21. Freesouls


    Serac Edin rumbled through the pink desert beyond [Laceration Gorge North], not knowing where she was headed. She knew only that she had to keep moving, because to stay still would be to reckon with her own wretched and unworthy self.


    “Hey.”


    She kept herself moving. Even as a stray Flesh-fiend jumped out of the pink earth at her feet. It tried to swallow her trailing leg within its lamprey mouth, but she kicked it away before unloading four unimbued bullets into its worm-like frame.


    [444!] points of total damage. Solid into Souldust. [120 ?] points of fresh Karma. Great. Wonderful. Did it really mean anything, though?


    “Hey, Serac? Will you stop for a second so we can hash this out?”


    Three more Fiends, coming at her as a pack. Serac shot the rightmost one twice, whittling down its HP by half. She then dodge-rolled out of a lunging attack before jogging away to give herself the time and space to reload.


    She rested a beat to recover some Stamina before hitting the leftmost (and therefore yet undamaged) Fiend with [Catharsis]. She didn’t wait to see the outcome before finishing off the first target with two more unimbued shots. By then, Zacko had already dealt with the remaining Fiend with a well-placed [Cestus].


    Three enemies dealt with in quick succession, with the smiting of two of them fully credited to herself. It was the kind of ruthless efficiency that had eluded her up to now, and she didn’t stop to wonder why the departure of her Wayfaring mentor had brought it out.


    What was the point of wondering? What was the point of understanding anything? The world and its inhabitants moved around her with no rhyme nor reason—or if they had any, they didn’t feel the need to clue her in on any of it.


    “Hey! Sweetcheeks!”


    Serac rounded on Zacko in an instant, REVOLVER’s barrel pointed straight at his too-sallow face.


    “I thought I warned you,” she snarled in a low voice, “never to call me that again.”


    “Oh, good,” the Manusya said breezily, even as he waved the hands he’d raised in mock surrender, “there’s still something in there, after all. For a minute there, I thought you’d been shriven even without the help of a Deva’s whip.”


    Serac glared at Zacko, more annoyed than angry. After only a second or two, however, she failed to see the point of even this. So, she reholstered REVOLVER and walked on without another word—though at a slightly slower pace than prior to the interruption.


    “If you won’t stop”—Zacko didn’t stop—“then I’m just gonna talk at you, and you can talk back to me or not, your choice. First of all, really nice job with the Fiends back there. You’ve really skilled up since we first met, and that’s different from ‘leveling’ up, mind you. Almost makes me think you don’t really need my help anymore.”


    “Then why are you still following me?”


    “Hah! That didn’t take long at all! I know how to push your buttons, Serac, and don’t you forget it. And that’s exactly the second thing I wanted to talk to you about. About making this partnership thing official, you know? I think we work well together, and I for one would like to see how far we can go as a team.”


    Partnership. There was that word again. One of the words Serac hated the most at the moment, right alongside other classics such as together and team. The worst part was that she couldn’t even understand why she was so upset.


    She’d known Trippy for a matter of literal hours. A drop in the bucket compared to the years she’d spent alone as an inmate of the Damnatorium. They hadn’t even been particularly pleasant hours either, with most of them spent tolerating her mentor’s snark or cowering under the control he had over her Circlet.


    Not that he ever actually exercised that control. I guess that’s one good thing I can say about him.


    “You’ve gone quiet again, so I’ma keep prattling on, if that’s alright with you,” Zacko cut in, his breaths slightly uneven from matching Serac’s brisk pace. “We can circle back to the partnership thing. Let me move onto the third topic I had in mind, which is this fellow you called Trippy. And what I think about Trippy is that… this isn’t about Trippy at all.”


    Serac stopped dead in her tracks, causing Zacko to skid to a halt.


    “What isn’t about Trippy exactly?”


    “Your whole…” Zacko gestured vaguely with his hands before mouthing a phrase that appeared to rhyme with ‘sissy hit’. “I don’t think you’re upset about Trippy the soul, but more about what his loss represents.”


    “Oh? What, you think you know me now? After sharing a couple of Waystations and a measly boss fight? And just what makes you think this isn’t about Trippy? I mean, did you hear his parting words to me? May your Path never lead you astray for long? After all that drama and nonsense, he couldn’t think to leave me with anything more than empty platitudes? Something other than what you’d find on a fucking greeting card?”


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    “Hello. Did you ask for me, Wayfarer?”


    “What? No! This isn’t about you!”


    At this ‘private’ exchange, Zacko’s irreverent smile only widened, and in turn, Serac’s jaw-socking impulse flared.


    “Ah, but you see, I don’t necessarily agree that those words were as empty as you claim,” the Manusya suggested. “But that’s also beside the point. You say I shouldn’t act like I know you after such a brief time together, but… we’re both people, aren’t we? And I like to think I know people. Especially someone who wears her heart on her sleeves like you.”


    “Oh, wonderful,” Serac spat, letting the naked distaste in her own words give her a jolt of bitter satisfaction. “Real happy for you, Zacko. Good on you with the whole ‘knowing people’ thing. A Manusya like you, I’m sure you had tons of friends to share your afterlife with. What is Manesfera like? Not like this hellhole, I’ll bet”—she gestured toward the Fiend-infested desert that stretched all around, which had seemed so inviting only minutes ago—“and don’t think I forgot how you introduced yourself. Absolute worst first impression imaginable, but I guess that’s par for the course if you hail from a Realm where the women flow like wine.”


    “Manesfera: the first and lowest of the three Virtuous Realms, predominantly populated by the race Manusya. In the current Kalpa, the Manusyas are best known for their technological advancements and complex societal structures, best exhibited by—”


    “Shut up! No one asked you!”


    Even as Serac yelled at (and immediately felt bad for) this decidedly non-Trippy-like version of Trippy, she noticed the change that came over her Manusya companion. For a shadow had crossed Zacko’s face at the mention of ‘women and wine’, before he quickly composed himself into his usual nonchalance.


    “You sort of have the gist of it, Serac,” he said, somewhat quieter than was typical for him. “I did spend my pre-Wayfaring days among… what one might call a large ‘family’. I met and got to know all kinds of people, including people like you.”


    Serac scoffed.


    “Somehow, I doubt that very much. I mean, just the fact that you called it a ‘family’… Did anyone in this big family of yours spend her entire existence being prodded from one torture device to another? With no one to talk to other than her own torturer?”


    “See? There it is again. The fact you even tried to be friends with your Jailer tells me everything I need to—”


    “But you don’t know me!” Serac shouted, surprising herself with her sudden uptick in decibels. “So don’t pretend you do! What do you gain from partnering with me, anyway? You have more levels than me. You’re more skilled than me. You’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself. How do I know you won’t up and betray me to suit your needs? Or worse, abandon me when you no longer—”


    Serac clammed up and looked away, refusing to meet Zacko’s gaze, as much as she despised finishing her sentence.


    Zacko wouldn’t let her off the hook, however. He shuffled over to a new vantage point and even deigned to slouch down, thus bringing himself eye-level with her.


    “You said you dreamed of ‘home’ when you were inside the Hanging Fruit.”


    Despite herself, Serac looked up to meet Zacko’s eyes. She wasn’t too surprised to see they’d taken on a kind of pall—the same despair that had held the Manusya spellbound during the earlier exchange with Sublimity.


    But no. Not quite the same. For his eyes also showed a sheen of—if not quite determination, then at least desperation—one that managed to shine through the cracks within a pall of despair.


    “I think this is what it all leads back to, isn’t it?” he said, voice quieter and clearer than ever. “The whole reason we became Wayfarers. The rhyme that explains why we, out of thousands upon thousands of souls, managed to transmute the Instruments in our hands. We’re all trying to claw back something we lost. You, me, Trippy… hell, maybe even that Sublimity asshole.”


    “You lost something too?” Serac asked in a sheepish mumble, even though she thought she already knew the answer. “Is that what you saw in the Hanging Fruit? Is that why you kept going back there, even at the risk of becoming a Penitent yourself?”


    Zacko nodded grimly after a moment’s hesitation.


    “You know me, Serac, so don’t pretend you don’t. I’m ashamed to say that losing VISAGE to that fucking donkey was the wake-up call I needed. A reminder that the only way I can get back what I lost is by becoming more powerful than the assholes who took it from me in the first place. And I can’t do that without my Instrument. I could do it without a Wayfaring partner, but… let’s just say, I’ve seen enough of the world to know the Path can be a bit lonely without someone pestering me with their bullshit.”


    “Someone calling you out on your bullshit, you mean.”


    “That too.”


    Still, Serac hesitated.


    She recalled her own brief tryst with the Hanging Fruit. Of the lush mountain she’d once called home in another life. Of the friends and family who’d shared that home—friends who’d never betray her and family who’d never abandon her.


    Was Zacko right? Was that what she’d lost and had been trying to claw back throughout her lonely existence? What she’d thought she’d found in Trippy, then promptly lost again after a matter of hours?


    Was it the same wind that stoked the flames of her rebellion?


    “If I may offer my two ?, Wayfarer, I believe the Manusya is being sincere with his bullshit.”


    Serac snorted despite herself, then managed to hold back for only a beat before she burst out laughing in earnest. A proper laugh—the first in what felt like (literal) lifetimes—holding her belly and emptying her lungs.


    Zacko, having missed out on Trippy’s non-joke himself, stared nonplussed for a second. But he was, not for nothing, a Manusya social butterfly who hailed from a ‘big family’. He joined in with his own belly laugh, soon eclipsing even Serac’s obnoxious loudness.


    When the laughter had died down—and with her ‘hissy fit’ well and truly aired out of her system—all that was left was for Serac to add a few new lines to a contract between Wayfaring partners.


    “We broke out of prison together,” she reminded Zacko, “and that means we’re both freesouls, bound to no one and nothing other than our own ambitions. That means you don’t get to decide my Path, and I don’t get to decide yours. Which also means—”


    “Either one of us can break off the partnership at any time and without the other’s say-so,” Zacko chimed in, then raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Are you sure about this?”


    “I’m sure,” Serac said with a serene nod. As much as she hated to admit it, Zacko had been right, at least partially. This hadn’t been about Trippy, after all.


    But it also wasn’t just about what she’d lost. No, because she too had needed a wake-up call. A reminder that the whole world had opened up to her, and that meant she stood to gain a lot more than she could lose.


    “I’m sure,” she said again, “but as freesouls, we could also do with friends who can keep us on the straight and narrow when, you know, we get a bit carried away with our freedom. So, what say you, Mr Bullshit? Are we doing this or what? To see how far we can climb as a team?”


    Serac offered her right hand—her Instrument hand. Zacko took it with his.


    “You’re on, Horn-girl. And may our Paths never lead us astray for long.”


    “May our Paths never lead us astray for long.”