What a difference but a few minutes could make—Hurinren had spent most of his life, save those scant few years before his lo’lu had picked him out as they passed in the street, the man claiming him for his own with the ease of soone who always got what they wanted, hearing exactly that. The Blood Rain General’s past was filled with stories of how the world could shift in re minutes.
People died in strike attacks, your muscles too slow to reach the area in ti to save anyone nor even catch any of the perpetrators—the Blood Rain General knew that one well, his past littered in the bodies of friends he hadn’t been fast enough to reach just as much as it was filled with the corpses of enemies he struck down knowing their strongest allies would be too far off to reach them.
There had been a handful of soldiers, throughout his teacher’s long line, who had been capable of near instantaneous and inescapable destruction. Those they served—Falrion, in one notably case, a criminal organization in another—were always high on the list of entities Dion avoided making war with, not that it had often worked, and the last Colonial War had been filled with just as many conflicts with Falrion as with Baalphoria. Falrion had been secretive for centuries, but occasionally, the monsters that were the Domani family could still be heard about in drinking songs and lants—these monsters who could reach out and crush entire battalions with nary a thought or regret.
Twisted.
Disturbed.
Monsters.
Once, the Blood Rain General had been spared from death at the hands of a Domani monster for the simple fact that he had been delayed by a beautiful bedmate. One more slide of hands and bodies between the sheets—fast and rough because he really did need to get back to his unit. If not for that tumble together, Hurinren’s lo’lu may well have died in that attack, unable to do anything to save his friends, teammates, nor even himself. Nothing stopped a Domani, once they set their mind to sothing. Fortunately, from all the stories the Blood Rain General and anyone else old enough to rember the war told him, the Falrion aristocracy seed resistant to letting their most powerful mbers wipe the fields of battle bloody too often—fortunately, or concerningly. Hurinren had no idea and he rather hoped he never had need to find out why so many of the smaller nation’s most dangerous soldiers were rarely deployed.
Currently, the continent was at peace—more or less had been for several hundred years. Sure, there had been smaller conflicts since the last Colonial War, but there was a reason it was still considered the last: nothing had yet to reach it in scale. Falrion and Byshire feuded, striking terror into the hearts of those who used the trade routes that ran along their borders, but full-blown war was unlikely. A few tribes from Nur’tha were perpetually causing problems for reasons unknown to anyone save themselves. The southern nations were the sa ss of tension they had been for millennia.
The continent was at peace, and while war could begin anew any mont, so diplomat or entitled ruler coveting this or that and breaking war upon their population in their desire to attain it, for the ti being, Hurinren had little chance of discovering the why of Falrion’s odd deploynt of soldiers.
Unfortunately, with the situation in Lüshan devolving faster and faster, a swirl of corruption and conflict that was bound to explode outwards over the city, the nation, and then further still, Hurinren could see a war bubbling—a war that, annoyingly, may be set off due to the difference of a few minutes.
Glaring down at the xphern in his hands, Hurinren squeezed, the squishy protective case barely giving under his ire. Unlike most people, Hurinren had one of the heavy-duty xphern models, which everyone assud he had because he was constantly at risk of being assaulted by his lo’lu’s enemies and had probably grown weary of replacing them so often. He wasn’t attacked often, but it did happen, especially when he left the palace. He had also beco… not quite annoyed, but baffled at the number of units he had worked his way through. Rather than his xpherns breaking due to attacks from his or his acquaintances’ enemies, Emilia kept sohow breaking them. It wasn’t even as though she were purposefully breaking them, nor as though in her occasional ambushes of him—which were done in so mixture of needing to retain their image of disliking one another and her existence as an agent of chaos—were destroying them. He couldn’t even claim that in his annoyance with his lokiar—make no mistake, he loved the girl but also had to resist strangling her regularly—had caused him to snap his xpherns.
Well, he had snapped one of them, but that hadn’t actually been related to how annoying she could be; rather, she had taken a photo of her and Yujao together, fully clothed but debauched enough that Hurinren had known exactly where her hand was disappearing, his partner’s head thrown back against her shoulder, eyes hooded, mouth agape. Worst of all, he had been about to head into a eting! He’d had to sit through the entire thing with a very inappropriate erection, his mind wandering back to his partner and friend and what they might be doing in his bed. A significant amount of the eting had also been spent concerned that he was going to accidentally acquire a fetish for financials or the old man giving a report on convincing one of the maintainers of the ancient chanisms that powered the palace entry gates to take an apprentice—convincing being the more polite way of saying bribing the current, terrible, entitled shit of a maintainer.
Fortunately, he hadn’t been traumatized by the experience, which had ended with Emilia riding his cock while Yujao rode his face and so nice burns from the ropes his partner had tied him up with.
“I don’t get why the cave system has no xpherns service,” he muttered as the ssages he was attempting to send ca back as undeliverable yet again. “It’s not like the city doesn’t have service.”
Yujao made a disgruntled sound from his position looming over the poor communications officer who had been conned into aiding them in setting up a system to repeatedly send the ssages they needed to get to Emilia’s rescue group, hoping that eventually one would get through. Once, hundreds of years before even the last Colonial War, such systems had been common, as xpherns were known to go out of communication range, much like the aethernet currently did. While several Free Colonies still used other technology to communicate, there were few that didn’t at least use xpherns for transnational communication. Hence, areas without coverage had been unheard of for centuries; instead, the only places without access to the xphern transmission network were those that were purposefully blocked from access for privacy. Without a need for the machines that had once been capable of sending ssages repeatedly, intent to make sure the mont the recipient was back in range they would receive it, such machines had been disassembled. Luckily, the Dionese military wasn’t stupid, so the machines hadn’t been completely destroyed.
Still, the only person they’d been able to find—at least within the bounds of the palace on such short notice—who might be capable of getting one working again was barely older than he or Yujao were. The young woman hadn’t been trained to do this; rather, she had stumbled across the manuals in the military archives and read them. Light reading, she had called it. Apparently she had an eidetic mory, but with Yujao staring her down, she had requested the manuals, to double-check what she was doing.
Every move she made to reassemble the transmitters had, so far, been perfect. Still, she looked at the book—which Hurinren would never call light reading—near constantly. If he had to place bets, he would say it was more that she was terrified of Yujao speaking to her again, asking if she was absolutely positive what she was doing was correct, rather than a need to confirm what she was doing.
His partner really was rather terrifying, and while Hurinren knew Yujao worked just as hard to co off to the Inner Court as a flighty thing as he and Emilia did to be seen as perpetually reluctant allies, he always found himself a little surprised no one ever spilled his secrets—after all, it wasn’t like they were going to kill this girl or anything! Still, he was sure it would end the sa as every other ti they had to bring soone else into their circle of knowledge: Yujao would hustle him out of the room and then do sothing to their new ally… or hostage. It was very unclear what all of their associates actually thought of their position. Still, whatever this sothing was, it was powerful enough to gain all of them the loyalty of whoever Yujao had been left alone with. Even after nearly a decade and a half of being in love with the man—of sharing his bed and secrets and regrets—Hurinren still had no idea whether it was a loyalty born of sothing positive or negative.
Was it odd that his partner was protecting him, the heir to the Blood Rain General, from whatever he did alone with the people whose loyalty he stole? Probably. Then again, Yujao had grown up on the streets and once been part of a powerful criminal organization—still was, to so extent—so perhaps he was the more terrifying of the two of them? Hurinren didn’t think the Inner Court would like that much, given they already worried about how powerful he alone was. With Emilia and Yujao as well? Each of them standing firm behind the future Empress Supre?
Yeah, the cokrina that slithered about the Inner Court, just waiting for a chance to consu every wisp of power with the ravenous appetite of those who had gone generations being tossed scrapes, wouldn’t like that at all.
This was all assuming that Emilia would ever talk to them again, even assuming she did manage to get out of Falmíer, considering they may have accidentally sent most of her friends to their deaths.
“It might be the makeup of that rock,” the girl helping them—eho Kun’sai—said, pushing her glasses up yet again.
They were odd, the shape haphazard and not quite right for her face because few people wore glasses. Instead, eyesight was generally fixed through dicine—or, if there was no treatnt, the eyes would be removed and replaced with prosthetics. Glasses weren’t a thing, and even Emilia’s friend Samina, who had injured her eyes in a chemical accident when they were teenagers, used a combination of contacts and her Censor to correct her vision, having not wanted to remove her damaged eyes. Glasses weren’t a thing, and Hurinren had no idea where the girl had even gotten them—for how terrible they were, she could very well have made them herself—nor why she hadn’t had so sort of corrective surgery. Perhaps, when Yujao wasn’t glaring down at her like he might slit her throat for even the comnt about the rocks, Hurinren would ask. He doubted his partner would actually kill the girl, probably. He definitely wouldn’t kill her until they got a hold of Emilia’s friends, in any case.
“The rock?” Hurinren asked, shooting a glare of his own at Yujao, before his partner could tell her to shut up and focus. They needed her cooperative, and who knew what she knew that they didn’t, considering how well read she was.
Nodding, eho Kun’sai didn’t look up from what she was doing—really, her hands didn’t even stutter as she began to explain that there were so old military reports from centuries ago, when Dion had been trying to find a way to destroy Lüshan’s cities from the outside. “They couldn’t get in. Most of the cities might have entrances from above, but they are said to be difficult to traverse, so the military wanted to blow them up from the outside. They took samples of the rock and did all these experints, but never really got anywhere. You know how they say the Lowdouran created those cities? Obviously, we have no idea if that’s true, but whoever—or whatever—created the cities definitely changed the makeup of the surrounding rock. It's not like anything else our scientists had ever seen, and in the end, they gave up trying to destroy it.”
The girl shrugged, pushing her glasses up yet again, repeating her suggestion that xphern transmission might not be making it through the rock. “According to docunts on the transmission points—there’s this huge docunt from eons ago where various Free Colonies agreed to maintain the transmission system, and the intended locations of many points are listed in it—all of the stations into the cities have transmitters in them. I always assud it was because there’s so much usage there, and they wanted the service bump, but maybe they knew the rock was interfering with xpherns?”
That was all interesting—it was especially interesting that this girl was apparently reading ancient docunts on transmission station agreents; who did that?—but unhelpful, given Emilia’s friends had not only entered an area without aethernet access, but then abruptly found themselves outside the reach of xpherns. This was, of course, just minutes before the gorankai had sent information to Yujao, telling him under no uncertain terms to avoid Falmíer's cave system.
They weren’t the only ones to know where the entrance was, and they weren’t alone in that cave system. No, there weren’t alone at all, and the people who were in there wouldn’t be letting a bunch of Baalphorians risk their operation.
A few minutes—just a few minutes sooner, and they would have still been in range. While Hurinren had his doubts as to whether those idiots would turn back or not, if they’d been able to tell them about the others in the cave system, at least they would have been able to prepare themselves. As it was, with how difficult it had been to find any information about the cave entrance, they likely thought themselves all alone—or, at the most, perhaps likely to run into lovers using the cave system to et one another.
Even the gorankai had only heard rumours of the cave’s use by chance, from a drink vendor who had been talking with another custor about so sort of drink that had been imported into Lüshan and was causing strife in their national unity—which, what? The pair had gone on to laugh about how one of the vendor’s most popular drinks used a substance that was smuggled out of Falmíer, which was just addictive enough to bring custors coming back for more without being so addictive as to cause problems—not at the levels he was using it, anyway.
“Very hard to get this stuff out of the capital,” the vendor had said. “Not the sort of thing even the incompetent Drini let through their paper points. Just another thing smuggled out through the darkness.”
A few questions—and possibly a few threats issued—later, and the gorankai had learned that while it wasn’t common knowledge, the lucrative and highly illegal smuggling operation out of Falmíer wasn’t just going through the papers checkpoints, relying on a mixture of incompetent and corrupt Drinarna to get through; rather, they were also using the cave system to get so of the most illegal things out of the city—the most illegal and the most profitable, the level of profitable where people killed risks to the operation first and asked questions later.
The reality was, as much as Emilia’s friends certainly weren’t stupid enough to let their guards down, they really had no idea what was lurking for them in the dark, nor how quickly their blood soaked hands might reach out to snuff them out.
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