The square was quiet for exactly three seconds... before Diana lost her cool completely.
"IRIS!" she scread, and then she ran, not caring about the bruised ribs and sore side from Kruger’s earth column.
She only cared about the short-haired woman standing over the demon’s body with a completely calm look on her face. She crossed the square in about four steps and threw herself at Iris with such enthusiasm that it was clear they had known each other for a long ti.
Iris tripped back half a step but caught her and laughed. "Aw! Your elbow is literally in my kidney."
Diana pulled back to look at her face and then hugged her again. "I don’t care!"
"What are you doing here?!"
"How did you find us?!"
"When did you get here?!"
It looked like the calm, tactical archer who had kept his cool during the whole battle had been replaced by soone who only spoke through volu.
"Jeez, calm down and take a breath for a second, Diana. You’re injured, and you still have the energy to ask all of that?" Iris laughed.
"Well, of course, I can’t help it! I missed you so much, who is always out for an assassination mission!"
"Alright, fine, it was technically two days ago," Iris said, giving Diana’s back a reassuring pat. "I’ve been tracking that thing since we were in the border town."
"I wanted to wait until I had a clear view, but you all were in the way."
Helena walked across the square faster than she should have been able to because she was exhausted. When she got to them, she hugged Iris tightly, and Iris hugged her back right away.
"Helena, it’s good to see you as always." Iris said while enjoying the hug.
"Likewise." Helena nodded.
Elliot, who was still leaning against the broken wall and clearly needed to stop moving, pushed himself up and walked over with a real smile that Rex had never seen on his face before.
Elliot said, "It’s good to see you again, Iris," and he really ant it.
There was no acting or heroic behavior in it. He was simply a tired young man, delighted to see soone he knew and trusted in all her endeavors.
Evelyn stayed a few steps back, her hands still on her weapons out of habit, but her shoulders felt better. She looked at Iris with the sa careful attention that soone would give to a list of threat levels, but the level of threat she was landing on seed to be well within the acceptable range.
Rex saw all of this from where he was standing. His face showed the right amount of relief and interest, but his mind was already sowhere else.
[NEW TARGET DETECTED]
[IRIS MORR NIGHTWING - AGE: 35 - STATUS: ASSASSIN, VISITOR]
[DESIRE LEVEL: 0/100]
[SYSTEM NOTE: TARGET ELIGIBLE. DESIRE AUTHORITY CHANICS APPLY.]
Zero percent. A completely blank slate.
Rex felt a special kind of interest that only cos from seeing a new target with no past relationship issues to deal with and no emotional baggage to deal with, but just open space.
"She’s thirty-five, but she still looks so young... and seems like she’s older than the starlights and even Evelyn, except Helena, of course." Rex thought to himself.
He really looked at her for the first ti since she had co. Her short black hair was cut close to her neck, and her dark eyes moved all the ti, taking in everything they saw.
She was lean but not too thin. She moved like soone who had been trained to deal with situations where being heard was more dangerous than being hit.
He hadn’t seen her put the weapon she had used on Kruger back in its sheath.
She was quick, but not at the sa level as Evelyn, but close enough, and unlike Evelyn’s speed, which felt like a system ability layered on top of a human body, Iris’s speed felt like sothing she had built through sheer accumulated training, so it felt kind of different.
And for Rex, that kind of shit is interesting.
Rex put it away and let himself drift toward the group, which was still getting back together like people do after a traumatic event when the adrenaline starts to wear off.
Iris noticed him over Diana’s shoulder. Her eyes t his, and for a mont she did the thing that experienced fighters did, which was assess.
Then she smiled, and it was a real, warm smile. "You’re the one who was keeping the demon still when I ca in."
Rex said, "Guilty."
"That was great actually! Whatever you were doing with your hands seed to be working."
"That’s just pure luck, I suppose," Rex said, which was his usual response when he didn’t want to talk about sothing.
"Pure luck...? That’s an odd way to express humility." Iris raised an eyebrow slightly, clearly skeptical, but she chose to drop the subject.
Rex observed that she was the type of person who would let things go when pressing the issue wouldn’t yield imdiate results. He then pondered, "She didn’t ask any more questions about it, did she?"
He thought that was a good quality in a strategic sense, but it was a little annoying for him personally.
She held out her hand and said, "Iris Morr Nightwing."
"Rex Rexilion," he said as he took it.
She shook hands with a firm but quick grip, like soone who had shaken many hands and stopped caring about it.
She said, "That’s a strange na... there are two ’Rex’ in your na."
"I’ve heard that before."
She smiled. "That’s good. It ans it will stick with you."
[IRIS MORR NIGHTWING: 0/100 → 3/100]
Three points from one exchange. Rex was happy to see it and chose not to push it any further.
Iris was smart enough to notice that aggressive early contact would seem strange, and zero-to-maximum runs worked better when the base was real before the speed-up started.
He had so ti. The upcoming capital trip would presumably provide him with plenty of ti, and he understood that Iris was here because of his foresight.
...
After the initial rush of excitent from being together again had died down, they went back into what was left of a mostly intact building near the square, and Iris explained why she was there.
She said she had co from the capital and traveled light and fast, covering the distance in about a third of the ti it would have taken a normal rider.
This helped Rex understand how fast she was going and know that the capital wasn’t close. That kind of distance in that amount of ti, with all her gear, said sothing specific about what her body could do.
"Lady Valentina sent ," she said, using the na that made Helena’s face change into sothing complicated but not bad. "She has been watching the news from the border areas for the past two months."
"When the pattern started to point toward the Broken Cross road, she got worried... and your group was the only active hero party in the area."
Helena said, "She could have sent a letter."
"She did send letters," Iris said. "Three of them, actually..."
"Two were stopped, and one got to you after you had already moved on from where you last reported." She gave Helena a look that was both loving and a little annoyed. "Your mom knew you’d say that."
"She told to tell you she tried to be nice at first."
Rex was taken aback to learn that a woman nad ’Valentine’ was Helena’s mother. This revelation sparked his imagination, leading him to envision so attractive grandmothers in this world.
However, he quickly dismissed the thought, realizing that Valentina was likely quite old by now, given Helena’s current age.
Rex thought. "I’ll have to wait for the reveal soon, if her mother is sexy... then I’ll fucking dig that, of course!"
Helena let out a breath through her nose, which Rex was learning was her way of saying she didn’t want to do it. "What’s really going on here...?"
"Not the summary, but the whole thing."
Iris pulled a small vial topped with dark wax from inside her jacket. It resembled the one Kruger had shattered with his teeth, causing everyone in the room to freeze at the sight of it.
"This is what the capital refers to as Demon Seed," Iris stated, raising the vial for everyone to see while maintaining a firm grip on it.
"D-Demon seed...? Like his sen or so shit?" Rex said that in his mind, of course, he can’t say it out loud.
"It began appearing in black markets about six months ago, and the price has been steadily decreasing. This indicates that more of it is becoming available, suggesting that whoever is producing it has improved their manufacturing process."
She set it on the surface in front of her and folded her hands. "Anyone who drinks it gets a huge and instant boost in physical and magical strength."
"The regeneration kicks in almost imdiately... and then for about forty minutes after drinking it, the person is impossible to kill by normal ans."
"And what about the cost of its usage?" Evelyn asked.
"Judgnt and self-control... the ability to rember who you were before you drank it. Those things co first." Iris lightly tapped the vial with one finger. "After the forty minutes, it doesn’t just wear off cleanly."
"Whatever the transformation does to the mind tends to be permanent in degrees... and the more doses a person takes, the less of themselves they retain."
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