There was no chance a 1st ranked world could hide a secret from a sentient super AI crafted by a 9th ranked demigod to be its assistant.

Biotracers were considered a diabolical type of gene tagging technology that took any random part of a person’s body and benignly altered trace amounts of the human genome to resonate at special biological frequencies that had no actual significance to anything except to a special type of mapping device that loved picking out very specific frequencies.

No Earth based institution had yet to find a way to even identify what constituted a signal, let alone detect a gene tagging that could be anywhere on the body.

Sophie saw it at a glance.

A small patch of skin behind the right ear was altered to become a biological tracker. Sneaky bastards.

It took Sophie one warm cuddle for her to remove it from Ella.

Now that they had the frequency the enemy used to track his little girl, it was impossible to resist the urge to set a trap.

Jun had reason on his side. They needed to know more about this shadowy secret organization that had loyal assassins who didn’t even know their names and did horrendous human testing. And traps were fun.

After Jun was finished with the live stream and the location, Sophie helpfully left behind an invitation, and, of course, a way to monitor any visiting recipients.

A man and his red bunny watched as the lone rune vehicle till Trident pulled up and seven masked figures clad in black combat gear cautiously descended.

They waited for them to enter deeper into the web and once the prey had reached the frequency emitting illusion Sophie was generating, Jun loosened the seams of space holding all the dislodged mountain that was shed in the sculpting of the Guardians to blind their senses while he silently and systematically assaulted the intruders and knocked them into empty pockets of space for interrogation.

Jun had been projecting based on his own experiences as a child and the type of vermin that was after Ella the first time, so he anticipated trained assassins and seasoned killers, and paid particular attention to give them the type of respect that such people were due.

A lot of violence was used to persuade them into portals. There were no words.

It wasn’t until the last that he felt the leisure to unmask one and see what kind of face would belong to the kind of guy that hunted down children for the very people that did horrible things to children’s souls. Literally.

The ones in the demonic lands that had hunted him since he was born were hard and weathered, having experienced too much death and taken too many lives.

The ones that he buried in the wilderness looked surprisingly normal, like any random dudes found at a grocery store in a respectable area. It was the casualness about them that Jun disliked even more than his childhood tormentors. At least they looked evil.

The face that looked up at him in abject terror was one that Jun found the most unacceptable by fucking far.

It was a child.

His face was small and slightly caved in like a deflated doll, but the blue eyes were that of undeveloped youth.

Jun let go of the boy’s neck like it’d turned into molten steel and dropped him into his own pocket space.

He stood there frozen as his mind raced. Reviewing everything he witnessed about the group of intruders suggested the boy being the leader, hence why he was left as last in the first place. But the leader was a child.

His general height wasn’t that short, and neither was anyone else, and the fastest one was even a bit larger than Jun’s own frame…. But the leader was a child.

Did that mean…

With a sinking feeling, Jun raised his right index finger up to his eye and hooked it down and opened a small crack in space.

Peering into the pocket spaces used to house his new prisoners, Jun reached in and unmasked the unconscious ones. And then the conscious ones.

Oh, icy underwear and Gates on fire.

They were all children.

Oh, the terrible feelings.

Jun wanted to jump off a building.

He used so much violence. So much.

This was why Mary said violence was bad. Good children didn’t knee over children in the kidneys. Or kick them out of the sky. Or throw overhead hooks into their giant eyeballs. Or break their limbs.

So much violence.

He was a child abuser.

He deserved incarceration.

But wait! No! He didn’t know! The real villains were the ones who turned children into tools! That’s right! He was a victim too!

With that bit of self-delusion out of the way, Jun made some calls. He was going to pay the price for it, but he needed backup.

——

“You kneed this poor innocent angel in the face?! Jun! How could you?!”

“Hey! I didn’t know! They were wearing masks! With violent intentions, I might add!”

Mary sat in a sea of pink cushions in the land of the giant pink bed with three little shivering girls protectively in her embrace, each carrying their own little mini Sophie to soothe their shocked little hearts, as she chastised her son for his casualness in dealing out pain. What if he jumped the gun next time and did something he really couldn’t take back? Jun would be eaten away by guilt. Like he was now.

Juan was sitting farther away from the verbal dueling and having a quiet conversation with the child called ‘Cerberus’ while the three unconscious boys were being examined by Physician Sophie off on the other side.

Apparently, kicking people out of the sky was a great stress reliever when they were certified villains, but bad for the heart and the spine when they turned out to be exploited kids that were broken.

The skinny black kid that was cosplaying a bird with the shattered spine was still considered alright.

The largest dark-skinned baby faced boy with the collapsed chest was finally out of the danger zone, but the worst was the little one that had an eye for a face.

It had been such a tempting target when he thought they were bad people, and so satisfying when he channeled his childhood traumas into the fist that collapsed the ‘murderer’s’ squishy face, but having himself become someone’s childhood trauma was so bitter. Jun couldn’t even bear looking at what he’d done.

Perhaps the only thing worth being thankful for was that the child was unconscious and free of pain, and would remain so until the most amazing super duper fix em all uppers Miracle Maker Sophie made all things right.

When the nature of their wounded captives became clear, Sophie immediately went into high gear and became an army of medical professionals, complete with advanced healer tech.

As an entity that existed in the physical plain as projections of dimensional codes, the Red Bunny could be whatever she wanted to project herself as. She just really liked being a bunny. But her physical projections weren’t limited to her many split entities.

Scans made clear the damages, and it was time to fix them.

Futuristic medical equipment was manifested into being, not through an Elder’s Authority to manipulate a domain, but by temporarily projecting into existence an extension of herself until her task was complete.

Three floating white sterile medical platforms with countless lifesaving functions each bore an unconscious child with teams of white gowned bunnies carrying a large variety of futuristic equipment and tools treating their wounds.

The ones close to death were hastily dragged away and the ones merely unconscious were patched up as good as new.

Three girls, similarly petite but ranging in skin tones, were the only conscious ones in the group and were initially huddled together in fear and unresponsive to his coaxing. Completely understandable when their captor used strength and unfathomable means to wipe them all out within seconds.

Thankfully, his parents were done with their days and rushed over when called for support.

It took less than three minutes to have the girls curled up in Mary’s arms like they grew up there, and only a minute more before Jun became the proper villain in the story with three tearfully nodding chicks at her bosom looking for protection. He was so scary.

Guilty guilty guilty.

“So, as I was saying,” Jun said, attempting to steer the conversation away from how much pain and suffering he’d knowingly and unknowingly inflicted upon those smaller and younger than himself. “Sophie removed all the little tracer patches and even the gene kill-switches from the kids.”

“Kill-switches?” Mary gasped, her two hands attempting to cover three pairs of ears.

“Yeah,” Jun tried explaining, still trying to wrap his brain around his ever shifting circumstances. “Sophie found micro explosives in their brains, which she’s already removed, and now they are cleansed of any leashes. There shouldn’t be any ways for them to be tracked by the other party anymore.”

A sudden animalistic howl that sounded like two screams of man and beast cut through the air. The one that had the collapsed chest was screaming a demonic scream that had the echoes of a low bellowing wail, completely unlike what a living person should be making, while struggling against hastily activated but sturdy restraints from the floating platform upon which Examiner Sophia was reading charts as Nurse Sophia hopped about ensuring the patient didn’t hurt himself.

“Jun,” the Sophie sitting on Ella’s lap, who was uncharacteristically quiet as she eyed the three older girls, looked up at Jun and warned, “we’re going to need you for this next bit.”

Hurrying over with the rest of the group trailing closely behind, Jun found a full team of over ten red bunnies busily hopping about as they worked tirelessly to maintain the child’s worsening situation.

“What can I do?” he asked a free bunny.

“These children all have highly unstable soul, but the oldest here is already at a very dangerous point. His soul and the grafted soul have lost balance and now the grafted soul is threatening to completely devour the human soul. We need to set a soul stabilizing formation down and allow all the children to rest, but this one most of all.” Sophie said and Jun actually did understand, but there were a few things Jun felt were worth exploring further.

“Grafted soul? Not human? What?” Jun sputtered.

“Jun, we can talk more about that later but first, this boy needs the soul stabilizing formation. Like, right now!” Sophie urged.

“Ah?! Ah! We need to call Lady Cynth!” Jun said, starting to panic now.

“No!” Sophie cried, startling Jun. Weren’t they in a hurry?

“Remember how she showed you the formation?” she asked instead.

Jun nodded, vaguely recalling the beautiful lines of energy that nourished Ella when she first arrived.

“It’s a big deal when a master allows another to see their runes,” the red bunny explained. “It means that they trust you and that you have permission to draw inspiration from their work. Since you’ve already seen the formation once, based on your level of Origin rune exposure, you shouldn’t have too hard a time reproducing your own version.”

Brown eyes blankly looked into expectant red ones. How did that make any sense?

He didn’t know anything about that rune formation. It was in a structure wholly unfamiliar to his own studies and written with world runes of a different universe that had no impact on his own. There were a few Origin runes, but that was only a small fraction of the overall formation. It wasn’t enough of anything. What did Sophie mean?

It was because he trusted his advanced AI companion that, although Jun was confused, he didn’t ask more. With so little time to fight tragedy, Jun closed his eyes and chose to temporarily set aside his doubts and believe this was a task that he was capable of doing.

Jun visualized the runes that he did recognize.

The four Origin runes holding the four corners with countless axillary runes that seemed to form the organizing structure Jun assumed were Lady Cynth’s native runes, but the core was still Spirit, Wellness, Peace, and Stable.

He remembered watching as mysterious powers surged and brought those masses of lines to life and glowed with nourishing light and how they seeped into the wounded and malnourished little girl that became his daughter and made her healthy, and understood.

It wasn’t that he could suddenly understand Lady Cynth’s world runes or the principles of the intricately designed rune formations that served as the structural base, but as one who had Glimpsed the Origin, he could see the flows and tides of the reality shaping energies of the universe and understood the importance of Intent.

Under everyone’s anxious gazes, four balls of white fire appeared below the base of the floating platform securing the still bellowing youth that was loosing more and more human aspects in his screams, and morphed into letters and shapes that couldn’t be properly viewed or comprehended by beings below the 9th rank.

Except for Jun.

Spirit, Wellness, Peace, and Stable.

Four origin runes established the first boundary.

With his intent, the four masses of white flaming runes spread their flames and formed more Origin rune scripts to act as support instead of world runes.

It was an extravagant formation. There was a clear lack of finesse compared to Lady Cynth’s version, but what it lacked in sophistication, it more than made up for it with sheer level.

Lady Cynth’s Path of ascension lay in the development of the Spirit and its related fields, making her a rare Elder with access to multiple Origin runes from a singular Glimpse with overwhelming potential in many other Paths, making her one of the most talented demigods within the Nexus.

Yet, even she had limits. A rune formation with four Origin runes was already one of the more extravagant formations in the multiverse, but to switch all the auxiliary runes to Origin runes was something only children daydreamed about. How many branches of origin runes would that take? How many Glimpses would a demigod have to have to make that possible? What kind of fantastical concept was that?

But Jun only knew demonic runes and Origin runes. He didn’t even have a clue as to what the world runes of Earth even looked like, and there was no way he was using demon runes again. So…

A pure Origin rune formation that hadn’t been seen since the Age of True Gods was clumsily and thoughtlessly and quietly created because a bunny said he should.

 

 

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Posting early today cause I'll be on the road till late. 

Mr/Ms 1 Star rating, 

Did I accidentally summon you back by talking about your disappearance? Can I take back any bad thoughts I had about you and pretend we don't know each other? 

That 4.7 was so nice while I had it... sigh