Project Seraphina [LitRPG, Magitech, GL] -
2.65 Against the Cultists III
It’s barely a minute before we’re spotted. Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long, after the grand entrance we made for ourselves. A couple of weaker cultists, I have to assume. One male, one female, both plain looking, with light brown hair and hazel eyes. Neither of them look older than about twenty-five, though both already carry the scars of body and mind alike.
It’s easy to see how they’d end up in a group like this. Plenty of dispossessed people here and in pretty much every other city. People affected by drugs, who had run-ins with the legal system, who didn’t thrive in school, who couldn’t find a job and a place to live and a group of friends and family they could rely on. Some of them turn to crime or other similarly unsavory ways to earn their daily bread. And some of them find solace and community within cults just like this one.
Neither of the two has the eyes of a murderer, nor the gleeful grin of madmen reveling in spreading mischief and chaos for their own sake. Were it not for circumstances beyond any of our control, I doubt they’d be our enemies. But in the here and now, rather than the hypothetical I’d imagined for a split-second, they are. And they realize it as well.
Each draws their weapon, though neither has a bonded companion as I would have expected. The woman carries a broadsword as thick as my thigh, hoisting it with ease belying her small stature. And the taller man pulls out a sapphire-tipped wand. Almost certainly embedded with glyphs to augment his Ice- or Water-element attacks.
Chloe looks nervous, no doubt concerned that we’re going to be fighting against people. I’m concerned too. It’s one thing to fight monsters. I’m trained and experienced in that. It’s another to fight someone like the bitch back at the capitol. She was actively threatening the lives of countless innocent civilians. Maybe not truly innocent in the case of the actual politicians, but the point remains. But it’s something else to go into a compound and start killing people who aren’t actively murdering innocents.
Kristil doesn’t seem to care about such moral quandaries. Her bloodlust, previously suppressed, boils over as electricity crackles all around her. Part of me wants to tell her to stop and at least try to have a pleasant conversation. It hurts more than I care to admit as I feel relief washing over me. Relief that that fighting has started, a clash of ice and lightning, and I wasn’t the instigator.
It doesn’t absolve me. But it does steel me. We came here with a purpose. If we succeed, people will die. But if we fail, more people will die. Having power means having the responsibility to make these sorts of ugly decisions. I don’t like it. It’d be no understatement to say that I actively hate it. But I promised Chloe that I would protect her. Come hell, high water, or anything in-between. And she wants to be here, stopping these cultists before they can cause more harm.
I raise my left hand and switch it from grasping mode to cannon mode. The shift in my arm, the joints and metal columns shifting into proper arrangements, once felt so distant. But now, thanks to [Cybernetic Body], it feels instinctual, like it’s always been a part of my body that I can modify with just a thought. And it feels so wonderful and fulfilling to change myself like that.
But I set the high of my minor transformation aside. This is ugly business. The least I can do is treat it with the gravity and dignity that it deserves. I fire an [Ether Bullet Barrage] toward the woman sprinting toward us, her weapons in hand. Each attack lands home, damaging and staggering her but failing to drop her to the ground.
It’s gruesome work. Especially because I can hear each scream, from the outflux of air from her lungs to the rhythmic, discordant vibrations in her vocal cords all the way to her tongue and lips making those sounds of pain and suffering. It affects Chloe as much as it does the woman before us. How I wish we didn’t have to fight, how we should be saving one another and banding together, not slaughtering one another. Is there truly no other way?
She stumbles to the ground after seventeen shots. Her breathing is short and shallow, accompanied by whimpers of pain. She doesn’t appear to be on death’s door, just yet, but her injuries are slowly catching up to her. For the first time, I truly don’t know what to do. I wish I could just tie her up, ask Chloe to stabilize her, and leave her until after the battle concludes. But I might be damning someone else, should she escape and rejoin the fray.
Over on the other side of the battle, Kristil is fighting with relentless ferocity. She’s long resolved to avenge her cousin, the moral calculus I struggle with not even a passing concern for her. She sees only enemies, smells only blood, and thirsts for vengeance alone. If I am an angel of guiding light, she is the harbinger of wrath, the herald of the unrelenting storm.
Her attacks are fierce and numerous, her [Lightning Reflexes] catapulting her physical prowess yet further. And it seems that some combination of her higher level and [Mind], her practice with the Skill, and her unflinching resolve has triggered an evolution in the Skill, allowing her to cloak her own body in violet lightning with each blow. Between her will expanding, her levels, and the accessory I made for her, it’s not long before she’s dominated and then subjugated the Ice wizard.
She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t look to us for our opinion, and she surely doesn’t deign to offer any mercy but the mercy of a quick death. Another life snuffed out before I can try to talk her out of it.
“What are you doing?” the woman before me asks. “Are you going to finish me off, or are you just going to leave me here for the vermin?”
“Why?” I ask. “Why fight? Why join this cult?”
She laughs, her haughty chuckles interrupted by her coughing and grimaces of pain. “You wouldn’t understand what it’s like, having nothing, losing everything to this damn System.”
“I do,” I say. “My mother was killed by thieves or other petty criminals the day the System arrived. My father is missing, and I have to presume dead. Chloe is about all I have left.”
“Well, your friend just took my brother from me. So, quit with the false sympathy. I can’t stand it. Just finish me off already and be on your God-damned way.”
“Why?” I ask.
“This is the state of the world we live in. We both understood it when we saw our parents’ bloodied, mutilated corpses.” She grimaces, her voice now barely more than a whisper, though I can make out her words as easily as if she were a drill sergeant screaming in my face. “Live and fight to become strong, cower and plead at the feet of the strong, or stick your head in the sand and be powerless when the end comes. We chose to become strong.”
“You chose to cower,” Kristil says. “Look at you. You claim that you became strong, but you stayed weak. You lost to three girls, two of whom aren’t even a month out of high school. If you wanted to become strong, you could have banded together with us. Or if not our group, with another. You know, good people who decided that we weren’t going to abide by the sort of crooks that you decided to join.”
“Save me the righteous monologue, you sanctimonious bitch. I lost, you won. Finish me off already.”
“No,” I say.
“Can’t even have the dignity of a proper death.” She spits. “Screw you too!”
She reaches over to her broadsword. She’s no threat to any of us; her health is probably in the low double digits and she can barely move. Hell, she’s probably already dying, and I’m not sure if Chloe can save her at this point. If she’s so eager to die that she’s willing to do the deed herself, I’m not sure we have the right to stop her.
But Chloe does regardless. She places her hand on the woman’s chest and chants a few words, channeling a weak healing spell. The woman’s wounds don’t fully close, but she stops bleeding out and her breathing becomes a bit softer.
“No,” Chloe says with a resoluteness equal to that Kristil showed while fighting. “That’s not the way it ought to be. “I’ve seen enough death already. We don’t need to add to it.”
I shake my head, as we’ve already spent more time than we should’ve. “If you still want to take the easy way out like a coward, we’re not going to be able to stop you. But if you truly mean to get stronger and try to change this world, then here’s your opportunity.”
She growls at us, giving us the universal gesture of disdainful contempt as we make our way out of the room. I don’t know what path is just, even now as we make our way out of the hangar and to the next one. The System is cruel, and it wants us to fight. But I still think we should be training in dungeons and working to overcome the obstacles together, rather than fighting and trying to impose the archaic, barbaric principle of might making right.
No System notifications. I guess Kristil did all the work against the man, and we never killed the woman. Maybe I’m being naive, not killing, depriving myself of Experience in the process. I’m sure that driving force would have been more than enough of a reason for plenty of others in my shoes to end her life without a second thought. But it’s not who I want to be. Killing in the defense of the self, or in the immediate defense of another is one thing.
But this is getting dangerously close to killing out of convenience, and it doesn’t sit right with me. At the same time, not taking action when I could save lives is just as reprehensible. As clear a case of damned if I do and damned if I don’t as I’ve ever seen.
“Sera,” Kristil says as we enter the next hangar and look around. “This isn’t a time for hesitation. It’s not a time for second-guessing yourself, false pity, or sanctimony. Every second we hesitate is another one of our friends who goes down. If we’re lucky, they’ll just be injured and your little girlfriend can patch them up. But what if they’re not lucky, Sera? Are you going to let your little bleeding heart lead you right into the deaths of your comrades, all so you can feel better?”
“Kristil, that’s–” Chloe interjects, but Kristil cuts her off.
“You were there, Chloe,” Kristil says. “When my cousin passed. When my cousin was killed. These assholes might be human, but they don’t let anything like moral scruples slow them down. They sure as hell didn’t hesitate when they were killing her.”
“But–” I stammer.
“I get where you’re coming from, Sera. I really do.”
“Kristil…” Chloe says.
“When I saw Caroline’s mauled body, I resolved myself. I wasn’t going to let that happen to anyone else. And right now, the three of us have a chance to save lives. If you want to dick and dither around, I can’t stop you. But I’m going on ahead. I’m going to stop these assholes once and for all, before they can kill anyone else.”
We rush toward a small office area sectioned off from the main part of the hangar. Out in the distance, I can already see and hear the battle raging. People on both sides are fighting. And just as Kristil said a moment ago, people are falling. Whether or not we do anything, people will die. All I can do at this point is try to tip the balance in favor of the people who aren’t actively trying to destroy the lives of the people of Red Clay City.
But my resolve falters when the office door opens, revealing the one person I never in a million years would have expected.
“F– Father?” I mutter.
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