Cauldron of Ghosts 013 (Patreon)

“Amelia!”

Her mistress’ voice cracked her name out like a whip, as the world of the instance finished coalescing around them, and Amy winced slightly even as she let go of her paralyzed sister’s wide-eyed, jaw-dropped arm and ducked her head, dropping her eyes to her boots and waiting for the chastisement that was sure to follow.

“Explain yourself, Amy. We were supposed to talk to your sister and explain things, not drag her through the gate without any warning!” Taylor didn’t quite snarl, but it was a near thing, and Amy shifted uncomfortably at the tenor of the words. A tenor that she hadn’t ever heard directed her way in the time that they had known one another. Yeah, Taylor wasn’t happy with her right now.

“Yes ma’am. I’m sorry, I didn’t think there was a way to explain the gate, and I didn’t think that we should sit around waiting, in case someone else came by.” she said quietly, not quite pleadingly and not quite wheedling, but not entirely repentant either…and Taylor was apparently quite aware of that fact, judging by the way her eyes narrowed.

“You wanted to pull one over your sister, you mean, and decided to play a little prank on her.” Taylor corrected her shrewdly, folding her arms beneath those magnificent breasts of hers, one index finger tap-tap-tapping, and Amy couldn’t help but picture her doing the same with a crop or a flogger instead. Which was a hell of a turn on and had her blushing rosily, getting an affectionately-disgusted noise from her domme. “I don’t know what you’re imagining right now, but if you’re thinking that you have some punishment coming your way, you’re right. Once we’re out of this dungeon, we’ll be having a discussion about just how bold you’re being with that nice, long leash I let you run on.”

Amy’s blush deepened at that, a shiver of anticipation running through her, a tingle gathering low in her belly and high on her chest. But before she could formulate a response, a strangled sound from beside her reminded her that they weren’t alone.

Vicky had finally come back to herself, it seemed

“Okay.” the blonde said, voice pitched rather high and more than a little thing. “Okay, so. Number one. What the actual fuck. Number two, why does my sister’s girlfriend have the ability to summon a dungeon gate in the middle of a fucking conversation. Number three, why is there a sign welcoming us to somewhere called Ellisburg like this is a goddamn tourist attraction, and number four—” her voice cracked slightly, “—did that text just say we had to kill a‘Goblin King’ to leave?!”

Taylor’s expression shifted, the sharp edge of her irritation with Amy smoothing over into something softer, gentler, as she turned her full attention to Vicky. Amy watched the change happen with something like relief -or perhaps vindication, since this was exactly the sort of gentle strength she so adored in Taylor. That she thought Vicky needed to receive- and no small amount of amorous interest.

“It’s kind of a long story, Victoria.” Taylor said, her voice calm but firm, like she was taking Vicky in hand without actually touching her. “I know this is a lot to process all at once, and I’m sorry that Amy decided the direct approach was better than an actual explanation. Let’s start from the beginning, okay?”

Vicky’s eyes were darting between the two of them, then out toward the ruined skyline beyond the sign, the crumbling buildings and the sickly green mist curling low along the cracked asphalt, before snapping back to Taylor with the sort of focused intensity that could be born primarily from desperation.

“Okay. Beginning. Yes. Please explain from the beginning, because right now my brain is doing that thing where it just keeps looping the words ‘Goblin King’ over and over and it’s really not helping with anything.”

“Fair enough.” Taylor took a breath, visibly gathering her thoughts, and Amy took the opportunity to shuffle a half-step closer to her sister, close enough that their shoulders brushed. A silent apology, one Vicky didn’t acknowledge yet, still too shell-shocked to do much more than stare at Taylor like she held the answers to the universe. Which, Amy supposed, in this particular moment, she sort of did. “You obviously know all about the Double Dungeon incident, yeah?”

Vicky nodded, of course. The question was a rhetorical one, all three of them were well aware that Vicky had known about it, given they’d met in the hospital while she was recovering from it, but she answered all the same.

“Yeah, I know all about it. After I saw how you and Amy looked at each other, I…kind of did a deep dive on you.” she admitted, sounding equally proud and sheepish, wincing slightly at the fulsome glower her sister leveled at her as a result. Taylor, however, merely looked amused, and murmured something low about that being a running theme with pretty blondes. Amy took that, accurately she was sure, to be a reference to Paige, and huffed in annoyance as Vicky continued. “Anyway, your injuries were supposed to be…well, fatal. And I know that story about a weird power interaction with my sister is bullshit, because you already had your limbs back by the time they got you to the hospital. So, I just figured you had a Second Awakening and it was all being hushed up for some reason.”

“That’s...actually a pretty reasonable guess. Well done.” Taylor admitted, tilting her head slightly and smiling faintly, clearly pleased with Vicky’s deduction, and Amy smirked with pleasure at both Taylor’s reaction and the faint blush her sister bore at Taylor’s praise. “It’s not quite what happened, but it’s closer to the truth than most people have gotten. What actually happened is that I was killed, then ressurrected. When that happened, I picked up something called a System. Think of it like...a game, almost. Except it’s real, and it’s attached to me specifically, and it’s been changing me pretty fundamentally ever since.”

“A game.” Vicky repeated the words in a flat, disbelieving drawl. “Like, video game rules. Attached to your body. In real life.”

“Basically, yeah. I get stats, I level up, I can see notifications only I can read, I have an inventory I can pull things out of—” she gestured vaguely at the space where the key had vanished from. “—and I get rewards for killing bosses and completing quests.” she paused contemplatively, and Amy saw her fingers flick in a particular way. A moment later, she got a Party Invite, and grinned as she watched the expression on her sister’s face as it popped up in front of her. “Also, I can invite people to join my Party, and there is a cash shop.”

“Of course there would be a cash shop.” Vicky muttered absently, almost reflexively to Amy’s eyes, as she stared at the screen in front of her, then flicked off slightly to the side. “So, this penalty it’s warning me about?”

“People have to be in my Party to be allowed in an instance. If you don’t accept, it will eject you at best.” Taylor tilted her head towards Amy. “That’s one reason I was so angry when she just dragged you in here. I wanted to give you a choice. If you didn’t want to join us, I would have made some calls and brought some other people in instead.”

“So…you said ‘at best’. That means that the best case scenario you can offer me is getting thrown out on my ass. But it could be worse than that?” Vicky’s voice was colder, now, and Amy quailed at the look her beloved sister shot her as she said the words. She…hadn’t considered that. She’d forgotten the threat the System had levied when she’d ended up in the first Instanced Dungeon with Taylor, and she felt something sick and fearful replace the fluttering warmth that had been resting in the pit of her stomach for the last several minutes.

“I don’t know. Amy is the only one thats ever been inside one of these with me, and it certainly sounded dangerous when it warned her. I think that this is different though. She basically snuck in and we argued for a bit, so the System might have taken offense to her. You’re here by invitation and aren’t picking a fight, so it might shove you back out the gate.” Taylor responded with a somewhat helpless shrug, running a hand through her beautiful hair. “I just don’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Vicky.” Amy said the moment her domme had finished speaking, eyes glistening a bit with unshed tiers as her hands twisted in front of her. “I totally forgot about the System threatening me, since things ended up so…so nice for me and Taylor. I just…Taylor needed someone else for this dungeon, Taylor needs a bigger Party, and I couldn’t imagine anyone but you with us right now.”

Vicky’s expression softened almost immediately, some of the sharp edge of her fear and anger ebbing away as she looked at her sister, and she reached out to bump their shoulders together, more firmly this time.

“Hey. Hey, don’t look like that.” she said, voice gentler now than it had been a moment ago, even if there was still a thread of tension running underneath it. No matter how annoyed she was with her sister, she couldn’t stand the thought of making Amy cry. Not since they were children, not since…well. She hated to see her sister sad, and come hell or high water she wouldn’t be the cause of it. “I’m mad you didn’t warn me, and I’m mad you didn’t think about what could happen to me, but I’m not mad that you wanted me here. That’s...that’s actually kind of sweet, in a really messed up, terrifying-but-exciting way.”

“It’s still my fault.” Amy mumbled, and Taylor made a soft, considering noise before stepping closer, laying a hand on the small of Amy’s back in a silent, grounding gesture that had the brunette immediately leaning into her for support. Which just went to prove how amazing Taylor was, because even when she was angry with or disappointed in Amy, she didn’t withhold comfort.

“You made a mistake, even if it was for understandable reasons, and you’ll need to be punished for it. By Victoria and by me, Amelia.” Taylor warned her girlfriend, getting a nod of understanding from the brunette and a curious, almost teasing glance from Vicky, before she dropped the more formal cadence and words to turn her focus elsewhere. “Vicky, go ahead and accept, then we can take a look around.”

Vicky stared at the little glowing prompt hovering in her vision for a long moment, visibly waffling in spite of the warnings she had received and the information that she had been given before, finally, she huffed out a breath gusty enough to ruffle the bangs across her forehead and jabbed a finger through the air where the accept button hovered.

“Fine. Fine! But if this thing turns me into a newt or something, I am blaming both of you for the rest of my natural life. Which had better still be a normal human lifespan, thank you very much.”

“What if you get better?” Taylor had time to say, getting a gleeful look from both sisters in the instant before there was a chime and more windows popped up.

[Victoria Dallon has joined the Party!]

[Victoria Dallon is now eligible for Party Loot!]

[Victoria Dallon possesses Unique Skill]

[Integrating Unique Skill with System]

[Unique Skill: Invictus integrated!]

“Hmmm. It didn’t do all of this when you first joined up, Amy. I wonder if that’s because you ‘snuck in’, or if its different because I’m a higher level than I was then?” she wondered aloud, looking at her HUD thoughtfully, and Amy shrugged lightly.

“That, or its because she’s a fighter-type and I’m a healer.” she proposed the first alternative came to mind, and Taylor tilted her head in acknowledgement of what struck her as a fairly reasonable theory. “Anyway. Do we know anything about this place except for the fact that we have to kill this ‘Goblin King’ in order to leave? Anything at all?”

“Well, the System said further information couldn’t be revealed until we entered the Instance. That’s a new one. The one for the hospital garage just said to kill the final boss, nothing more. Hold on…” Taylor mused, looking through her UI, and before making a noise that sounded both curious and triumphant as she tapped something. Large windows, portraying the ruined city down the road and carrying text that looked like a stereotypical military briefing file, popped up in front of all three of them.

[THE NEST OF NILBOG]

[Sixteen years ago, the town of Ellisburg was a modest municipality of some four thousand souls. Then came NILBOG, theoretically an entity from beyond the Gates that remained on Earth indefinitely, who was later known as The Goblin King or the Maker of Monsters. Rather than the typical monster-horde rampage associated with such breaches, NILBOG instead chose to remain, subjugate, and ultimately transform.]

[Using his wicked powers, “The Tyrant’s Blessing,” NILBOG kidnapped and infected the town’s population over a period of months, priming each and every man, woman, and child living within it’s limits to become as much a monster as any beast inside a dungeon. Slaves to his will that went about their lives in ignorant peace until the moment he deemed most appropriate. In an instant, they were transformed. Efforts to contain them resulted in further victims, normal containment measures are insufficient, and so it falls upon you to put an end to this threat. Fight your way into the city, make your way through it to the old cinema -now NILBOG’s palace- and cast down the goblin king to put the ghosts of his victims to rest at last.]

“…well, I sure as shit hope that we’re not expected to fight four-thousand odd people in order to find this guy, because that would take a while, probably get us killed, and scar me for life.” Vicky sighed, flicking the notification away with an almost casual gesture, reminding Amy that her sister was something of a gamer as well, even if she didn’t do it nearly as much as pre-System Taylor had. She shrugged then, grinning, and pounded her fists together, moving to take a step forward. “I’m guessing I’ll take point, so…”

“Not a chance. I’m taking point, you’re backing me up and keeping your sister safe. She can fight if she has to, but your job is making sure that she doesn’t, understood?” Taylor cut her off briskly and bluntly, those beautiful crystalline blades of her swirling into existence in her hands as she stepped forward and a cross to keep herself in front of the golden-haired girl, and Amy winced again, this time at the expression of shocked offense on her sister’s face. Small wonder, really. She wouldn’t have liked in regardless, but having it done by someone that she probably still thought of as a much weaker and lower-ranked Hunter than herself? Galling, to say the least, though at least she didn’t say anything stupid to Taylor as a result.

Whether it was because she recognized that Taylor wasn’t weak anymore, recognized that she was the ‘Mysterious Hunter’ that had shown up on the news earlier in the month, or simply because she wasn’t dumb enough to swallow her foot whole when it came to Amy’s first girlfriend, Amy couldn’t guess. And, quite frankly, she didn’t care. All that mattered is that she and her two favorite people were doing something together, and while it may not seem the most romantic thing at first glance to some -frankly, she thought it wasn’t all that unromantic, there had been more than one reason she’d picked the movie she had for their date, after all- she was going to be thrilled with whatever she could get.

And this was only the first step, she reminded herself as they started making their way down the road towards the distant, ruined municipality.

Well, the second, if you counted convincing Taylor to let her bring Vicky along and to work on seducing her, or at least being open to the possibility. Of course, Amy knew that Taylor would be Taylor, she probably wouldn’t even try to seduce Vicky, anymore than she’d tried to seduce Amy. Which would only make her efforts even more potent and, hopefully, guarantee the end result that Amy was hoping for.

The point was, she was only just getting started, and she was almost painfully excited -in more than one meaning of the word- by that fact.

Not that she could let herself be distracted by that right now, given that they were inside of a likely-deadly raid and heading towards their ultimate objective. And if Amy knew anything about video games -which she hadn’t, until she’d learned about the System, and now she was learning as rapidly as possible to try and understand what Taylor was dealing with or how to best help her-, she knew that there was a big difference between a dungeon and a raid.

Not to mention the fact that neither she nor Vicky had had their power throttled the way that she had in the parking garage dungeon. Which meant that the System thought that a level 70 Healer, a level 60 Fighter, and a level 30…whatever it was that Taylor counted as now, constituted a perfectly reasonable party for this place. Which, quite frankly, was more than a little scary.

Still, in spite of her low level, she knew that Taylor was dangerous, Vicky’s talent and her strength made her nothing short of lethal, and without having her healing ‘nerfed’ Amy was more than capable of keeping them alive through damn near anything.

She smirked a bit to herself. She had a great opportunity, here, to make sure Taylor understood just how valuable she was. After the not-so-great showing she’d made in their first dungeon, on more than one level and in more than one way, she was going to get to strut her stuff a bit…

She jerked to a halt alongside Vicky as Taylor’s head snapped around and her hand came up in a blatant and well-known gesture, eyes narrowing as they swept the world around them -consisting mostly of the ruins of the gas station whose canopy they were walking beneath and a burger joint across the street- with her blades held ready. Everything was silent for a long, long moment, long enough that Amy would have started to doubt Taylor’s senses if it wasn’t for the experience that she had with those senses.

Vicky, on the other hand, had no such knowledge, and no such constraints.

“What’s the problem? There’s nothing out here, I’d be able to tell…” she scoffed, sounding almost offended as took another step forward and to the side. She promptly squealed in surprise when the entirely non-descript pile of leaves her right foot crunched into as a result of the movement turned out to be hiding a snare trap. With a snap and the sound of a running pulley, she found herself hanging by her leg from the ceiling as twisted, monstrous-looking caricatures of men and women came swarming from what looked like everywhere.

“Vicky!” Amy screamed, already lunging toward her sister even as the first of the Nilbogged townsfolk got within dozen feet, weapons both makeshift and ‘natural’ alike ready to pierce the flesh of the three dungeon-delvers. It was too late, though, the blonde half of their duo now a story in the air, and Amy was forced to retreat quickly as more than a few of the monsters went straight for her.

Not that she needed to worry about her safety, of course. Not with Taylor there.

Taylor, whose body and blades were already moving, crystalline scythe-blades flashing silver-blue as she carved through the nearest attacker —what had once been a mailman, judging by the tattered remains of a postal uniform stretched over distended, misshapen muscle— before pivoting to intercept the next. And the next, and the one after that.

They kept coming, pouring out of the gas station’s shattered windows and around the corner of the burger joint and out of the sewer grates. A tide of wrongness, and if it hadn’t been for the situation, Amy was pretty sure she would have been stuck between crying at how horrifying it all was and vomiting at how disgusting they were, with their oozing wounds, old wounds, and God only knew what else they were afflicted with. It was like watching something out of a pre-Gate horror movie, complete with the hero(ine) standing alone against the horde to protect the love interest.

And, much like in those films, the heroine couldn’t be everywhere at once. Fortunately, unlike those love interests, Amy was reasonably capable of defending herself. Equally fortunately, her lover had planned for this eventuality -mostly at Amy’s insistence, unwilling as she was to be a burden on Taylor- and so Amy pulled from her very-limited-in-size inventory a simple mace. It wasn’t anything special, and she had essentially no skill with it, but her opponents weren’t exactly graced with an abundance of martial skill either, and as a result she was able to splatter the skull of the first one to come at her across the overgrown pavement without much issue.

The second one didn’t go down quite so easily, catching the haft of her mace with what had once been a hand and was now something closer to a bear trap wrapped in rotting skin, and Amy grunted as she wrenched the weapon free, kicked it in the chest and sending herself stumbling back a step as a result, before putting herself more firmly between the horde and her dangling sister.

“Taylor, she’s stuck, someone needs to cut her down!” she shouted, even as she swung wildly at a third opponent, the impact of her weapon on it’s forearm sending the lower half of it’s arm snapping off to reveal blackened and fragmented bone ,earning her a shriek of rage in response. At least, she hoped that it was rage, because if these poor bastards could actually feel pain…!

“Kind of busy, babe!” Taylor snarled back, and Amy could see why with even the briefest of glimpses — her domme was a blur of motion, blades weaving faster than she could properly follow, as she battled no less than a dozen enemies simultaneously. And it didn’t look like things would be calming down for her anytime soon, either. Every time she cut one down, two more shuffled forward to take its place, and the rope holding Vicky aloft swayed and creaked with every one of the blonde’s increasingly frantic attempts to get herself free, but Taylor didn’t have so much as a moment to spare from the mob to handle the matter. “Can you find and break the anchor?”

“Little busy myself!” Amy shot back, voice cracking with strain as she brought the mace around in a clumsy arc that connected more by luck than skill to pulp another creature’s head, wishing she’d have thought to get Taylor to give her a weapon and some training earlier than this. Hell, she could have made it a steamy date, but instead she’d missed the opportunity!

For now, Vicky was just going to have to stay where she was, because her companions had more numerous problems to worry about.

###################################################

Above the two battle-locked girls, Vicky twisted and thrashed against the rope, her fingers scrabbling uselessly at the knot cinched tight around her ankle. She’d already tried reaching up to grab at her own leg, but the angle was all wrong, her abs burning as she strained to fold herself in half in mid air, using nothing but her own muscles. Which, it seemed, were not entirely up to the effort.

“Oh come on, come on…!” she growled, swinging her torso up in yet another desperate crunch, fingertips just brushing the rope before gravity yanked her back down and she swung in a lazy, humiliating circle, blonde hair hanging down around her face like some kind of particularly drab maypole decoration. This was beyond humiliating! For God’s sake, her sister was a healer and yet there she was, swinging that mace around and clobbering monsters, while her stupid ass had walked right into that trap and was doing her best impression of a fucking pinata!

She tried again, curling upward with a grunt of effort, fingers stretching for the rope just above her ankle. Close, so close -if she could get her hands around it, she might be able to climb up high enough to get the slack she needed to slip loose!-, and then a fresh wave of shambling horrors lurched into view from around the side of the burger joint, stealing her attention away as she gave her sister and Taylor a warning shout.

“More coming from the left!”

Neither of them so much as glanced her way, though Taylor shifted positions to make sure she was between the new arrivals and the two Dallons, and that stung a bit more than it probably should have. She was the strongest person here, dammit, or she was supposed to be. And instead of kicking ass and proving it she was dangling helplessly while her little sister and her little sister’s girlfriend handled a horde that, by her rough count, now numbered somewhere north of three dozen.

She gave up on the rope for the moment, going still —or as still as she could manage while swaying gently from the lingering momentum— and simply watched, because there was genuinely nothing else left for her to do. At least, nothing else that would actually accomplish anything.

It should have been the worst kind of humiliating. It was the worst kind of humiliating, a quiet and furious part of her insisted, the part that had spent years being the strong one between the two of them. The reliable one, the one that lead, the one that was listened to. The girl who threw herself between danger and the people she loved without a second thought. That part of her wanted to scream and keep thrashing and somehow rip herself free through sheer stubbornness, because this was not how things were supposed to go.

She wasn’t supposed to be the one being protected, not by anyone, and certainly not by Amy. It was the opposite of the way the world should be, her whole purpose was looking after her precious sister. She’d been doing it for her entire life and she’d had every intention of continuing to do it. Helping her find love, helping mediate between her and their mom, helping keep her dad from turning her into a piece of shit like him, keeping the jerks and the vultures away from her…

But now…now she seemed like she was starting to…well, it hurt to think, but it was true.

She didn’t need Vicky, because she had Taylor.

And that…that was a very bitter pill to swallow, and right alongside it she was having to swallow the fact that ‘The Weakest Hunter’ damn well wasn’t. Not anymore, thanks to this ‘System’, and while she’d like to be bitter about that, angry about the ‘cheating’, she couldn’t. Not knowing what she did about what it had cost the other girl.

So now here she hung, watching as Taylor tore the vast majority of their enemies to pieces and Amy did her best -which was pretty good, for someone with so little experience- with the rest. She had to admit, it made one hell of a sight. She’d always found competency to be pretty sexy, especially amongst her fellow Hunters, and Taylor had both competency and beauty in spades.

It was damn near a hypnotic sight, the way that the tall and slender ravenette almost literally danced through her enemies, occasionally flickering out of sight entirely when she landed a particularly brutal blow on one of the monsters. And every strike that she landed seemed to cost her nothing at all, given how easily and smoothly she was flowing from one to the next with a genuinely awe-inspiring economy of movement. The sort of movement that you’d expect from someone with years of experience in wielding their chosen weapon.

Another example of the System’s effects, she would wager, but that was a distant thought in the face of just how damn dry Vicky’s mouth had gone for reasons that had nothing to do with a lack of water and everything to do with an abundance of thirst.

If there was one thing that was unfair about all of this, it wasn’t the fact that Taylor had received the System.

It was the fact that she could look that good while doing something so incredibly brutal.

Blushing quite fiercely and trying to deny it, she resolutely turned her head away from Taylor to check on Amy. She was, after all, rather safer ground for watching. She was family, after all, and she felt a distinct warmth of what could only ever be pride at the sight of Amy’s clumsy but effective fighting. Pride that only had anything to do with her courage, and with it came admiration that only had anything to do with the cute expression of fierce, scowling determination as she battled the handful of creatures that managed to slip by Taylor.

The flood finally began to thin over the next few minutes, the once-overwhelming numbers dwindling as Taylor’s blades kept up their relentless, lethal rhythm and Amy’s own weapon started to find its own. What had felt like an endless wave slowed to a trickle, then a final few stragglers, then nothing at all as the last of the Nilbogged townsfolk collapsed in a heap at Amy’s feet, twitching once before going still. The sudden silence, broken only by the harsh breathing of the three young women that were still alive.

Vicky barely had time to process the fact that the fighting seemed to be over before Taylor was moving again, though the target of her blade this time around was a rather different one.

One instant the taller girl was standing amid a battlefield of fallen monsters, chest heaving slightly, blades dripping black-streaked crimson, the next Vicky was dropping a handful of inches into her arms as the rope was severed at last.

The world tilted, gravity reasserting itself properly on her bloodflow, and then she was cradled against a chest that was somehow both soft and iron-hard at the same time, one arm hooked beneath her knees and the other braced firm across her back. She was, quite absurdly, being carried like a faity-tale princess, and the blush that had started to fade bloomed sharply again as Taylor dropped lithly to the ground before setting her down on the cracked pavement with a gentleness that was one hell of a contrast to the violence that the other girl had been unleashing moments before.

“You good? Anything broken, sprained, bleeding?” Taylor’s eyes were already scanning her, quick but thorough, and Vicky shook her head mutely, still catching her breath, though she regretted the motion almost immediately as her head throbbed.

“I’m fine, they never touched me. Ankle’s a little sore from the rope, that’s it. And a hell of a headache from being upside down for so long, I guess.” she managed, and beside her Amy dropped to her knees as well, hands already glowing faintly with healing spells.

“Let me just…hold still, this’ll tingle a bit.” The warmth of her sister’s magic swept over her ankle, the dull throb fading into nothing within seconds, and Amy’s hands moved on to check her scalp with brisk, professional efficiency before she seemed satisfied enough to sit back on her heels.

“You’re fine. Physically, anyway.” Amy said, and there was something in her tone that made Vicky’s stomach drop even before she looked up and caught the expression on Taylor’s face.

It wasn’t anger, exactly. Or it wasn’t only anger. It was something colder, flatter, more disappointed than furious, and somehow that was worse. Vicky had faced down plenty of chewing-out sessions in her time -from coaches, from her mother, from more than one team leader who thought she was too reckless, from Amy all the time- and she well-recognized the signs that she was about to get another one.

“That trap you walked into,” Taylor said, voice low and even and somehow more cutting for it, “was in plain sight, and even if it wasn’t, I called a halt. I was obviously searching for something, obviously concerned. And instead of stopping to ask what, or falling back, you decided to do whatever you damn well pleased and got yourself caught in a trap like an idiot.”

“I didn’t hear—”

“You didn’t listen.” The correction came fast, and sharp enough that Vicky actually flinched. “There’s a difference, Victoria, and it matters. This isn’t some C-rank clearing job with a full support team and a gate to retreat through. This is a Raid. Do you understand what that word means? It means everything in here is scaled to try and kill us, all three of us, and it means if one of us goes down, stays down, or gets pinned somewhere stupid, the whole fight gets exponentially harder for everyone still standing.”

Vicky squirmed, but before she could open her mouth and -probably- make things worse by running it, Taylor kept going.

“I left an opening because I had to compensate for you being out of the fight.” Taylor continued, arms crossed, the last vestiges of adrenaline still visible in the tightness of her shoulders. “Amy had to fight and cover ground she shouldn’t have needed to cover, because you weren’t there to hold it. That’s not a hypothetical, its a consequence. That happened, thirty seconds ago, while you were hanging from that rope looking pretty.”

“I know—”

“I really don’t think you do, actually.” The words weren’t shouted, weren’t even particularly loud, but they silenced whatever protest Vicky had been about to make. “Because if you understood what almost happened, you wouldn’t be sitting there waiting for me to finish so you can defend yourself. You’d already be apologizing to your sister for putting her in danger the way that you did.”

That did it. The last of Vicky’s bravado crumbled, her cheeks flushing hot with a shame that -this time- had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with the sick lurch of realization in her gut. She’d been so busy being frustrated at feeling useless that she hadn’t actually let herself think about what her uselessness had cost.

“I—” she started, and then stopped, swallowing hard against the lump forming in her throat. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking about that. I was too busy being pissed off that I wasn’t in the fight to actually think about what that meant for you two.”

“That’s a start.” Taylor’s voice hadn’t softened much, but her eyes had, and Vicky got the distinct feeling that she was waiting and watching for more.

“I’m sorry that I tried to do my own thing, that I didn’t listen to you. I…I know it sounds like an excuse, but I didn’t think there was anything out there. I would never deliberately do something to get a party member hurt, and I would never willingly put Amy at risk.” she said the last few words fiercely, before dropping her eyes to her lap. “But I know what you’re going to say. I didn’t do it willingly, but I did put Amy at risk, didn’t I? She could have been hurt, even killed, and it would have been my fault.”

Taylor’s fingers caught her chin before Vicky could finish shrinking further into herself, tilting her head up firmly, forcing their eyes to meet even as Vicky tried to flinch away from the contact, to pull herself away.

“Don’t do that.” Taylor said, voice quiet now, but no less commanding for it. “Don’t look away from me when I’m talking to you, and don’t you dare sit there wallowing in guilt like it accomplishes anything. Sorry doesn’t put you back on your feet faster next time, and sorry doesn’t keep Amy safe. Sorry doesn’t teach you to listen. You don’t need to be sorry, Victoria. You need to be better.”

She was pinned, trapped. Not by the grip on her chin, not really, but by those pale green eyes that seemed to burn with some kind of inner power. She was entranced, hypnotized, but that didn’t stop her from hearing and absorbing what Taylor had said, what she said next.

“So the question is, Victoria: are you going to be better?”

There was only one thing that she could say to that.

“Yes. I promise.”