Chương 18: Chapter 17: Just One Deal

The boiling water tanks. The meticulous, agonizing removal of her skin. Elma thrashed, her sleeping mind dragged back into Beitelham's white chambers. She remembered the biting chill of the artificial breeze sweeping over her exposed muscle—a cold that somehow burned far worse than the scalding tanks. But she hadn't shattered. The Other took the brunt of the torment, relishing the sheer intensity of the sensation. It liked the pain. It made it feel alive.

The cold pulse of the green veins suddenly flooded her vision, ripping through the nightmare and tearing her back to consciousness. Elma gasped, her eyes snapping open. She tasted the fine grit of the sand against her mouth. She didn't need to see it to know the color. The nursery was gone. For a moment there was only the dark, the same starless black pressing in from every direction.

Then, one by one, a ring of torches kindled around the perimeter, their orange glow pushing the gloom back just far enough to see by. She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, instinctively scrambling backward as her eyes adjusted to the light. Sable stood directly before her. Elma caught her balance and immediately dropped to one knee, her head bowed in the ingrained posture of a subordinate asset. She looked up, running a rapid visual sweep of her handler. Sable looked wan.

The imposing aura that usually radiated from her was fractured. A dark leather cloak was draped over her frame, but it couldn't hide the slight, labored hitch in her breathing. Elma's mind rapidly caught up. The timeline aligned. It must have been the fallout from the battle at the estate. The entity that had assaulted the manor—the long, red whips of sinew Jorm had described—had been devastating enough to inflict this much damage to both Christa and Sable.

"You summoned me," Elma said.

"I did," Sable replied, her distorted voice sounding thinner than usual.

"It is time to prepare for your first mission." Elma's heart raced. A mission.

"What is it?" Sable did not answer immediately. The dark slits of her mask remained fixed on Elma for a long moment.

"Where were you when your house was under attack?"

"I was stabbed through the sternum. The next thing I registered, I woke up in my bed. I do not know how I am still alive." Sable tilted her head slightly.

"I see."

"Do you know how I survived?"

"I might." Sable let the silence stretch a beat longer.

"And all you need to know is that you got lucky."

"I… it's not another deal?"

"No. It's not another deal. Our shepherd can't bring back the dead." Sable's masked gaze didn't waver.

"Your rebirth was an exception—an opportunity, not a guarantee. Tread carefully with this life," she advised.

"You won't get a third." Elma's breath eased. Just one deal. Just one deal. She narrowed her eyes, seizing the momentary shift in the interrogation to press her own inquiry.

"Why did you expose yourself in the courtyard? If your presence was detected, your position and my cover were critically endangered." Sable looked down at her. The momentary weariness vanished, and her voice instantly regained its razor-sharp edge.

"I intervened to protect you. Because you clearly could not do it yourself." Elma tightened her jaw, her small hands balling into fists against the dirt. The reprimand burned.

"I am still learning to map this power."

"We are out of time," Sable stated coldly.

"Your mission is going to be exceptionally dangerous. It will require you to be fully capable of protecting yourself." Elma kept her gaze locked on the mask.

"I am not certain I have the capacity to do that at this exact moment."

"Then stand up," Sable commanded, taking a step back.

"You will have to." Sable slowly extended her right arm, turning her palm upward toward the starless sky. A dense glob of water materialized hovering mere inches above her leather glove.

"Weaving," Elma whispered.

"The universe is an ensemble of threads." Sable started.

"Threns are the vibrating sections of these threads. They are the units that compose everything. Yet, despite how it appears, most of the threns surrounding us are still. Empty. Weaving is fundamentally the act of making those silent threns vibrate in the specific patterns you desire." She inclined her hand, and the suspended glob of water drifted smoothly toward Elma. The moment it crossed the threshold, Elma felt the liquid enter the grasp of her field.

"You should be more connected to your field by now," Sable noted, watching her intently.

"You must feel the threns to perceive the note vibrating above your palm. That note is what everything truly is." Elma closed her eyes. Rather than searching for an abstract concept like a "note," her mind began deconstructing the data of the floating mass. She quantified its shape, its exact volume, its density, its barometric pressure, and its kinetic heat. Then came the noise. It wasn't a sound for her ears, but a distinct, micro-frequential hum vibrating against her lattice. Her eyes snapped open.

"You felt it," Sable stated. Elma didn't answer. She remained entirely focused, her consciousness locking onto the specific, artificial noise vibrating above her palm.

"You will need to sit here for hours," Sable continued, "until your brain permanently memorizes that noise. If you want to replicate it." Elma didn't need hours. Her cognitive architecture was designed for hyper-efficiency; she could memorize an entire wall of cramped text with a single glance. She lifted her left hand and closed her eyes again.

Feeling the space just above the empty palm, she mapped the emptiness of the silent threns, observing how the strings vibrated slightly the moment she applied the slightest fraction of pressure. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Focusing entirely on the captured frequency, she replayed the note above her left palm, adjusting the vibration until it was a flawless, identical match. She opened her eyes. A second, perfect glob of water was hovering effortlessly above her left hand.

Her breathing accelerated, a sudden surge of adrenaline coursing through her veins. Sable was visibly taken aback, her rigid posture faltering for a second before she offered a single, quiet word.

"Remarkable." Elma didn't waste time celebrating. She elongated the new glob into a tight, hyper-compressed spiral, spinning the water at such a high velocity that the friction caused it to glow a dull, furious red. She drove her palm forward and launched it across the bruised desert. The projectile tore into the dune, boring cleanly through the sand and leaving a hissing, steaming crater in its wake. Water Drill.

"You learn fast," Sable said, her voice dropping into a dangerous cadence.

"Perhaps too fast. But real battles are not simply about weaving..." Suddenly, Elma felt a massive shift in the air currents. Sable's field was aggressively expanding, rapidly pulling the surrounding threns to weave something. Is she going to attack? Curtains down. Elma expanded her own perimeter and activated her mutual negation toggle immediately. The invisible wave surged outward. The moment their fields overlapped, the gathering resonance in Sable's airspace vanished.

At the exact outer layer of her field—where Sable's resonance did not overlap her own—Elma rapidly wove two more water drills. She aimed the spinning spiral directly at the assassin's chest, a satisfied smile tugging at her mouth.

"You were saying?" Sable remained completely unbothered.

"What I was saying," she countered smoothly, "is that Resonance battles are not just about weaving." Sable began walking forward, methodically reeling her own field back in—collapsing what should have extended out around her, absorbing it back into her body until nothing remained outside her skin. What is she doing?

"Stay exactly where you are," Elma ordered, the water drills spinning faster, their high-pitched hum cutting through the dry desert air. Sable didn't listen. She kept marching forward across the purple sand as if Elma's words carried no weight.

"I warned you." Elma snapped her fingers, launching both water drills straight at her. Sable blurred. She moved with a blistering speed that was biologically impossible for a human frame, slipping past the trajectory of the drills entirely. Before Elma's synapses could even register the displacement, Sable was standing directly in front of her. Elma squeezed her eyes shut, throwing her hands up to shield her face. Sable reached out and tapped her lightly on the shoulder.

Elma opened her eyes, her breathing gradually settling. Sable was strangely timid tonight.

"A Resonant's field cannot manipulate the space occupied by another Resonant's lattice," Sable explained, looking down at her.

"The space another Resonant's body occupies is completely out of reach for any external field. What I presume is your innate ability can cancel my external domain, but it cannot cancel my Internal Reinforcement." Internal Reinforcement. A jolt of realization struck Elma's mind. So that was the mechanism Fenric had utilized to be that strong. A surge of hope flared within her chest. If Internal Reinforcement was a universal application of resonance, then this pathetic body could actually be of use.

"How do I use it?"

"That would require a night of its own. For now, let's focus on weaving. The fact that you possess an innate ability that gives you an advantage in that area makes it all the more worthwhile." Elma nodded. Weaving first.

"We are Flow Resonants," Sable explained, the firelight catching the edges of her mask.

"We naturally resonate with the lighter elements. We lack the density and sheer kinetic weight of the elements that Geo Resonants have. But our advantage lies in efficiency. Flow elements cost significantly less to weave... and to break." Sable raised her palm. A violent, roaring flame erupted directly above her leather glove. It burned with a harsh, orange light, reflecting in the dark void of Elma's wide eyes.

"How do you execute that?" Elma asked.

"Most of the threns that compose the air around us are a fusion of smaller, fundamental threns," Sable stated.

"Fire is not merely woven from nothing. It is the resulting energy released when you force those fused threns to break apart into their base components." Fission. Understanding the fundamental physics, Elma extended her own consciousness back into her field. She applied the exact same microscopic focus she had used on the water orb, pushing her awareness into the ambient air. She possessed no map for what specific threns to break, nor where she should break it.

But if this was simply a matter of applying enough omnidirectional force to shatter a bond, she didn't need to be precise. She just needed to be violent. Elma seized the air above her palm and pulled against it from every angle, actively trying to rip the threns apart. A sudden, violent flash of emerald flame sparked above her palm and instantly died.

"Keep breaking them," Sable instructed. Elma kept the pressure, tearing at the invisible strings until the light stabilized. A roaring torch of brilliant green fire whirling over her small hand. Elma stared at the emerald glow, the thermal heat washing over her face. The color was a complete anomaly. Is it green because of my connection to that entity? Now, she needed to formalize its tactical application. Sable opened her mouth to issue the next directive, but stopped.

Something in Elma's face had already gone cold and empirical, already running its own numbers. She didn't need her hand held. She needed a problem and the room to break it. Elma closed her hand, extinguishing the torch. Immediately, she compressed the air into a standard air bullet. Then, she applied the new metric. Fission. She ripped the threns apart inside the highly pressurized sphere. The compressed air instantly converted into a violently unstable, glowing green ball of condensed plasma.

Elma launched it directly at a distant dune. Slag Round. The detonation was deafening. The explosion completely melted a massive, slag-dripping crater into the dune, fusing the purple sand into jagged streaks of red glass.

"When I chose not to reprimand you for drilling a hole through that dune earlier," Sable said, her distorted voice cutting through the ringing silence, "it did not mean I was giving you a pass to tear apart this sacred ground as you see fit." Elma completely ignored the warning. She was already generating a second glowing green orb of compressed energy. Sable tilted her head, the cat mask locking onto the child.

"Did you listen to a single word I just said?"

"A single, high-yield detonation is an excellent offensive strike, but the recovery time leaves my physical frame entirely open to a counter-attack. Against a coordinated squad, it is insufficient. I need a continuous stream." Noticing that Elma was lost in thought, Sable sighed and left her to experiment once more. Elma maintained the crushing pressure containing the volatile green orb. Instead of launching it, she anchored it directly in front of her.

Slowly, she lowered the pressure on the exact axis facing away from her body, feeding it a steady stream of air from the opposite end to sustain the force of the blast. Pyroclast. The sphere breached. A blinding, continuous blast of emerald fire erupted from the release point—a localized, high-velocity flamethrower that carved a searing, molten trench across the dune. The sustained burn gave Elma absolute directional control, and she swept it in a slow arc, melting the sand before her into a glowing river of glass.

She closed her fist, cutting the flame, and analyzed the glowing, red glass. It was highly efficient. It provided more than enough sustained fire to maneuver against multiple active opponents simultaneously. Sable stood where she was, studying the molten trench cooling across the dune before shifting her gaze back to the four-year-old standing at its epicenter.

"You have a distinct tendency to overcomplicate things. But seeing as your method gets the job done faster, I will let you proceed as you please." Elma extinguished the lingering ambient pressure in her field.

"The mission," Elma prompted.

"What is it?" Sable stepped closer.

"We intend to send a message." Elma's brow furrowed slightly.

"A message? Why would a message be so dangerous?"

"The kind of message that decides a nation's fate, depending on whether it arrives in time." Before Elma could ask for the details, Sable interrupted.

"We will get into the specifics when the mission officially starts." Elma closed her mouth. The sand beneath her feet thrummed—and for the first time, she felt the veins before they connected to her, as if they were already an extension of her own body reaching out to close the distance. Then the green light ignited, wrapping around her legs, and a blinding flash swallowed her whole, dragging her back to her nursery.