Chapter 29: Indecent Proposal

“Is this supposed to be a joke?” Abigail asked.

Here she was, resigned to getting chewed out for cocking things up during the battle and now the Professor was telling her that she'd done 'exceptionally well'?

“Why would you think that?” he asked, and she was surprised to find no trace of levity in his voice. The question had been asked with genuine puzzlement.

“I screwed up!” she yelled, surprising herself with her volume. “If I had noticed sooner what the miasma was doing to the others I could have done something. Instead I got blindsided and nearly got not only the support line killed but the front line as well. And then I wasted even more time I could have spent helping the front line by fixing my mistake. I've been waiting to get chewed out here, not be praised for messing up!”

During her little speech the Professor's eyes had gone ever-so-slightly wider and Elaine had scooted a bit away from her. Apparently she'd seemed just about as unhinged as she felt right now.

“I feel like you've misunderstood the situation,” the Professor finally said. “You could not have expected the red haze to behave this way. Nobody did. If we had expected such an interaction we would never have allowed the camp soldiers to support you.” He paused, then muttered: “In retrospect it should have been obvious. Revelations does mention that the Red Rider is able to make allies turn on each other. We all had merely assumed this was a reference to its ability to raise the dead.” He continued at normal volume: “But that was not your fault. From our point of view you were blindsided by this ability but managed to disable the camp guards without harming any of them.”

“I was about to burn the frenzied cadets to a crisp before Private Devereux saved me,” Abigail countered.

“And yet, you did not,” he said. “You are a team. The fact that your team member had to bail you out of trouble is no failing of yours. It is what a team is for. And that situation was, in its own way, quite fortunate.”

“What about that would be fortunate?” she hissed.

“Her strength of will hit the threshold, didn't it?” Elaine asked.

He nodded. “Hit and shattered. While in this life-or-death situation, your strength of will soared. You are now capable of becoming a Lacrima, same as Sergeant Caldwell here.”

Abigail's eyes went wide.

“If you are at all concerned about your inability to fend off these assailants, you will never have such worries again if you swear the Oath of Crystal Tears.”

She bit her lip as she thought about it.

“You do not have to give me an answer right—“

“Would doing this involve the same... process... Elaine went through?” Abigail asked, interrupting him.

“Indeed,” he said.

She nodded, then calmly stood up and walked out the room.

**

“I hadn't expected her to react quite like that,” Stollos muttered under his breath, forgetting that Elaine could hear him just fine.

“Abigail has... baggage,” she said once Abigail was a ways down the hall.

“Did she confide in you?” he asked.

She pursed her lips, clearly considering how much to tell him, then said: “The idea of using intimacy for personal gain disgusts her.”

He nodded in understanding. That made more sense. It explained quite a lot about the woman, in fact.

“Is there really no way to do it that doesn't involve sex?” Elaine asked.

“I did experiment with ways to perform the Oath that don't involve sexual stimulation,” he admitted. He did not admit that he'd researched this when he'd recruited a girl too young to go through the normal method. He'd turned this girl, this broken starlet, into a killing machine in his fight against God and Lucifer but he'd been concerned about her being below the age of consent. Sometimes his messed-up priorities from back then made him chuckle. Poor Cecilia. He'd done wrong by her. She was one mistake he would never be able to fix.

“Then—“ Elaine began.

“No,” he cut her off. “Unfortunately not. While it is possible to induce the transformation without sexual stimulation, well, you remember the pain of those soul slivers being pushed inside you, do you not?”

That gave her pause. She clearly had. Having a piece of someone else's soul rammed into one's body was traumatic. Proximity to the donor and sexual stimulation could make that pain bearable. But when having the soul slivers clinically injected, with none of those safety measures...

“It shatters the mind. The Lacrima created through this process was incurably insane.” Granted, Cecilia had been unstable from the start but even so, he was certain the unbearable pain of having her soul melded to slivers of beings she shared no connection with hadn't helped. The fact that she hadn't lost her strength of will through pain horrid enough to drive her mad was a testament to how badly she had wanted to murder her parents.

“Bad memories?” Elaine asked, pulling him out of his thoughts.

“Indeed,” he said. “So, how much progress have you made with your Soul Shards, Elaine?” He had deliberately referred to her as Sergeant Caldwell earlier because they had had company but in general he addressed all celestials and equivalently powerful people by their first name. Using only one's given name was mostly a thing in Heaven but it had been a habit Lucifer had never been able to break and Stollos had absorbed it, at least in part.

The use of her first name had jarred her a little but it also caused her to actually think about it and finally she told him: “Typhon told me that so long as I continue fighting against tyrants he will keep lending me his power.”

He nodded. His own shard of Typhon had given him a very similar deal. These days the tyrants in question were just far more universally maligned than the ones he'd fought before. “What about Tiamat?”

“Typhon told me that Tiamat attempted to talk to me even before him but it hurt my mind so badly that I can't even remember it. He promised me that if I keep getting stronger I'll get to speak to her before long.”

“Interesting,” he muttered.

“Is this unusual?” she asked.

“It is. For most people with two Soul Shards at least one tends to be stubborn and refuse to cooperate. Or at least that's what I had assumed. But maybe it isn't about stubbornness and simply lack of strength. At least sometimes.”

“I guess all rules are out the window right now anyway.”

“How do you figure?” he asked.

“Well, they're gods. They're part of this world. Right now it's not about dumb power squabbles between faiths or ideologies, it's about the world itself being at stake. Wouldn't it make sense for them to be more willing to cooperate if the stakes are that high?”

He thought about it. “You aren't wrong, Elaine. I hadn't thought of it like that.”

They were both quiet for a moment before Elaine asked: “Should I talk to her? Convince her?”

“Stars above,” he said, “please don't. You may talk to her but trying to convince her would be counterproductive. At worst it might make a successful Oath less likely. At the same time, if she asks you about the Oath – and she will, believe me – then be as honest as you can be.”

He could see a blush start to form on her cheeks. Those irrelevant side effects again? He preempted her and said:

“I am certain she will not ask about that.”

She glared at him but then the expression softened. Had she come to terms with the side effects? She seemed quite relaxed about it compared to before. Well, it didn't matter to him either way.

What he needed was a way to find out where Caulder was located, strengthen his subjects until they could take him on, and crush the man. Stollos had been content to just ignore Caulder but now it had become apparent that Caulder was part of the problem Project Divinity had been created to deal with and Stollos was going to see things through to the bitter end.

That meant hoping Private Peterson would get her act together. At the same time it also meant focusing on the other subjects that were showing potential.

**

I'm sure I could arrange a better venue for you than this dump. You have talent in spades, Nightingale. All you need is that little something extra, that extra 10%, to become a star. I can give that to you.

Money? Oh, heavens, no. I would be delighted to help. You're a beautiful young woman, I must say. Quite breathtaking.

I'm sure we could come to a... mutually beneficial arrangement.

Abigail was standing in the training hall of Base 15, firing arrows and hurling spells at target dummies as the ghosts of her past haunted her on repeat. She needed to get out of her own head but nothing was helping. Casting the most powerful magic she could without damaging anything, listening to music, aiming as precisely as she could, anything to drown out the words repeating over and over like a broken record.

She'd joined this project in the hopes of leaving all of that behind, of accomplishing something without having to debase herself. But here she was, forced into a situation where the only way to be valuable was to sacrifice her morals, to have sex to get what she needed.

It wasn't the idea of spending a night with Jeanne and Rachel that repulsed her, not as such. She could appreciate pretty women as well as handsome men, that was not the issue. Of course, truth be told, she rarely pursued relationships at all. Sex had been fun and easy and carefree for her once upon a time. And then it had become a commodity. She had become a commodity. It had disgusted her, the way people looked at her, the way people desired her, not for who she was but for the looks she'd happened to inherit.

Eventually that disgust had eaten its way inside her and she'd stopped having any physical desire at all. When she masturbated it was to relax and unwind, not to satiate a burning passion inside her. She wished she could be like Alexis, Ophelia, Evelyn and Cassie, having a lover they enjoyed being with, who cherished them and drove them crazy. But she couldn't. She was broken.

And that was just her hang-ups about sex in general. The idea of having sex as a means to an end repulsed her to such an extent that even the poet inside her lacked the words to adequately explain.

But... what repulsed her even more was that feeling of helplessness she'd had when the miasma had taken hold of the cadets around her. The Professor was right. If she gained the same strength as Elaine she would never be in a situation like this again.

The question was, what was more important to her: Her morals or her fear of being powerless?

An impossible decision. No matter which way she leaned she felt like she would lose a part of herself. She either used her body to seize what she needed or she would remain powerless in the face of the end of the world. She hated this, hated the Professor for giving her this choice, hated herself for being too weak to hack it without this power, hated her team for not having to worry about shit like this, hated...

“Apple juice?” Elaine offered, holding a bottle of ambrosia in her field of vision.