[Can’t Opt Out]

Leerin rolled her eyes as a chorus of curses exploded out of the massive group she’d been dragged into actively being a part of, their haphazard form converging on the point where the trio should have been. Should, but weren’t. Shocking, she knew.

“I thought your fancy skill told you they were here!” one of her cousins hissed. Annoyingly, despite being nearly four decades younger, Callum was taller than her. He hadn’t been the last time they’d seen one another, several months previous, but one growth spurt later, and he—and nearly half of her other cousins—all but towered over her. A few did tower. It was highly aggravating.

“No,” she said, speaking slowly because if Callum was going to put a whine into his voice, she was going to talk to him like he was a child. “I said that {Beholden Recon} had indicated they might be here, but given they had at least one Free Colonier with them, I couldn’t be sure.”

Free Coloniers and their core abilities fucked up the results of so many skills, especially farsight skills like {Beholden Recon}. It didn’t even matter that it was one of the more powerful farsight skills, designed to track the monsters of war. Those monsters had been challenging to track, their biology never consistent between species—sometimes not even consistent between beings that seemed to be the same species! Sometimes they had aetherstores, sometimes things closer to cores, sometimes things that weren’t either. {Beholden Recon} could look for all of those things, and were they out in the open, it probably would work against a Free Colonier. Not so much within a raid.

No, within a raid, she could only look for pure energy. Why? Honestly, she didn’t know. Presumably, it was for privacy. Looking at another person’s core was considered a bit rude, while peaking at aetherstores was tantamount to asking how powerful the person was—aetherstores were considered to directly correlate with a person’s D-Levels, as well as how they would fare in battle, although Leerin knew full well that some of the most powerful skill actually used very little aether from either the user or the aethernet.

Unfortunately, some Free Coloniers could suppress their energy so much that {Beholden Recon} was useless. On top of the fact that whatever was causing phantom dots on the map was probably created by the Free Colonier of the trio, and therefore pure energy. Yeah, it didn’t really surprise her that {Beholden Recon} had failed, but a number of her cousins had whined and demanded she use it. Served them right that they’d ended up following a ghost.

“So, where are they?” another member of the group asked, glaring at her like they blamed her too. Asshole. She’d been upfront that her skill might very well fail. They’d still demanded she use it.

Around her, the group began to argue about where the trio had ended up. Several of her cousins were for abandoning their search in favour of attempting to get through the hero blocking the entrance to the next level. Several more were demanding they continue to search for the trio—one of them even stomped their foot, and they weren’t even her youngest cousin! Ideas were offered up on how to find them, ranging from splitting up to trying another farsight skill—Leerin, who was the only one capable of using any farsight skills, as far as she knew, really didn’t want to try using {Into the Frying Pan} on a moving vessel. A few of the random heroes who had joined this disaster offered up their own opinions, but Leerin couldn’t really be bothered to listen.

Being part of this group—this entire raid—was turning into a massive pain in the—

“You are looking for me?” a soft, accented voice asked—a too close voice.

Leerin swirled around, her neck craning to meet the eyes of the young man standing only a few feet behind her. No, not man—a synat.

The trio had a fucking synat with them? Since when did anyone from Nur’tha, save Wyren, participate in real-world raids? They were rare even in virtual ones!

“You!” the mass behind her yelled, a cacophony of voices overlaying each other, so loud that even her attention briefly drifted from the syn—she thought they were a syn, but she was no expert on synat braids—to them. Not the syn—they only had eyes for her. That was both flattering—Leerin was aware that among the group, she was the most dangerous despite largely being a support, but also knew it very much wasn’t obvious—and concerning—she didn’t believe in the whole the synat can see the future thing, but she did know they had freakishly good reflects and instincts. To have attracted a syn’s attention was so not a good thing.

“Attack!” someone yelled, the aether rising and shattering behind her because everyone was a fucking idiot without enough real-world experience!

“Stop!” she yelled back, too late.

There were too many heroes, all bringing out their most powerful skills in an attempt to killshot the syn, pulling too much from the aether too close together. Practically the first thing they’d taught recruits during the war—and realistically, it had been a repetition of what they’d all learned when first getting their Censor’s installed—had been to not use too many skills too close together, or even in the same spot too often. Draining the aethernet was dangerous. Thankfully, it wasn’t common for such stupidity to cause serious tears in the aethernet or long-term damage, but it could only take so much before it stuttered, every skill in the area failing as its source sputtered out. It only lasted microseconds, but it was enough, and then aether would flow in from elsewhere, disrupting even the most stable of skills, only a few weird skills able to avoid such repercussions.

This was, unfortunately, exactly what the idiots behind her caused.

The lights of the level shuddered, flickering as their source of power briefly fell away, all the skills that had been gathering behind her screaming out of existence. It was rather amazing how much a little sputter could cause, especially considering they were on a moving vessel.

In theory, the fact that the ship was moving should have made using skills all but impossible, the aether moving too much for skills to connect where they should. One moment, a skill’s target was at one point in the aethernet, a moment later, another. In practice, it used to be like that, many millennia earlier. Then, there had been advancements for aerial warfare. Then, there had been the war and Halen and Emilia, tweaking stars knew what so that Censors and skills could manage to hit practically anything—could account for sparking while another skill was activating and the target was moving, and it was all happening on a fucking airship, and yet the skill would still connect.

That was all way above Leerin’s head, but she still knew this—the aether moving and yet backfiring on the idiots who couldn’t be bothered to do anything other than use brute force trying to kill the syn—was strange, some weird quirk of the aethernet that shouldn’t be possible, but was.

It was almost like the aethernet was choosing to sputter, despite the ship’s movement theoretically allowing them to not all pull from the same source; a purposefully glitching out where the skills were activating, just for shits and giggles, or because it was unhappy with the raids, but thinking that would open a whole host of issues that she definitely didn’t have the knowledge or understanding to think about.

Helix would. Maybe when he was out of his reality show nightmare—although from what she’d seen of it, the guy seemed to be having a mostly enjoyable time—she’d ask him. The meet up next week, perhaps. He’d show—he rarely didn’t, despite knowing his meeting up with them made them all the more conspicuous—and then she’d ask him about it. Of course, whatever he explained wouldn’t really be something she’d understand, but he’d be so happy to talk about it that the not understanding would be worth it.

“What happened?” Callum asked, and Leerin smacked her forehead, turning away from the syn to gape at her dumbass cousin.

“Are you fucking kidding me, you dumb fuck!?” she growled, ignoring the way the younger half of her cousins gasped dramatically. “You can’t use that many skills in the same space without having your Censors synced up so you don’t overlap so badly! There are dozens of you! Of course your skills interfered with each other!” Was she using her captain voice? She might have been using her captain voice.

Several of the assembled group stepped backwards. Not her cousins—those little shits were too used to her authoritative voice to do more than scowl at her, offended that she’d tried to make them feel smaller with a simple change in tone—but a few of the random heroes they’d managed to con into their group. A couple of the heroes—the ones she had pegged as being vets—straightened slightly, despite the fact that most of them hadn’t been stupid enough to try activating any skills in that disaster.

Not all of them, according to her Censor, which was diligently marking out what skill each of the idiots had attempted to use before the aether decided to halt all their progress, but enough that it was embarrassing. So much training, lost to a decade of peace and using skills with barely a thought in raids.

So. Fucking. Stupid.

“Leerin! Is this really the time to be lecturing us!” one of her cousins hissed, her eyes flicking between the syn and her, red spreading over their cheeks because they just had to add more terribleness to this situation. “He could attack you at any moment! And you turned away!”

Well, at least, despite Korrin’s apparent crush on the syn, she wasn’t just jumping ship and refusing to attack them? That was something? Maybe? Although, it might have made it worse?

According to some information she Censor supplied her with, flirting in the midst of raids generally involved doing your best to either one up the object of your affection—in the case of normal raids—or beat the shit out of them—in the case of PVP raids. What the fuck. That was somehow even worse than the stupid way soldiers had flirted, making a game of killing the most monsters with dates and nights-out on the line. They had been in the middle of war, and finding fun and amusement everywhere was important, regardless of what the brass had said, but this was real life! Peacetime! These kids should have been meeting in sweet, kind ways, not in fucking battlefields, regardless of the low stakes!

“They,” Leerin told her cousin, eyes glaring into the rest of the group to make sure they were listening as well, “are a synat from Nur’tha. Unless something massive has changed in the last decade, they aren’t going to attack us until we’re ready.” She glanced back at the syn, who was still watching her, amusement dancing in their eyes. “Is that still right? During the war, it was a pain to even get you guys to sneak attack the enemies on the front. I can’t imagine those guys attacking random heroes who are arguing about this”—she waved her hand at the group—“nonsense.”

The syn tilted their head, considering. “I will not attack you until you are ready, but that is simply because I am giving the others time and am not meant to attack you yet. If the synat ever raised us to have such… stringent morals on attacking unprepared opponents, it is no longer so.” Their golden eyes, so strangely light for a northerner, much like this skin and hair, flickered as they sent off a message. “I will ask.”

Leerin suppressed a groan. While she and the others had stayed in contact with a number of their Nur’tha teammates, the synat ones had thankfully seemed to have no interest in them following the war. They were just… weird, tiresome. Their entire demeanour screamed that they were different in a way they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain, simply because they knew Baalphorians wouldn’t believe or understand them.

Fuck. She should have gone off with—

“What are the other members of your group doing?” she asked through gritted teeth, eyes narrowing at the syn as her Censor spun out a message for Darrian. The annoying thing about this raid was that while the map gave a general indication of where people were—unless they were a synat, apparently, fucking with the system—it didn’t label anyone, not even teammates. During her running about through the level and then use of {Beholden Recon}, Leerin had lost track of her cousin. He hadn’t messaged since then, neither to tell her he’d been offed by someone or anything else.

A response didn’t come in from him, not immediately, not after several beats had passed, the Free Colonier continuing to softly watch her. Behind her, the group was growing increasingly restless, some combination of being unsure what to do, knowing they weren’t organized enough to attempt fighting the syn without risking another sputter of the aethernet, and their Censors supplying them with information about the synat. Most of them wouldn’t believe what they learned, of course, but that would just make things worse, especially if someone decided to— Thɪs chapter is updated by novel[f]ire.net

Someone snorted, derisive and cold, the eyes of the syn finally snapping away from her to whichever one of her dumbass cousins had just decided to offend the syn. Well, if the syn traumatized them, it would be deserved. For them. For their relatives and their increasing hatred of anyone different.

Leerin was almost tempted to let the syn hand their asses to them. Unfortunately, she’d get in shit if she did.

Fuck. Fighting the syn was really going to suck.