“Branch Head. It’s good to see you. I was getting worried that something was wrong,” Keldryn admitted, relaxing just a bit. “This is Mikayla. I rescued her near the ruins of Balmwind,”

  “Rescued, you say,” Lahlee searched her face, and Mikayla wasn’t sure what she was looking for.

  “What’s been going on in Cliffwatch? No one’s around and the guards are acting weird. Where’s Chesham?” Keldryn continued to press.

  “Unavailable. Before we get to any of that, how was your journey?” Lahlee settled down on the other side of the table, facing them.

  “Branch Head, please -“

  “Make your report, then I’ll fill you in on what I’ve been dealing with,” she insisted.

  “. . Alright, fine,” Keldryn’s ears went flat, but, in short and concise sentences, he recapped everything that had happened to him over the past two months. For the first few sentences, Mikayla listened with interest, appreciating the details of what he’d been doing before they met, but his clinical recap of the Kaijus he’d encountered rapidly grew grating. “Gale Glider, estimated Tier 3, engaged and dispatched. A day later, a Sabretooth Tiger, Earthshaker sub-breed, estimated Tier 7, avoided and noted its rough location in grid square DKJ-1781. Three days after that . .”

  Mikayla’s attention wandered, and she glanced around the sparsely-funished room but found nothing to occupy her distracted mind. Her eyes were drawn instead to Lahlee’s right arm, clad in metal. Was it a strange sort of partial armour, or a prosthetic?

  Mikayla wondered if what she was about to do counted as a breach of privacy, but her boredom won out over her better judgement. Besides, the two Goliath Guardsmen were entirely focused on Keldryn’s report and she’d never felt anything when Keldryn had done this, so surely Lahlee wouldn’t even notice.

  “Scan,” she mouthed, squinting at the Branch Head’s prosthetic.

  Lahlee, though, had been watching her much more closely than she realised. “What did you say?” she interrupted Keldryn, focusing on Mikayla.

  “What?” Mikayla was immediately distracted from the very interesting results of the Scan. “Oh, nothing. Wasn’t trying to interrupt, sorry. Go on,” Mikayla made a slight gesture with her hand to wave them off, and Lahlee pursed her lips, but nodded.

  Mikayla just kept squinting at Lahlee’s arm, trying to puzzle out what exactly she was looking at without interrupting.

  “A Stranded teenager who stumbled upon a working Armour Core?” She was drawn back into the conversation a few moments later when Lahlee parroted the statement with disbelief, and she realised Keldryn’s report had caught up to when he met her.

  “Yes. I confirmed it. She showed me the remains of her clothes from her world and lacks common knowledge, such as the Map,” Keldryn confirmed.

  “What’s special about the clothes?”

  “The material, and precision with which they were made,” Keldryn clarified. “I could not identify the type of fabric used, and the stitching was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, incredibly precise,”

  “I see,” Lahlee, for her part, didn’t buy it. Ignorance could be feigned. Fancy clothes could have come from a highly skilled tailor. Even seeing Mikayla’s round, human ears didn’t disprove her suspicions; it wasn’t that hard for an elf to disguise their pointed ears with an illusion. She had to admit to herself that the idea of a wealthy young elf pretending to be Stranded was a bit contrived - but it was much more believable than the story about a teenager who’d miraculously salvaged a functional Core Controller from a corpse, and taught herself to use it well enough to survive until Keldryn joined up with her.

  It wasn’t as though they were living in a hackneyed novel about some loser stumbling their way into an unearned chance to live out their wildest dreams, or some similar nonsense.

  “Who are you, girl?”

  “I’m Mikayla Aiadon, a history student. Nice to meet you,” she replied, offering her hand.

  The introduction sounded rehearsed, because it was. She’d practiced it in front of the mirror for hours, trying to ensure it made the right first impression on her teachers at high school and university. Lahlee’s status and finery had induced Mikayla to subconsciously slot her into the same category as her professors, and she’d fallen back on old habits.

  To Lahlee, though, this clearly rehearsed introduction smacked of falsehood. Why rehearse introducing yourself, unless you were doing it with a fake name? Her eyes narrowed as she regarded the outstretched hand, concluding that Mikayla, or whatever her name really was, wasn’t aware that her acting skills were subpar.

  After a moment of awkward staring, Mikayla retracted her hand. “We don’t do handshakes in this world, got it,”

  Lahlee pursed her lips. “Well, allow me to officially welcome you on behalf of the Goliath Guard. How are you finding Cliffwatch?”

  “I mean, I only just got here, so I don’t really have a frame of reference,” Mikayla admitted, trying to be polite about how uncomfortable this so-called town was making her. “It does seem quieter than I expected, though,”

  What a suspiciously evasive answer.

  “I love your outfit, though,” Mikayla misinterpreted the tightening of Lahlee’s features, trying to course-correct from what she feared was a bad first impression. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s like an armoured suit, practical yet stylish,” she nodded, doing her best to convey her approval. “Though, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s going on with your arm?”

  Lahlee’s eyes widened and her nostrils flared. Unbeknownst to Mikayla, the question she had just asked was something the Branch Head had been hoping would not come, a slip up that confirmed her identity as a hostile agent. How else could anyone tell at a mere glance that her prosthetic was enhanced using forbidden magic?

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  Lahlee’s own lacking knowledge of what she had placed inside her own body was to blame here. Since accepting the Regressors’ gift, since they had returned her arm to her, she had never attempted to Scan her own body. If she had, she would have realised how obvious it was that there was something aberrant about her new ‘prosthetic’.

  Because the Scan that Mikayla had been running made Lahlee’s right arm look very, very strange.

  Mikayla could see Lahlee’s vitality with the Scan, the energy suffusing her body, like the world was being rendered in thermal vision. But there was something else inside her flesh. It was almost like the roots of a tree, a cluster of unnatural material that was growing out of her shoulder and filling the metal arm, but also spreading into her body, burrowing through it like a parasite.

  Mikayla stopped herself from thinking that it was quite disturbing to look at. She couldn’t make that kind of judgement call. Clearly, she was looking at some kind of biomechanical prosthetic, but she’d only looked at it for a few seconds, not enough time to tell if it was still growing or stable. Was this normal, this world’s equivalent of prosthetic limb technology? Some kind of symbiotic flesh graft, with metal armour either fitted or merged into it? She didn’t know. Maybe it was entirely ordinary.

  Lahlee, though, knew it was anything but normal, and Mikayla’s question had been the final straw. Her eyes narrowed, and she stood. “Alright, I’ve entertained this long enough. Guards!”

  Keldryn started. “What?”

  Hidden doors at the back of the room slid open, and four men emerged. Mikayla twisted to look at them just in time to see Armour Cores in green, blue, brown and orange wrap around them each with a unique design.

  Keldryn’s eyes narrowed. “That’s Jacked Lumber. You’re not Chesham! Why do you have his Armour Core?!” he shouted at the man in the orange armour, whose head was crowned with a thick and bushy afro.

  Weapons appeared in their hands as soon as their armour had finished manifesting. “Alive or dead, boss?” Brown asked, no one paying any attention to Keldryn’s demand.

  “Alive. For now,” Lahlee asserted.

  At those words, Mikayla realised just how bad the situation was. Keldryn’s boss had decided they were a threat. The Armour Core of Keldryn’s mentor had been taken and given to someone else, apparently on Lahlee’s orders, which implied that Lahlee’s tactic had subdued more experienced Guardsmen than either of them. She certainly didn’t like her odds against four people stronger than her.

  They needed an advantage.

  “Mana Assistance, Black Knight!” Mikayla commanded, leapfrogging onto the desk with her left hand - when had she gotten strong enough to do that? Wow! - and conjuring her sword in her right hand. She thrust it forward, aiming at Lahlee’s chest. She was already planning what she was going to say. Taking the Branch Head hostage probably wasn’t a very good plan but it was all that she could think of.

  And it was irrelevant. Faster than her eyes could follow, Lahlee’s prosthetic arm whipped out and caught the tip of her blade in its palm. If the sharp edge bothered her at all, she didn’t show it. “Bold. But foolish,” she asserted, and shoved the blade right back into Mikayla’s chest, its hilt knocking her backwards and into two of the men.

  Their arms wrapped around hers to restrain her, sparks of Mana flying where their Armours ground against each other.

  Keldryn had turned his attention to the two men that had gone after him, bashing them out of the way. The blades on Skyward Grasscutter’s wrists drew sparks as they left scratches on their Armours, and his Leaf Shrapnel Technique peppered the Brown Armour’s helmet but was rebuffed by its visor.

  Mikayla struggled, but Green and Blue had caught her and were wrapping their arms around her. In a flash of desperate, adrenaline-laced inspiration, her Sword, half-formed and improperly manifested, burst from the back of her hand, punching through Blue’s faux-chainmail and leaving a bloody puncture wound in his pectorals. The man screamed, releasing her arm and clutching at his side, blood staining the inside of his translucent armour.

  Mikayla’s struggles ceased, her arms suddenly feeling leaden. She’d done that, she’d hurt a person, she could have killed him. She’d stabbed him. She’d never done that before. It wasn’t like with the Kaijus - this was a man, who could be reasoned with. Why had she resorted to violence? Wasn’t that supposed to be wrong?

  Her moment of panic proved to be a fatal distraction, as Green tackled her, forcing her to the ground and pinning her in place.

  Still running on adrenaline and instinct, Mikayla struggled again, grappling with the unknown man. Her focus had evaporated and her Sword had gone with it. Green shifted so that his shoulder was digging into her ribs and punched her in the face, causing black spots to dance in her vision.

  Patterns of Mana snapped into place along her arm, gearing up to return fire with a Firestarting Punch, but the flames washed over her enemy’s Armour ineffectually. She tried to roll over, but her captor proved both too strong and too heavy.

  A purple blob loomed over her, and Mikayla managed to focus enough to recognise Lahlee carrying a shield that was rimmed with pink and wielding a spiked cudgel in her left hand. It would really suck to be hit with that thing.

  So of course, Lahlee hit her with that thing.

  “Mikayla? Mikayla, do not pass out! Keep your eyes open! Fight!” Nocturnus whispered, but it sounded like he was at the top of a pit that she was falling into.

  Dizzy and dazed, Mikayla blinked and found that she could no longer open her eyes.

  Everything went dark.

  <=====}—o

  “Hm,” Lahlee regarded the two unconscious teenagers as her men broke open their Armour Cores and removed their Core Controllers, suspicion still etched into her face.

  She reached down and rested the edges of Mikayla’s cheek, running the tips of her left hand’s fingers along her cheekbones. “No mask. No evidence of appearance-changing Techniques. Perhaps she felt she didn’t need them,”

  “Are you certain, ma’am?” Brown asked. “It could be a Technique beyond your ability to detect,”

  Lahlee considered. “I doubt it. If she were that skilled, she’d have put up much more of a fight,” It was actually impressive that the goons had managed to defeat her, even fighting two on one, she’d have expected any reasonably competent Guardsman to triumph over the dregs she’d hired from the bottom of the barrel. Good help was hard to come by out here in the boonies.

  Could it be that she really was some fresh-faced Stranded weakling?

  “I want you to check all of the dossiers that we were provided by the Regressors’ information network. Mikayla Aiadon is probably a fake name, but it’s worth looking for, and check for her face as well, we might be able to find out who she really is,”

  “Alright, sure - uh, I mean, yes ma’am,” Brown corrected himself.

  “You two,” she gestured at Blue and Orange, “take them to the cells. Put them in cages if the cells are all still full. But use the weakest cages, and have guards ready, just in case this girl is hiding her true strength. You,” Green snapped to attention, “tell everyone to be on high alert. I wouldn’t put it past that blue git to send these two in as a distraction while some ninja or something sneaks in with an Invisibility technique,”

  “I thought those’re made up?” Green questioned.

  Lahlee’s eye twitched. “Think for a moment, moron!” she snapped. “If you knew the secret to something as useful as invisibility, wouldn’t you do your very best to make the world think that invisibility is impossible? Assumptions get you killed, and I’ve seen enough starring nonsense from the high levels at the Guard that nothing would surprise me. Enough chatter! All of you! Hop to it!”

  the opposite here.

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