It took half an hour—thirty long, painful minutes—for some measure of calm to return to the Caravel.
Vienna had endured worse cleanup duties during her grunt years. Compared to redigging trenches and clearing sewers, collecting bodies and dousing fires was mundane work—at least when a sobbing Light Clan heiress wasn’t part of the equation.
Ten minutes in, Vienna regretted saving her life. Twenty minutes of constant crying later, a fist came down on Mimio’s skull as the Magister chose corporal punishment.
Elder Green winced as several more hits landed. He knew he should feel grateful—Vienna had saved their lives—but seeing his clan’s young mistress reduced to drink service after her first taste of violence felt wrong.
Green tried salvaging the situation for his house’s sake. “We do have Adept Warriors.”
“Suffering builds character,” Vienna brushed his concern aside. Her voice carried the iron edge that explained why Chuck Silver refused to let her adopt a kitten, much less raise a kid. She growled at the wincing girl. “She’s supposed to be the Landia heiress. How is she so spineless?”
“All her maids just died.”
Vienna remained unimpressed by Green’s defense. She emitted a baleful aura that contrasted with the silk-covered sofa and pinkish luxuries surrounding them. The exotic furniture felt therapeutic to lean on, but did nothing for her migraine.
“Well, that’s sad,” she said dryly. “I once had a unit who all died too. I still completed the mission alone with a fever.”
“She’s still a child.”
“I was fifteen back then.”
Green wanted to smile but couldn’t keep his mouth straight. Vienna scared him to the bone.
The young heiress returned with a tray, trembling like a scared hamster serving tea to a tiger.
Vienna took the wooden cup and drank. “This tastes like urine.” She gave the cup back to the girl. “Do it again, but I want you to taste it first. We’ll keep doing this until I find the result satisfactory.”
Green watched the young girl bite back a sob as she walked away dejected. His mind couldn’t help but compare her to Thessa. It wasn’t something the elder did often—wanting to live up to his position as fair and impartial family member—but this terrifying human’s presence forced him to confront an uncomfortable reality. Maybe the various parties, fancy dresses, and etiquette classes wouldn’t help much when facing a monster like Vienna.
He couldn’t help but wonder how Thessa managed it. Both sisters shared the same face and build, but the Fae could tell this hyperspeed killing machine preferred the older sister.
“I still believe you should leave her alone.”
“And you should be thanking me for intervention on your inept excuse of an heir. I heard what she did to her older sister. Don’t try to defend her too much.”
Green felt his spine run cold. He forced back a sob himself.
“Anyway,” the Magister spoke, cutting Green off mid-regret. “What did you do to get attacked by the Inferno?”
“N-Nothing,” the elder stammered. “They suddenly boarded the ship out of nowhere and killed our men.”
Hearing this, she closed her eyes in concentration. “Do you have political enemies?”
Green’s mouth started flapping syllables, but no words of value emerged.
“I see,” concluded the Magister, who had never expected a helpful avenue from there in the first place. “Too many enemies to narrow down.” She eyed Mimio in the corner, still trying and failing to make adequate tea. “You’re mixing salt with sugar, dimwit.”
“I’m sorry! Please don’t kill me!”
Vienna’s attention then flowed back to the conversation. “Let’s change the avenue. We know whoever did this tried to frame Kondu.”
Green nodded. The dead pirates—now separated from their fallen crew in the hold—had been placed aboard Landia-5 by Caste Warriors carrying them in sacks. Everyone understood: someone planted evidence linking Kondu to the attack.
“We’ve also collected dozens of explosives clipped to our ship’s interior,” Green added. “I believe they planned to kill all of us here and detonate this Caravel had you and Thessa not arrived in time.” He paused. “Speaking of Thessa—”
Vienna didn’t let the question finish before cutting to the answer. “She’s back on our ship, receiving medical care at this very moment.”
What she told him was true but left out major context. The injury to Thessa’s spinal cord and respiratory system was lethal, forcing Artemis to perform the riskiest medical procedure of all: an Omic conversion using one of Wonderweiss’s supersoldier serums. The Ambassador should be able to perform the process with the mutagen sample they had packed from Omicron, courtesy of Wonderweiss’s foresight.
Part of her wanted to tell Green the full details, but the implications and survival rate of this maneuver would only trouble him; from her experience, keeping things on the need-to-know basis often made the troops sleep easier.
In Vienna’s opinion, the old man must have expected them to come under threat and arranged a method for quick recovery just in case—a method which happened to coincide with Project Guardian’s original objective. Thessa’s recent injury would even help it in a lucky coincidence.
A race change from Fae to Omic had been done before. Sahrin and Shayara stood as its proof of concept. But observing Thessa’s transformation, under full observation of Artemis, would have perfected the process even further. This coincidence seemed deliberately good—too good—in Wonderweiss’s favor.
Vienna sighed. Cloak and dagger wasn’t her preferred subject. She didn’t even know how Wonderweiss managed to predict all of this, or whether he just got lucky. She frowned at that sudden thought: maybe he didn’t actually know about subterfuge and backstabbing. The old man, through bizarre circumstances, had survived similar situations many times, and somehow everything worked out. Either because conspirators lost support due to the old man’s new tech, or his would-be assassins were eliminated by other interested parties.
Yeah, she admitted silently, maybe that previous owner of his John Williams original score truly did die by a badly prepared fugu in the black market.
“Okay.” She abandoned her brief introspection and returned to unraveling this mystery, this time by approaching it in reverse. “What would happen if the assassination succeeded?”
“Err,” the elder lacked the ability to answer her question, but fortunately someone else in the room could.
“M-May I say something?” asked the tearful Mimio, wiping her mouth from what had to be the fifth cup of horrendously brewed tea.
Vienna stared at the girl, then back at Green for clarification.
“Politics and such are Mimio’s hobby,” the elder quickly explained, “so I think she’s best suited to answer your query.”
Vienna studied the girl more carefully. The chick, cowering by the Fae Garden-made teapot, appeared more like a recruit who would have a heart attack before the first volley. Those two shaking legs could never carry anyone far, but experience had taught her that even the most useless rodent had at least one talent.
“Fine, let’s entertain this. What do you think would happen?”
“Camelot is already monitoring Kondu like a den of criminals. Omicron is quickly joining that list after Thessa’s screw—”
Vienna impatiently cracked her fingers, and Mimio hastily got to the point.
“If I, or the elder, died during the attempt and Kondu got blamed, the entire Landia family would have to come down on the pirates like a hammer. Given Thessa and Omicron’s circumstances, and your affiliation with High Terraria, it wouldn’t take much for a state of emergency to be declared at the border,” Mimio squeaked. “If I were a mastermind, I’d position myself to seize emergency powers using defense against High Terraria as an excuse, then swallow all three border planets!”
Vienna stared at the girl, reassessing her.
“Did you just think of this takeover plot on the spot? Damn. Maybe it would have been better for everyone if I hadn’t gone out of my way to save you.”
“Please don’t kill me!”
Soon everything that had transpired in the Twisted Garden was relayed to Wonderweiss—or at least as quickly as “soon” could pass in a space where time had no rhyme or reason.
The result was not desirable.
Neptunia—consisting mainly of Bravo the sushi restaurant owner and a handful of eggheads—descended into hair-tearing panic at this sudden slip toward open conflict. Admittedly, the situation could have been worse. Vienna had saved them from societal meltdown by rescuing Mimio; singlehandedly shifting the crisis from “space fairy enraged” to “space fairy confused.”
In this murky situation, where predictability had sailed into the sunset, the Prime Magister devised a plan forward. The first step was simple: send Sistine to inform Erika to get ready for a new mission the moment she returned to the bay.
They had already relayed the information through their newly minted network. But after five grueling days of tempests, crab attacks, and flesh-eating insects, the logistician’s reply came back as a mixture of curses and sobbing. They let it pass. Most still felt guilty about asking more from someone who should have been enjoying twenty-four hours of solid sleep.
Fortunately, the other forty people on that ship still functioned—by virtue of not being the glue holding the ship together.
The expectation was high. This was more than being the first generation of artificially created Omics on their inaugural voyage. After getting ridicule by the storms and mock by sea monsters for five grueling days, the mission had become personal. If they, somehow, got lost after all they endured they could never live it down to themselves.
By hook or by crook, they would make it to Neptunia.
Even the most troubled students, namely Helena Christy, had dropped her datapad. She promptly decided any cipher hidden within the mundane but fantastical story could wait until her power nap. Meanwhile, Lemuel came to accept that the universe wanted to break his spine. The only person who seemed to enjoy this was Mary—for one reason only.
“Look at my new modification to this Particle Pulse rifle,” she cheered as the ship lurched and relentless waves listed their boat fifty degrees to the side. “I modded it to shoot sonic grenades.”
“That’s great, Mary!” Helena screeched. She maintained perfect balance, enduring pain and impact that would render normal humans into shambling bone piles. Soaked to the bone, she felt grateful for her inability to feel cold.
For what had to be the twentieth time that week, something cut through the pattering rain. From starboard emerged a body resembling a flat, prehensile chain attached to mandibles.
Helena cursed and opened fire at the Omicron Sea Centipede, releasing a bolt of heated particles that exploded like a grenade. Ten more pulse rifles joined her, trying to send the monster back to hell. Plasma rounds glanced off chitin, but many more drew blood.
As Helena hammered the trigger, she reviewed her recent close calls. The time she rammed a High Terraria destroyer and banished that behemoth into dead space with a modified Rift Compass still took first place. But the giant swordfish that speared their hull a few days ago had quickly claimed second.
She shuddered. That was the first time she’d fought a monster underwater with no weapons—made worse by Mary’s improvised pump nearly blowing their ship apart while trying to save it. She could still hear the ticking in her dreams
Erika soon arrived to join them, kicking open the hatch from the hold and rolling onto the flooded deck above, her Siren Eagle Compact aimed at starboard. She wore the same grim expression as when she’d bashed that nightmarish swordfish from days ago with her waterlogged rifle and killed it by driving the broken barrel through its eye.
Lemuel Swift followed Erika out of the hatch, barking commands as more Omics emerged from below: “Everyone brace yourselves! Response team, get the high ground. Second team, check the hull for damage—”
Lemuel didn’t finish his order when an enraged, pain-ridden sea insect dove toward the group to snatch some meat.
Worthy of their title as Omicron’s Prime Species, not a single Omic fell for the lunge. Everyone rolled clear as the barreling beast scarred the vessel with another gash in the wood.
Helena watched its segmented body and skittering legs run through the planks like chainsaw teeth, then opened fire.
Meanwhile, Lemuel and Erika communicated their plan through a single glance. They vaulted over the moving body and landed together on the other side for a clear shot at the Sea Centipede’s unarmored belly. Both lifted their weapons and severed the beast in half with synchronized blasts of sound waves and particle pulses.
The centipede shrieked louder than the roar of storm and thunder. But in Helena’s opinion, its dying scream wasn’t as bad as its oily blood.
It was Mary who finished the battle. She took aim with her new weapon and silenced the creature with a sonic grenade, obliterating its tenacious upper half as the bottom slunk back into the sea.
Helena turned to the shaking girl and gave her a thumbs-up. “Great shot, Mary.”
“T-Thanks,” she said, setting down her weapon and nursing it like a baby. “Is this over now?”
As if answering her question, the ceaseless rain that had haunted them since day three suddenly lightened—to every Omic’s pleasant surprise. The sun beat down, and in the distance a shore of ice slowly emerged into view.
“It is over,” Erika confirmed.
Helena wasn’t buying it. “Are you sure? The last time—”
Answering her incomplete question was an island-sized humpback whale native to Omicron, emerging beside them with a friendly waterspout. The conspiracy theorist could swear the creature winked before diving back beneath the newly created rainbow.
Helena couldn’t believe it. “Did that thing just congratulate us?”
“Yes, the damn planet can be nice sometimes,” Erika answered, sliding into a sitting position on the stern. “We’re likely within Neptunia’s rescue range now.” She groaned; her suffering had only begun. “You guys can go look around. My teams can guide you.” She spoke without caring who listened—the information she’d received had moved up her internal priority ladder and sank its teeth into her like a cobra. “According to the plan, they should be throwing you a party.”
Mary, sensing the gloomy mood, leaned closer to the orange-haired Omic on the verge of curling into fetal position. “What about you, Erika? Are you joining us?” She asked, praying for a yes. She liked her new mentor, and the woman needed a cooler of citrus soda by every metric.
Unfortunately, the young Omic was about to be disappointed.
“No,” Erika answered, staring at the open sky with pupils dead inside. “I have to go strangle whoever just told me to go to Kondu.”