Aqua Regalia [Monster Progression LitRPG]

All around, her body shackled like a padlock.

And Cas could do nothing but watch, as her body toppled over that critical balance point, falling onto Sara's position.

Sara's sleeping hands shot out on instinct, deflecting her to the side as she woke with a start, springing up to a seated position. "Cas!?" Sara yelled. "What's gotten into you?" she stared directly at the Cas's body through her steel-plated eye mask.

When no response came, she took the effort of raising the eye cover, peeking a worried expression out from underneath the mask.

"...Cas?"

Cas tried to respond, to move, but no action volunteered itself. Her crystal eyes stared directly out at the unfocused image of a sideways world.

She tried to move again. Occasionally, a procession of nerve impulses would fire in random, senseless waves. An arm would twitch, a leg would shudder, but nothing more.

One by one, all the human distinctions bestowed by her body disappeared.

Her aura-boost evaporated, all sensation left her body.

Even her emotions had dulled.

Sara was beginning to grow worried, Cas noted with inhuman dispassion.

It felt like being a slime again, floating somewhere within herself. But slimes, for all their limitations, were good at taking care of corpses, and Cas decided to do just that.

Prfrf!

In a short burst of effort, the body liquified, and Cas felt a sudden freedom.

Sara raised a hand to her nose, a mix of disgust and relief apparent. "Cas!" she beseeched, trying to hide the gag in her voice. "Tell me you're not dying right now."

"I'm ok." Cas answered through artificial vocal chords, sounding like a mistuned guitar.

Sara, in between coughs: "What happened?"

"I died."

It was a simple answer, one which begat more questions.

"You died?" Sara perked up, looking around for signs of danger.

"I mean I'm fine," Cas corrected. "My body died."

As a slime, Cas had refined tastes, but it didn't require all that sensitive a palate to discern that her body's chemistry was a complete mess. And that was putting it nicely.

Dead cells, stress hormones, inflammation. It was a horror show everywhere she looked.

The horror was easily unmasked, however. After all, Cas could turn a conglomeration of monster bits and random crap into a living human body; fixing some bad chemistry was child's play.

A moment's work, and her Alchemy skill would return everything to baseline. With that done, it would be a simple matter to become human again. Easy peasy...

Well, it was almost that simple.

As she fixed the acidity in her blood plasma, Cas noticed something that prompted a double take: The iron in her body had rusted.

Most of her blood proteins were completely destroyed and the iron, which was supposed to act as a carrier of oxygen, had rusted, completely useless to her.

Worse than that, many of her nerve cells -- particularly those in the brain -- had burned, carbonized into ash.

Despite her Alchemy skill, Cas couldn't fix inorganic matter, and neither could Human Figure when she'd tried it.

[Transmutation Failed]
[Alchemy 101 at Insufficient level to transform inorganic matter.]

[Minimum required level: 70]

And Human Figure was only level 60 – go figure.

She managed to corral the waste products into a vacuole, but any attempts to manipulate the rust felt like trying to tear apart steel – for lack of better analogy.

She didn't even try to unburn the ash-lines which had previously been her nerves. The soup of soggy charcoal danced away from her fickle grasp whenever she tried.

"...Cas."

A distant voice interrupted her musings. It was Sara.

"Cas, what's wrong?"

Cas turned her attention back onto Sara.

"I need iron," she admitted.

"Iron?"

Cas explained all that she had seen, and she expected confusion on Sara's part, maybe some clarifying questions, but the woman caught on immediately.

Her reply was harsh and immediate:

"Cas!" Sara leant forward with scrunched brows and an accusatory posture. "Have you been Conflagrating?" speaking with the same embarrassed disappointment Cas's mother had displayed that one time she caught Cas with that magazine.

Cas, remembering too vividly the embarrassment of that moment, tread carefully with her next responce.

"...Ok," she said at last, measuring her words. "Before I answer that, I need to know exactly what 'Conflagrating' means."

As it turned out, 'Conflagrating' was the proper term for 'Aura Boost'.

And, you weren't supposed to Conflagrate for more than a few minutes at a time.

"Unbelievable," Sara would mutter occasionally over the following week. "Four days without a break. You burnt your nerves to crisps!"

Thankfully, Cas's embarrassment outlasted the damage. Sara procured some iron flakes from the smithy. The neurons were easily replaced after eating some field mice, and Cas was back in Human Figure just in time for movement.

Cas, Anne, Dacula and Reginald escorted the munitions cart they had spent so much effort loading. Given that the cart could drive and even steer itself in a limited fashion, it was easy work… until the cart broke down, that was.

How a cart propelled by fairy dust and waggling fingers could break down was lost on Cas. Reginald mentioned something about 'magical erosion'. Cas didn't care to understand the problem. What Cas did understand, was the solution: namely... a lot of pulling on their part.

Cas was in a dour mood when, finally, after four miles of drudgery, they dragged the monolithic, metal cart past the entrance gate of the Army base.

The army base was massive. Taking up a full acre, it was surrounded on all sides by high, wooden walls. A maze of defensive trenches zig-zagged through the surrounding valley, growing out from the base like creeping vines.

The outer walls glowed with a living aura. This effect worked to obscure everything inside the walls, so much so that Cas was surprised when she entered and got a good first look at the interior.

A large courtyard was immediately visible. In it, carts even larger than the one Cas's team had been lugging were parked in neat rows. Surrounding them, a menagerie of loud stables lined the borders.

A distinctly earthy note could be detected in the air. Cas sniffed it, and many around her scrunched their noses. It smelled like a barnyard, too.

Beyond the courtyard, the Base was far less rural. A Kowloon of multi-story buildings packed the interior. Every building had its own shroud of living aura, obscuring the signatures of people inside.

Despite this, Cas could feel the mass of population that occupied the area. The whole base was bustling, a veritable hive of activity. Everywhere, people crawled through the narrow alleyways, hurrying between disparate buildings with hardly a note of acknowledgement between individuals.

The buildings themselves were plain, utilitarian boxes of wood and adobe. They created a jagged sky-line that stair-stepped unevenly through the air. Some had open windows, where a myriad of panicked scenes played throughout various office rooms.

Cas overlooked this in a single sweeping glance, and then she looked away.

It was just like the broken Carriage. Cas just couldn't muster the energy to care about the fine details.

She felt depressed, a feeling which only deepened as the day wore on.

Eventually, the sun was beginning to set. By then, Cas felt dead to the world. Nothing seemed to catch her interest and everything seemed muddled. She wasn't sure why.

It were as if the color had drained from the world.

Cas considered her recent bout of depression, her lack of interest in anything. She wondered if it wasn't a symptom of withdrawal. After all, she had spent the past four days in the high of her 'Conflagration'; with a mind on fire. Cas had grown used to holding a conversation while counting the patterns of blinks in different groups of people: (As it turned out, women blinked more often in groups, and people blinked especially fast when in the presence of higher ranking personnel.)

Given the tireless energy she'd grown accustomed to, maybe it was natural that 'normal' would feel depressing by comparison.

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Then again, maybe depression was just the natural atmosphere of a funeral.

Diiiiiiing!

The delicate chime of the mourning bell rang over the procession..

Prince Haowi's body was laid out with the head pointing northwards.

The funeral lacked the adornments one might have expected of a departed prince. His body wrappings were plain white – the same as any other soldier. The dais which displayed his body was similarly mundane, being knocked together out of wood and adobe.

Of course, what it lacked in ostentation, it more than made up for with attendance numbers.

At its feet, a whole field of soldiers sprawled out before the dais. Looking from afar, it looked like a shimmering carpet of aura had been laid out for the prince's departure.

Squinting through the intervening space, a dense forest of solemn faces could be made out, stretching in organized files to the limit of the gathering field.

With so many people in attendance, placements had to be made, and Sara, along with even the most senior auxiliaries, took her place in the far back.

Cas had expected similar treatment but at the last moment, right before the funeral was started, a respectable looking gentleman in elaborate clerical garb came asking for: "the foreign princess".

Cas was then placed at the front of the formation, in a specially cordoned island formation for the 'diplomatic types'. Next to her, two humans and a wolf stood wearing foreign attire.

Having a princess from another continent attend your funeral was worth something, it seemed, even if only bragging rights.

Whatever the reason, Cas found herself in the stall, hardly ten feet away from the prince's body.

Being so close to the open casket, and in such a place of honor, it made Cas realize that she'd never sat in the front row of a funeral before.

This was only natural.

Cas had no dead friends, no spouse, she wasn't close with her extended family, and – importantly – she had died before either of her parents. That fact struck her suddenly.

She died before her parents.

Guiltily, Cas felt a bout of selfish relief at that fact. No parent wants to outlive their child, that was true, but… no child wants to bury their father, either. Not really.

In a way, Cas had forever escaped that grisly reality.

She'd never have to see her parent's die, now that she was in another world. Hell, she managed to get off Earth without losing a single loved one, save for some ill-cared-for goldfish.

As far she was concerned, everyone she cared about would live forever, in her memories of them, at least.

Then, the second arm of that scale fell, and Cas realized that, alive or not, she would never be seeing any of them again.

Mom, dad, Jennifer, Dr. Sal, J… everyone.

You couldn't ever go home again. That was the saying, wasn't it?

Cas wondered what the real difference was, between her current circumstance and losing everyone she'd ever cared about.

She failed to find any real distinction, and the grey-scale of her world pitched into blackness, and the practiced sadness on her face turned genuine as she looked out over the melancholy assemblage.

Everyone present was wearing the same, respectfully sad expression as her. Cas wondered if any of them were feeling it as much as her.

A series of choked sobs answered her.

It was the prince's brother, and the young boy was kneeling on the top step of the dais, pressing his face against the Prince's chest, trying valiantly to hold in any noise as tear-stained cheeks dried themselves on the burial shroud.

"Ugh!" Another, pained sob shook the boy.

The funeral director – the same wizened man who had called for Cas – nodded his head at the drummers and they set about ringing the mourning bell once more.

To tell by their surprise, ringing the bell at such a time was a novelty, but it seemed appreciated by the young boy, who took advantage of the sudden noise to let out his most delirious emotions.

Diiiiiiing!

Diiiiiiing!

Diiiiiiing!

Like all field funerals, the prince's burial was a hasty affair, and it was over so quickly that Cas was left with some whiplash.

She sat at a lonely table in the corner of the mess hall, ignoring her soup and wrestling with the memories of her parents and everyone she'd left behind on Earth.

Absently, she caressed the spot on her cheek where the funeral pyre left an imprint of a warm sensation.

She blinked up as some familiar faces carried a conversation in her direction.

It was Reginald speaking: "Well, Dacula," he conceded gracefully, "you were right. I was wrong."

"Me? Right about what, exactly?"

Reginald explained. "I mean you were right to play your scam early. I remember telling you people gamble larger sums at deployment's end, and that is usually the case, but – he glanced around at the dark mood of the mess hall – I doubt anyone here is in the mood for merrymaking.

Dacula laughed suddenly at the recollection. "You still remember that?"

"People tend to remember losing more, ya?" Anne growled, scowling up as she remembered her losses.

"I won that money fair and square." Dacula sounded hurt. Besides," he continued in a cheerier tone, "how can you be thinking of that at the end of deployment. We're free people, now!"

Dacula held up a wrinkled piece of paper with curled edges as proof, dangling it from a fist as if it were a prized catch.

Anne held up her own, far more carefully preserved parchment, looking at it with suspicious appraisal. "… maybe," she sighed, slipping the paper into a compartment of her shoulder bag. "We're just going to deploy again right after this. It's nothing much to celebrate."

She turned to Cas directly, looking at her with a serious eye and asking. "So, princess, what are your plans?"

"Don't call me 'princess', please" Cas requested immediately. She'd gotten enough of that in the diplomat's circle. Even the talking wolf had insisted on the formality. It had gotten so annoying, Cas quickly soured on the novelty of a talking wolf… waste of an opportunity, if you asked her.

Anne laughed at the seriousness of the request. "Oh, why keep it secret? Do you have enemies, ya?"

Dacula, always quick to carry a joke, joined in: "maybe she's lying low to evade a plot against her life? It would explain why she had to escape to a foreign land."

"Oooh, just like the stories!" Anne reminisced romantically.

"I didn't run away," Cas seethed, "I'd just rather not hobble every conversation I ever have with formalities."

"Oooh, fancy talk! Finally!" Anne clapped excitedly.

"Royalty always have good speech," Dacula added proudly, "even in second languages. Isn't that right, Reginald?"

Reginald scooped a spoonful of soup beneath unamused eyebrows.

"I'll remind you, I'm not nobility," Reginald announced dryly. "Certainly, if I were, I wouldn't be going on another deployment with you."

"Aww. That hurts," Dacula mimed, holding hands over heart.

"That's life," Reginald retorted. "Anyway, Cas… I don't believe we ever got your commitment to another deployment. You'll have to notify the unit leader before day's end, if that's your plan."

And then the table fell silent, and they all looked at her with something like bated breath.

Cas returned a dry-ice grin.

Reginald had already guessed her answer, to tell by how smoothly he'd forced the issue. And, now both Anne and Dacula were in on the secret: that Cas wouldn't be asking to deploy with them.

Goodbyes were always difficult, and Cas was terrible enough at the easy hellos. So, she took advantage of their silent acknowledgment, and simply switched topics.

"So… what are those papers for?"

Anne replied immediately, with an exaggerated cheer designed to plaster over the recent awkwardness.

"Oh!" she hopped up into a straight sit, drawing out her parchment and handing the crisp note over. "So, they're our pay, ya?"

Cas blinked in surprise as she took the parchment in hand.

It was thick, almost leathery. An intricate seal was tattooed into the upper right corner, and a crystal eye was embedded into the upper left.

Instinctively, Cas ran her aura over the object.

Bank Note Equipped!

[By the authority of the Imperial Army:

Anne Zephyra, for due service of 126 days in the expeditionary division Ember Regalia, is hereby discharged early on special notice. Her conduct was honorable.]

Immediately after this, a second page popped up, showing a table of figures.

[Pay: 36 Silver Coins. 9 Copper.

Unspent stipend: 2 Silver Coins. 3 Copper

Hazardous Duty Bonus: 12 Silver Coins.

Breacher Bonus: 8 Silver Coins. 9 Copper.

Retirement Contribution: 3 Silver Coins. 8 Copper. [Not to be accessed until the twenty third of September. Year: 11,023]

Total value: 3 Gold Coins. 3 Silver. 9 Copper.
]

"Surprised?" Anne asked, showing some professional embarrassment, as one might after uncovering their salary books.

Cas was. Apparently, her shock had shown.

"It's nothing bad," she assured. "I just assumed you'd be getting paid in actual coins, or gems or something," she clarified, remembering the glimmering loot tables in Siablo.

A round of laughter rose, and the dreary mood was gone

"Hahaha! Cas, I never knew you could be such a funny girl!" Anne guffawed, forgetting her embarrassment. "I really will miss you!" she announced simply, looking at her from across the table.

"Here here!" Reginald raised a mug, stamping the table with a closed fist in agreement. He was laughing too, even harder than Dacula. The ridiculousness of Cas's statement had managed to break his iron mask, it seemed.

Cas felt a bit sad watching the scene.

The scene sparked a memory of everyone she left on Earth.

Just then, the evening bell rang. Cas remembered her earlier appointment. Hesitating only a little, she stood up from her place, waving a silent goodbye.

It was sad to go so soon, but why not leave on a good note?

A voice called her back.

"Cas!"

It was Anne, looking up at her with a face that was at once happy and deadly serious. The woman furrowed her brows, leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner. "So, this goodbye, ya?"

Cas could only nod.

"Well," Anne continued unabated, looking to either side to draw Reginald and Dacula closer, "my deployment ends next Winter ya? Let's all meet up back in Drossland. I'm going to buy a house there. You have to show up to give me presents. If not, I'll come kicking your door down to pay you back."

Cas, still in her jovial mood, laughed and asked: "Why?"

Anne's answer was as simple as it was quick: "because we're friends."

Cas caught her surprise at that answer. She felt a bit jealous at how easily and honestly Anne was able to make such proclamations, but it was a jealousy that inspired respect, and she merely nodded in promise: "I'll be there.."

Sara had a private room in the specialist's building. Her floor was filled with Psychic specialists, hence why it had earned the moniker: 'the floor of invisible gossip'.

Of course, the Psychics vehemently denied using their powers to spread salacious rumors on private lines, but the reputation stuck.

Sara, didn't comment on this accusation. And, to tell by her bored expression as she packed her bags, the rumor mill in this base was quite droll.

Cas knocked on the open door. Sara looked up from the open top of her carrying case, not bothering to mask her annoyance.

Not hiding her annoyance. That could have been a sign of trust or anger. As was often the case with Sara, her thoughts could be surprisingly elusive for a psychic.

Cas wasn't sure how to start the conversation, so she plagiarized: "What are your plans for… after this?" she asked, copying Anne's question down to the mannerism.

Sara apparently caught the lack of authenticity, to tell by how she turned her nose up.

"I'm going back home," the woman said.

Cas feigned surprise. She remembered deducing that very fact back when she was Conflagrating several days ago. "I thought you'd be going on another deployment. Everyone else is."

Again, Sara caught the lie, and her nose only lofted to higher extravagances of disappointment. She answered with an official and distant tone. "I joined this unit because prince Haowi was in it. Life can be rough in my line of work, and I take care to calculate risks finely."

Cas laughed. "Is that why you joined the army?"

":I suspected travelling with the Ember Regalia would be safe," Sara clarified. "I thought wrong"

"I imagine everyone did," Cas consoled.

"No matter. I suspect the king will want to make an offensive push, now." Sara sighed, putting the last of her items – a toothbrush – into the designated sleeve and closing the case with a loud click. "I'd rather not partake. Anyway, I'll be leaving soon, so, if you'll excuse me," Sara brushed past Cas at the doorway, making her way down the empty hall.

Cas stopped her, hooking hands onto shoulders.

Sara looked back over Cas's left arm, almost offended. "It's improper to touch a lady without permission, you know."

Cas smiled. "No exception for princesses?"

Sara almost rolled her eyes. Almost.

"Is there a point to this?"

"Well, I can't let you get away before I'm ready."

"Pardon?"

"I'm coming with you." Cas explained.

"Oh?" Sara said, voice cold and disbelieving. "I thought for sure you'd be going off with those ruffians you've taken such a liking to."

Cas, over the course of her four days in Conflagration, had noticed a lot. Among the myriad minor and mundane discoveries she'd made was this: that Sara, despite her social skills, was almost always the loneliest figure in camp, hanging exclusively with Cas whenever she wasn't attending to official duties. The life of a mercenary, perhaps.

Of course, Sara never seemed lonely. Her demeanor and expressions were unreadable even to Cas. But, Cas had also never seemed lonely back on Earth, even to herself, until she'd made friends that was.

"No," Cas answered. "I'd rather go with you."

Sara humpfed: "Why would you want to go back home with me, of all people?"

Cas could have answered that in many ways.

'Because I'm not deploying, either.'

'Because of the demon.'

'Because you're the only person in the world who knows my secret.'

But, eventually, her thoughts came to a rest on the most honest answer:

"Because we're friends."

Sara, noticing again the hint of Anne's mannerisms in the answer, only quirked an amused eyebrow as she slipped from Cas's grasp with a forgiving smile. "Well," she said, standing up straighter as she walked further along the hallway, "I suppose I did promise to introduce you to society. It wouldn't be very lady-like to renege on a promise. Have you managed to get your pay in order, yet?"