It was hard to get moving after all the physical activity, but it was still the dead of night, and sleeping in a messy pile of limbs in the middle of a grassy hill, with no alarm runes or protection of any kind, did not seem like a good idea.
The moment I got up, however, a wave of vertigo made me collapse right back on the ground.
"Ow," Vespera cried.
I blinked. Did I accidentally fall on her?
Nope, I didn't. Then why did she cry out in pain?
I looked down at my hands. They were fine, but the ground was a bit on the harder side, and I had the good luck to fall on a sharp rock. Thankfully, my Vitality protected me.
I tried to get up again, and the feeling returned. I fought it, but it felt like my brain was refusing to acknowledge that I wasn't lying on the ground anymore.
"Oooh, it's all wobbly," Elyra muttered drunkenly.
Then, she blinked and tried to make the horizon look straight instead of all strange. Wait, how did I know that she blinked? I wasn't looking at her.
This gave me an idea. Half walking, half crawling towards the girls, I helped them to their feet, and the swaying, disorienting sensation vanished at once. It was when I took a step while they remained still that the wrongness returned, lasting for just a fraction of a second.
"I think I know what's up," I said.
"Good, because I am feeling nauseous, spacer boy. Make it stop!"
I looked at the demon. She saw my face and knew what I was about to say before I opened my mouth.
"You can't make it stop, can you?"
"I don't think so, no," I said. Unless? We could try to sever our bond, I guess, but did we really want that?
"NO!" Elyra shouted before blushing. "Ah, apologies. I felt suddenly worried about something. The bond, maybe?"
Vespera touched her chin. "Me too… Sol, were you thinking about bad things?"
My eyes narrowed. "Maybe. But it was just a thought."
"No thinking bad things," she said sternly.
When she punched me in the arm, however, it was she who winced. She and Elyra, with the angel massaging her own shoulder, pouting at Vespera. "Ow, that hurt…" she whined.
"No, it didn't," I said.
The demon squared me up. "Now, who do you think you are, spacer boy, to tell me what hurts and what— wait a minute. It's true. It doesn't hurt anymore."
I laughed. "That would be my Vitality at play."
"Do you mean to say that I felt my own punch as if I had punched myself?" the demon asked.
"Rather," Elyra interjected. "How hard did you punch the poor Sol, little troublemaker?"
The demon shrugged. "He can take it," she said.
"But we can't!" the angel countered.
I was enjoying this. I waited until the right moment, then lifted a finger. Seeing me, the demon crossed her arms and stared at me. "What," she said flatly.
"Actually, I feel the pain. It's just that it doesn't last long. I'm guessing you felt exactly what I did."
"Cap," she said.
"Cap?" I asked.
"Means I don't believe you."
I chuckled. "You don't? How about this."
I pinched myself. The demon yelped, little tears forming at the corner of her eyes. "Owiee, that hurt. Meanie."
Instead of her, I walked up to Elyra and massaged her arm right where I had pinched myself. "Sorry, little angel."
"It's okay," she said in a small voice. "But it did hurt a little."
"Alright, alright," Vespera relented, finally. "I guess you do feel pain. You win. Okay? Now, care to explain what's up here?"
"Simple," I said. "Our bond has deepened again."
As if saying it, and recognizing it, was the last missing piece, the System stirred.
Your bond has deepened.
"Damn," Vespera exclaimed. "Now I feel on the cusp of leveling up."
"So do I," Elyra said.
I confirmed that I too felt it. Luckily we were only on the cusp, because we didn't have many cores to fuel the acquisition of a new skill. I sold most of them to buy supplies and a new backpack, only keeping one for emergencies. Using it wouldn't net me a new skill, but it would drastically extend the period of time before the 'insufficient energy' message disappeared and we lost the skill point forever.
I refocused on the last changes to the bond. It had been able to share our emotions at first, then our conscious thoughts—telepathy—and now we shared sensations and deeper thoughts.
Just to test it, I tried to think about how much fuel it would take to haul an ice asteroid from Prominence Vector to Waypoint Station Paavs.
"Stop that," the demon said almost immediately. "It's making my head hurt. What's with all those numbers and… heavens. Space is BIG. I never thought…"
She fell silent, contemplating what she had just witnessed. Oops. I didn't mean to do that.
"Do not feel bad about it," Elyra said, once and for all confirming that she could read my deeper thoughts. "Vespera had it coming."
I felt like it wasn't all. In fact, I knew that it wasn't all. There was more that she wasn't saying. I used the newest feature of the bond and tried to divine her deeper thoughts.
A sea of sensations invaded me. Awe. Desire for knowledge. Deep admiration for me, space, and the allure of the vast, dangerous emptiness above. Complex thoughts, each one touching upon another, going deep inside Elyra's mind, triggering connections, memories, flashes and images.
Soon, I was part of the infinite cascade of neuron activity that was her mind.
Oh. It ended.
Now I understood why it had taken me actual effort to peer into her mind, while she and Vespera could feel mine no problem.
First of all, I was loud. Or they were very quiet, I didn't know. I mean, it probably had to do with my childhood ADHD? I took meds to deal with it, but who knows?
"What's adeeichdee?" asked Vespera. "Sounds like a rather bothersome curse."
I sent her some thoughts to chew on and watched her face go blank for a second or so.
Right. The other factor that surely came into play was… they had no memories from before they met me. I could feel the gaping void in their minds. They were not gone, but shrouded, so that whenever a thought touched upon them, it simply ceased to exist. It was like brain damage.
But, maybe, with effort, I could help them. Already our level-ups helped them recover some bits and pieces, random knowledge that also happened to be strangely similar to my own culture. And now, I could feel that each time I followed one of their thoughts to the end of its line, where it vanished, I could add a little bit of my own mental power to it, so that it did some damage to the veil of forgetfulness on its way out. It wasn't going to be a quick thing, but…
I noticed that Elyra was crying. She hugged me, wings wrapping around us and sealing us from the world. They only opened when, without the need to speak, Elyra realized that Vespera wanted to join and she let the demon in, and us three hugged and shared ourselves, the dark of night be damned.
There was no need for words either. I knew.
But still, they chose to speak.
"Thank you, Sol," Vespera said. Her voice was softer than usual, her mood more somber and contemplative. "Once again, you find ways to help us. I can speak for both of us now that I feel what Elyra feels. You are making us fall for you all over again."
I didn't—
Elyra pinched me. The pain reverberated through three bodies. "No. Do not claim that you are not doing anything much, as you put it. You are very special. Your mind is very special. I know you are worried that we admire you because of this suspension bridge in Stockholm or something, but it's not that."
"Silly spacer boy," Vespera said. She kissed me, and once again the sensation spread to all three of us like wildfire.
When we broke apart, she licked her lips and bit them with her fangs. I shivered.
"I could get used to this," she purred.
We reveled in the sensation of each other's thoughts, feelings, and emotions for a while on the way to the dryad's tree. The silence was nice and companionable, because it wasn't actually silent at all. An outsider might think that we spoke no words and were barely better than strangers, but the reality was that we never stopped communicating, using ways that went beyond simple words.
"Damn," Vespera said. "We should deepen the bond more often. It did more than killing monsters could ever do."
Elyra blushed at the hidden meaning behind the idea of deepening the bond. I too felt a strange prickling heat under my skin, even though such innuendos would have never affected me before. Part of it was Elyra's reaction, which had spread to me.
But it wasn't all. The other reason was that, whenever we talked, words were no longer just words. There were entire oceans of meaning buried under them. It was like each word carried with it terabytes of information. Sensory, emotional, memory engrams.
And, damn. I thought it would make me more sluggish. But my mind felt quicker than ever! It was like I could be up to three times smarter, and the girls could too!
"Which reminds me," Vespera thought with no little amount of shame. "Or rather, reminds us. We can share attributes around, can't we? We totally forgot to do that when I got hurt in the last fight."
I smacked my head. "We could have saved the potion money! And even your scars! They could have been gone in minutes!"
Elyra laughed. "The money thoughts were mine, Sol. Keep your grabby hands away."
"And the grabby hands was my thought," Vespera told her. "It's gonna take a while to stop mixing our thoughts together."
I paused. They stopped walking at the same time.
I looked at Elyra, then at Vespera. The truth was, all three of us thought the same thing at the same time.
"Why the fuck would we ever want to stop mixing our thoughts?" I said, laughing. And yes, speaking a little bit like Vespera.
And you know what? I loved it.
So did she. So did Elyra.
We grinned in unison. Oh yeah, this was going to be fun. Fuck all the problems, little mishaps, Buck's death, and the three-letter club's horrible, rotten truth. Whatever it might be. Right about now, we didn't care about any of that.
All that we cared about was this world and its magic, the bond we shared, the adventures we could go on… they were ours. And it was awesome.