Moonlight assassin a lit.., p.62
Moonlight Assassin: A LitRPG Space Fantasy, page 62
Ready to call her father out for what he did? Ready to deliver proof that might send him to prison? No, Rachael wasn’t ready for any of that.
“Yeah, I am,” Rachael lied.
She placed her bowl and spoon into the dishwasher then darted to her quarters. The data recorder Guy had pulled from the downed cargo hauler was on Rachael’s desk, decorated with cute pink plush toys. It contained all the incriminating evidence against Rachael’s father and Admiral Dietrich.
Dietrich . . .
Rachael thought about the last time she saw her father. He had introduced her to one of his new transfer students, Flosshilde Dietrich, the admiral’s daughter. Rachael wondered how Flosshilde would take it when learning that not only her father would be going to prison but also her university professor.
I’m wasting time . . .
Rachael placed the data disk in her left pocket beside the sentinel codex and her hand terminal. Her right pocket had her communicator and silly gizmos that Henrietta had made. Rachael needed to avoid using her Inventory screen going forward. Doing so would out her as a member of the corrupted, which was frowned upon throughout most of the fleet. Something she still had to keep secret from her father and mother.
It took Rachael twenty minutes to approach the exit to her quarters. She couldn’t recall what the delay was.
I’m wasting time . . .
She left and found Ulysses on the bridge speaking to a holographic projection of his brother, Lucas. Rachael wasn’t sure what the two star-elves were talking about, just that she caught them in the middle of their chat.
“Nice work,” Lucas’s projection said. “You’ll have to relay my thanks to Sutherland.”
“Guy’s still on Ellyllon/Penna,” Ulysses said.
“Ah, I see.”
“It was best to split up and get this done.” Ulysses typed on his keyboard. “Speaking of which . . . I’m transmitting a copy of the data to you now, Lucas.”
“Might be best if you delivered it in person,” Lucas’s hologram said, and he grimaced. “Just in case someone hacks the data link. I got one of my special shuttles waiting for you on the Shelby.”
Ulysses faced the projection with a swift nod. “Understood.”
Lucas’s hologram looked to the side. “Rachael, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” Rachael said, stepping forward.
“While Ulysses hands me a copy of the data, chat with your father about this.”
“I plan to.”
“Get him to admit what he did and record it. It’d make things easier on him in the long run. With your father’s admission of guilt, we can put an end to this quickly instead of fucking around with a lengthy investigation and trial—”
Lucas’s hologram vanished.
“Ulysses!” Rachael sighed. “What the fuck? I wasn’t done talking to him.”
“I didn’t cut the link.” Ulysses examined his computer screen and pointed. “According to this, Lucas did.”
“Didn’t sound like it to me.”
Ulysses stepped away from the console, wincing. “I know . . .”
“The chat ends mid-sentence?” Arn spoke up, his fingers interacting with his computer station. The star-druid shook his head. “That ain’t no coincidence. Someone is trying to silence him.”
“Like the hacker he hinted about?” Rachael said, her voice full of uncertainty. “Fuck, maybe we should have met face-to-face right at the start.”
Ulysses spun to Rachael, his face covered in a layer of sweat, likely brought on by the concern for his brother. “Rachael, you know much about that shuttle Lucas talked about?”
“Yeah, used it a few times to reach the Eleanor.”
“Take me to it.”
“Okay, but leave your gear in your inventory and wear plain clothes. You need to look like a normal person without any special powers. And whatever you do, do not use any of your abilities.”
A pair of airlock doors slid open, allowing Rachael and Ulysses to depart the shuttle that brought them from the Shelby to the Eleanor. The look on Ulysses’s face was the same one Rachael and Guy had when they returned to their home city-ship, having been away from it for months. She could tell Ulysses was half tempted to return to his place and see what happened to it or check in with old friends. Or maybe that’s what Rachael wanted to do?
But the two had a job to do, and time was running out.
“I’ll head to my place,” Rachael said, ambling toward the bus stop. “My dad should be home by now.”
Ulysses moved in the opposite direction. “I’ll go to where Lucas’s signal . . . died.” And he sounded disturbed to use the word “died.”
The bus delivered Rachael into the upscale neighborhood where her family’s house was. She walked past the lush green front yard and knocked on the front door, sighing when she remembered that her access keycard was still disabled.
Her father, Steven Leighton, opened the door with eyes wide open, dressed in a white dress shirt, blue necktie, and black dress pants.
“Rachael, back from the stars already?”
Rachael’s fae wings tightened. “Yeah, I am, Dad.”
“Come in, come in.” Steven stepped aside and allowed Rachael to enter. Shutting the door behind, he spun and shouted, “Chelsea, Rachael’s back!” Steven escorted Rachael through their home’s foray and into the main hallway. “I know it’s short notice, but we should do something before you leave again. Perhaps dinner? I know a good fae restaurant across from the university—”
“Dad . . .”
“What is it, dear?”
Rachael walked into the living room, found the seldom-used holoprojector, pulled out the disk, and eyed it. She eyed it for a long time.
Steven entered the living room and stood behind her. “Rachael? Honey, what’s wrong?”
“You need to see this.” She slipped the disk into the projector, activated it, and played its files.
“See what?”
The last moments of the cargo ship came to life inside their living room, captivating her father’s awe. As Steven watched the recorded logs play, Rachael slipped her hand into her pocket, pushed aside the codex, and activated her hand terminal’s record function.
“That you have a lot of blood on your hands, Dad.” She pointed at the footage that turned the living room into the cockpit of a cargo ship. “You gave magitech weapons, reverse-engineered sentinel tech, to the land-dwellers.”
Steven frowned and shook his head. He spun and put his back and fae wings to the hologram. “I did no such thing!”
“This says otherwise.”
The two spent the next three minutes watching the recorded footage and data play out. Off to the side was a floating display that allowed anyone watching to examine the ship’s data logs should they reach out and interact with it. The crew in the projection spoke and started dropping names, mentioning Rachael’s father and Admiral Dietrich.
His face turned pale.
“Steven.” A voice called from behind. Rachael spun away and found her mother, Chelsea Leighton, standing at the entrance to their living room. Her mother had walked in unnoticed and had been watching the projection play. Chelsea’s shaking hand placed her glass of brandy on the side table with a lamp on it. “This is . . . this is fake, right?”
“I wish it were, Mom. But the hyperspace trip from Ellyllon to the fleet gave me lots of time to review it over and over. This is real.” She spun to her father. “Dad, why?” Rachael and Chelsea eyed Steven, their ogling eyes demanding his voice to fill the silence. Rachael pressed on when he didn’t reply. “Did you do it, Dad?”
“I did, yes. I was involved,” Steven said and exhaled deeply. “Our research projected that the land-druids could be saved from their afflicted counterparts if we intervened.”
“But, Dad, the afflicted aren’t bad people—”
“They are!” Steven raged, cutting Rachael off, his left finger pointed at her. “They are twisting the universe to benefit themselves! If we allow the reality corruption to spread, the galaxy will become a vastly more dangerous place. How do you maintain law and order when people have such powers? How do we prevent land-dwellers from murdering each other over petty differences with such powers? Imagine how the crusades against the shadow angels would have been if the reality corruption existed. And the shadow angels? Now that the corruption does exist, they’ll want revenge and will use their newfound superpowers to do it. And now the dark elves of Alfheimr want to conquer the stars and have already established a foothold in the Hecate Nebula? No, this must end.
“Listen, Rachael, the magitech weapons in the hands of the land-druids were not only our means of saving the druids from the corruption but also providing us with valuable test data. With the data gained on Ellyllon, we can create stronger magitech weapons. We can save the galaxy from the reality corruption, the monsters it spawns, and stop land-dwellers from reaching the stars. Land-dwellers must stay on their planets while we star-dwellers stay in space. That is the way it must be. That is how we maintain order in the galaxy.”
Ulysses entered a sparsely tended bar where he discovered his brother, Lucas, seated and nursing a drink. A public place, smart. With so many witnesses and innocent bystanders around, nobody would dare try anything. Ulysses dragged a stool beside his brother and sat next to him.
“Yo, Lucas!”
“Jesus!” Lucas, shaken by Ulysses’s outburst, spun and faced him. “You scared me.”
Ulysses reached into his pocket and pulled out a data disk, handing it to Lucas. “Here it is, as promised.”
Lucas accepted the disk and slid it into his hand terminal. “Thanks. I’ll make a copy of it now. You came alone, I take it, Ulysses?”
“Yeah, Rachael’s off talking to her father and getting him to admit what he did.”
“All right.” Lucas peered at his terminal’s screen, studying the data disk’s contents. “Oh, and I was right, by the way. Someone hacked the link and fucked up the data transfer right after you ended the call. Be careful on your return to the Seraphim. Someone might be watching us.”
“Strange, it looked to me like you ended the call.”
“No, I thought you and Rachael did it, since you were in a rush to get here. I assumed you wanted to get back to Guy and the others as soon as possible.”
“No, we didn’t cut the link. Was it the hacker?”
“I wonder if it was . . .”
“So do I,” said the deep voice of a third party behind.
The two brothers spun around to see who it was.
Ulysses narrowed his eyes and studied the man up and down. It was a human man with long, silver hair tied into a ponytail, wearing a black business suit and red necktie. He spoke with a land-dweller accent, too.
It was Serzax. And he was dressed like a star-dweller.
“Because I would love to thank them,” Serzax continued.
Serzax summoned his Inventory screen, pulled out the Nocturnal Blade, and shoved it through Lucas’s chest.
Ulysses’s world went silent when he saw the blade cut through Lucas, poke a hole through his back, and squirt his blood onto the bar behind. The bartender’s face turned red with it. She dropped a tray of beer bottles and screamed. Ulysses wanted to scream too, but the shock surging through his body paralyzed him.
And then, as if someone upped the volume in the galaxy, sound returned to the bar. Screaming, tables and chairs flipping, glass falling from shaking hands and shattering to the floor. The bar’s patrons ran from the man of darkness, thrusting a sword imbued with dark elemental power through Lucas.
Finally, Ulysses mustered the ability to move and talk.
“No!” he shouted.
Ulysses kicked Serzax backward, opened his Inventory screen, and retrieved his Marauder’s Bow. His actions only made more people run, scream, and point. Ulysses had just revealed that he was afflicted, and he didn’t give a fuck anymore. He pulled back on the Marauder’s Bow’s string as astral energy swirled and brought a nocked arrow into his grip. Ulysses released the arrow, and it sank into Serzax’s left shoulder. Ulysses fired at him six more times, but Serzax swung the Nocturnal Blade, swatting the arrows away, then cast the spell Dark Orb.
A black and purple orb of dark elemental energy soared toward Ulysses. He leaped out of the way and rolled across the floor as the orb hit the wall and exploded. Ulysses lifted the Marauder’s Bow and let loose another volley of arrows, sinking them into Serzax for 40 damage each, lowering his HP to 91%. Ulysses was lucky Serzax wasn’t wearing any armor.
Serzax just smiled at the arrows in his chest that were not drawing any blood, then heaved his Nocturnal Blade for Lucas. He wanted to finish the job. And then something made Serzax stop. Rather than ending Lucas, Serzax turned around and fled past the escaping bar patrons, vanishing into the streets outside.
Ulysses slung the Marauder’s Bow over his shoulder and ran to Lucas. His brother collapsed to the floor while holding his chest, his uniform turning red with each second. Don’t get Ulysses started on the circle of crimson Lucas ended up laying on or that it was growing larger.
Shit! Ulysses looked at his hand now red with Lucas’s blood. Shit, shit, shit! What do I do? I’m not a fucking medical expert . . . But . . . Rachael, she’s a nurse! She’ll know what to do!
Gripping the communicator in Ulysses’s pocket was much harder than he thought. His hand shook way too much, and his brain kept telling him he was going to lose his only sibling. Ulysses gripped the device at last, staining it with red handprints, and selected Rachael’s information. As Ulysses waited for the device to signal Rachael, he looked behind to see what became of Serzax.
The bar was empty, save for one human girl staring ominously at Ulysses. She had long brown hair tied in a long ponytail that reached past her yellow skirt and pale knees. She had a youthful appearance, making her too old for high school and a bit too young to be a college or university graduate.
The human girl didn’t scream, panic, or yell for help. She just stood there, staring at Ulysses and his dying brother.
“Help me!” Ulysses called to her, one hand holding the communicator to his face.
The girl just shook her head, no. “I cannot. I am so sorry.”
She ran away and pushed past the frightened crowd ahead of the bar.
Chapter Eighty
The living room window shattered, drawing Rachael’s and her parents’ eyes toward it—
Boom!
A blast of black and purple mist hurled the three backward. If Rachael didn’t know any better, she’d say someone had cast Shadow, a dark elemental spell that damaged anyone standing ahead of the caster. The spell removed 149 HP from her, not that her parents on the floor could see, though she worried about the burns on their hands and arms. Out from the shattered window stepped Serzax, dressed in a black business suit and red tie, clenching his Nocturnal Blade, its blade covered in dripping blood and his long silver hair trailing behind as he casually strode forward.
Serzax was on the fleet, and he probably had been there the whole time, having got there the same way Vix did when he had snuck onto the Seraphim. Serzax swung his blade at Steven. He was there to silence him. Rachael dashed ahead with her arms spread to defend her father, hoping her defense would be enough to save him. Wishing that she had come as a Berserker rather than Medic. Wishing that she had gear on too.
Fuck. The incoming Nocturnal Blade was going to hurt a lot. She shut her eyes and—
Slash.
Serzax completed his cleave, but Rachael didn’t lose any HP. When she opened her eyes, she saw her mother, Chelsea, standing ahead of Rachael. Blood jetted from the deep left-to-right slice through Chelsea’s upper torso.
Chelsea collapsed, and her faded fae wings went limp. She never moved after that.
“You stupid bitch,” Serzax snarled, and shoved Rachael aside. He readied his Nocturnal Blade again, raising it to decapitate Steven crawling away on the floor backward, his shaking hands raised.
“Tell me, Rachael,” Serzax said, ambling toward Steven. “Do you know what it is like to mourn the loss of a loved one? No? Well, allow me to show you.”
Serzax lunged downward.
Clang.
Rachael deflected the strike with the left column of her Topaz Photon Staff, having quickly pulled it free from her Inventory screen. A screen that her father looked at in shock. She swiped the Topaz Photon Staff again, forcing Serzax to swing defensively, parrying each of Rachael’s strikes. She backflipped, landed on the couch, and cast Adrenaline Shot by conjuring a syringe into her hand. Rachael injected herself and received a buff that rose her AP by 4 each second, then cast Regeneration afterward to receive the spell’s 183 HP heal-over-time effect. She jumped off with a vertical smash aimed for Serzax’s forehead.
Crack.
Rachael hit Serzax for 133 critical damage, fracturing his skull and staggering him long enough for her to twirl the Topaz Photon Staff above her head then heave it into his chest with Gravity Swing, hurdling him some five feet backward. She fetched an MP hypospray quickly. The downside to casting Adrenaline Shot was its 700 MP cost. The hypospray vanished upon restoring 221 MP to Rachael. She cast Recovery Orb twice in preparation for whatever the Nox Knight planned to do next.
The two red-glowing orbs hitting the ground further confirmed her father’s fears.
“Rachael, dear,” Steven gasped. “You’re one of them. Oh God, now it makes sense.”
Serzax steadied himself, tightly gripped the Nocturnal Blade, kicked Chelsea’s body to the side, then made his dashing assault. Rachael held the Topaz Photon Staff horizontally and guided its left and right columns to parry Serzax’s strikes. Neither of the two made much progress. Rachael suspected that it was because they were both wearing regular clothes. Apart from their equipped weapons, they weren’t gaining the stats armor and accessories gave, nor the power of asteriarite that one would slot into an accessory. All Serzax had was his level advantage; all Rachael had was her healing spells.
