Once Amelia got out of bed this morning, she realized something very important—her entire body ached beyond anything she had ever felt before. Her soul cried out for help, and she could do absolutely nothing about it.

Her systems were skittering, and her modules would not even activate. Even her HUD was hardly operational.

Scanning...

Scannrrtg...

Vital sitns funthyrional.

No [email protected] detected.

Nohfghtyjhg’s wrgty wgfdh yrtu, Amerta. :)

Her head pulsed and throbbed in what she assumed was an awful headache. Back on the farm, Ed used to have bad migraines every now and then, and Amelia always had to be there by her side to comfort her through them. This was certainly not as bad as Ed’s seemed, but it still made every moment a mini-nightmare all on its own.

After her nightmare last night, she hoped she had seen the last of the pain her own body could bring her. But she was very, very wrong.

Absorbing the data server golem, absorbing all those other soul gems, came at a tremendous cost. Her systems simply could not handle the energy given to it, and in fact she was even worse off than the last time she went through this very same thing.

Why did her body refuse to process the souls? Was it guilty about the lives lost for her to gain this power? Was that it? If so, she would have gladly relinquished at least some of the power to smooth over the process. But, unfortunately, it was no moral conundrum; it was an error in her core that the Access Core did not even realize existed.

She did her best imitation of walking as she made her way downstairs and collapsed on one of the kitchen chairs. Everyone else was already down here, eating breakfast or otherwise spending quiet time together. Otto the olm immediately came up to check on her, trying to put his slimy head on her leg before she shooed him away.

Her attempt to act natural and hide her ailments from the others failed instantly, as Phelia placed a claw on her upper arm and said, “I’m here for you.”

“Wh...”

“I heard you crying this morning,” Aeo said, sitting backwards in a chair with her arms over its back. There was no possible way Aeo had heard that through her own snoring. Moreover, she was furious that she would decide to tell the others instead of keeping that private.

“You went through a lot, yesterday,” Phelia told her. “It’s okay to feel bad for a while after big events like that.”

“We’ve all been through bad stuff too,” Aeo added. “So we’re here to talk.”

“I’m not... Thank you.” Anything to get them to stop.

Phelia, thinking her work done, went over to the couch to go dote on Hummer, who laid self-satisfied and showing a smug smirk to Amelia. Their shared secret had stuck. They had actually managed to get away with sneaking off in the middle of their dungeon dive, somehow, and now the others were giving them extra attention instead of extra scolding. A fantasy land, indeed.

All the while, Mino’s face was covered up by the newspaper spread out in front of her. If there was anything that could take Mino’s attention away from the hostel, it was reading the paper.

Amelia looked at her, or at least the part of her she could see. Just her two small hands. The pink hue in her skin that sometimes sparkled a little bit if it hit the light right. One of the hands took its grip off the newspaper and turned the page, gently and quietly. Her fingernails were painted today. She wondered what the occasion might have been, or if it was anything at all.

Then Mino lowered her newspaper and looked at Amelia directly. “I assume if you’ve been staring at me this long, there’s something you need?”

Amelia’s eyes darted down to the floor. “No. Nothing.”

“It’s not even on the front page, but they talk about that explosion yesterday,” she said in a voice that carried throughout the common room, just to make sure everyone could hear her. “Fifteen dead, and a lot more injured. They say it was a big accident, and they’re blaming it on the Fourland Growth Corporation. It might have been a drug storehouse, so they’re investigating the company and all its executives.” She set the newspaper down and folded it gently. “Sounds fishy. Fleet’s Pride has its paw prints all over it, but the government is covering it up.”

Throwing Fourland under the truck, that was what they were doing. After what happened on Floor 5 yesterday, North Sunwell had a tremendous amount of clean-up to do, and giving Fourland all of the blame was likely the easiest path out. Destroying one small business partner was easier than publicly accepting what had actually happened, after all.

“Guess we can’t go back into the dungeon for a while...” Phelia said, shoulders slumped.

“We were definitely not going back into the dungeon for a while anyway,” Aeo said. “Please, I’m so tired.”

“Well, all I want to do is get that treasure we found on Floor 3. Mino said we are gonna go find it again!”

Amelia groaned as quietly as she could as her headache pulsed through her very essence.

“She was being nice, Phelia. There’s no way you’ll—”

“You just don’t trust me. You think I’m not a good adventurer, and—”

“I never said that—”

“Everyone thinks I’m weak, like I’ll always be weak—”

“I’ve been through a lot lately, and I don’t need some guilt-tripping twerp—”

“What the hell are you calling me a twerp for? All I said—”

“Twerp. Twerp, twerp twerp—”

“Stop it, Aeo! You purple jerk!”

Amelia slammed her fist on the table, rattling its dirty dishes, and making Otto jump back in surprise. She stood up and gripped her forehead.

Everything went quiet almost immediately, waiting for Amelia to say something to cut into Aeo and Phelia’s snippy argument. Instead, she simply walked out the door and closed it quietly behind her.

She wandered the empty streets of Beechhurst for a while, soaking up as much of the air around her as she could. The last vestiges of winter creeping into the atmosphere and failing to make a dent. No longer did snow manage to make a difference. No longer did icy winds sweep around and send chills through Amelia’s rocks.

No one but elderly elves was out this morning. Everyone worked, or they slept, or they had better places to be than this forgotten pocket of the city. She came to that lonely children’s park, with a slide and a swing set and other equipment, all covered in rust, forgotten about for so long the elves had probably forgotten why it was built in the first place.

Elves, and sun elves in particular, very rarely had children. Despite living hundreds or thousands of years, sun elf women would reach peak fertility perhaps thrice in their lives; pregnancy at any other point was considered a miracle from the Gods, and carrying such a miracle to a healthy birth was fraught with difficulties for their mana-filled bodies.

Amelia knew about this thanks to Ed’s work in the village, back when they lived on the farm. Many mistook her for a healer, and would come from long distances to see her. There were all too many times when a sun elf couple would show up, begging for help with a soon-due infant because literally not a single person in their town had remaining memories of childcare. She had to turn them away, but always directed them to the closest hospital. A week’s journey by motorized truck, but the only safe location for them.

Beechhurst did not have any children that Amelia had ever seen. Mostly elderly women, and elderly for a sun elf was an age beyond comprehension for almost any other glossal race. These were ancient beings who slowly paced around the neighborhood, their lives filled with the kinds of histories that storytellers dreamed of learning. And yet, because of the curse that afflicted them, they could remember none of it.

Entering the small park, Amelia thought about sitting down on one of the swings, but the chains looked precarious enough that she might have snapped them just by touching them.

Instead, she sat at the bottom of the rusted-over slide and spread out her legs.

The pain all over her body made it almost impossible to focus on anything. But perhaps if she upgraded her systems, she could alleviate some of that pressure that had been malfunctioning everything.

The only question was if she could manage to actually do any upgrades thanks to those very same malfunctions.

Upgraridng which systuejms?

My reocoemenati: Acxet Coie.

The HUD issues notwithstanding, Amelia had no idea how to actually upgrade her Access Core. If she knew anything deeper about her own systems, she might have been able to create brand-new functions, but at this point that was far beyond her understanding. Ed had left her before teaching her proper golemancy.

Instead, she went to her Repair Module.

Her experience with the Repair Module had been fairly positive over the years, but its powers were extremely limited. As she discovered just yesterday, her only real ability was to solder on or burn off chunks of rock. The improvised wound cauterizing was one of the most risky things she had ever done since coming to Fleettwixt, and that was saying something.

Even for her own self, she needed extra healing capabilities. Half her body was made of skin and bones, after all. And, fortunately, as she sifted painfully through her system she discovered that the Repair Module had several experimental, but not locked, upgrades available to her. Things that Ed must have been creating before she left, but had never gotten to completion. Amelia had the souls to activate them, even if she could not verify their effectiveness.

Ujgtpwepgaridng Reuei Moueuile.

Pleeast wauj.

...

...

Aedigg new cuneptonet: Shtych.

Spfsh now acutovatd.

Eljoky. :}

If she was discerning her HUD correctly, her new Repair Module component, or ability, was called “stitch.” She turned it on—aching with pain as she did—and found her right arm hand changed into a sort of needle, with a long, very thin coil of metal threading popping out of one finger that she could use as well. Then, with a flick of a mode in her system, the needle and thread turned into something of a staple gun, shooting small metal brackets at her command.

That would have been absolutely perfect for yesterday, and could have prevented some of the danger that Hummer faced. She did not, however, have very robust sewing skills as embarrassing as it was. Ed had been fairly skilled and did most of that work back at the farm. And since they separated, Amelia never slowed down long enough to let anyone else teach her. Perhaps that was why almost every article of clothing she possessed had at least one egregiously sloppy tear sewn or patched up.

Next, Amelia upgraded her Boost Module, although this time the HUD did not appear at all to tell her what was going on. She did not attempt to unlock extra functionality, but instead upgraded its initial start-up by about ten percent. As her fight with Liss in the warehouse showed, its activation time took several seconds too long, and even just that extra bit of speed might save her life one day, she thought.

She sat back and waited for the pain against her soul to lessen... And, to some extent, it did. It felt less like overwhelming pressure, and more like simple soreness.

Actually, Amelia felt good, in a way.

Just one day ago, she had managed to ruin the entire Fourland Growth Corporation, almost entirely through her sheer willpower. She had grown tremendously powerful, and would continue to gain even more strength with every soul she processed.

She hesitated to call herself “unstoppable,” but indeed, not a single threat had done much more than slow her down so far. After a few days of rest, she would be back on track, ready to continue her pursuit for revenge.

In the meantime, she had brand-new leads to crush. Fourland was unimportant. The synth trade was a tiny fraction of North Sunwell’s bottom line, and its executives likely did not even know of its existence. The real target was Fleet’s Pride, was that accountant Castien. And, quite possibly, was Ed herself. She would do everything in her considerable power to uncover the truth, and luckily, her next step would not need her to be at full strength, either.

Her mission had fundamentally solidified itself. No longer was she tracking down random criminals on the street just to attract attention. Now, she knew the scoreboard, and was determined, more than anything, to get ahead in points.

Amelia stood up from the base of the slide and pounded her fist into her other hand... and then, legs wobbly, fell down to the ground.