112 - Don't Trust Him

The sounds at her window were starting to irritate Lexie. She was trying to nap, which she had been trying to do for the past thirty minutes, but the incessant tapping of whatever bird was outside her window kept interrupting her. Right as she was on the precipice of sleep, it would tap again. Then, Lexie realized that the taps were too coordinated to be a bird. 

She slowly opened her eyes right as another one bounced off her window. It looked like a rock. Lexie frowned and got out of bed, walking slowly to the window. She opened it and looked down at the familiar boy on the grass. 

“Are you really throwing stones at my window?” she asked him.

Tate gave her a crooked smile. “Yeah?”

“You couldn’t just, I don’t know, ring the doorbell?”

He gave the door a single glance before looking back up with a shrug. “This way seemed more fun.”

Lexie shook her head. Why were all the kids she knew so weird? They all had a penchant for windows and hated doors. 

Lexie put on her slippers and went outside. It was sunset, a gentle breeze rustling over the grass. Her dad wasn’t home, having gone to the Healing House to help Emma with a potion. He told her he would be back before dark, which meant he would be back soon. Hopefully, he wouldn’t see her with Tate and bring up Wisteria Calmpotter and Victor Valdam again. 

When she went outside, Tate was sitting on the grass, facing the suns. Lexie dropped to sit beside him, drawing up her legs and wrapping them around herself as she stared at the sun. 

“So,” he said. “That was one hell of a fight.”

Lexie sighed. “Yeah.”

“Were those the cards you made in the dungeon?”

"Some of them yeah,” Lexie said. She let go of her legs to plant her fingers on the grass squeezing the soft wet surface. These were Hinton weeds. She didn’t know how she knew that but the fact whispered in her mind. She suspected that her memories as Lexie Sparrowfoot were returning, which is why some things started to feel more familiar to her. Would the cycle happen again? Would she lose her memories all over again?

Hopefully not, if Naem was to be believed.

“Conrad said you didn’t want to continue with the AFC,” he commented.

“Yeah. I don’t think cards are meant for combat, at least not the way I used them. I think I messed up somewhere and that's why someone got hurt.” Lexie wondered if making the cards in Eldritch territory had contributed to the spread of her Eldritch essence. Aiden thought that might be a possibility, which meant no more crafting cards in dungeons. On one hand, Lexie knew that was probably the right thing to do. On the other hand, she felt a little depressed and resentful about giving it up. After receiving free reign to make amazing cards without system limitations, now she was back to the basics, making frustratingly ineffective cards. 

But it was for the best. She didn’t want to get more Eldritch after all. At least that was what she reminded herself. For now, she would refocus on studying cards instead and using loopholes to do her research. Aiden had told her about a deck, the Prankster’s Deck, which had more to it than met the eye. It was also highly customizable and he thought that with enough tweaking and working she could make it work for her needs. He was also back to teaching her Fae intent and Lexie was back to struggling with it. 

Once again, depressing. In the meantime, Naem said he had to leave but he would be back soon enough when Aiden figured out what they were going to do about Lexie’s essence.

“How long have you been here on Earth 9?” Lexie asked Tate. He glanced at her in surprise. “I used to think it was only for a year, but I’m guessing it’s much longer.”

“Well, I've been here my whole life. I was reborn here.”

“So like a baby?”

He nodded. That meant other Chosen were literally reincarnated into this world rather than transmigrated as Lexie had been. 

“I think you can tell me things about the ISTS,” she said.”I don’t think I’m technically part of the Chosen program.”

“What?” 

“I told my dad everything,” she admitted and mild panic flew into Tate's gaze. “Not about you though, just about me. And nothing happened. I didn't get my soul terminated. I take that to mean I’m not officially part of the program even though I have some of the features.”

Tate stared at her in surprise for some time. He suddenly exhaled. “You know I thought that might be the case.”

“You did?”

He nodded. 

“How come?”

“I suspected it when I kept running into you. It’s not just that we’re not supposed to run into each other, but the program specifically tries to keep us apart. Forces are preventing us from meeting even without us even knowing. But I ran into you pretty easily, twice in fact. Add to the fact that you don’t have a guide and well, I figured something was going on with you. I'm guessing your dad did something?"

"Something like that." That was all Lexie was willing to admit. "Wait so you knew that you could give me more info, but you didn’t?”

“It’s not like I knew exactly," he said “I just suspected and my guide still didn't want me to do it even if I wouldn’t get my soul terminated. There might be unforeseen consequences. Besides, I didn't tell you everything because, on a selfish level, I still needed a bargaining chip for you to help me out with the dungeons remember?”

“You dick!" She punched him in the shoulder, hard enough for him to flinch. She frowned at him, feeling mildly betrayed.

“Ouch.”

“You deserved it. And worse.” 

He sighed. “I do. I never said I was a good person.”

"I'll remember that," Lexie said. “So then tell me? What is the program about?” As annoyed as she was at him, she still wanted that information.

He rubbed his shoulder, smiling. “As far as I can tell, they pluck chosen souls from different dimensions and slot them into this world. Don’t ask me how a soul gets chosen because I don’t know. We get one artifact from our old world when the program activates and if we don’t participate we lose all memories of our past life.”

Lexie wondered if that was linked to her memory loss. “To what end?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll tell you when I get there.” 

“You could have dropped more hints.” 

"I was planning to, after we raided one last dungeon." He gave her a hopeful look and she shook her head.

“My dungeon days are over,” she told him.

He looked disappointed but he nodded. "I figured as much. But I have to say I truly don't get why you're upset over some little love taps."

"Love taps? I traumatized that girl."

Tate made a face. "Please. She had it coming. I read her lips."

Lexie shook her head. "Still."

“But I get it. I’m gonna miss you, dungeon buddy.”

Despite Tate's decision to keep secrets from her, she had to admit that she would miss going on raids with him too. “I’ll miss you too.”

***

Lexie thought she might have figured out exactly how to fix Urmas’ problem.

She had been on it for a few days now, mostly as a distraction, but also to prove something to herself. Maybe to prove that she didn’t need dungeon-made cards to make a difference in this world. Maybe to check that if she did good things and helped people, the eldritch part of her may recede. At this point, she was scared of using magic, even though her father assured her that it should be fine to use her other cards. She wouldn't go to any dungeons either and hoped that Tate was faring well without her. 

Still, she mostly decided to focus on her scholarly side for now. She read medical textbooks and consulted medical forums where she asked questions about the causes of mana instability when interacting with a prosthetic. One reason was a longstanding infection which would cause the prosthetic to glitch intermittently but frequently. Another reason was just mana congestion caused by pathway interruption. The mana would simply bottleneck at a point. Lexie thought it might be the latter considering it only acted up when he was approaching fatigue and when his mana had been most active. Infection may also have played a role. The next step was figuring out how to fix it. 

She couldn’t unaffix the mana in his leg without serious medical and surgical expertise, but she thought she could dull their effect by siphoning mana from his legs into a card. It didn’t matter what the card did, only that it had to be active for as long as possible, and it had to specifically siphon mana from the pathways in his leg.

Affixed mana was still mana and still behaved in many ways like free mana. When activating a card, it would automatically call to the free and affixed mana in one's body. Affixed mana would not be able to leave its position but free mana would. If there wasn’t enough free mana to fill out the card pathways, the card wouldn’t activate.

The catch here was that there was probably some free mana left in Urmas' body. While affixing free mana to physical attributes, it was a given that only 90% would be affixed, leaving 10% unaffixed, just due to margin of error. Usually that 10% leftover mana wasn’t enough to do anything with. But, with a B-Rank mana user, which is what Urmas was, that 10% just might be enough.

What Lexie wanted to do was create a very very weak card that activated on a sliding scale. What that meant was that it would activate in increments and it would only use as much mana as was available. When the free mana was used up it would go for the affixed mana. Of course, it wouldn’t actually be able to use that mana, but then the affixed mana would be caught in that pull, and fighting the pull would drain them of energy, keeping them still, meaning they wouldn't be able to revolt against Urmas' prosthetic, thereby stopping the glitching. Another good thing about it was that, since the card was so weak, and required so little mana, Lexie could bump up the active time to almost five minutes. 

Lexie thought this might also lead to a breakthrough in making cards for mundanes, but she needed to see if it worked first. 

To make it, she reworked the very first card she’d ever made during the summer, the balance card, tweaking it with some of the knowledge she had now. She made sure it was specific to improving his leg balance and activation drew the mana from his legs specifically. She also wanted to add a loop function whereby the card would automatically loop every five minutes so that Urmas wouldn’t have to worry about activating, but that might have to come later so that activation wasn’t too complicated. 

A few days later she was done. 

Now she just needed to see if it worked. Which meant she had to speak to Urmas. 

It took Lexie a couple more days to go back to the dojo. She hadn’t really left her house much for the last week and certainly hadn’t gone to Arcadia either. She was nervous to do it, and the thought of going there and facing everything that had happened sort of gave her hives. But she didn’t think Urmas would have time to meet up with her, what with training for his next match and such, so it was better for her to go with him. Plus she couldn’t hide from her forever. She probably owed them all an apology. 

She told her father where she was going and he gave her his blessing, simply telling her to be careful. Luckily it had gotten cold enough that no one batted an eyelash anymore when she wore a heavy sweater and a scarf that covered half her face. That was precisely how she’d showed up to the dojo, tentatively in case there were people camped outside. She knew there might be. Despite her making a point not to watch any of her matches, it was too easy to find her name in the comment section of her teammate’s matches along with all the speculations that entailed. 

Mr. Douglas had been right in that she’d become severely talked about and Lexie had managed to find her name and her family under pretty much every comment section. There was talk of her being banned and while some people agreed with that verdict, a lot of people seemed to think that was unfair. After all, she’d only reversed the skill Diana had used on her. The only problem was that she had boosted Diana's pain to unimaginable levels and Lexie hadn't been able to stop it when she needed to. 

They were also those who had zoomed into the video to count exactly how many cards Lexie had used and wondered how a C-Rank mage could use that many cards. Some thought she might be a silent spell caster, and she was just using the cards to cover up. Lexie didn’t mind the speculation although it made her nervous. But what she hated was all the speculation about her father and her mother. It reminded her of Diana screeching all those nasty things to her. 

Even with that, Conrad had been asking Lexie to come over to the dojo and say goodbye in person. She figured she might as well do it now.

But now that she was here, staring at the door, she couldn't bring herself to open the door. No one else was in the parking lot, to her relief so she took her time, to calm herself.  

She dragged in breaths to soothe her nerves. Calm down. The worst they can do is throw you out and tell you never to come back. But that would break her. She would hate to see fear in the eyes of those she’d come to consider friends. She would hate for them to shun her and be scared of her the way she scared herself when she thought about Diana’s contorted face.

The door pulled open suddenly and Lexie jumped back. Boris’ smiling face filled the doorway. 

“We made a bet on how long you would stand here,” he said as Lexie blinked at him in surprise. “And I was about to lose so I came to get you myself.”

“How did you even know I was here?”

“Conrad got security PHORBs around the place,” he said. “People started coming over randomly and trying to break in so he had to up security by a lot. Now it gives us regular alerts when someone is at the door.”

“Oh.” Lexie gripped her pants, her palms suddenly sweaty. She found it hard to meet Boris’ gaze. “That…that might be my fault. I’m really sorry.”

“Aw, you want to apologize, little birdie?” He bent and swooped her up, ignoring her protests and walking right in. “Guys Lexie's here to apologize!”

Lexie was mortified. She ran her gaze around the dojo, spotting Jan and Shadow sparring, Cara talking to Lane and Ken, with Conrad adjusting Tate's stance as he did pushups. Conrad was the first one to look over and he smiled at Lexie. 

“Nice to see you come over Lexie,” he said and Lexie smiled, successfully managing to get Boris to drop her. 

The others started speaking at once. “Lexie!”

“Ha, I told you she would be back. You owe me thirty credits, Tate. Heck, I should have asked for more, seeing as how you got those fancy new mechs.”

“Hey Lexie, can you show me that move you pulled? And lend me that card? Could use it for my next battle against Megador.”

Lexie didn't’ answer any of the questions, because they all came flying at heart once. Boris though shushed the group. 

“Guys Lexie’s here to apologize.”

“For what?” 

Lexie hated being put on the spot, and Boris smirked as he knew it. “That’s for not answering any of my texts.”

“I’m sorry for what I did,” she said to the group. “I broke the rules and I used a card that I shouldn't have. Sorry if you got increased scrutiny because of it."

“Well I don't think anyone thought that card would work like that, did you?” Cara said. 

She shook her head. “I just tried something new for the first time that day and once I did, it didn’t turn out how I expected.”

Cara nodded. “Makes sense. I knew you wouldn’t do that on purpose, but my cousin was trying to tell me that your father taught you some kind of forbidden magical skill.”

“My father had nothing to do with it,” Lexie said sternly. “He didn’t even know I was making those cards. If he did, he would have asked me to stop."

‘Are you really a C-Rank mage?” Shadow asked quietly. “A C-Rank mage shouldn’t be able to make that card, not on your own. It’s making me wonder just how powerful you really are.”

Lexie felt her heart skip a beat at the scanning look he gave her. “I really am a C-Rank mage. They checked my system screen and everything to make sure.”

“Ignore Shadow,” Conrad said. “He’s just salty that your fight overshadowed his. You didn’t do anything wrong. And as to all the attention we’re getting now, well most of it’s good. We even have an online team name now. You all are Conrad’s CoolKids.”

“Except Boris who is way too old to be called a kid.” 

Boris shot Jan the middle finger and said, “You’re only two years younger than an asshole.”

“Lexie,” Conrad said, “You’re free to hang around for as long as you’d like but the rest of you need to get back to work.”

“Um…actually I wanted to talk to Urmas.”

Urmas seemed surprised. He’d been quietly on the bench and said, "Me?”

She nodded. I" think I have a card that can help you."

There was a hush in the atmosphere and Lexie could almost see the thinking. Were they thinking about what she did? About if the card would be dangerous?

"It's not dangerous at all." She rushed to clarify. "It's a weaker balance card. The problem is that one or a few of your pathways got severed which then blocked the mana flow in that area. There's some free mana and affixed mana bottlenecking there and it has nothing better to do but attack your prosthetic and when you're fighting it gets even more agitated causes the prosthetic to glitch. It’s not a very common problem so you might have also sustained an infection at some point that damaged those pathways although I'm not sure about that.”

"I was sick for a while after the amputation," Urmas admitted, looking interested in what she was saying.

Lexie nodded. "What I’m going to do is to try to siphon some of that maa=na from your leg to hopefully calm it down, and stop your prosthetic from glitching. It should work in theory, but I’ll need to see it in action to be sure.”

“Um alright,” he said and she walked over to him. Lexie materialized the card and showed Urmas how to use it. “Eventually, if it works, I can find a way to make it specialized for you so it reduces the activation time.”

“You can do that?” He looked amazed.

She nodded. She'd done something similar with Cara's card.

“Neat,” he grinned. “Thanks.”

After he activated it, he frowned. "I don’t feel much different.”

“It’s only a slight mana drain and the balance it lends is minimal. But when you're fighting and your free mana is going haywire, that would suck it out and reduce the activity of your affixed mana."

“Alright,” Conrad said smiling, “Let’s test it out.”

Lexie sat on the bench as she watched Urmas fight Cara. It went on for about ten minutes with no glitching. A couple of times, she glanced at Tate, who was now fighting Jan.

As she did, Conrad came to sit beside her. “How are you? Really?”

“Better," she told him. “I should have listened to you that day when you told me not to go on.”

“It’s okay. We all make that mistake at least once.” He grinned. “‘I'm glad you’re feeling better though.”

She scuffed her shoes. “I thought you would be a little mad because I no longer want to be in the AFC and I wasted your time."

“Of course not. How can I be mad at you for doing what's best for you? That would make me a hypocrite, wouldn’t it?” he said. Lexie grinned back, and he reached out and ruffled her hair. 

The card seemed to work for Urmas though his activation time (for the first increment) was a hefty thirty-five seconds. She asked him to practice so he could bring it down and he readily agreed, thanking her.

"This is amazing," he told her, staring at her like she hung the moon. "Thank you. Seriously, I don't know how to repay you."

"You don't have to. I wanted."

"Yes, but..." He shook his head. "Even when you told me, I didn't think it would work. I feel foolish for ever doubting you. Thank you."

"It's fine," Lexie shrugged, feeling embarassed with the effusive gratitude. "I had time on my hands is all."

Urmas kept thanking her right up until she left. She felt a lot lighter and happier on the trip home. Later, when Lexie was home, she got a text from an unknown number.

Unknown number: Lexie?

Lexie: Yeah?

Unknown number: This is Shadow. Got your number from Boris.

Lexie wasn’t expecting that. 

Lexie: Oh. Hey, Shadow. What’s up?

Shadow: Watch out for Tate.

Lexie: What?

Shadow: Don't trust him. He’s not who you thinks he is. He's not your friend.