For some reason, the mere sight of the child sent a shiver down my spine. Not just because it was extremely unnerving to see her, no. The instant she was revealed to my eyes, I swear I felt the presence of someone standing just behind me. A cold breeze blew out of nowhere to tickle the back of my neck, almost as if a frozen breath had appeared from nowhere to fall upon me. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I wildly spun in place to look behind me.

  Nothing.

  There was nothing there. The only thing I could see was the room behind me, lit by the strobing red light of the greater hall through the door I had entered. I did my best to calm the heightened breathing from the near panic I’d fallen into and scolded myself.

  Get a grip, Nate. There was nothing down here but dust, rust, and my missing companions.

  Presumably.

  Well…

  And the little girl in the pod.

  With one last wary eye at my surroundings, I turned back to inspect her and the pod. Turned out, I had been wrong about what these things were. I hadn’t been able to see into the capsule with the glass darkened, but it appeared that these weren’t specifically ‘cryo’ pods.

  Instead, they seemed to suspend their occupants in some kind of liquid instead. The entire thing was filled to the absolute brim with a strange, clear substance of some sort. It wasn’t water, I could tell that if only from the viscosity of it. Too thick, for one, and too…

  Well, bright.

  There was a very slight glow to the fluid that indicated mysticality of some kind. My senses couldn’t tell what form of energy it was through the glass, but I didn’t really know of any sort of liquid with an inherent glow.

  Other than particularly potent potions, of course. But... if this was a potion, there sure was an awful lot of it.

  Thankfully, the kid inside wasn’t as naked as I believed the rest of the ‘victims’ I suppose I could call them, had appeared to be at the time of death. Whoever this child was, she was wearing what appeared to be a medical gown of some kind, stark white against the deep blue plastic of the cushions behind her. It waved slowly in the circulation of the fluid in the pod, along with the child’s very long, bright blonde hair. That might be the longest hair I had ever seen on a kid, actually. The thin golden strands very much appeared to have grown past her own height, to where I think it might well drag on the ground behind her. The effect appeared almost as if she bore a long, brilliant cape behind her thin body.

  Which was odd, considering her apparent age.

  I wouldn’t put this child past ten years old, maybe eleven if I was being generous. I hadn’t even known it was possible for kids that young to have hair that long.

  Through the pane of thick glass, the child almost appeared as if she was sleeping peacefully. Strapped to her face was one of the silicone medical masks I’d seen on the remains in the greater hall, but I could still her face beneath it. This girl had thin, almost elfin features to my eyes, but thankfully she wasn’t literally an Elf. The tips of her perfectly round, decidedly human ears occasionally showed through her golden hair.

  The entire sight of the girl, suspended for who knows how many years, was almost…angelic, in comparison to the dour environs I found her in.

  I had followed the continuous beeping in the hope that I would find a surviving member of the bunker people. Someone who could give me some much-needed answers.

  Instead…

  Instead, I had found someone who needed my help instead.

  I had to get this girl out of here. I realized that pretty much the instant I had laid eyes on her, I’d made that decision. Whoever or whatever this girl actually was, I couldn’t just leave her down here. This was a child. What kind of monster would just leave a little girl down here to potentially rest in suspended animation for eternity? I had to assume she was a survivor of whatever had befallen this bunker, somehow protected from the cataclysm that had wiped out the entire population.

  She might well be their last light of hope, carried into the future.

  That left me in a quandary, however.

  Did I get her out now, or come back for her later? Even beyond the trap that had drawn my companions and I into these depths, this place didn’t exactly strike me as safe. Those violet tendrils of corrupted Aether from earlier had been monstrously strong. To the extent I’m not sure Rhazal himself would have disregarded them.

  That wasn’t all, though.

  Sometimes…

  Sometimes I felt like I was being watched, in here. There was the incident only a few moments ago, of course. But more than that, while I had been exploring the veritable hall of the dead outside this lab, I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that I wasn’t exactly…alone.

  The space of the hall didn’t feel as empty as it might appear. I didn’t see anything, of course, and I had very much been keeping an eye out. But…

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  But.

  That feeling had passed, once I had entered this lab. In here, it was just me.

  And her.

  Something about this lab felt...safer than the greater hall, but still.

  Was it safe to take this girl out of her protective shell, and bring her with me? Would I only be dooming her to whatever it was that had infested this bunker in the long years since it had fallen? I…might be able to come back for her later, after I had found my friends and dealt with whatever resided at the core of this complex. After all, I hadn’t forgotten the implicit request of Masayuki Ashiwara to deal with whatever was causing the continuous return of Tatsugan, presumably down here. I even wanted to do that.

  If I had the ability to effect lasting positive change in the history of an entire nation, I felt I had the duty to at least make the attempt.

  But…

  Still, something in me said I needed to get her out now. I and my companion's entrance into this bunker had changed or perhaps awoken something down here. There was no telling that this girl would remain safe, or that I would even be able to return to this specific hall once I’d fulfilled my objectives.

  All of these thoughts passed through my enhanced mind in an instant. And when they did, I made a snap judgment, made purely off of a gut feeling.

  Honestly, it rarely steered me wrong.

  I reached out and lay one finger on the green button.

  For a moment, nothing happened, not like the immediate change that had occurred with the blue button. I momentarily feared that too much time had passed, and the pod had degraded into a prison instead of a life-saving womb.

  The sound of long degraded pumps firing to life somewhere below the floor disabused me of that notion. Creaking, groaning, and the growl of a hidden engine filled the air. Before my eyes, the strange fluid that filled the pod slowly began to empty through a small drain at the bottom of it. The girl inside began to lower with the level of the liquid, until her small, dainty feet touched down onto the grating at the bottom. Once all of the fluid was gone from the pod, she hung in place, suspended by two small prongs that had popped out of the backside of the tube. Still, she didn’t stir from her slumber, dripping the strange fluid. Strangely, it slid off of her form perfectly, including her clothes and hair. It didn’t appear to leave any visible moisture behind when I had been expecting her to be veritably soaking.

  I was startled out of my examination by the sound of long-neglected gears grinding to life from the pod. The entire enclose began to lean forward from its slightly reclined posture in fits and starts, until it stood fully upright. Visible sparks flew from the sides of the pod as hidden hinges on the front door tried to open the whole thing vertically, releasing a curious smell into the dusty interior of this lab. I swear, the scent was almost minty. I stepped back to watch so I didn’t get hit by the glass, but I needn’t have bothered.

  The mechanism to open the pod failed halfway, leaving the girl trapped inside.

  I frowned and stepped forward, bending down to grab the lip of the door. With just a little force, it was surprisingly easy to lift the glass panel until it was all the way open, stretching nearly to the darkened ceiling.

  I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

  The pegs holding the child upright retreated for some reason, causing the still comatose foundling to bonelessly list forward. Thoughtlessly, I stepped forward to catch her before she could hit the ground, kneeling before the pod to gentle the embrace.

  She was so…light. Fragile, really. In the incredibly dim light of the Skill I had left floating in midair, it struck me then that this child’s purity was at incredible odds with the bleak atmosphere of the bunker.

  Kneeling there with the child in my arms, I felt her stir in my arms. She was finally waking from the long, long sleep she had been placed under. Before my eyes, she shifted in my arms, and I saw movement under her eyelids. I held my breath as those same lids began to inch open, allowing me to see her eyes for the first time.

  I think it was only because I had held my breath that I didn’t gasp.

  Because they were green.

  Emerald green.

  The same shade…as my own.

  Somehow, someway…

  A perfect match.

  Our eyes met, and the two of us inspected each other for a moment. She was…very definitely awake now, and yet the child had yet to make a sound as she stared up at me. I didn’t either, to be fair. I was, in a way, terrified that the girl was terrified of me. I was a fairly…gruesome sight, these days, and I was very aware of that.

  Long, inhuman ears ridged with blackened scales jutted from the sides of my head, while similar scales traced the old scar I’d received from my first monster. Weapons, armor, and equipment covered every spare inch of my body, and I was aware that they were somewhat ragged from days of hard marching and combat. I’m sure I stank, too, despite the perpetual shower happening outside the bunker.

  Yet…

  The child slowly raised one hand to curiously trace the line of black scales on my left cheek, tilting her head at me as she did so.

  And spoke.

  In.

  English.

  “Who…are you?” A tired, high-pitched, and yet strangely unafraid little girl’s voice echoed from the child in my arms. She blinked slowly at me. “Did mama send you?”

  I barely registered the words said by the fey-like creature in my arms. Instead, I was still struck dumb by what they’d been said in. I hadn’t heard spoken English from another person in…God, I had no idea how long. I don’t think I even spoke it to myself, anymore. Language Adaptation had been steadily teaching me Veredenese Herztalian for some time now. I had to check with my shell-shocked core ring to be sure that the Skill hadn’t just been translating for us.

  But no.

  That was English, all right.

  My mother tongue sounded outright alien to me.

  “Mister?” A small voice called out, snapping me from my shock. I blinked and looked down at the child once more. She was still curiously calm, completely at odds with my experiences with children.

  But I didn’t know what to say. I realized now that the girl had asked after her mother.

  How…how do you tell a little girl that her mother was likely dead, and might have been for possible centuries? Maybe even millennia?

  Thankfully, I was saved from having to try by the little girl wincing in my arms, one of her tiny hands reaching up towards her scalp. Momentarily, I thought she might have hit her head on the way out, but no. Instead, she was just inspecting the no doubt incredibly heavy weight of all of that hair. In fact, she looked confused at the sight of just how much she had.

  I’m guessing she didn’t have that when she went under.

  I finally found my voice. “Is that new for you?” I said in as gentle a voice as I could muster.

  With my help, the girl sat up just before the pod she had fallen from. Outside of it, the sheer amount of hair she had looked decidedly unwieldy. The look she gave me from underneath all of it, there in the light case by her former sleeping place, made her look decidedly like a bedraggled kitten.

  I couldn’t help but smile slightly, despite the circumstances. I crouched back down to eye level with her. “What’s your name? Mine’s Nathan Hart.”

  She gave me a curious look, her eyes lingering on something over my shoulder before she smiled at me.

  “Aveline,” The girl said quietly, peering up at me with strangely unafraid eyes through thick locks of golden hair. “My name is Aveline, mister. Can you…can you help me with my hair?”