Zyphell muttered, Coral’s connection to Grenner’s mind as it spun snapping out—that was fine; it wasn’t like Coral wanted to be connected to the clone while he was forced to burn the body of another clone.

Still, she sent off a thank you to the man for protecting her girlfriend. As Emilia’s babysitter and friend, Grenner fell into the category of . Coral knew they would never be so heartless as to let her girlfriend die—neither would Emilia, although Coral knew they silverstrain she disliked Polianna enough to heartlessly leave her to die. She wouldn’t—Emilia was too soft-hearted to leave almost to die. Really, when she found out Grenner had needed to kill one of the clones, Coral knew Emilia would feel bad not just that her babysitter had needed to kill someone but also that the dead clone had been pulled into In Emilia’s mind, Coral knew there existed a desire to befriend as many clones as possible, if only to keep them from falling into the machinations of , every clone who found themselves a pawn in whatever game those were playing a little spark of regret within Emilia’s heart.

It was in situations like this where Coral felt the true horror of that faction—after all, what sort of people tried to kill a bunch of young adults in the middle of a situation like this!? Were they and their influence on The Black Knot really so terrible that some members of that faction would effectively seal their fates—there was no way that the clone, Fushal, would have been able to hide their attack on Polianna, although perhaps he would have tried to argue it was an accident—trying to get rid of even a single one of them?

Annoyingly, Coral’s readings of the now-dead man’s emotions and intents wouldn’t be enough to hold him or anyone else accountable, and in this sort of situation, trying to keep the clone alive so he could be questioned later would have been risking more of their lives. Thus, he was dead, and at the very least, the loss of one of their numbers seemed to settle the other two clones who harboured ill-will towards them—it was one thing to take them on when there were three of them. Only two wouldn’t get them far, especially as Grenner was now to the other clone with seeming allegiances to , leaving the clone—who actually was on the older side, unlike the barely one-hundred-years-old Zyphell and Fushal—with little opportunity to try to sabotage Polianna again—not that her girlfriend could be sabotaged! Even that earlier attempt would have done little, all of them well-used to the chaos of certain members of their age group. So many pranks and crazed, unpredictable sparing partners had left all of them constantly prepared to trip over their own feet.

Such experience was partially why, Zphell’s presence or not, Coral had always been running defensive skills around herself. Now that it was clear these clones could not be trusted, she wasn’t going to be dropping her own defensive skills and leaving Zyphell alone to keep her safe, regardless of his antagonistic emotions flat lining. The next thing she knew, the clone would be dropping his defensive skills, both of them dying in an attack of some sort.

, someone would claim.

No thanks.

Halen—who, along with a number of other people, were receiving all of her readings—said, the relays she could no longer access through her cut-off aethernet connection being forwarded by Polianna through another communication protocol.

In the background, the triplets were unimpressed that had actually tried something during such a chaotic situation. The few other people who were getting all the information about the goings-on were quiet, while most of their group, who had little practical experience with the factions of the Hyrat clones—mostly, they knew something strange was happening within their ranks, much of it wound up in the clones’ relationships with Emilia—were simply told that one of the clones had died.

There was no point in telling them more, most of them had agreed, long ago, when Coral had first begun cataloguing each of the clones’ minds and emotions in regards to Emilia and her friends. It was a terrible thing, to know that a faction of the Hyrat clones might take any chance they could to kill any of them—to snuff out the lives of every person they loved. As long as were content to bide their time, there was no point in burdening the rest of their friends with the full scope of the situation—if their knowledge of it could even be considered anything near

With this attack, though…

Forwarding that reading along to Polianna and leaving it to her to distribute it—this implication from the clone Grenner had attached himself to that Fushal shouldn’t have tried to mess with Polianna and that there was some plan for the future that might be keeping the other faction of clones from attacking them further—as needed, Coral began to move. At the very least, that meant they all still had more time—that they didn’t yet need to burden more people with the reality of the situation with the clones.

That was good—they didn’t have time to deal with ’ faction at the moment. With Grenner occupied and one of the clones dead, Polianna needed help, and Coral hadn’t spent so many years inside without coming out just as much a monster as everyone else—more of a monster, in many ways.