Chapter 1516 (1/2)

Charlotte Wick walked calmly next to Benjamin Rex, accompanying the slender young man toward their destination. They hadn’t arranged to meet like this, but when they had seen each other, the fell into step beside each other. Charlotte resigned herself to the pitstop that she knew Benjamin would make, but was glad for his company.

Having a companion keeps the flies away, Charlotte sighed inwardly.

Of all the recruits, Charlotte got along best with Benjamin. One reason was that he was also uninterested in the political posturing of their peers. A second reason was that he also had powerful enough backing that no one pushed him. And finally, because they could exist next to each other without either trying to start a conversation. The peace was immaculate.

They walked in glorious silence, letting the sound of wind through bamboo be their only accompaniment. The sound of their footfalls on the dirt ground became the baseline to a calm sonata. Charlotte revelled in the experience right up until the point there was a barely perceptible shiver through the air and both of them stopped.

Something was coming. A split second later, it hit them both.

While Benjamin remained rather stoic in the face of the invisible reverberation, Charlotte could only accept the sickening heaviness that came with this invisible energy with a grimace. For several seconds, she stood as still as a status, trying her best to not think too deeply about the strange sensation of other that invaded her body. Her stomach flipped over, urging her to vomit immediately, but Charlotte stifled that impulse.

In a way, it felt like her skin was being peeled away, but not painfully. No, the sensation was curiously numb. But after her skin was peeled back, these other… perspectives slipped into the place where her flesh had once been. While Charlotte’s consciousness observed from a distance, those confusing and erratic invaders inflated her skin and pretend to be her, right in front of Charlotte.

Her skin crawled as the sensation continued to build. It was a sensation that an image could affect not at all; Charlotte could only endure it. She pressed her eyes closed to block out that unfamiliar vision of herself in her mind’s eye and clenched her hands so tightly that her wrists began to ache. This sensation had been occurring rather frequently over the past six hours, described by the Overseers as ‘a new training formation designed by the Ghosthound’. Periodically, everyone would experience this horrible exposure to Nether, gradually acclimating them with a softened version of what they would fight against in the Fifth Cohort.

If this was a softened version, Charlotte certainly dreaded encountering actual Aether.

But the immediately obvious truth about this array was that it didn’t affect everyone equally, or at the same time. The tremor that precipitated the Nether’s arrival was something that could be mysteriously sensed by those in the surroundings. So sometimes the Nether would arrive at most of a group with tiny tremors, then crash all together inside the body of the final individual, leaving that person in something near a seizure.

Everyone had their own experience with it too. Some said it felt like their blood was turned to ice. Others said that it seemed that tiny agents of darkness began to nibble at the edges of their senses until they were entirely isolated.

Charlotte had the mysterious others that rushed under her skin.

Over time, it became obvious that the intensity these episodes weren’t random; the Nether, by design or chance, favored certain individuals, giving them a few seconds of agonized stillness every hour. The recruits had taken to calling this ‘the Ghosthound’s favor’.

Charlotte wasn’t the worst recipient, but she was in the top five.

Truthfully, a version of Charlotte that had somehow achieved nirvana would have calmly agreed that the process wasn’t without benefits. When that strange sense of foreign observers being present in her body left, Charlotte found her mind was clear and calm. Her image seemed especially robust in the aftermath. In addition, she was gradually becoming accustomed to the sensation. She recovered much more quickly afterward.

But the sensation was still horrible. She felt like a well-used piece of leather armor, worn and then tossed to the side. The clarity came from being discarded and left with a strange hollow sensation in her chest.

The Charlotte Wick who had been spent all her life receiving ‘benefits’ from Commandant Wick didn’t trust those benefits for a single moment.

Charlotte let her breath hiss through her teeth as she raised her head and looked at the sky. Those strange observers seemed to mutter to each other and roam along the length and breadth of her body. Her extended muscle fibers hummed with their passage as if their invisible feet touched lightly against her bicep and quadriceps as they trotted back and forth. The visitors seemed to multiply until their innumerable whispers tapped at the interior of her skull. Her body resonated like the string section of the orchestra right before the show starts.

Much more persuasively this time, her stomach made its case for vomiting. Although tempted, Charlotte refused once more. She clenched her jaw.

After the peak, the sensation began to fade. One by one, the strange visitors trotted their way out of Charlotte’s body, leaving her with the same sense of numb satisfaction as an intense workout. The horrible otherness of her own body receded, fading like a nightmare before the calm light of morning. Gradually, she could open her eyes; Charlotte released a shaky breath.

Benjamin looked at her in sympathy. “You are… truly favored.”

“I suppose so,” Charlotte sighed. Then, without any further comment on the incident, the two turned and continued their journey forward along the dirt path. She would have been quite happy to move without any further reference to the incident, but to her surprise, Benjamin spoke again.

“There is a pattern, you know. To the Nether arriving.” He blinked his pale eyes twice, as though consolidating his thoughts physically in his vision. Each word was exactly spoken then, without hesitation. “Even now this is just a theory, based on the infrequency of the arrival and how little time has passed… but I spent my meditation hours chasing the ripples. The Nether seems to flow and gather together…”