A/N: So...this update is very, very late. Sorry about that. I have quite a lot going on now that college has started up again. It doesn't help that I found a major mistake in this chapter and had to all but rewrite it...
As always, I hope you enjoy.
"Look, look, that cloud looks like a dog!"
"Really, Colette? I think it looks more like Lloyd when he's trying to think."
"Oh really? Wait...hey, shut up, Genis!"
Genis and Colette giggled as Lloyd looked away, red in the face. Rai sighed in the background. He was getting tired of the inane chatter. He had only gotten about an hour of sleep, if that, and his head was pounding horribly. When he was this tired and irritated, it became doubly hard to ignore all the voices, so they seemed slightly louder than usual now. He'd gotten tired of trying to convince W it was wrong, and that he'd made the right decision, and now he was forced to endure it saying the same thing over and over again (We're a horrible person, we're evil, we're terrible, we're horrible, we're evil...). It sounded more and more distraught as time went on, until Rai wanted to just pound his head hard into the ground to make it stop. Only he knew that wouldn't help, unless he knocked himself into unconsciousness, but everyone else would probably think he was crazy (They wouldn't be wrong, stated the cynic).
Maybe he should join into the conversation after all, if only to escape his own thoughts for a short while. Raine and Kratos both traveled silently, so that left only the children to talk to. They seemed to have moved on from the topic of clouds now. He realized suddenly that Lloyd was now addressing him.
"Hey, Rai, so why are you wearing that cloak and that scarf? Won't that just make it even more hot?"
Rai sighed. Was Lloyd really this clueless? "Lloyd, the desert sun is so fierce that it's not a good idea to bare too much of your skin to it. My skin would probably be peeling off by the end of the day if I didn't do this."
"...Oh. But, wait, what about the rest of us, then?"
"You're all already fully covered. If you hadn't noticed, Genis is wearing long pants today."
Genis snickered again. "Wow, you didn't know that, Lloyd?"
"Sh-shut up, Genis!"
Don't they ever get tired of this?
"So - Rai, what do you think?" asked Lloyd.
Huh? "About what?"
Genis cut in. "Lloyd thinks that it'll take three hours to get to Triet. Colette thinks it'll take four hours, and I guessed six. What do you think?"
He did some quick mental calculations, taking into account the map he'd seen in a book once. The precise amount of time it had taken to get from Iselia to the House of Salvation, as reported by CO, had been sixteen hours and 34 minutes, starting at about six in the morning. The distance from Iselia to the House of Salvation had, by the map, been comparable to the distance from the House to Triet at about 97 kilometers, assuming they walked in a relatively straight line from point to point (which they had). They'd left the House of Salvation about nine and a half hours ago (precisely nine hours and 24 minutes, subtracting out the time taken to eat lunch), and had entered the desert around the two-hour mark, so it should be about...
"It'll take a little over seven hours," he said. "More precisely, assuming we keep a constant rate of about 4.8 kilometers per hour, which is average walking speed, it should take seven hours and ten minutes." Kratos snorted from ahead, but said nothing.
Genis laughed a little. "I guess you win, Rai. I'm curious - were you keeping track of how long it took us from Iselia to the House, or did you just assume 4.8 kilometers per hour?"
"I kept track. Sixteen hours and 34 minutes."
"Guuuuuuyyys," Lloyd whined, sounding annoyed. "We were just supposed to guess, not start a math lesson!"
"That's amazing, Rai!" chirped Colette happily, hands folded in front of her. He felt a stab of annoyance at the obvious facade. Why did she believe she had to act this way?
"It's not exactly that impressive," he muttered, shoving his hands into his pockets. More like sad - who would actually remember such a useless fact? CO really was pretty annoying, despite being more tolerable than most of the others. The times where it actually came in handy were few and far in between.
"Hey! Stop right there, inferior beings!"
The harsh yell made Rai freeze in his tracks. The party took various defensive stances as a group of four Renegades advanced on them. The rest of the party still thought they were Desians, though, Rai reminded himself. Still, it would be better to end this encounter peacefully. He had no desire to kill people for no reason - especially not fellow half-elves, and especially not ones who were against Cruxis.
"What is your business in the desert?" one of the soldiers demanded, after they'd gotten close enough to speak comfortably. Raine stepped forward, giving a generic response. She was avoiding the fact that the Chosen was with them, and for good reason. Rai stepped forward, closer to Colette, and under cover of slinging an arm around her shoulder, quickly wrapped the scarf he'd been using to shade his face over her head.
"Keep your Cruxis Crystal covered. We don't want them to know you're the Chosen; it'll be easier to avoid trouble," he hissed in her ear. She shot him a grateful look as she adjusted the scarf.
Rai shifted his attention back to the Renegades. "Rai - you've noticed their uniforms, right?" Genis breathed in his ear. He stiffened. Genis had noticed the difference? Unlike in the game, the Renegades' uniforms were not blatantly green, but there were a few subtle differences in the belts and the boots and even in the weapons the soldiers carried. He nodded very slightly to acknowledge his brother's comment and continued watching.
As the leader continued to grill Raine with questions, Rai noticed one of the other Renegades nudging his partner. They seemed to be looking at something specific; he followed their gazes and froze. Was he imagining things, or were they staring at Lloyd's hand? Which, he realized in horror, was for some reason no longer covered by a cloth. One of them looked down at something in his hand and then back up at Lloyd, as if he were checking something. Did they realize that Lloyd's exsphere is special? Lloyd didn't seem to have noticed anything - his attention was fixed on Raine's conversation.
The Renegade paced up to the leader and whispered something in his ear. He looked startled, and then glanced quickly at the visible exsphere on Lloyd's hand and then at the object in his subordinate's grasp.
"Is something the matter?" Raine asked suspiciously.
"Ah, no! Nothing at all!" The leader smiled. "Everything seems to be in order. Continue on your way." He turned quickly and gestured to his subordinates to follow.
This sudden change in attitude - they had definitely noticed something. They'd probably realized that it wasn't a good idea to try to take Lloyd here, since they were outnumbered. If they were allowed to report back to the Renegade base...
Rai's mind weighed various proportions and probabilities lightning fast, and in a split second, he reached the safest decision.
As the Renegades started to walk away, Rai quickly raced up to Raine and caught her sleeve. "We need to kill them," he said urgently, just loud enough so that the others could hear. Her eyes widened.
"What - "
"I'll explain later, just do it!" he snapped. Lloyd lost no time in charging forward, and after a long, measuring look, Kratos did the same. Genis looked frozen. "Rai - "
"Genis, I have a reason for this. Do you really think I'd just decide to kill people for no reason?!" he hissed as he started to cast. After a brief pause, Genis did the same. The Renegades were turning around with cries of shock as they realized they were under attack.
As Lloyd and Kratos each tangled with a Renegade each, Colette helping with throws of her chakrams, the other two were racing towards where Rai stood with Genis and Raine. He cursed, quickly finishing his initial spell and firing off another within the next five seconds. He was casting nonverbally, allowing the rational voice to take over, narrowing its concentration onto the spells. The Renegades both dodged his first attack, but the second one, a concentrated air attack, hit precisely where he'd been aiming and neatly severed the head of the half-elf on the left. Rai's blood ran cold as he saw the head bounce on the ground astride a torrent of blood.
"Layn!" screamed the one still standing. Then he was racing toward Rai with redoubled fury, probably distraught at the death of his comrade.
As the man neared, Rai was distracted by the tears in his opponent's eyes and almost stopped casting.
"W-why?" the Renegade stammered hoarsely. Rai said nothing. He didn't have an answer.
He's the enemy, he berated himself angrily, and managed to send a large fireball at him at point-blank range. The Renegade threw up a mana shield and came out somewhat singed but still very much alive, now with tears streaming down his face. "Aqua Edge!" yelled Genis, but the Renegade leapt neatly into the air, dodging the attack, and brought his sword down towards Rai.
He panicked, barely managing to roll out of the way. Akira! He narrowly dodged another attack. Weaponless as he was, there was no way he'd be able to keep this up for very long, and his opponent was armored, so hand-to-hand combat wouldn't be very useful. Luckily, the Renegade seemed to have let his emotions get in the way of his fighting skills, because he was flailing wildly with his sword, still asking desperately, "Why - why - " His voice was broken.
Then Lloyd was there. Without a moment of hesitation, the swordsman stabbed straight into the Renegade's back, hard enough that the weapon went all the way through and came out through the chest, so far that the blade's tip brushed against Rai's shoulder.
The enemy was almost nose-to-nose with Rai. His face held more shock than pain as he choked out, "Wh - " and staggered. Lloyd yanked his sword back out abruptly and the man crumpled to his knees in front of Rai like a marionette whose strings had been cut. His dark eyes never left Rai's - they were filled with hate and pain.
"Curse - you - " he forced out between wet coughs, dark blood trickling from his mouth and mixing with freely flowing tears, "...you murdering - blood - traitor..."
He fell on his side, eyes still fixed on Rai's face as the life slowly left them. For some reason, Rai couldn't look away. He could sense the Renegade's mana draining, the signature fading slowly into nothingness.
Then it was gone.
Like it had never existed.
So, that was what it would be like to die? Would that happen to him some day, too? He would just be...
"Rai, are you all right?" It's Lloyd, CO announced distantly, in between specific reports of the half-elf's appearance in death and what he might have felt. He's shaking your shoulder.
Rai was shaking uncontrollably, mostly because of the juxtaposition of all the voices. Within the last few seconds they'd all intensified at least tenfold, so much so that he couldn't even decide what his overall opinion was about this. Even though he'd made a decision that led to this course of events, he hadn't prepared for the sensory overload. He'd known he'd have to kill individual innocents for the greater good, but he hadn't given much thought to the idea that his enemies would act like real people, and would hate him for killing them. W was screaming so loudly now that he could hardly tell whether the voice was still in his head or whether it had somehow burst out into the real world. YOU IDIOT! YOU FUCKING IDIOT! WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST -
"Rai!"
With a monumental effort, he blinked and tried to pull himself back into reality, although the voices didn't even pause in their screaming. He stared at Lloyd, who was looking at him concernedly. "Yes?"
"Are you okay? You just froze there for a second..."
He looked to the fallen half-elf, who stared unseeingly up at him with bloody tear tracks on his pale cheeks, and then back to Lloyd. Who had killed him. "I'm fine."
The rest of the group was now gathered around him as well, looking at him with varying levels of concern. There was a short pause, as Rai pondered the unusually dark coloring of the dead half-elf's hair and eyes.
"Thanks for saving me," he said, after the silence had stretched long enough.
Lloyd looked a little uneasy. He wiped his blades carelessly on the ground, staining it red with the Renegade's blood. "No problem..." He smiled, then. "Well, let's get going! You said we wouldn't make it in seven hours unless we kept going, right? I can't wait to get to Triet!"
Rai stared blankly at him. How could he just act like nothing had just happened? When he'd just...murdered a person? Not a monster, but a person? Rai had done the same thing, of course - he wasn't trying to throw blame around - but it was obviously having an effect on him psychologically.
Raine stepped forward, her eyes sharp. "Wait. First - Rai, why did you feel they needed to be killed?"
He felt a wave of vertigo as W's screaming redoubled and he raised a shaking hand back to his head. He'd... forgotten about that, actually, in the mental turmoil. Somehow. So really, the blood of all of these Renegades was solely on his hands. The one he'd killed directly - Layn - as well as the three others.
"They seemed to recognize Lloyd's exsphere," he explained distantly. "I heard at the Desian ranch that there's a special exsphere that they're looking for, and I deduced that it was Lloyd's. It would have been trouble if they'd reported back about it." On second thought, he wasn't sure why he'd been so confident in his decision. Would it really have been so bad? Weren't the Renegades supposed to already know about Lloyd's exsphere by now, anyway? It hadn't had any fatal consequences in the game...
But even as a weaker portion of him entertained such thoughts, wanting to hide behind the idea of having been wrong, or having misjudged, Rai knew that his decision had been correct with the parameters he'd put into it. He'd already decided at some past juncture that there was no point trying to steer events through the exact course they'd taken during the game, since his mere presence in this world seemed to have changed things drastically already, and there was no guarantee it would go how he'd remembered. For example, if he allowed the party to be captured by the Renegades, they might be unable to escape, especially since in the game they'd always done so through a series of lucky coincidences. So he certainly couldn't make decisions based based on what was "supposed" to happen; if he'd allowed the Renegades to gain possible knowledge of Lloyd's exsphere, there was no way for him to predict the outcome. He could only try to steer the plot on a larger scale, and even then only so that he'd have some idea of what was to come.
Taking that into consideration, his decision had been correct, at least in terms of ensuring the highest possible chances of success for this journey. The simple matter of fact was that when weighing priorities, he hadn't assigned a single Renegade life much importance in the overall scheme of things. He'd decided to sacrifice four lives because he'd decided that they were unimportant against the possibility of the journey being potentially unsuccessful. But even though he knew the decision had been correct with respect to his current goals, that didn't make it any easier to handle emotionally. He supposed nobody had ever said the right decision was supposed to be easy.
He wondered briefly why this particular set of deaths was affecting him so much - it wasn't like he hadn't killed before. There had been Vidarr, and some other Desians in that same battle. But...no, when he had helped kill Vidarr it had felt somehow different, more like self-defense. Here, it had just felt like they were ganging up on some poor soldiers who were just doing their duty.
Half-elves like me.
"Wait - what?" Genis sounded confused and angry. "Why didn't you mention this before? And how did you even know that they'd recognized it? Are you telling me we just killed four people on a hunch?"
This comment only served to feed W's rant, and he was actually afraid now that his head would literally explode, the pain was so blinding. He realized after a few seconds (at CO's prompting) that he had yet to answer the question. He let the rational voice take over, and it said calmly, "I had been waiting to mention it until I had solidified some of my conclusions. They had obviously seen something unusual; they kept looking at Lloyd's hand suspiciously and then one of them reported it to the leader, after which he immediately changed his attitude and wanted to leave. I admit that none of that proves beyond all doubt that it was because of the exsphere, but I judged that the chance wasn't worth taking." There was no evidence in his voice of internal conflict, and he silently thanked the rational voice. This was why it was his favorite.
Genis was shaking with anger now. "W-what? You're saying that we killed them just in case? So other people's lives are just that insignificant to you?"
Yeah, Akira muttered bitterly. On the large scale - unfortunately, yes.
Lloyd cut in now. "Genis, they're not other people, they're Desians! The evil bastards who killed my mom!"
Through his shock, some things were clicking into place. So this was how Lloyd could cheerfully kill people with seemingly no remorse or conflict. He felt a chill down his spine. It was an eerie contrast with Lloyd's harmless demeanor. He had a dangerous black-and-white mentality, and in that spectrum, the Desians fell on the "evil", "must-be-killed" end. He'd labelled them as subhuman as a group, and blamed them collectively for the death of his mother and the endangerment of Colette. That was probably what made Lloyd so important as the protagonist of the "game" - he was ridiculously emotionally stable and confident in his beliefs, whether that meant to trust someone or to kill them. It was dangerous, but also an asset.
So Lloyd hadn't seen that half-elf he'd just killed as an important life, as a man with feelings? Who might have a family and friends that he cared about?
Just an evil half-elf, the same as those who had killed his mother...
Raine was speaking now. "Stop arguing. I believe Rai made the right decision. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made, and Colette's safety takes highest priority right now."
Yes, that was it. He'd been focused only on his goals, not on minimizing deaths; the four Renegades had been mere pawns. Not people.
Not lives.
But this was the better outcome, wasn't it?
"However," Raine was continuing, fixing a steely gaze on Rai, "you should have informed us about this 'special exsphere' business as soon as you found out. And Lloyd - don't you usually cover your exsphere? What happened?"
Lloyd shuffled uncomfortably. "I only just noticed that the cloth was gone. It must have gotten messed up when I was fighting at some point."
Raine sighed. "Well. There's nothing much we can do about it now." She turned back to Rai, who was staring blankly into space. "Anything else you need to tell us, Rai?"
Is there? he wondered hazily. He was having a hard time separating things that he knew because of his past memories and things that he could feasibly have found out in this life. Not to mention that if the group found out things early, that could change the storyline drastically, and not necessarily for the better. He needed to think about this, later, when his head wasn't killing him. Thankfully his rational voice, which was still in control, was already giving the safe, default answer. "Not that I can think of at the moment. If anything comes to mind, I'll let you know."
For the next two hours, nobody spoke.
As they continued walking, the atmosphere tense, Lloyd couldn't help but glance back at Rai. The half-elf had acted very oddly earlier. He'd totally frozen after Lloyd had taken care of the Desian, and then put on that blank look that Lloyd now recognized easily from all the times he'd noticed it before. Before the blankness, though, he'd been holding his head as though he were in pain.
He couldn't help but want to understand Rai better. He was curious; he'd seen him wake up from multiple nightmares, and he'd said some very telling things while having them. And then he'd go blank again, just as he had just now; just as he always did when he showed weakness or had something to hide.
He racked his mind for any reason that Rai could have had to act so weirdly just now, but came up with nothing. The half-elf had probably just been shocked by his brush with death. He had almost been killed, after all. That Desian had been ready to deal the killing blow when Lloyd had acted. But still - Rai almost seemed like he was angry at Lloyd. He'd looked at him as if he'd done something wrong, but he couldn't figure out what it was. Shouldn't the half-elf be grateful? He'd said as much, but the gratitude definitely hadn't reached his eyes - on the contrary, the cold look on his face had made Lloyd uncomfortable.
Rai was still blank now, and there was no way to tell what he was thinking. His eyes were empty - they showed absolutely no emotion. It was a bit scary, to be honest.
Lloyd thought back to the most recent nightmare he'd seen Rai have. He'd lied that he hadn't heard anything, but that was just because he could tell that Rai didn't want him to have. In actuality, Lloyd had been pretty taken aback. He'd woken up to Rai whimpering things in his sleep, like someone was torturing him, though whatever he was saying hadn't made much sense. He'd been shaking like crazy, too. Lloyd had even tried to wake him up with no success. And then the half-elf had started laughing - not just laughing either, but crazily laughing. Like he'd gone totally insane. Still sleeping, though. And then he'd started screaming and woken himself up.
It was after he woke up that he was even scarier, though. He'd gone from screaming with tears leaking out of his eyes to the totally blank, emotionless expression he had on now. All in less than a second.
It was totally unnatural.
But Lloyd knew that there had to be a reason for it - and he was determined to find that reason out.
A/N: If you find any enjoyment in this story, please considering leaving a review. Until next time!