Side Chapter Metous 11: Tyell’s Worry
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Side Chapter Metous 11: Tyell’s Worry 

Ceella was gone again.

This time she did have a date when she would be back.

But it was hard to trust it. 

How many times did she have to go missing before the Stella family would just assume she wasn’t coming back on time? The only sad upside was that, so far, she had always made it back in the end, so far anyway.

Tyell didn’t know what he wanted to do. The last year was an absolute mess. His family came together again, only for them to be torn by tragedy and torment again and again. 

I need to do something... 

Then, as to pour acid into his bleeding wounds, he lost his best friend. 

Elly... 

He was glad that time had passed between that incident and Ceella's return home, he had managed to calm himself to the point that he looked composed. His mood shifted between happy and sad as the days went by. Some days he was able to hide or forget about the pain, on others he couldn’t. It was good that it did get easier with time, but that knowledge also hurt. Maybe one day, Tyell feared, he would just forget his friend.

But the scene... it was burned into his mind. 

“I’m sorry, Tyell.” 

As his flesh was sown to the ground, as death approached, his life was spared at the cost of another. 

The physical pain of his flesh being torn apart as he tried to drag himself closer to her was nothing compared to the dread and despair of watching Elly’s body collapse into dust.  

When Nina arrived, it gave Tyell some hope that was immediately shattered as she tried her best to heal Elly, but the destruction’s progress had already gone far past what Nina could recover. It was an evil attack that turned people to waste. Elly was too weak to even resist it; her body and soul had already been exhausted from her overuse of her future sight-related skills. 

Elly was his closest friend; they had fallen into trouble together, and he failed to bring her out of it.

“Ergh… I need to get up.” Tyell crawled himself out of his bed.

He opened the water bottle next to his bed and chugged down half a litre of water. 

“A-h, eh, huh, cough, I should look at the recording.” Tyell thought for a moment about going out to see his family, but instead, he decided to listen to an audio file he recorded without permission.

He pinched his face for a moment as he stared at the recording app in his hand. Tyell placed his phone on Ceella’s clothes and had it record from when Ceella left the house, for Nina’s meeting and stopped it when he recovered the phone. 

It didn’t take a genius to know what he did was wrong, and normally getting away with something like this was impossible. Pretty much every public place had technology in place that disabled most portable audio and visual record devices if they were exposed for too long. Tyell didn’t know how they worked, but he had tested, and his recording stopped after a minute, the warned amount of time. Once it was stopped, there was no resuming unless it was started again. 

However, Tyell was desperate. He wanted to know if his elder sister was okay, and he knew that information wouldn’t just be given to them. 

Even though the moment she went anyway it would stop working, even the moment she entered Nina’s garden, as there was no way that Nina didn’t have the proper security measures in place, he at least wanted to try. 

If he failed, so be it. 

He would try asking directly again, even though last time that didn’t work.

Should… I just delete this?

Tyell hadn’t even listened to the recording and was already feeling guilty. 

He utilises his sister’s seemingly regression in technology safety and etiquette to even get the chance to do this. 

Click

His teeth clicked together as he started to bleed from his right thumb that he was biting on. 

At that moment, he made his choice and started playing the audio. 

….

There was no sound for a while, but eventually, as he fast-forwarded, he reached the part where Ceella and Nina said hello to each other.

“Ah… fuck…” His eyes were firmly closed, even though there were no visuals. 

The audio was overall quiet, and the two participants sat down and started talking, first starting the conversation about their mother. That conversation quickly ended, which left Tyell slightly surprised. This was the day Ceella sent the message about their mum’s Vocation, so he had wondered if it was brought up during the talk but apparently not. 

Then, as he continued, something happened.

The audio seemingly randomly cut and jumped to future parts of the conversation. 

“What’s going on..?” Tyell wondered and decided to listen for a moment longer and then rewound the audio and relisten to the audio clips before and after cuts. 

“Haha…” He let out a dry laugh. “She knew all along…” There was no way this recording was ever supposed to exist. Tyell didn’t know how much security Nina had, but it was certainly more advanced than anything he had seen before, and that was only the parts of it he could see.

Tyell shook his head; he didn’t know if his sister knew, but Nina definitely knew what he was doing. And she had the audio perfectly cut to not mention certain topics.

“Sigh…” Tyell smiled as he sighed in relief. In his mind he got nothing 

“Oh no, I got a new one after I lost my first one after nearly being murdered and getting my soul damaged–”

“What?” The audio had cut to something completely ridiculous. There was no context for before and after. 

Wait, Nina, what happened to Ceella?! 

He had to hold back a lot from yelling.

What made it worse were the lines that followed.

“I think it would’ve been best if we talked on the ship instead of you ghosting my conversations.”

“Yeah, I can’t even properly absorb mana at the moment. My soul is super damaged. Same weapon as last time, with added bullshit.”

His panic was rising, and he continued to listen.

“What do you need for your recovery?”

“Nothing that can be provided. For the time being, it can only be stalled with mana recovery products.”

“Is your deal the reason why, or the soul injury?”

“If things go well, maybe five months; if they go horribly, it will at least be less than two.”

“And due to your complete lack of ability to naturally recover mana, even the potions and crystals have their limits.”

“Correct.”

“But I will, of course, be doing my best. I ain’t going down without a fight.”

Eventually, the recording stopped. 

The whole conversations about the deal, Dominous, and Witches weren’t there in Tyell’s recording, but he had no way of knowing what was left out.

Sis is in trouble... 

A bomb went off inside of his head; now he knew the fact that Ceella was in trouble. It was the worst-case scenario—losing his elder sister again. When she had been missing for the past year, he knew she was safe; he was confident in that decision. After appearing and disappearing so many times, he believed no matter what, Ceella would return.

But what if… this time, Ceella didn’t return?

“Deal…” Based on the wording, he could only assume she made a deal with Nina about their family’s safety and stability if anything went wrong.

Dammit Ceella…

In truth, he knew something was wrong. 

It was hard not to.

Ceella looked more pale than she did before, and lying down in the sun all day wasn’t changing that.

There was the even obvious change of the two small horns growing from her forehead.

Tyell couldn’t tell if they were bone or a white wood, he was afraid to touch them.

They did ask Ceella, and she just replied that they were a side effect of a skill. 

But it appeared there were worse side effects that she wasn’t letting on.

Then, while he was contemplating everything, his door opened and quickly closed. 

Tyell’s head shot up and he saw Lila, who had entered the room.

“Hi… Tyell…” Lila barely raised her hand in a small, awkward wave. She seemed uncomfortable but determined to be here.

“Lila?” Tyell turned his head to his surprise guest. She had never entered any room without permission before. She even kept asking for permission to just enter the kitchen when she first arrived, which she thankfully stopped doing in the family’s mind. “What are you doing here?”

He asked as quickly as he moved his phone into his pocket without provoking suspicion. 

That didn’t matter though, as Lila knew all along. “I know what you have been listening to… I was tuning in.”

Lila quickly and quietly explained that Nina told her about a recording Tyell had about the meeting Ceella and Nina had. Apparently, when Tyell had started the recording, the file got sent from Tyell’s phone to Lila’s. Lila had no control over it; it was just something that Nina said would happen if Tyell started the recording for the first time and she was nearby.

“I… should’ve expected my phone to have been hacked when I went through with that.” Tyell was barely surprised. He pulled out and looked at his phone again before turning back to Lila. “So… did she say anything else?”

“Yes…” Lila didn’t look happy. “She said to not worry. I know you wish to help, but this can’t be solved with normal means. Ceella is going to get help.”

“Not… to worry?” He gasped.

Lila held back her own hand. Not knowing what to say. She heard the same audio, but what could they do? She had no idea Ceella had a soul issue, and if Nina couldn’t help with it, who could? 

“No, we have to think of something. We need to.” Tyell stood up. “I am not going to let my sister carry everything on her back… again…”

It was a promise to himself. 

One that he would do everything in his power to keep.

Well, Tyell was being a bad boy again. Let's hope it doesn't bite him in the butt again.

I thought about delaying this chapter just so I could have a main chapter out this week first, but I figured I would upload a chapter on time, for once.

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