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Arc F1.8 | Chapter 36: Fear

Fear, so overwhelming that his breath caught, shot through Baylor.He knew fear.

He knew loathing.

He knew fury.

No matter how many years passed, Baylor could still taste the fury and loathing he felt for Warren and every other piece of shit who had ever turned their malicious attention on Emilia. The only reason he didn’t rip any person who looked her way apart was that Malcolm had pulled him aside, back when he’d been eight or nine and first contemplating slicing into the men who dared look at a small Emilia like they’d love to snatch her up and make a meal of her.

For over twenty years, Malcolm had made sure Emilia was safe from every predator that dared look her way, vanishing people—men, mostly—into black sites and having older clones force secrets out of them. The names of other horrible predators slipped out of their minds—off their tongues in the moments before they were sliced off, any subsequent claims they were or caught in a gurgle of blood. Once his Censor had been installed, Baylor had occasionally been allowed to join those clones, all so well-trained in the torture he himself would one day inflict on the world—an attempt by The Black Knot to give him something to help contain his urges, as thought he wouldn’t be perfectly happy sustaining himself on the blood of anyone who dared utter a single word against Emilia, who dared look at her with a covetous desire she hadn’t consented to.

That was what Baylor wanted to think, anyways: that killing for Emilia alone would be enough. Even he wasn’t positive it would be enough, however. Sometimes he thought it would be enough. Other times, he thought that in no world would snuffing out the lives of the creeps and purists who assaulted Emilia with their tongues and minds ever be enough to sate him.

Regardless, Emilia’s experience with people looking at her with ill-intentions was why Baylor knew there was no way she was still with her group. According to the messages they were getting from her new friends, they were organizing to get the people they had found moving and out of . Baylor didn’t doubt Emilia had left them, intent to get to the little boy who was in danger of being handed over to the sort of person Malcolm had always protected her from, even when he had still been a teenager himself.

This, of course, was where Baylor’s brain had been struggling to reconcile itself—after all, he knew that Emilia was now likely travelling alone, doing something insane for a child she had never even met. Yet, Baylor wasn’t worried—if anything, he had a strange tug within his soul telling him he to continue on into the holding cells in order to make sure all those people the girl he loved had rescued were okay.

Part of him wanted to believe it was simply the fact that Emilia had saved those people that was making him feel that way—she’d be sad if they died after she left them, after all! One child’s innocence—Vtraní had assured them that the boy’s life wasn’t in danger, only his body—wasn’t worth all the lives that were attempting to escape that place that Emilia hadn’t wanted a single one of them to step foot within.

Oddly, another part of Baylor’s soul told him… that wasn’t it? The tug wasn’t coming from a desire to protect Emilia’s heart, but was instead coming from somewhere else—was connected to someone else.

Someone important.

Someone he needed to keep safe.

At least, there to be a tug. Currently, it had vanished under the chaos of his overwhelm—of the fear cracking through him, so unlike anything he had ever experienced.

Usually, his fear had been wound around Emilia as well, colliding with her propensity for finding herself in the most baffling of situations. There had been Emilia, lost in a million different places: vanished into the Cyrenix Desert; disappeared by the sex-trafficking group that they now knew had been trafficking so many more people for Fräthk; missing amongst the many halls of Dion as she and Hurinren set down the pieces needed to murder Yujao’s father. Each time, Baylor only found out after the fact. There had been smaller instances, when he had overheard Loren speaking about this or that to another clone, about something Emilia was up to.

Fear—so much fear for his friend, then the girl he loved from afar, then the girl he had managed to find with, even if it wasn’t what either of them truly wanted. Baylor loved her so much he didn’t know what he would do without her, but even his worry for her right now was somewhat

Emilia wasn’t there—she was in danger, yes, and he logically knew that. She still wasn’t right there, within his reach. Somehow, it had escaped Baylor’s notice until this moment that this simple fact made a difference. That seemed crazy: he have been rushing to get to her, even before that tug started to exert itself over him, telling him to and that Yet, while the itch to get moving lived like a permanent bug under his skin, for the most part, he had been able to brush it aside because there was a distance between himself and Emilia.

There was no distance between himself and Darrian—and even, he rather abruptly realized, the Lüshanian teenager. Since when had he considered her a friend? It didn’t really matter, but also! How had the girl managed to dig her way into his heart until Baylor was sure that, had he needed to choose between her and Darrian, he likely would have hesitated, and he would have hated himself for having to leave one of them to die.

Thankfully, they were both close behind him, so this wasn’t much of an issue. The real issue was the sheer amount of fear rushing through him. It was so much that his sense of time had slowed, the two seconds between one of Fräthk’s people bursting out of the building, attack already surging out of them towards their little threesome, stretching into such a ridiculous amount of time that Baylor wasn’t convinced his Load Levels were going to collapse once the man was dead!

Now, was it a surprise his brain and Censor were stretching time a bit longer? Not exactly—all of the clones knew that their genetics inclined them towards such feats of awareness when highly stressed. It existed among the reasons why their line had lasted as long as it had, tiny tweaks being made to the genetics of their originating embryo every so often. At the same time, it was somewhat surprising because the stretching of time wasn’t something that usually happened to them; it was a possibility, but by no means was it something common.

Perhaps it made sense that, between himself and his brothers—as well as all the other clones within a decade of them—he would be the first one to experience such a thing. In the end, Baylor knew what he was: the deranged one; the one who felt too much; the one who was broken.

What better way to be broken, than to feel this uncommon phenomenon first? What better example of how much he felt than for his mind to stretch itself to the limit for two people who had only just carved a place out for themselves within his heart? What better proof of his derangement than the brutally he laid on the man who would dare try to hurt people who were his to protect?

A counter skill had already split through the aether, courtesy of Taelor, by the time Baylor was moving, a million strategies having organized themselves within his mind as time stretched around him—he hadn't spent the whole time contemplating Emilia and her new friends, thanks. He moved, shifting out of Darrian’s grip and microsparking towards their attacker.

The man never saw it coming.

The willbrand he hadn’t activated since they’d fought the last of the corrupt Drinarna sparked back into existence. Power crackled up his arm in shots of purple and green. While his and his brother’s willbrands’ default form might be golden braces, the chemicals contained within them were not—no, they were the three of them, plus Emilia. Purple, the same shade as the chemicals she used within her own willbrands, only one containing shining pink—one that she rarely used, now that she and Rafe weren’t an item anymore, although Baylor knew she kept it on her, as inseparable from her person as her love for Rafe. Green,

Emilia had told each of them, back when they were still young and fully coming to realize that they were and that that might affect their ability to be with Emilia. He and his brothers had rarely hated their identity, but as they came to accept their love for Emilia, it became something of to look at themselves and wonder what they had to offer her. There were over a thousand of them. What would make her want them over any other clone? What would make them when a thousand other clones had their bodies and features?

Emilia had looked into each of their eyes, declaring them all beautiful and unique, although they were in no way unique.

she had insisted.

For over an hour, she had poked and prodded at each of their preteen bodies, making them strip down so she could point out small scars that no other clone pod had. Emilia had counted freckles, catalogued the burns on each of their fingertips, brushed her fingers over each of their nails and then given them all manicures—then, she’d given them pedicures, relishing in the way each of them had ticklish feet.

she had concluded, throwing herself into the puddle of their naked bodies. Had they been a bit older, Baylor suspected one of them would have broken and pressed close to her own scantily clad body, asking for things they had struggled to articulate at the time, existing on the cusp of puberty as they had been. In the memory, they just snuggled, Emilia so happy to be cocooned in their love and warmth.

was of course the colour they wanted for their own willbrands, as locked up in Emilia’s love as the shade of their eyes now was. Each of them, Baylor knew, loved when Emilia gazed into their eyes while they fucked her—a small reminder that while they might look the same, she always knew which one of them was inside her, holding her hand, smiling down at her. No, Emilia didn’t to see their eyes to know which of them was which. It was still a reminder of this little claim she had made, almost twenty years ago.

Body parts splatted to the ground, blood splattering over Baylor’s arms and chest. Their attacker might have been capable of more powerful attacks than the rest of their stalkers had been, but it never would have been enough.

This much power wasn’t even close to enough.

Westrial called, whatever irregular deviation the girl was hiding alerting her that someone else was coming.

It didn’t matter that the girl was hiding things, Baylor had rarely gotten any sort of malevolent energy from her; rather, the girl seemed to be just that: a girl, a child, someone who had an agenda and didn’t yet realize that all she needed to do was tell them what it was and they would help her.

Maybe that was a good thing: Baylor didn’t think it good for anyone who might be watching them through fuck knew what sort of ability or spying device to realize the girl was more than just a tag along. For the moment, he could pass his rage off as being for Darrian’s safety alone—which still sucked, as it would inherently make his new friend a target. Darrian, at least, could defend himself. Westrial, while weirdly skilled for someone so young—perk of having lived on the street, presumably—didn’t deserve to be targeted just because someone wanted to upset

Another set of limbs hit the ground, and it really was quite mean of Darrian to not be giving up any information on those skills he had been using! Turning people into human mush would be so much more enjoyable than simply cutting them to pieces!

he asked, relying on a mixture of Westrial and his brothers to let him know what they were feeling through secret abilities and recon skills.

For a moment, there was silence, Taelor informing him in their group relay that didn’t feel right. Silent as she was, her lips a firmly unhappy line, Westrial seemed to agree.

Within their relay, a copy of the feedback from Taelor’s recon skill presented itself, Baylor hitting the ground just as an attack from the lavender code exploded through the place he had just been standing.

Well, fuck.