A/N
As some of you have expressed, I'm open to the possibility of reposting the original Recourse Light somewhere else, either on a public document site or another fic-hosting site, so that you can go back and read it at your leisure. Ideas/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Eight and a half hours later, I find myself sitting on a chair next to the bedridden Director of the Chaldea Security Organization, whose facility we currently reside. It's a facility that, publicly, is supposed to be located somewhere in the Alps, but in reality it sits at the bottom of the world - smack in the middle of the Antarctic continent to ensure maximum isolation for its intended purposes. Given the Animusphere family's astronomical background, it certainly makes sense.
I take a slow sip from the cup of coffee that Romani's fixed for me while thumbing slowly through the emails on my phone. By this point in the day, my computer should have received its workload of business emails for my day job, which is a small freight forwarding and logistics company that I took over from my dad. I've been passing the time waiting for Olga to wake up sorting through the emails, looking through what I can here and leaving the emails that are better off being done at home alone. Stuff like invoices, delivery orders, entry summaries - I can leave documents like those for later, since they only require me to print them out and file them accordingly, whereas other emails like messages from other co-loading companies and customers demand my immediate attention and replies, which I type out on my phone and send out as those such emails arrive in my inbox.
Having done what share of the workload for today that I can, I glance with bloodshot eyes over to my left to check on Olga's condition. Her breathing has normalized, and she's sleeping calmly. I wouldn't say that she's sleeping peacefully - the physical trauma isn't completely gone yet - but she's certainly looking a lot better than eight hours ago.
Both of her legs are successfully reattached and are functioning properly, with their blood flows repaired and working at nominal conditions to sustain those limbs. Her motor functions in her legs will take some time to recover fully, but at least they will make a full recovery; I suspect they'll still feel a bit numb and uncomfortable at first when she wakes up, though.
Several medical runes surround and hover over her head; I've assigned them there to apply mana-based trauma therapy to calm Olga's nerves so that she isn't freaking the fuck out when she comes to. Knowing how she was back when she first had the Director position forced onto her and after she found out about the shit her dad was doing, I felt that giving her this additional medical attention was necessary.
Well before they reach the room, I sense an entity outside in the hall approaching the room, and sure enough, the door to the room pulls open to reveal Doctor Romani, also with a cup of coffee in hand.
"And I'm back, this time with my own coffee ~ " the Doc proudly announces, letting himself inside as the door pushes shut behind him.
"Welcome back," I dryly respond, and I drink a bit more coffee to alleviate the dryness in my throat that is audible by this point. I watch Romani take a seat on the chair across from me and take a drink out of his own plain coffee mug.
"You haven't slept a wink yet, have you?" he asks, gesturing with his coffee cup.
"Of course not. Not when my patient was in critical condition for the good part of the last eight hours."
"Even though she hasn't been for half that time?"
"Maybe not her actual body, but her mental state still was. Nobody needs to hear Marie immediately screaming her fucking head off the moment she wakes up during a time like this."
"Th-That's a good point, but - but that was cold, August."
"Was it? Maybe it was. We are in the middle of bum-fuck Antarctica..." I take another sip from my black coffee. "You're not particularly fond of her, last time I checked."
"Shhh, shhh! What if the Director overhears you saying that! She'll fire me instantly if she finds out, you know! There's no such thing as job security around these parts, now that she's the Director!" Romani begins to panic, and the coffee in his cup trembles and splashes, coming dangerously close to spilling.
Making the Doc panic like this is quite the entertainment. Then again, when you've been up for thirty hours and spent the last eight of them in the same room except for a few minutes to go use the bathroom, anything other than staring at your phone feels like entertainment. I wouldn't expect this current generation to know anything about that, though.
"Well, she very well could...she should be close to waking up..." I sigh tiredly, taking another cursory glance down at the girl next to me.
"A-Already...? Even though she was that badly injured...?" the resident physician runs his free hand up through his hair. "Well, I guess that's the legendary Battlefield Angel for you..."
I frown immediately through my sleep-deprived exhaustion. "That nickname again? Y'all need to learn when to drop it. Besides, I get the feeling that kind of a name doesn't belong to me."
"Then who else does it belong to? You're bar none the best medic and magical surgeon that Chaldea's got access to."
"There are people better at it than me. People who've actually been studying and practicing in this field for their whole lives. Just by virtue of age, I can't hold a candle up to them, yet you all act like I'm hot shit."
"I mean, it's undeniable that you're the best we got, at least as far as freelancers are concerned. Those other people you're talking about - they're all already contracted with other organizations like the Clock Tower and such. We can always find mercenary mages out there; they all come by a dime a dozen. But to find one who's also got medical knowledge, especially emergency treatment and surgical experience, now that's eye-opening."
"Maybe it's not Olga you should be worrying about, but me instead."
"You? What for?"
"With what you said earlier. About how you might lose your job if Olga's listening in on us. Rather than her, I think you should worry about me replacing you in your job."
"Aaaaah, you're right! Oh noooooooo!" Romani cries out in horror at this revelation that my medical skills are in direct competition with his, and he quickly bows his head repeatedly as if in apology. "Please don't take my job! It's all I have, I can't lose it! If I lose it, there'll be no way I can sustain my relationship with Magi-Mari!"
"Magi-Mari...speaking of which, I hear there's a new magical girl gacha game that's coming out in Japan later this year, sometime around August," I mention to the Doc, pulling up my phone again to find pictures on Google Images. "Magia...something, I think it was called? You might wanna check it out since I know you're into Magical Girls."
"I'm not into Magical Girls, I'm just into Magi-Mari! No one and nothing will be able to replace my Magi-Mari!" Romani hotly corrects me, but his indignant expression drops almost instantly to display his inevitable inner curiosity. "...what did you say the title was?"
"Found it...it's called 'Magia Record'," I inform him, showing him a promotional piece of artwork for the game on my phone.
"Okay, okay...got it...by the way, how the heck do you know about it?"
"A friend of mine I graduated high school with and I'm still in contact with let me know about it. We hang out pretty often, usually to grab food and chill, and he likes to talk about weeb shit and such."
Romani laughs heartily at this little anecdote of mine. "Does he know about you?"
"No. That's what makes it funny."
"You're a cruel guy, you know that, August?"
"I'm surprised it's taken you that long to realize."
"No, trust me, I noticed a long time ago, I just never bothered to say it straight to your face until now."
"I see. Then if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and slip Da Vinci an application form to formally take your place as Chaldea's Resident Phys - "
"I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY, PLEASE FORGIVE ME, I DIDN'T MEAN IT THAT W -"
Completely forgetting that there's a patient who's supposed to be in the ICU ward of a hospital in the same room as us, Romani immediately shuts himself up as soon as he hears Olga groaning weakly with discomfort in her bed, stirring somewhat but managing to relapse into her sleep.
"Goddamn it, Romani, I really will kick you out of the room if you don't keep your fucking voice down," I warn the Doc in a low voice, checking the therapy runes applying their light, steady streams of mana that gently caress the top of Olga's head to facilitate optimal blood and mana flow through her brain to ease her levels of trauma.
"S-Sorry! And...don't tell the Director about this either, okay? Please? Pretty please?"
"I'll leave that for Olga to decide."
We spend the next five minutes or so in silence, the majority of which I spend rechecking Olga's vitals and condition to make sure nothing's going out of whack because of Romani's sudden outburst. Not that there should be any anomalies just because an idiot decided to start yelling in the room, but what few years of medical experience I do have taught me that you can't ever be sure and you can never make assumptions without properly checking out the situation first.
"Come to think of it, Olga...Olga seems pretty close to you, doesn't she?" Romani mentions lightly after a sip of coffee, naturally. "I don't know if anyone else's asked you about it yet, but I never bothered because it seemed like something Olga would fly off her rails at me about if I did."
"Her dad and my dad were business partners," I explain swiftly, configuring the therapy runes slightly to adjust the levels of mana output being applied to Olga's brain.
I spy the physician reel a little at the sheer swiftness of my answer. "W-Whoa...that was fast..."
"Is there a problem with fast answers?"
"Well, no, that's...that's not what I meant. It's just that, y'know, I expected you to like...give me a pause or something before answering...since I know I could've been asking a potentially sensitive question there..."
"It's not sensitive, though. It's just a fact." I then turn to Romani, who sits up in his chair once he feels my piercing gaze land on him, even through my eyes' bloodshot albumen and weariness.
"So...so Marisbury knew your father, huh. He was always the type of person who would never shy away from recruiting people of all sorts of backgrounds and experiences to his cause, after all. Definitely very unorthodox as far as the Clock Tower's concerned...if I might prod a bit further, what did the two of them do? Do you know?"
"My dad was a freight forwarder; he originally moved to America from South Korea as part of his job, since his company needed to send some of their logistics personnel to their branch in the West. He decided that he liked living in America better, quit the company, and used his freight forwarding experience to make his own startup and developed his own customer base. That was around the time Olga's dad was first beginning to work on the Chaldea Project, and because he initially began working on it in secret, he needed a way to move materials and equipment around on a small and affordable scale. That's when he found out about my dad's startup and collaborated with him."
"Ahhh, so that's what freight forwarding is? I've always heard the term tossed around here and there but I never bothered looking it up fully..."
"As a freight forwarder officially registered with the United States government, my dad - and now me, now that I'm working his business - have the power to move anything you want into and out of American borders. Doesn't matter what it is." I drain the rest of my coffee and set the cup down on the medical cart next to me. "We specialize in figuring out the best and most affordable methods of transportation for your goods and contacting moving companies like trucking companies to do that. Normally, since we're registered with the Feds and we're kinda under contract to not do some shady or straight up illegal shit and move stuff we're not supposed to, we make sure not to get ourselves in deep shit with the government doing stuff like that. But my dad made an exception for Olga's dad because the venture he put forth for him was the most lucrative deal he'd see for years, and by taking it, he'd be able to set his own business up for immediate success rather than having to wait ten, twenty years to see it get anywhere."
"So it was basically the perfect deal, then?"
"Couldn't have been more perfect. My dad needed to expand his customer base and was on the hunt for a big contract, while Olga's dad was looking for the perfect business partner who could help him move the stuff he had in America secretly and quickly out of American borders up to Europe. I looked through the files of their transactions from back then, and apparently Olga's dad even had some stuff move from Japan, through the US via MLB, and back to England at one point."
"Huh, interesting, so your dads were close business partners at some point. But what about you and Olga? Where do you two fit into that story?"
"It's not really much of a story. We first met...I wanna say, five years ago? Five? Was it six? Maybe it was six...yeah, sounds about right. Let's say it was six years ago. My dad and Olga's dad met for business dinner, I guess you could say. I think Olga's dad was against it, but my dad insisted since it's part of Korean business culture to take the time to meet your customers at least once and treat them to dinner and whatnot. Olga's dad at the time was in the area, and with my dad's insistence, he gave in, so we all met at a Korean soondubu restaurant. Olga was with him at the time too, so we all had dinner together."
"Wow ~ sounds romantic."
"It's...really not. Magi Mari's screwing with your sense of romance, Doc, I recommend completely purging her from your life."
"Nuh-uh, no way! Not happening!" Romani, who's also pulled out his phone in the meantime to check on Magi-Mari, starts hugging his phone like a manchild. Perhaps there's no hope for him left.
"I was already working as a freelance mage at the time, so Olga's dad, through my dad, offered me a few jobs that basically boiled down to delivering certain packages or shipments to specific warehouses in our area or making sure that people didn't break into the 3PL's that had his stuff in them, since we're right next to the LA Port, which is one of the bigger international ports in the country, so it was convenient for Olga's dad to keep stuff in the area. On a few rare occasions, I've even had to meet Olga's dad in person for a few deliveries, and I met Olga a few times along the way that way."
Nodding sagely as if able the grasp the full picture, the Doc raises his cup of half-drunk coffee at me. "Truly the making of a modern fairy tale..."
"Olga fucking hates my guts, are you kidding me?"
"But you can't deny that she's way closer to you than she is to anyone else."
"By 'close', you're talking about how she constantly yells at me, forgets to pay me, and puts all these bullshit terms and conditions on the contracts I had to sign to be a freelancer with Chaldea? Because I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like being 'close' with someone."
"Sure it can. Just think about how Olga interacts with everyone else." Romani sips again as if he were a Discord emote. "She's normally super cold and curt, and she'll come off as cold and condescending to most other people; she'll act like how she does to you to others, sure, but only if she feels like her nerves are getting pushed to that state. But with you, she instantly warms up and acts obnoxious from the get-go. That means she's much more comfortable around you than with others."
"And you're sure that Magi-Mari isn't fucking with you right now? What's the last thing she's told you as part of her 'Advice for Magic Dummies'?"
"Uhhh, let me see..." Romani begins thumbing through the Magi-Mari app. "The last thing she told me was...'if you're not happy with how your life is currently going, why not consider telling yourself that you're a piece of unwanted trash that not even the garbage can wants'."
I just stare back at him silently.
"L-Look, it's great advice, okay? Let me explain - "
"Guilty as charged."
"Let me explain, August! What she really means by this is - "
"Guilty as charged."
" - is that you need to get the anger and frustration out of yourself first if you - "
"Guilty as charged."
An air of swift depression hangs over Roman's head as he turns around in his chair to face the wall, and raising his phone again to his mouth, I hear him muttering, "Help me, Magi-Mari...one of my coworkers is bullying me again..."
And his phone responds with,
"Maybe you deserve to be bullied with how dumb you are ~ "
"Yeah, you fuckin' tell his ass, Magi-Mari," I call over, and Romani whips around again with horror on his face.
"B-But you were the one telling me to uninstall Magi-Mari! And now you're on her side?!"
"If it involves calling you a fucking idiot, yes."
As I'm about to finish my thought, I hear a soft moan exit Olga's lips, and I sense that she's about to wake up from it, so I turn to her to give her my full attention - and sure enough, Olga-Marie Animusphere slowly opens her tired, orangish-golden eyes that squint uncomfortably and slowly manage to focus up at the ceiling - until I hold my hand over her eyes to help block some of the lights on the ceiling that must be blinding her. With my left hand, I wave the medical runes away to dissipate them and place my hand directly on her forehead to help accelerate the rate at which her sluggish senses stabilize by Tuning the Animusphere Magic Crest that's right on her forehead.
"Welcome back, Director," I tell the girl who now slowly sits up on her bed once I'm finished clearing her senses. The Animusphere Family Crest, stimulated a little by the light amount of Tuning I've done, glows lightly for a moment before fading back into her skin. "How do you feel?"
Olga doesn't say anything at first, which is natural, since she's probably wondering how she's even alive right now. I'm not sure how much she remembers before the blast, but we'll find out once Olga finds it in her to start talking. She slowly stares up at me.
"...August? What are you...?" But even as she starts asking me what I'm doing here, my presence alerts her to what must be a terribly horrifying truth to her, and the way her facial expression morphs with that horrified look of revelation is a dead giveaway. "...no...no, wait, then...then that means - "
As she begins to quietly panic, I reach over and pick up a tablet that's sitting on the second rack of the medical cart and turn it on.
"Mash and Da Vinci finalized the casualty count - 209 killed and thirteen wounded," I report to her calmly, scrolling through the list of names now categorized under "FATALITIES". "The bomb that Lev Lainur rigged inside the Central Control room wasn't the only one - he'd set up multiple explosives in the Rayshifting platform, the Coffin Containment Room, and out in the hallways outside Central Control just in case. Since all the staff was called in there, the bombs took out most of them - among the Masters, only the Crypters of Team A survived, but their conditions are critical - I offered to take a look at them, but since the bombs went off in the middle of the Rayshifting process, they're stuck in there, and Da Vinci's put them into cryogenic sleep for now as a - "
"What about Candidate #48?"
I look back up at Olga next to me, who's leaning towards me with eyes wide open, in urgent demand of an immediate response.
"Where's Miss Ritsuka? Ritsuka Fujimaru?" the Director asks hoarsely.
"Dead. Both Mash and Doctor Romani have confirmed that Ritsuka Fujimaru was killed in action as a result of coming into direct contact with CHALDEAS." I lower the tablet in my hand.
Looking like I just slapped her across the face, Olga-Marie shrinks slowly back onto her bed as the heavy truth and dire situation begins to take root in her conscience.
"...hey, August? It wouldn't kill you to be a bit less, uh...direct, now, would it...?" Doctor Romani asks me with an awkward smile. "The Director just woke up from a pretty traumatic experience, after all..."
I place the tablet back where it was on the medical cart next to me.
"I could be, but that would be undermining the gravity of the situation that we have on our hands. While I'll admit that my normal behavior doesn't always adequately convey the same kind of gravity, right now I think that this is not a time to be sugarcoating anything. That, and Olga is perfectly capable of handling this, she just needs a bit of time to digest everything that's going on right now. Or are you maybe suggesting that Olga can't do her job properly as Director?"
Romani quickly shakes his hands before him in my direction in a bit of panicked denial. "N-No, I'm - I'm not trying to suggest anything of the sort, it's just - "
"August's right, Romani. I'm the Director of Chaldea - I need to handle this."
Perhaps with surprising speed, Olga, facing this chaotic situation ahead of her bravely, sits up straight in her bed again after wiping her eyes with the back of her hand to look at the two men in her room.
"Is there anything else either of you need to report?" the young Director asks as calmly as she can, though her voice is still a bit broken and quivering slightly.
"I need to talk to you about your condition right now, but that can wait if Doc's got anything to add." I gesture over to Romani.
"Well...it's basically all bad news, but...Central Control's a big mess, as you can figure. Da Vinci's doing her best to repair it, but with most of our staff gone, including basically all of our technicians, it's going to take a while. Luckily Da Vinci did study the layout of the rooms beforehand, and she said she'll be able to complete repairs all by herself, but still. Most of the Rayshifting Coffins are destroyed as well, and what few did survive the blasts are knocked offline since the power grid supporting them's torn up. Everything pretty much got damaged to varying extents...LAPLACE, SHEBA, TRISMEGISTUS...it's even a miracle how Trismegistus even managed to Rayshift Olga's consciousness over to Singularity F before it failed due to the damage it sustained...I guess CHALDEAS survived, but..."
"How long will it take for Da Vinci to conduct repairs?" Olga asks with a light voice.
"We don't know yet; Da Vinci did say that she'd be able to determine an ETA by the end of today, and she said to check with her once you're awake."
"Very well, then I shall do that. Is there anything else?"
"No, that's...that's it from me, other than to get another cup of coffee."
"Then you may go. I have a few orders of business to settle with our freelancer here, so if you'll please give us to space to talk."
"Oh, you need the room? Okie-dokie, I won't get in your way ~ " The Doc springs up to his feet to vacate the room, and as he makes his way to the door, he offers to take my own empty cup of coffee, which I hand to him. "Do you want a refill, August?"
"I'm fine, thanks."
The door closes in his wake, leaving the room empty except for me and the Director.
"First things first," Olga says swiftly, shifting her gaze down at me, which I don't return at first. "How did you know that there would be bombs planted in Chaldea?"
"What do you mean?" I look back at her with confusion. "I didn't know that Chaldea would get bombed like this."
"Liar. Lev told me right before Romani emergency-Rayshifted me and Mash out of Singularity F that he'd made sure to put some bombs right underneath my physical body at the time that they blew up," Olga says angrily. "I should be dead right now, yet here I am."
"Yeah, and that's great; the Director of Chaldea is the most important person here, so it's a good thing that she survived. What's your deal here?"
"My point is that you must've somehow known that something like this would happen, and so you protected me somehow! You're the only one I know who'd be that crazy prepared, even for something like a terrorist attack on Chaldea, of all places!" Olga argues with me hotly again.
"Well, apparently not prepared enough to anticipate an entire bombing of the entire Control room."
Suddenly, I feel a small but fierce tug on the side of my hoodie collar as Olga, reaching over for me, grabs me by that particular article of clothing of mine and yanks me close.
"Why did you only save me?" she whispers with almost seething anger - but it's not just pure anger that I can hear in her shaking voice. "Why was it only me that you saved? I should've been among the dead. I shouldn't even be here right now. Yet here I am, still alive when almost my entire staff, the staff that Father entrusted to me after his death, the staff that I handpicked - why didn't you save all of THEM, too?!"
I turn my neck ever so slightly to glare back directly into Olga's golden orange eyes with my own eyes that are dark brown, so dark that you can only really see their brown hues if you're as close to me as Olga is right now.
"If you must know, two years ago, when I first signed on with Chaldea as one of its few freelancers, I put a defensive matrix rune on you. Remember when we shook hands to seal the contract? That's when I planted it on you."
"And why? Why did you do that? Because you thought I was weak and needed protection or something?"
"Do you also remember the first time we met? When our dads met at that one Korean restaurant for dinner one night? After we went home, my dad told me that he could tell you weren't a very happy kid. And since the business partnership that our dads had at the time would go on for a while, he suspected that we'd cross paths every now and again, and he asked me to do whatever I could for you, just as he'd done for me."
As I'm explaining this little anecdote, Olga slowly relinquishes me and retreats gradually to her bed.
"...so that's it? You're only doing that - you only did that just because your dad said to, because he took pity on me?" she asks weakly.
"I mean, yes, it's a good part of the reason. My dad's done a lot for me in my life, so I'd like to be a good son and do what he asked in regards to you. And for the record, I don't think it's fair to say that he told me to look after you because he pitied you; he probably saw a bit of me in you and wanted to do what he could to help, but obviously he's not going to tell another man how to take care of his kid, you know?"
"That's still pitying me!"
"Then fucking whatever, think of it as whatever you like."
I can hear Olga's teeth grinding against each other behind her pursed lips.
"Then what's the rest of the reason?" she asks me demandingly.
"Because I like you."
And before Olga even gets the chance to register those words and react accordingly, I whip out my phone and press it on, and the phone screen as the Jebaited emote ready to go. Together, Alex Jebailey and I both face Olga swiftly while her face is turning red.
"...sike." I even throw out a finger gun with my left hand to point back at Olga.
Immediately raising her own right hand in an actual finger gun in retaliation, the Director swiftly blasts me with the fastest Gandr shot on the western Antarctic ice shelf. Because Olga is quite prone to outbursts of anger such as this one that I've elicited from her, I react to it and tuck my left hand back in, blocking the Gandr bullet with the back of my hand - and a sharp PING! is emitted as soon as the bullet makes contact with my bare skin. Normally I'd be wearing fingerless gloves, but because I'd performed reattachment surgery on Olga's legs earlier, I've taken them off and haven't put them back on yet, but it makes no difference, as my hand appears unscathed following the block.
Quickly slipping my phone back into my pocket, I leap out of my chair next to Olga's bed as she rapid-fires more Gandr shots at me out of embarrassment, and I track them precisely with my eyes, estimating their trajectories and blocking each and every one of them that comes out from her fingertip.
"Stop parrying them so I can freaking hit you!" Olga shrieks while blasting away to her heart's content, clearly frustrated as all hell that absolutely none of her attacks are effective whatsoever.
"No can do! This is some damn good training if you ask me!" I call over the high-pitched PING's that my left hand keeps making every time I bat another one of Olga's Gandr shots away. "It's not often I get training like this for free!"
So Olga stops shooting Gandr at me, swings her legs out of bed to stand on her feet, and turns to face me in her pajamas that we changed her into after I was done with her surgeries. She begins to chant with an emotionally driven set of clenched teeth,
"Stars, Cosmos, Gods, Animus...!"
"Olga, let's not blow up the rest of Chaldea, Lev already did that for you," I holler at the Director while she's chanting her activation spell for an explosive attack.
"Half of Chaldea's already blown up, so what's another explosion?!" she shrieks with frustration. "Especially if it's to get rid of YOU!"
With the family crest on her forehead glowing back into view, the Director raises both of her hands at me to direct her charged mana in my direction, and -
PING!
Other than that high-pitched emission of invisible mana, nothing else happens. Shaking my left hand off, I take a quick sigh.
"No, but seriously though, your explosive magic's actually pretty good, so don't throw that shit at me. I'm not exactly in the mood to reattach my own arm after what I had to do eight hours ago."
Olga looks down at her legs, which seem to have regained full motor functions if she was able to get out of bed so smoothly like that.
"By the way, who - who changed me into my pajamas...?" Olga asks slowly, her face reddening up even more. "And - and how did they know where I even kept my pajamas...?"
"I don't even wanna answer that."
"W-Why not!?"
"Because you're gonna try to blow me up again, regardless of what answer I give you."
"I won't this time!"
"That's the second biggest lie you've ever told me."
"It's not a lie! And what's even the first, anyway!"
"That you'd pay me on time."
"THAT'S NOT MY FAULT! OUR FUNDING'S BEEN GETTING THROTTLED LATELY, OKAY!?"
"Okay, okay, calm down, your legs're gonna fly off again with all that stress."
That particular remark shuts up Olga real good as she quiets down quickly, her hands lowering down to her legs right above her knees - but to her visible surprise, she can't feel any surgical scars through her pajamas.
"There's no scarring; I made sure of that," I tell her quietly, approaching her slowly to walk up next to Olga's bed whose sheets we've changed after her reattachment surgeries were done.
"...how did my legs even get blown off, anyway? You said you put a defensive matrix on me, right?"
"Well, since I obviously wasn't here and the explosions took out the security cameras in Central Control so I couldn't review the footage of the explosions in full, I don't know for sure. But my best guess is that the matrix did cover you enough to protect all your internal organs, thankfully, but because it was literally six blocks of C-4 you were standing right on top of, the sheer explosive force breached the matrix around your legs, and the sheer amount of force funneling through that breach probably sliced your legs off clean. I've installed another stronger defensive matrix on you in the meantime; it should now account for close-range explosions like that one, so you shouldn't worry as much about another instance like that happening."
I stand next to the bed, on the other side from the Director, waiting for her to say something if she's got more to say to me, but when it's nothing but silence, Olga's golden-orange eyes fixed on the bedside in the meantime, I take the conversational lead again.
"Since you seem to be in good shape, that's basically it from me. I've got my own day job to do, so if you'll excuse m - "
"Wait, August. There's one more thing."
"What?"
Olga looks back up at me.
"...with all the Masters we had assembled for Singularity F gone, and with Team A in cyrofreeze, we have no one left to investigate future Singularities. We can't let this incident leak outside of Chaldea, either - then our funding'll be cut for good, and who knows what'll happen to this facility if word does get out. That means we can only rely on what little staff and resources we have left until we can find a way to slowly replace the staff we lost."
I have a sinking feeling that I know where Olga's trying to go with this, but I let her finish her thought.
"I myself normally don't show any aptitude for being a proper Master like the others were, as much as I hate to admit it, so me becoming a Master instead, like back when I initially joined Chaldea, is out of the question. So that means our only feasible solution is to bring in one of our freelancers to act as a provisional Master until we can find a suitable replacement."
The Director keeps her eyes firm on me.
"You're the best freelancer we have by a large margin. Will you become a Master to help Chaldea resolve the Singularities we detect in the future?"