Chapter 13 - What All Humans Want

Power. I learned from Ame that all humans want power. I didn’t have a reason to not believe it, so I did. But power wasn’t the only thing. I couldn’t tell what the others were. That's another thing added to my list of what I want to know. Now that I had all this, my time stretched out far in front of me. I could do all of this now that I was alive. It was rather nice.

“Nell, wake up!”

Huh?

“Wake up Nell!”

A voice resonated throughout my head. It was the God of Time. It was weird to hear her speak to me through my brain and not through my internal world.

“Somebody is here. Everybody is asleep. If you don't act quick, your companions in Eternal Flame will die. I can’t intervene. I warned you about this yesterday.”

What? Die? Before I could even think, I shot out of the tent and used all my senses to the highest degree I could. Where were they? Somebody was here? How did they know where we were? What was their goal?

While thinking, I felt the density of the air change near my leg. Without a second thought, my body shot upwards and avoided the air around my ankle imploding and crushing it. They were nearby. It was wind magic, so there was a high likelihood that it was a member of the army. It seemed to have a high control over wind magic to be able to use it at that range. But, I’ve fought wind magic users more than any other type. Keeping my distance would only harm me because I couldn’t counter, and I couldn’t find its location. Raw magical energy would be hard to control, so I couldn’t use it to sense its location yet.

My options were being limited by the second. There wasn’t a single way for me to gain the advantage here.

I would be forced to defend. I could’ve waited for it to strike, and then counter, but there was no guarantee that it would go after me instead of Ame. I would have to weigh my options.

I dashed in front of Ame’s tent, and stood there while waiting. My arms were shaking, but I couldn’t freeze yet. As much as my body wanted to stop working, I was the only person who could do this. I needed to be diligent. I used to think that effort would cause disappointment, and yet the opposite is true. If I didn’t act here, I’d be more than disappointed.

Think. Think. Think. Where are they?

SLASH!

I heard howling towards the east, along with a woman screaming. The pressure that was around me had dissipated. The wind she used to sense my movements from afar had been released, so that had to be her. This was the only chance I would have.

I sprinted faster than I ever had in my life. I propelled my legs with little enough RME so I could control it, but it wasn’t enough to make me go as fast as I needed to go.

Run faster, Nell. Go. You can’t let this opportunity slip by, just as you didn’t let Ame slip by. Run. Run.

As I blitzed through the trees, I spotted Little Man standing there, wounded, fighting a woman. She had silver hair, darker than Sy’s. Little Man was injured, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t fix.

The main problem was the commander. It was too dark to see her number. If she was able to be that powerful from such a distance, I couldn’t imagine how strong she would be from close range. But this was the best way for me to fight.

With everybody so far away, nobody could be hurt.

Even if I died here, everybody could live just as happily as ever. That was what I needed to protect. This was the status quo that I loved so much.

I couldn’t see anything, so I needed to use my other senses to fight. It was a rather terrifying wake up call, considering I was relying on my sight too much. I had to use magic.

However, if I used RME as I did in the fight against Sy, I would get blown up, because there was no guarantee that she would call the fight off.

Was that really a bad thing though? Of course, the preferred outcome was winning, but if we both died then she couldn’t attack everybody.

As I heard her start to move, I had no time to think any harder.

I had to put up the cloud of RME, so I did.

As Ame said, every human wants power. I didn’t know any other things that everybody wanted. But, I found another one. It was such an obvious one too.

Every human wanted to live, unless something caused them not to. While putting up the cloud, I had simply thought I was a defect. An error on my creators' part when it attempted to create a human.

And, a millisecond later, it was already too late. With the commander in my sight, inches away from me and a stern look on her face, my humanity kicked in. I was afraid to die. My face was probably showing it too. However, If it would save Ame and the others, this was a fear I was willing to endure. My desires didn’t matter in the face of an explosion.

A sharp pain arose in my head.

“Nell!”

The God of Time yelled inside my head as the cloud of RME disappeared, and I was punched in the stomach and shot into a tree. Little Man was yelping in the corner.

I was alive.

“Nell! Don’t do that again. Your life is just as important as theirs. You can’t calculate the value of life for others, so don’t even try to do it for yourself. We’re observing you. That’s all you need.”

This would be convincing coming from somebody else, and yet I felt no connection to this logic. It didn’t even sink into my brain.

I was alive, and I could keep fighting. So that’s what I did.

“Fine. If you aren’t going to listen to me, I’ll still help. It doesn’t matter.”

My eyes started to burn. I forced them open, and I could see. RME was embedded into my corneas as the entire area lit up as if little fireflies were floating around around every object, dispelling the darkness of space. When I looked closely, they weren’t fireflies.

They looked more like stars.

One star stood out from the rest, on her ankle. It lit up the area I was the most curious about, and displayed the number 94.

My fear of death slowly dissipated as a smile grew on my face. Ninety-four wasn’t that high. It was winnable.

Although it would be difficult to control the RME shot I was planning on using, I had the advantage due to being able to see. My aim would be worse, but her dodging would be as well. If she tried to block it with magic, I could either make it explode on contact or break through it if it’s strong enough. This was my best chance at winning.

I held out my hand. If I used just my finger, my arm wouldn’t be able to support what I was about to use. Not too much to kill me, but enough to do damage. Just slightly less than the one I used against the 97th commander. I didn’t want to take another life if I wasn’t forced to, after all. It’s a guilt that was rather hard to handle as I was.

The arm grew heavy as the force of the RME spread throughout my palm into a ball.

I had no other options at that moment besides to shoot it out.

It shredded all the wind in its path as it shot directly at her. As it was an inch away from her stomach, I noticed a light near her other ankle. It was somewhat of a trampoline looking contraption made entirely of wind magic. As it was about to hit her, the middle went down along with her foot, as she was instantly shot up into the sky.

She stood there, atop the trees in the forest, floating in the sky with the moon behind her. My attack had missed. My chance was lost. But it wasn’t over. I still had more energy. I put out my hand again, and the last drop of energy poured out before fizzling out and seeping into the soil. It was barely anything. My water magic wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t do anything.

With any of the hope I had once gained from the fight gone, I fell and stared at the stars my vision had created. My ball of raw magical energy had hit the stars, and instead of breaking it, it broke.

It split into two pieces and shot to the other star. The star besides it split that piece into two pieces. It shot to the next one and split again, as the amount of RME had doubled yet again. Eventually there were over 3000 tiny dots of RME floating around, continuously bouncing. I couldn’t do anything with it. It was a beautiful sight, and all it did was make me feel slightly warmer. I loved the stars a lot. When I had been released from the heart, the stars were the first I watched.

They were the things that I loved watching me. Hundreds of them were there, on the same wavelength as me. I could view them as equals.

I looked up at the commander as the stars were spread behind her, watching me as expected. But those weren’t the only stars there. The small ones that had been created by my vision were there as well, duplicating the RME as I thought.

Maybe it wasn’t over. She was midair, so she had nowhere to run.

I unconsciously smiled. Despite another life going to be lost, I was happy. It was a disgusting thought yet it was nothing I could control.

With a swift hand movement, the thousands of invisible RME particles surrounding her scattered the air and hit her. Leg, ear, arm, heart, neck. Every part of her body was shot hundreds of times, until I could no longer see what she used to look like despite my vision.

She died within moments.

I fell back and my RME vision dissipated and all the energy went back into my body. The floating corpse fell to the ground as a card fell on my head. It had her identity on it, along with a set of numbers and a chip. I put it in my pocket and began to walk back.

There was nothing I could think about besides the death, and yet I pushed it away from my mind. I would rather think about nothing than what had just happened.

Little Man brushed her head against my torso as I jumped on her back and rode to the camp while healing her.

As I had nothing better to do, I pulled out the identification card from my pocket and began to read the text on the back.

“Amelia Beckwith. Sex: Female. Age: 41.”

Knowing more about her only made me hurt worse. I didn’t want to kill her. If I had just made her disappear from my life, if the circumstances were different, then the same effect would have happened without me having to hold this guilt. And yet there was nothing I could do. My only choice was to carry this burden as long as I lived.

There was no comfort in this world besides Eternal Flame. That’s what I realized, and that's what I wished to disprove. The stars had so much to them that I didn’t know about. This world was the same, and yet only one of those two comforted me.

But I was fine as it was, for the status quo was as close to what I wanted as I had ever reached.