Chapter 13: 13 – Squad Dynamics

Makhus did his best to ignore Zelsys as he walked out onto the clearing, making a beeline for the still. The entire time she watched, casually leaning on the transport. “How’s the sickness? No aftershock seizures?” he offhandedly asked Sigmund as he tinkered with the glass and copper monstrosity, adjusting the barrier-stone fragment in its mount with one hand and the tube its condensation fed into with the other. 

“I had a rather bad one, but I got over it,” the bearded man responded in an equally offhand manner, chuckling into his beard as he gave Zelsys an utterly unsubtle wink.

“Really? Any obvious trigger?”

“Oh, just that the rot-bear we were out hunting showed up. Our new friend dealt with it quite handily, I must say.”

Makhus froze where he stood, looking straight ahead before he turned to look at Sigmund, then at Zelsys, then at Sigmund again, visibly unsure whether he should chide the bearded soldier for joking around or ask where the corpse was. A smile on her face, Zelsys explained, “The body’s in your little field, sans a couple parts.”

“Ho-” he began with a questioning tone, turning the word to a faux cough almost quickly enough that she didn’t notice his partly surprised, partly impressed tone. “Well, there go all our crops,” he sighed instead, turning his attention to the butchering table. 

“Where’s the-” he wondered looking around for the cleaver, but Spliteye interrupted him. “Don’t even think about it, we’re leaving in the morning,” she rebuffed, rising from her seat and dusting herself off before she began walking towards the transport. With a nod of her head towards the silver-haired woman, Spliteye added that “Besides, it’s hers by rights.”

“The fuck y’mean-”

“Seems I’m strong enough to use it properly, unlike you,” Zelsys mocked in a joking tone, lowering her hand to the cleaver’s handle. She couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear when his eyes went wide, fists clenched in sudden anger.  “That’s not yours!” he shouted.

“It is according to the Squad Dynamics Guidelines contained within the Ikesian Military Doctrine guidebook. The decision was put to a vote within the unit, and a majority of the unit’s members voted in favor.”

With every word she said, the anger faded from Makhus’ face and turned to disbelief, then to plain confusion. He turned to Sigmund, questioning, “Really? You did that?” 

The simple answer of a few nods from the bearded man as he ate more soup seemed to hit him like a gut punch, considering the weight with which Makhus dropped onto the stump. 

“You gave the Captain’s Cleaver to a foreigner?” 

Sigmund swallowed the current mouthful and, slowly stirring the soup in his tin, looked up at the younger man with a hardened gaze. “She could’ve split as soon the beast showed up, but she chose mauling and Nigredo exposure instead. I think that’s a good enough reason alone, not to mention the fact it’s just a burden to us. A shiny and expensive burden, but a burden nonetheless.”

A heavy sigh escaped Makhus’ lungs as he grabbed the nearest mess tin in reach - the one Zelsys had used - and stood up to get himself a portion of soup. 

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There it was. The Tablet. Her ticket to a new identity. Just sitting there on the bunk, next to a puddle of that asshat’s drool. She’d given up on trying to help him directly long ago, with how eager he seemed to close himself off and play the good soldier. 

It made her entire forearm buzz with pins and needles when she picked it up, just like the attribute scanners back in the barracks. A word appeared in the middle.

SCANNING 

She never did find the sensation painful, regardless of how much the others complained about the monthly attribute checkups during training. The device took some time before the first stage of its work was finished, after which another projection manifested above its surface. One sentence in white, two in blue.

RECORD FORMAT NOT RECOGNIZED

 

REGISTER NEW FORMAT

OVERWRITE RECORD

As the brief argument outside unfolded she climbed into the lower right bunk. It wasn’t hers, but she didn’t want to risk falling out of hers as a result of whatever reaction she might have to the Tablet’s overwrite process. 

The pain wasn’t a concern. Her pain threshold was higher than most men’s, and even then she knew how to deal with what little pain truly affected her. It was the unconsciousness, in particular the possibility of her other eye opening for that bizarre projector-like side effect. 

While she sat there staring at the Tablet and trying to mentally talk herself into just doing it, the nearly-empty bottle of “Liquid Vigor” next to Makhus’s bunk caught her eye. “Addict,” she thought as she leaned down to grab it, downing the rest of the liquid in one gulp. Much to her surprise it smelled and tasted different from what she was used to, though that wasn’t the surprising part - the evershifting, undefinable olfactory qualities of Viriditas were almost as well-known as the theory that no matter what, it would always be to a person’s liking.

Through the aggressively minty notes of this batch, there pierced an undertone that smelled both different and familiar. Something new, but something she had smelled before, rather recently. It smelled like… “The foreigner?”

Her mind raced with a dozen different thoughts as she furrowed her brow, looking the bottle over in a futile attempt to discern whether the tan giantess had drunk from it. The smell hit her nostrils again, and she realized that it wasn’t the Viriditas - it was just the foreigner’s smell lingering in the bunk from when she had used it to change clothes. Somewhat eased by this realization, Spliteye took a deep breath and laid down in the bunk, then pressed “Overwrite” on the Tablet, doing her best to keep her left eyelid closed. 

The buzzing sensation grew and eventually became painful, the brief urge to open her other eye fading a moment before her consciousness slipped. 

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