AN: Hello again! Thank you Minyalos, The Great Daifuku and Shi-P-Dream for your reviews! I can't believe it's been a week already. I'm going to be busy for a little while, so I'm falling behind on this story a little – I mean, I'm still ahead by a bunch of chapters, but I like to have a comfortable space to work ahead in. This is the last manga-focused chapter, and I'd personally say it's a pared down version of it. After this, it's all me, for better or worse! Oh yeah, and there are various translations of Esther's mother-figure Laura. I went with Bishop Laura, even though ladies can't be bishops in the Catholic Church, but whatever. They can't be reverends or cardinals either – I'm looking at you Caterina. Bishop simply appealed to me more. I guess laws changed after the massive devastation in the TB universe. Yeah, anyway, enough of my rambling over translation. Well, thank you all again and here's chapter four! Enjoy!
Chapter Four
Esther had never been on a ship. The thought of being between two landmasses, not quite close enough to either if the boat sank unnerved her. Abel appeared even less thrilled with the idea, rambling inanely even a little excessively for him before dodging into the toilets the moment the ship started rocking slightly.
And so she and Tres were left alone on the deck. She leant on the rail, staring out at the sea while Tres stood close by.
"I never would have believed I'd end up on a ship to get to Rome," Esther said, trying to make some conversation. Tres said nothing, watching her as she spoke.
"So…" she continued, "It won't be long before we arrive in Rome."
She sighed, nervously meeting Tres' blank stare. His auburn hair was pushed back by the breeze. He looked a little odd without his bangs around his face. But she was mentally stalling and drew a breath.
"Tres, I have to apologise. For forcing myself into your group and causing all this trouble. It seems like every bad thing that could have happened, happened, you know?" she said. Various Methuselah, crazy vine wielding enemies, trains blowing up, and drugs riddled towns… yeah, pretty much everything went wrong somewhere or another.
"But some of that was you pushing us into this stuff, I guess to see how I'd react. I'll bet even the superiors know that Abel wouldn't be able to keep his mouth shut," she sighed, biting her lip. The confidence Leon had given her to keep pushing on to Rome had drained a little now he wasn't around.
"I simply carry out the orders I am given," Tres replied and Esther's heart sunk. She should have expected something like that from Tres, but no, she had to get her hopes up.
"I was notified nine hundred and thirty-seven seconds ago before the departure that travelling with you is not a problem," he continued, making Esther gape. Where had this come from? He began to walk away.
"Tres…"
He turned his head to look at her.
"Additional advice: We must uphold our discipline until we arrive in Rome. Example: the event from yesterday. You decision to act alone could have caused damage to you."
Esther felt her cheeks growing hot. It wasn't as if she set out to end up in all that trouble, but she understood what Tres meant. He did care if she got injured or not, though she wasn't sure if it was something his superiors wanted or a personal motivation. Somehow, after hearing he received a message claiming she was not a problem, his superiors wanted her in Rome in one piece.
"Where are you going?" she asked as he stomped off.
"Patrolling the ship. Please return to your room," he commanded, and disappeared around the corner.
Esther sighed and looked out at the slowly setting sun.
'This is really it. I'm really leaving home.' Her heart fluttered with worry. Realising she wasn't going home for some time made her think about Bishop Laura and grief gripped her.
'I always end up crying. I hate it.'
She rubbed at her face, as if it would erase her sadness. She wished it was so easy.
"You there, Sister," a kindly voice said, coming closer and Esther immediately looked up, "You miss your home?"
Esther found a man in a top hat wielding a fancy looking cane and a pipe stuck in his mouth standing nearby. She'd never seen anyone in such a strange getup. So many props…
"Or…" he continued, tilting his head slightly, "has the beauty of the sunset made you sentimental? If it is, what a coincidence, since I too am enjoying it."
He handed her a handkerchief and Esther stared at him. She couldn't work out if this was another test by AX or not. He looked kindly enough, but still…
"Oh!" he suddenly exclaimed, his green eyes widening, "You shouldn't be standing here! It's dangerous!"
However, before she could ask him what exactly was dangerous, something smacked her hard in the head and everything went black.
Tres had finished his patrol. He had been replaying Esther's words to him as he walked, trying to understand their meaning. Her expression had been of anxiety. A team member's mental wellbeing was as important as their physical health, but Tres had not been designed to tend to such matters. He didn't know why he was even speculating on what was wrong with Esther currently.
Suddenly, he detected Abel's voice, screaming about a professor and followed it to find Esther and Abel with fellow AX member William Walter Wordsworth. And then they had gone inside to have tea and Tres had stood nearby, listening to William explain that there were strange incidents occurring in the sea where their ship was crossing.
"Once the ship is captivated by the mermaid's song coming from the 'sun silence', nobody can escape shipwreck," William finished.
Abel had gone positively pale, while Esther stared at William in a mixture of fear and disbelief. Abel turned to look at Tres.
"Tres… do you believe it?" he nervously asked.
"Negative," Tres responded, "There is not enough evidence to support his claim. Also, if no-one can escape, how are there survivors to talk about seeing a ghost ship or hearing a song?"
Tres observed that Abel didn't look convinced, but Esther visibly relaxed at his words. William smirked.
"It's just as Tres says," he reassured, "Those tales shouldn't be taken seriously."
"Then why are you on this ship? Aren't you here to investigate the mermaid?" Abel questioned, watching William carefully, who grinned.
"You shouldn't look at me that way," William replied with a tut, "This ship is actually where I'm exhibiting my latest invention to the public!"
William then leaned forward, eyes sparkling with what Tres approximated as 'mischief'.
"Abel, you're going to be my assistant."
Abel's expression darkened.
"I should have known it couldn't be this easy…" he muttered, eyeing William furtively, "What is it, then?"
But before William could explain, he became distracted by a woman entering the large hall.
"Oh, it's the singer," he said. No-one in the room could take their eyes off of her, save Tres, who merely observed her for security purposes. Her extremely long dark hair swayed along with her hips as she walked. It was difficult to tell where her dress ended and skin began, giving the impression she was only dressed in strings of beads wound around her head and body. Tres detected that the people in the hall were all whispering about the singer, who batted her eyelashes as she passed by their group. She sashayed to the stage and drew breath.
"So beautiful…" Tres heard Esther inhale. He looked over to her to find Esther looking almost hypnotised. Was this a common reaction to singers? Tres did not know.
"The song of a mermaid," Abel said, cheeks dusted with red as he stared. William gave another smirk.
"It probably is," he said, putting Tres on alert. This woman could be a threat to them? Wasn't captivation part of that unfounded story?
"Now, dear children…" the woman sang with a smile, "Go to sleep." Tres noted the reveal of fangs in the singer's mouth and that all the humans began following her command.
Esther stood up, as if to run away, but failed to move, clutching her head.
"Abel, it's…" she began to say, but she couldn't keep her eyes open and fell to the ground, hitting her head on her chair in the process.
"Esther!" Abel cried, not reaching her in time. Tres, meanwhile, used the distraction to carefully strafe around the target, getting his guns ready.
"T-This song…" Abel gabbled as the woman drew closer. She smiled.
"Nothing to fear," she sang, and Abel blinked, unable to keep his eyes open, "Nothing to fear."
The woman removed his glasses, caressing his chin as he plunged head first into her chest.
"You're lucky to be asleep," the woman commented, as Tres began to sneak up on the woman, "Dreams are preferable to watching your blood be drained away. Then everything will end."
Tres pressed one of his guns to the back of her head.
"I'm not interested in a machine with no blood," the woman merely hissed, "Oil cannot be made into haemoglobin capsules."
"Put Father Nightroad down," Tres commanded. The woman sighed and laid Abel on the ground.
"It's all just business," she told Tres, slowly standing up, "Methuselah need capsules to stop the thirst and it so happens human blood is the base ingredient for them. They'd rather go through this process than sully their mouths on Terran flesh. Pointless in the long run, but still… it's my livelihood. So don't interfere!"
In a blink of an eye she had spun around. Tres caught sight of a razor blade in the fray as he leapt backwards.
"Zero point two three seconds too slow," he informed her as he targeted her head and began firing. It was too constricting to fight in this area; too many civilians that could become injured. His gaze briefly flickered in the direction of where Esther and William were lying unconscious, but he couldn't see them through the masses of sawdust thrown up from shredding the wooden furniture and floors.
"Target out of sight. Possible escape. Initiating search mode." He began holstering his guns, but his left arm twitched out of control, sparks erupting from the elbow joint, causing the gun and lower half of his arm to fall to the floor. He surmised the razor had been so sharp that his touch sensors couldn't detect the cut. He tried to move the upper portion of his arm, but it merely made a whirring, then a grinding whine. He holstered his right gun and picked up the fallen one as his primary weapon, abandoning the lower part of his arm. He checked on Esther, William and Abel as the dust cleared. Assured their vitals were good, he looked around. The woman, Methuselah or mermaid had run off, so he exited the hall and carefully made his way along the deck.
He could not comprehend the readings he was receiving. His sensors could detect a living organism, but there was no infrared radiation. It didn't help that he was getting constant internal reports on the damage to his arm, which was beginning to affect his processing power. The most he could currently surmise was that she possibly escaped into the sea.
"Into the sea…" he vocalised, processors whirring, "Sea… mermaid. 'Sun silence'."
Suddenly everything fell into place. Before he could say anything else, though, the mermaid herself leapt into view, her fingernails now claws. She slashed at him and he lifted his good arm to defend himself, but was knocked hard and toppled backwards. All four hundred and forty pounds of him went over the rail and plunged into the cold ocean depths.
"Target category F. A Methuselah with the ability to transform in the water: Mermaid."
Tres, being Tres, was not fazed by this new and terrifying situation, but simply pointed the gun above him, where the now transformed mermaid swam. She was smiling, her lower half now resembling the tail end of a shark. Her alabaster skin was almost luminescent in the darker ocean, her hair tangled around her like seaweed. Tres fired as best he could in the water, the force of the gunfire pushing him further down.
"How stupid," she spat, her voice clear as a bell to Tres' auditory sensors, "A lump of metal under the sea is no match for a shark!"
In a few kicks of her tail, she was upon him. With a laugh, she punched her hand straight through his chest.
The water filling his mouth and chest was causing a great deal of error reports, not to mention the joint fluid pouring out of his body. He was aware in his current state, he would be unable to propel his body to the surface; it was too heavy and he was too damaged.
"Keeping businessmen from trading is the same as keeping someone from continuing their life," the mermaid crooned, drifting in front of him, his viscous joint fluid floating around her hands.
"I can't afford to have my business stopped, so I too must live my life prepared to fight to the death."
The mermaid valued her job on a par with her life. In that way, she and Tres were not so different, though he would argue the semantics of him possessing a 'life'.
"Die…" he said, his voice garbled by the water. The mermaid began pushing him down in the water, watching his expressionless face.
'"Dying is reserved for the living. You will merely be damaged. Your duty is to protect as many people from dying as possible, even at the cost of damaging yourself. You may be repaired; they may not."' That memory… it had been Cardinal Caterina lecturing him when he had first been shipped to AX. He didn't know why she had sounded so hostile when he'd never met her before. It mattered not; they had been orders and he had obeyed ever since.
"I am a machine," he asserted, "Not a human. I am just damaged."
The mermaid pulled a face.
"How un-cute," she sighed and shoved her hand into his face, blinding him. He couldn't even move to defend himself anymore; all that rang in his head were warnings and errors reports. His auditory sensors were beginning to fail; whatever the mermaid said next, he didn't hear. He only felt her shove him so he'd sink to the bottom of the sea.
His eyes now free, he looked up as he sank to see the mermaid smirking at him, then her eyes widen in shock as a hole appeared in her arm. She recoiled away and gripped her arm, revealing Abel diving towards Tres and grabbing his leg.
'"I'll prove to you that I've got your back just as much as you have mine, Tres! That's what friends are for!"' It had been Abel's mantra in the early days when they had been paired up together. Now he was screaming underwater, and therefore incomprehensible.
Abel dragged them up to the surface, his Crusnik strength pulling Tres' weight up with relative ease. Tres followed Abel up a ladder to the deck, despite his body's groaning protests, and sat on the deck to let the water drain.
"You are disadvantaged in an underwater fight," Tres pointed out, "Why do you still purposefully interfere with the situation, Father Nightroad?"
Abel gasped for breath, his silver hair plastered to his face.
"Are you mad?!" he screamed, "If I hadn't interfered, you'd be dead!"
The error reports were still buzzing in his head, but now the water was draining, they were starting to decrease.
"Negative, I would only be damaged."
Abel looked ready to throttle Tres with all his might.
"Crazy! You won't survive with that ideology."
"I was not programmed otherwise."
One of his primary directives was defending humans even if it caused critical damage to himself. He would not preserve himself if it consequently caused humans harm. But Abel treated him like a human, and never took Tres' orders into account. There was little Tres could do beyond protect Abel as he tried to protect him, which subsequently caused Abel to talk about what great buddies they were, protecting each other's backs in battle.
"Very close, as always, with you two," a voice sighed and Tres swivelled his head to find William and Esther on the deck, perfectly alert. William was holding the rest of Tres' abandoned arm, scratching his head.
"You know, Abel has a point, Tres" William continued, "It's not much good acting without thinking until you damage yourself like this. Who do you think is going to have to fix this?"
William raised an eyebrow and gave Tres' arm a little twirl. Tres noted Esther's expression of horror at the sight.
"T-Tres…" she stammered, stepping forward, "I'm so sorry! When you saved me… that arm…"
"Negative," Tres stated, "as I have already informed you, Esther, being wounded on duty can always happen. Do not take it to heart."
He was still sopping, his hair plastered to his face, but his body felt good enough to stand, which he managed with only minor body spasms.
"O-okay," she replied, still fretful.
"May I ask how you are all here, when you were put to sleep by the mermaid nine hundred and fifty five seconds ago?"
William grinned.
"Ahh, so you are curious! Here we go!" He pulled something out of his ear. It was an earplug with his initials on it.
"Such an elementary evil requires matching protection," he said dramatically, "Sound goes through smoothly. My proud invention: 'Ear Man'!"
Tres looked over to Abel, who had shuffled over to Esther, enjoying her fussing over him, trying to dry his hair with a hanky.
"He got to use that, while we got injected with a suspicious special stimulant formula by the Professor," Abel whined, shuddering at the thought. Esther didn't exactly look pleased either, speeding her handkerchief dabbing up. She had to stretch up a fair amount to reach Abel's head. Eventually she gave up, wringing out the hanky and watching William laugh and twirl Tres' arm about again.
"Is that earplug the latest invention you were talking about?" Abel questioned, narrowing his eyes.
"How can this be an earplug?" said William, rolling his eyes, "I'm not swimming around or competing in diving contests like Tres, am I?"
Abel pouted, stomping over to the edge of the deck where Tres stood. Before he could come up with a counterattack, a hand snaked out and grabbed him, tugging him back into the ocean.
Tres immediately went to follow him, but William appeared at his elbow, looking deadly serious.
"No," he commanded, "you know your current state cannot function in that environment. Perhaps if you'd taken better care of yourself, Abel wouldn't have to fight by himself now, hmm?"
Tres said nothing in reply, trying to see what was going on in the ocean.
"Abel!" Esther cried, peering over the edge. Nothing could be seen. The silence was abhorrent to her.
"H-How long can Abel hold his breath?" she whispered after several minutes with no sign of Abel.
Tres opened his mouth to reply, but the boat rocked suddenly and Esther went stumbling backwards. William caught her around the waist with ease.
"Please excuse my manners," he said with a smile, "It seems the time has come…"
He pointed with his cane.
"Look ahead, Esther, Tres, at the results of the research by me, William Walter Wordsworth, codename 'Professor'."
Esther gaped at the massive shape emerging from the depths of the ocean. It was a humongous white robot of some kind.
"I present the heavy android for sea combat – 'Poseidon WWW'!" William shouted over the noise of the robot and ocean.
Esther gaped as the robot managed to stand straight for roughly ten seconds before being knocked over by the power of the ocean, it's metal body groaning under the strain.
"Oh my…" William gasped, "My Poseidon!"
"Look!" Esther pointed at the Poseidon's head. Washed up on it was Abel. Even from the distance they were at, they could hear Abel moaning, "What… what happened?"
The mermaid was washed up in the robot's hand, looking equally dishevelled and confused.
"This is not about 'what'!" William fumed, "This invention was built with all my love, as if my own precious child! Did this happen because I waited too long and the fish got in? Another miscalculation?!"
Esther was pulling faces at William's words, though Tres did not know what they represented.
"What are you making a fuss about?"
Esther looked up to see a massive airship in the sky above with the Vatican seal on its side, where the voice had come from.
"I've come to pick you up," the voice continued.
"The Iron Maiden two!" William exclaimed, apparently over his invention's failure, "Kate!"
Tres observed Esther's wide-eyed amazement briefly before returning his gaze back to the airship.
"I am here on Lady Caterina's request," Kate told them.
Abel grinned up at the airship.
"Nice timing, we just finished another job!" Abel shouted up, "Is Lady Caterina well?"
"Yes, she is. She's awaiting you all in Rome. But what's that?"
William immediately went into a sales pitch for the Poseidon WWW, but Kate cut him off.
"I decline the offer," she said curtly.
William looked disappointed for a moment before catching sight of the mermaid.
"Oh, I almost forgot about you," he said, "Now, Miss Mermaid, what you said to Tres…"
Esther turned away in favour of looking up at the airship. Her heart was pounding. Her journey was finally finished.
"Oh!" Kate said, "You must be Sister Esther. Travelling with useless priests must be extremely tiring." A flickering image of a woman appeared near the entrance of the airship where a ladder was lowered. Esther blinked.
"Hey, useless?!" Abel protested as he got up and grabbed at the ladder, "What's that supposed to mean?!"
"Hope that doesn't include me…" William muttered.
Tres said nothing as Esther stepped forward, her eyes glued to the translucent figure.
"Welcome to the Vatican!" the kind looking lady said with a bright smile.
Esther looked over at the ladder. Abel was on it, grinning.
"Come on, let's go, Esther," he said, his voice filled with warmth.
With a smile, she took hold of Abel's hand and allowed him to pull her aboard, tucked close to him.
Finally, perhaps she would get some answers about the members of AX and their enemies.
