The Fusionist Book 3 -- Epilogue

Epilogue

Nedira’s hands shot to her head as she struggled awake, a throbbing pain that felt like it was threatening to split her brain in half causing her to hold her skull together. Or at least it certainly felt that way.

The light of the fading day was still blinding as she forced her eyes to open, but all she saw was a blurry collection of what she could only assume were clouds in the sky. Closing her eyes and groaning as the pain inside her head slowly faded, she eventually rolled to her side so that she could start picking herself up, only to run into something lying next to her. The act of touching the other person caused them to stir, and she heard a moan of pain that was immediately familiar.

Norde!

Her eyes flew open once again and this time she pushed through the pain and blurriness to see her brother stirring, his own hands pressed up against his temples. Nedira could only commiserate with her sibling as he seemed to be struggling with the same thing she was, but if it was anything like her own pain, it would start to fade soon.

Looking past him, she saw Verne near her brother, and just past the three of them was a quartet of other people that were beginning to wake up, as well. Kimble appeared just as debilitated as she was, but Bartholomew, Vivienne, and Penelope seemed to be recovering faster. Probably due to some sort of Martial Skill or whatnot.

“What—?” her brother mumbled from where he was still lying in the short grass around them, his eyes still closed. He licked his lips, which seemed to be dry, before he spoke again. “What happened?”

That was an excellent question.  A quick perusal of her mind as the last of the pain from her head faded into a dull ache revealed that her memory of the events that led them all to be asleep and in pain in a field… somewhere… was fragmented or just plain missing. “I don’t know,” she answered, shaking her head – which she stopped immediately as it only exacerbated the pain.

It wasn’t until she looked behind her that she noticed that there were dozens of other people that were also waking up in pain, and suddenly her memories flowed back into her mind as she recognized Major Kuama and the local SIC members from the town of Whittleton. That naturally flowed into her memory of the Aperture and the dangerous three-headed lizards that had been spilling out of it incessantly.

Thankfully, they had managed to temporarily close it through the efforts of… it was closed by… something? An explosion, perhaps? The exact method escaped her, but she figured it was something that the SIC managed to pull off and was therefore successful.

Regardless of her ignorance about how it was closed, they fortunately had a while until it would open again and start spewing out more monsters. There were more important things to worry about, because while this Aperture was the first of its kind, it wasn’t going to be the last. They had to warn the rest of the SIC about this development, because they were the only ones that knew about—

Wait. How is it I even know about Apertures and how they operate if this was the first one?

Flashes of some sort of notification she read somewhere filtered through her mind, which held the information she possessed, but whose notification it was remained blank in her memories. Nedira thought for a moment that it might have been her own, but she couldn’t seem to pull up anything like that while searching through her Status, so she gave up after a short time of looking for it. In the end she supposed it didn’t matter; what mattered was that she had the knowledge, even if she was unsure where it came from.

As unsatisfying as that lack of information was, it still helped to explain their location. Picking up the pack that had fallen to the ground while she helped her brother up, she knew that their group was currently traveling toward Silverledge Academy and Fort Ironwall to attend classes there, and this whole Aperture thing just happened to occur while they were nearby. The exact events surrounding their discovery of it was muddled in her mind, but the important thing was that they discovered it in time and managed to close it – all before it expanded far enough to end up hurting someone.

Though why the local SIC would need the help of a bunch of students and trainees to do something like that was lost on her. A glance at her own robe was enough of a reason, she supposed, because the Fusions on them were so powerful that she couldn’t even see them clearly. With them helping to boost their stats, they were probably just as effective as an average Academy or Fort graduate, and at that point they were probably better than nothing.

Looking at the incredible Fusions once again, something about them tickled a memory of a figure creating them, but she couldn’t quite grab onto it enough to make sense of it. All she could remember was that it was someone extremely tall and was from the Kingdom… but that couldn’t be right. No one from the Kingdom was over 6 feet tall, and even that height was a rarity.

Shaking her head at the incongruity of her memories, which fortunately didn’t cause any more pain, she looked toward the Major and the rest of the SIC, who appeared just as confused as she was at their current situation. Walking over to the powerful Martial figure, she asked, “Do you happen to know how we ended up here?” She gestured to the grass, indicating what she meant.

Unfortunately, the rapidly recovering leader of the local SIC didn’t have an answer for her. “Not a clue. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the Aperture being closed? I’ll be sure to report it once we pass on the information to the higher-ups.”

That answer wasn’t exactly satisfying, but she couldn’t figure out exactly why it wasn’t. After all, it sounded completely plausible that it was the Aperture that had caused them all to collapse and hurt their heads, especially as it was something new and they didn’t know all that it could do to the local environment. Nevertheless, there was a nagging feeling in the back of her mind that she was missing something obvious.

Shrugging, she gathered with her group, who had largely recovered from whatever it was that had affected them, before saying goodbye to the Major.

“Thank you again for your help,” the local SIC leader said, though there was a hint of a question in her statement. “I’d appreciate it if you helped to spread word of this as you journey wherever you’re headed to next.”

“That was our thought as well,” Penelope said in response. When she spoke, Nedira had a sudden urge to punch the Martial in the face for some reason, though when she investigated her feelings over why she felt that way, she came up blank. Did she do something to me? The whole situation was becoming stranger by the second it felt like, but she wasn’t even sure where to look for answers to why it was becoming so strange.

She missed whatever the Major and Penelope said to each other before the SIC took off at a run back toward Whittleton. As her own group turned to leave, heading toward the northeast once again on their journey to her new Academy, Bartholomew kicked at something in the grass.

“Hey, you forgot your staff.”

Nedira looked at the staff in her hand before glancing at Norde, Verne, and Kimble. All of them seemed to have their staves, so she wondered who the Martial trainee was speaking to. “No, we’ve got them.”

“Well then, who’s is this?” the Noble asked, kicking the staff up with his foot before catching it in his left hand as his spear was occupying his right.

“One of the SIC’s?” Penelope asked.

As she looked at the extra staff, Nedira could immediately tell that it wasn’t one of the staves that the Mages with the local SIC had been using. For one, it had different Fusions on it, and while she couldn’t make them out because they were too complicated, they had a different feel to them that she couldn’t explain. Secondly, it was near their group, and it also matched the construction of her own staff, which was just slightly more natural than a normal Mage’s staff she had used back at Copperleaf Academy.

That had to mean it belonged to someone in her own group, especially when the SIC hadn’t claimed it before they left. But if every Mage already had a staff, who did it—

A picture of that figure she saw in her memories flashed through her mind, as well as a question that she wasn’t sure why she hadn’t thought of until that point. Why did a bunch of students and trainees leave Copperleaf and Pinevalley to travel through the dangerous parts of the Kingdom without an escort of SIC members or access to the Transportation Network? What was it that prompted our departure?

As much as she attempted to remember, nothing came up. Only a few random flashes of a tall figure effortlessly producing powerful Fusions that nobody else in the world could create gave a hint as to why. In the end, through deduction and a deep-down feeling she couldn’t rightly explain, the only explanation she could deduce was that – as impossible as it seemed – it belonged to someone in their group that was no longer there.

But if that was true, who was it?

The better question probably is: What happened to them?

Nedira didn’t know, but she was determined to find out as a longing that surprised her in its intensity shot through her chest at the thought of the figure in her memories.

I’ll find out who you are and where you went if it’s the last thing I do.

The End