act34side

Consul Clementia.;Madame Consul.

Greetings, Doctor of Rhodes Island, and well met in Milliarium. At long last, our first official conversation.

Well, Kal'tsit's the official Iberian envoy.

Save your modesty. Dr. Kal'tsit's awe-inspiring knowledge transcends the boundaries of space and time.

So for her to be keeping you up her sleeve, the depths you hide must be deeper still.

Whether you come to me in doubt, or with conclusions of your own to share, I am prepared to listen.

You sent the Hunters into a literal nest of danger.;You're endangering three of our operators.

Much like Dr. Kal'tsit, you have misgivings about this decision.

Yet I had no choice but to order them to meet death in the eye once more; my hand was forced. Only they can break our present impasse.

Rational. Maybe a little too rational?

The Legions are deployed to capacity. The Abyssal Hunters must assume combat duties, even having recently returned to Ægir. You suspect this situation was deliberately engineered.

I gather you return from the city with findings of your own.

The beacon-weapon link was tampered with.

Little Handy, priority order. Contact the supervisors for the beacon and Class IV weapons R&D.

And notify all Legion commanders: leave enough of your fleets at the front to curb the Seaborn and assist the Hunters. The rest should withdraw in order and return to the city. The Sea Patrol will seize the beacon tower right away.

You have our gratitude for informing us, Doctor.

(Nod in silence)

I know I owe the two of you an explanation for how I have deployed the Abyssal Hunters.

We don't hold you accountable on a tactical level. You know their prowess against the Seaborn better than us.

I can only say this. Your powers of observation would not have missed the scales on Gladiia's neck.

We can assume the Hunters will have no trouble seeing this assignment through, but what was your guarantee they would be spared from mutating while in the nest?

The word of Advisor Blandus, and nothing more?

Advisor Blandus's statement at the tribunal served to strengthen Milliarium's confidence in the Abyssal Hunters.

I confess, though, it failed to even ease my mind.

I take it the Hunters still weigh heavily on your thoughts.

...Ægir never truly wound down the Abyssal Hunter project, following the strike on the Firstborn.

I've not been involved, but my countrymen have every right to interrogate me for my awareness of it alone.

For a short time after the Firstborn died, the project went through major upheavals. Anomalies plagued the experiments, and the Church grew only more fixated on the Hunters.

This suggests there are urgent, hidden truths about the Hunters yet to be found. Yet it also proves that the project can no longer run publicly.

To this day, it still operates in secret. But even now, Ægir has only three Hunters including Gladiia... No, four.

For how constantly we iterate on our technology, we have never succeeded in making another Abyssal Hunter.

No matter how stable the subjects' signs and psychological indicators are, they lose their reason the moment they awaken, immediately corrupting into Seaborn.

They don't even make it out of the chamber, let alone to the ocean proper.

'Abyssal Hunters are bound by blood.' We forgot...

What IS this blood binding them?

We don't know.

We still don't know why Gladiia's group have kept their reason intact.

Sounds like they're your key to solving this.

Yet you chose to send them to the front.

...Indeed. For Gladiia, Laurentina, Skadi, and all the participants, it was an irresponsible act.

But the front lies at Milliarium now.

We made it in time to cut off the Seaborn tide as it laps at dry land, but Milliarium is far from impregnable. If we fail to open the Waterway now, it is only a matter of time before the city is lost.

The Seaborn have organized to seize that Waterway by the throat. Storming them head-on will invite a large-scale counterattack.

At which point, I fear none will survive.

Is risking the Hunters a necessary cost here?

The Hunters may well give their lives. They may well transform. But right now, they are our greatest hope.

Gladiia has always been skeptical of the Waterway Program's feasibility. It was for that exact reason that she did not hesitate to serve as a link in its chain.

Your doubts and struggles may differ, but all roads lead to the same place in the end. That seems to be an unspoken yet shared understanding among the Ægir.

...One not without its sorrows.

Upon the bricks of the Sophontheatrum entrance, the architect Mártus left this maxim: 'There is no justice here, only the path ahead.'

In later generations, some criticized Mártus as being overly fixated on material value, squandering his energy on comparing worth against worth.

But ultimately, all that mattered to him was Ægir's path forward. Justice was merely a value cherished by the masses; and he preferred to apply his thought elsewhere.

Perhaps Gladiia and I have been acting on his philosophy without realizing it.

Dr. Kal'tsit, everything you have said rings all too true. I am bound in the end to carry 'Ægir's arrogance' with me, and nothing will change that.

I would like to amend that wording. 'Arrogance' as a word seems insufficient to describe Ægir.

You respect equally the humanity of your every citizen. To realize each individual's worth is the guiding star for your entire society's development.

Yet at the same time, you are capable of making the cruelest judgments, and calmly accepting them, for the sake of Ægir's survival as a whole.

'Calmly'... you say?

We Ægir are not cold-blooded. Whenever you would feel wrath, our own hearts are far from unstirring.

These are feelings I had wished to convey to Gladiia, once upon a time, but I realized I had no right to.

Every decision I made for her, I based in pure rationality. How natural, then, that I lost that right. How dare I ask for an emotional pardon.

The same is true, even now.

And so, 'calmly,' I accept my own judgment.

The designated individual has been contacted. Advisor Blandus did not pick up.

Dr. Kal'tsit, Doctor. I am deeply sorry I could not give you an appropriate answer.

But right now, I ask that you permit me to carry out my duty.

Ah, awake?

I've taken care of your wounds. You'll find two doses of stimulant beside you, to bring you back to your senses. Shall I administer, or would you prefer the Little Handy?

Fine, do it yourself.

...Very practiced motions. It seems you've recuperated well.

Now, useless as I know it is, I do need to tell you this.

You cannot keep experimenting on yourself, or you'll have to cover your eyes as well to avoid looking like you've been tortured. The mask won't be enough, at least.

My wardrobe has nothing to do with my modifications.

True, you've always looked that way. We all got shivers as you entered the classroom and sat your gloomy self down.

All this time we've known each other, and you barely even show me your face.

Blandus. Given you've started cracking jokes, I take it the results are less than awful?

Now, that's tricky to say. The emotional ride I've been through felt like being seated next to Secunda as she sailed a patrol ship with both eyes shut. That is to say, utter madness.

First of all, I noticed a baffling effect in your auto-adaptive junction...

Your body's reaction is bizarre: when the Seaborn genes exert their abnormal dominance, your anti-Seaborn rejection response doesn't intensify. No, it actually lightens somewhat.

Which means my transformation is getting faster?

No, quite the opposite.

It was right as I was canceling the surgery that I observed a curious phenomenon. Once your rejection ebbed, your Seaborn genetics slowed down their influence.

As if, to be crude, your body and the Seaborn genes had reached some sort of understanding.

This is certainly worth further study. But for now, I need to know one thing: will this impact the Hunters in their upcoming battle?

Slaying the Firstborn will be our single most important operation since we were created.

At this point, I will allow no freak accidents.

I've observed no negative effects so far. I'll be setting up a few more risk assessments before you head out.

That said, if we're going to figure out what's underpinning this phenomenon, then you'd best come back alive so I have something to study at all.

I'll be honest, I'm anxious.

We've never waged a war on this scale before. We're marching every single Abyssal Hunter, plus three whole standing Legions, off into a single trench...

If not with a war like this, how would we ever kill their genesezoic, their source, their 'god'?

Do you truly believe we can polish off the Seaborn just like that, once and for all?

You've worked with us for over a decade, and you still have doubts about the Hunter project?

Do you want the truth?

The truth is, I should've vetoed this project at the audit stage. A roadmap to warping evolution, predicated on sacrificing our own people's humanity.

If not for you, I wouldn't have even entertained its feasibility, let alone poured ten years of my own blood and sweat into it.

...But it's a sunk cost now. The more I doubt it, the more crucial it is for me be its core member, to steer it with my own two hands.

Yet I can't shake the thought of how many 'monsters' this lab's created.

The majority of which were put down by <i>your</i> own two hands, Ulpianus.

Yes.