HERA

Appendophobia of the head. Until a dam in her willpower broke, the thought of transforming that appendage was enough to give her nightmares. The irony that she was afraid of a Fear sigma was not lost to her.

It was odd. Hera didn’t get to see Lena Kurova’s appearance. However, there was minimal tingling with the transformation. She mainly felt shifts in her cheeks and brow. Her hair extended to brush against her upper back and her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. Rex called her a doppelganger. Maybe he was right.

Crumbling roars and cries of terror. Aspic, now background scenery from their position on the beach, was a moving model of devastation. Even after the threat had ended, the chaos was far from quelled. He was dead now, but Balder Rex’s legacy uprooted the bedrock of this city. Literally and figuratively.

The people of Aspic were assholes; Hera finally dared to say that now. They left Berto to die and let Balder and his goons run amok. Even when they put on a painted face all grins and greetings, they were selfish, greedy, callous, conniving schemers at the core of their hearts. Hera hated them, yet they didn’t deserve this.

What’s there to hate? In her mind, she described a foul existence of a species, but hating them was too far. After all, what differentiated the people of Aspic from the rest of the world? If she hated them, she hated people, everyone. And when you learn to hate that much, you end up hating nothing at all. It just isn’t worth it.

A whiff of sand blew against her ankles, spatters of blood buried among the grains. Zeta’s body lay face down on the shore, immobile, with a slight rise in the chest to signal his vitality.

Damn it Zeta! Now she had to carry him out of here. Weren’t things like this supposed to be the other way around?

A little crystalline structure bumped against her boot. Oh, how she had seen the tiny little menaces time and time again. Balder Rex’s sigmas scattered around his corpse. Multiple greens, a few blue, and one magenta, the Grand sigma.

Aching, Hera picked them all up, tore a little rift in the air, and tossed them in her Pocket Inventory. Huh, It’s almost full. A rare sight, but there was no way she was letting the sigmas sit around unattended.

There was something sad about seeing Rex lie in the sand. There was no love lost in his death, yet she couldn’t bring herself to just walk away. Zeta mentioned something about this once. Compassion? Empathy? Why? Rex was a monster. No, he deserved better. Nothing morbid, yet nothing decent.

So she made him a grave of sand and rolled him into it, patting the surface to a smooth texture, where the waves could wash over and nourish him. It wouldn’t last, but Hera could not fathom leaving his body to bloat and rot there, regardless of his actions. If necessary, the sea would carry him to hell in time, or wherever else it deemed fit to send him.

Next, she attended to the other dead body on the beach. Well, he was still alive, technically, but Hera knew that may not last long. Gently, she slung Zeta’s arm over her shoulder.

How the hell are you so heavy?

Zeta’s pride, the black sword, lay nearby. Knowing him, another, deadlier demon would terrorize the city if she decided to leave it. Dulled and chipped from the toil of fighting, if someone else found it they’d likely mistake it for a piece of trash. She placed it in Zeta’s sheath anyway. Sentimental value.

As Hera started moving, it occurred to her that there was no home to return to, and no doctor for either of them. Where was she to go? Aspic had no laws, it had no protection. It had not changed, yet she kept striding forward.

Her route led to an alternative entrance to the docks. With the fighting ended, the citizens slowly returned to begging for the sea to save them. For rescues to swoop down from the autumn evening sky, pluck and drop them in a safer, newer city. Hera ignored them and kept walking, an unconscious savior hoisted on her shoulders.

Her first steps on the wooden boardwalk brought her adjacent to the warehouses. She halted in front of Warehouse 6.

They still had not repaired a single damn thing. Perforations in the straw roof, bricks and wood chips from the walls scattered at the base of the structure.

Yet there was a force that pulled Hera inside. It was warm in there. It mimicked safety, comfort. The days of old. A dried bloodstain centered beneath a ray of what used to be the skylight. She didn’t remember whose it was. It didn’t matter anymore.

After exiting out the other side, her body lost all sense of thought. She stared to the horizon and sat Zeta down beside her. Where else was there to gaze? Like the dozens of other desperate Aspic citizens, she also sought a hope that might never arrive.

No, that was stupid. It had been a long day. She just wanted some damn sleep.

“Drowsiness isn’t productive. You lose profits. I believe it was you who told me that,” said a voice that startled her.

Hera jolted her head in its direction, eyes widening, “Igel!”

He smiled. “I was only away for a day, yet I find the streets on top of the roofs and a few abnormally large potholes in the ground. I’d ask you to explain, but I’ll just assume it was that bastard, Rex.”

“Where have you been?”

He pointed to the other side of the port, where the hills shadowed the countryside and the shore beyond. “Let’s talk more after you get some rest. They’ll be happy to accommodate you, just don’t be rude.”

“What are you talking about?”

Before she received an answer, a steel hull appeared from around the end of the bay. Giant iron behemoths with pointed bows and small cubic heads emerged bearing the flag of a diamond with wings. Tiny specks of men and women dotted the edges of the deck, donning the white garbs of sailors and nurses respectively. Their hardened faces meshed well with the looming structure of the frigates they crewed for.

“Berto’s death was the final straw. I grew fed up with Aspic,” Igel said. “The lawlessness, the careless status quo, all of it. So I visited the Technocracy’s port authority here and campaigned for them to bring order.”

“And they listened to you? How did you manage that?” Hera asked from the comfort of the ship’s medical bay. The fluffy cot had deep cushions that sucked her arms and legs inside like a void of comfortable suffocation. If only the room didn’t smell like rubbing alcohol and the musk of unwashed crewmen.

All her words stuttered as the surroundings were overgrown with strange equipment she had never seen before. Supposedly it was designed to heal her. As far as she knew, the bag of liquid pumping into her arm was poison, and she could do nothing about it except ‘trust them.’ It was a shame the medical crew on these ships had few Healing sigmas. Their presence in her recovery would put a lot more at ease.

“I certainly don’t have any pull with the Technocracy itself, much less their diplomatic representatives here. The top officials were content with the way things worked before as of yesterday. Nevertheless, I planned to beg for their assistance until I starved.”

Hera frowned with disbelief. “And they conformed to sympathy?”

“Not exactly. You see, we were the problem, Hera. The Technocracy was growing hostile towards Rex and his organization ever since a particular warehouse exploded and they discovered a bunch of their stolen guns.”

Hera’s jaw dropped, although she snapped it back up when leaving it hanging proved painful.

“As clients, regardless of whether or not they knew about our involvement, our actions are considered Rex’s responsibility in their book. That’s why they haven’t arrested Zeta, you and I for the warehouse, although I caution you not to tell them any stories. They weren’t happy. They wanted him gone. They expected a fight, so they called in reinforcements from the Western Shelf.”

“Some intuition on their part. Although I doubt even the Technocracy expected this much destruction.”

Igel shrugged. “I was only gone because I offered to sell out to them and expose all elements of Rex’s organization I had access to. We were working on a deal in the port authority when everything went to shit. Regardless, now that they’ve seen the carnage, the Technocracy is more than willing to bring the city under control, for better or worse. I heard they’re on a manhunt for the mayor who’s been vacationing for a year.”

“Serves him right for abandoning this place,” Hera grumbled. She turned over. Zeta asleep and gargling saliva. Disgusting. At least the medics managed to heal his jaw. Once again, I’m astounded by the medicine they have available aboard here.

Igel smiled as he told his story, but a part of him seemed permanently unrelieved. “It won’t bring Berto back, but maybe his pointless death can be made into a martyr for this city’s future health. The world owes him that, even it claims it owes nothing.”

Berto. That reminded Hera. She opened her Pocket Inventory and pulled out a full Natural Padding set that she retrieved from Rex.

“Igel, I want you to have these,” she said.

“Is that from the Lion? I want nothing to do with him.”

“Technically, most of these are from Berto. He stole them off his grave.”

Igel clenched his fist in contempt. She thought he was going to start throwing punches at everything and anything, but the rage passed. “That bastard. Although, with all that has happened, I’m not surprised.”

Hera urged for Igel to take the sigmas. “Purify them, Igel. When we met Zeta, he said no man can be the strongest sword and shield. Prove otherwise.”

He chuckled. “Proving that smug idiot wrong would be pretty satisfying, wouldn’t it?” He frowned. “Hera, you sound dismissive. Why are you giving these to me as if they are a parting gift?”

“I don’t quite know,” she said. “I…need some time to think, but I know for a fact that you want to stay in Aspic, right?”

“Do you not?”

Zeta snagged their attention with a loud snore. Dumbass.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

It was boring, sitting there for hours with nothing to do and a constant stream of nurses wandering in and out, asking mundane questions like How are you feeling? Or Can you feel anything when I touch here? They’d say, jamming her leg. She’d poke them with Neural Fighter if they didn’t always stay out of reach. Assholes.

When no one bothered her, the halls bustled with the loud stampede of crewmen running across the ship. Apparently, reconstruction was an ardent effort, even with all the resources the Technocracy was pulling in from nearby towns to assist. Hera wished she could see the process, but she was stuck below deck in the dark.

Zeta had still not woken up. A few hours without his voice was pleasant, but now she really needed someone to talk to. Besides, his continuous snoring grated her ears. She wondered if this was intentional. If it was, she had been practicing some new Neural Fighter techniques. A stationary, unguarded, living target was a perfect test for them.

Glass crashed to the floor, and Hera scrambled to sit upright. The darkness obscured a clear view of the cause, but she saw a figure slip into the far room.

“Hey! Who the hell are you!” she had no ranged attacks, so she grabbed the nearest blunt object. A vase on the nightstand.

He came closer. Hera broke into a cold sweat when she saw him.

“I thought you would be sleeping soundly,” said Terrent Gust, the former Curved Storm. “Guess I was wrong.”

“Oh, this is just like you, Terrent. Kill a girl while she’s hospitalized.” She gestured to Zeta, unstirred by the commotion. “You want revenge?”

“How petty, Harpy. It’s rude that you would assume that. Revenge? After Rex lost?”

“I’m not the Harpy! Not anymore. And what reason do you have for me not to assume the worst?”

Terrent sighed. “Hera, I came to congratulate you.”

She raised a perplexed eyebrow. “What?”

“You win. You are your pet swordsman. You win. Look at me, no scythe. Read me, no sigmas. You win.”

She read his score and inventory. He sat at a flat zero and did not hide a single sigma in that tiny rift in space. “Your point? Why are you here?”

He took a seat in the visitor’s chair. “I don’t deserve to live, I think you and I agree on that. But Zeta over there, he didn’t agree. He offered me life, even after everything.”

“Don’t think much of it. He’s stupid.”

“Maybe, but maybe not,” Terrent said. “There was a bit of genius on his part. In duels, it’s common for a man to lose one sigma if he loses the duel. Zeta forced me to hand them all over.

“I have the Divinity. If I wanted to go back and refill my score with new sigma, I can, but- He took something more significant than that, my motivation to pursue them. Even with the Ora Charms of today, the thrill has vanished. Climbing the ladders of the Sigma World from the first rung is unappealing in a society that despises underdogs. To become the Curved Storm, I had to suffer and sacrifice my integrity, my character, until I became a shell of a human being. I don’t want to go through it again. I’m done.

“Zeta there, he has the right idea, even if it’s going to smack him in the face more than a few times in the future. If he lives, mercy will come to his aid when he needs it most. He’ll earn it, and he deserves it.”

“Cut to the damn chase, Terrent!” Hera demanded.

He laughed. “You sound like Marc. Look, Balder Rex had to die, you all knew that, but there was always a point where his fate could have changed, and Zeta insured that. Crue could have lived as well, but the idiot tried to blow up a building with his dying breath. Me? I’ll enjoy my second chance. It’s not something any judge in this world would have granted me.”

“So what? Do you want to thank him? Tell him yourself. I don’t think I can forgive you.”

Terrent shook his head. “He’s sleeping, darling. If you have respect for what he stands for, be a messenger for the times when he is vulnerable.”

Terrent stood to leave, but Hera spoke up. “So what are you going to do then? I’m assuming you’re leaving Aspic.”

“Anywhere where sigmas don’t exist. Rare as those places may be. Maybe I’ll farm? Nah, fishing is a better hobby. I’ll stay on Axle Island, away from the world’s troubles.”

“Whatever. Don’t pollute our homeland with your presence.”

He raised an eyebrow as he snuck out of the room. “Our homeland? I have to ask, do you mean Aspic? Or the Kapitaal?”

Her eyes burst open. Terrent couldn’t be talking about-- How the hell did he know!

Terrent smirked but said nothing of it. “Goodbye, Hera.”

She wished she could punch him, but the worthlessness of such an act occurred to her. Strangely, the self-absorbed aura that Terrent used to exude had committed suicide. The man behaved as if he attended a military academy during the past day. Maybe he did.

Her fist scratched at her palms. Why did he get a chance to reform? Where was the justice in that!

She lay her head against the pillow. For all his talk, only one thing Terrent said stood out to her. One question.

Do you have any respect for what he stands for?

Waterski - Liquid, Physical: Allows the user to glide across a liquid surface with enhanced speed. (323).

(A) Throw hands behind back while standing on a shallow liquid surface. If trying to use Waterski in a deeper liquid, jump in and throw hands behind back before body is submerged. User will slide across the liquid as if propelled by an unknown force. It is recommended to try and remain still while moving so as not to accidentally disrupt Waterski. Waterski will only continue while user’s feet are in contact with any mild liquid. Friction will quickly apply otherwise.