Shadow Runner [LitRPG]

It wasn't exactly unexpected, especially since she was constantly watching through my eyes. Still, the sight of Amelia standing outside her clinic, scroll clutched to her chest as she waited, made my face light up.

Then I immediately flinched and slowed my bike on its entry to the parking lot. Why? Because my lover slammed the scroll into Mela's hands (who I only noticed at that point) and started stomping in my direction, a storm of rage dancing behind those pretty green eyes of hers.

"Um…"

I didn't get to say much more as she stopped in front of me, fumbled with my bike helmet for a few seconds, and tore it off my head. Her jaw was tense, her movements jerky, and she looked like she wanted to slap me right across the face.

The fact that she threw her arms around me instead, drawing me into a hug that would have been painful without all the meds in my system, was a relief.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled, all tension draining out of my body now that I felt safe.

"Don't be sorry. Be more careful! You absolute idiot!" she hissed. Pulling away, she pointed imperiously at the clinic entrance. "In! Just… in! I need to look you over and start treating all your many severe wounds!"

I'd still been sitting on the bike until that point. When I slipped off it and tried to do as ordered, it was with some surprise that I met the pavement instead. My legs just sort of folded under me. Even trying to get my hands in front of me didn't really work, 'cause all I could make them do was flop uselessly around.

Amelia, meanwhile, was frozen in shock. She tried to jump in my direction to help, but since I'd already toppled over, her assistance was limited to frantically turning me over to my side. I just groaned and tried to keep my eyes open, since that was all I could do at the moment.

"Adrian? Say something, please."

"Ahm fihn," I mumbled, feeling a wave of sleepiness roll over me. "Jah tihd."

She screamed something at me, but I didn't really hear it on account of passing out.

—

There was no beeping or jostling or whatever when I started to come to. I wasn't woken up, after all. My body just decided it had had enough sleep, and roused my brain in response.

I did, however, relish in the softness and warmth enveloping me, particularly the left side of my body. I had a strong suspicion of why that was. Cracking my eyes open and tilting my head just a little confirmed it. Amelia was glomped onto me, and looked to be holding on for dear life.

It was a good thing my arm used to belong to an eldritch monstrosity, because it would have been achy and numb otherwise.

Amelia was a heavy sleeper at the best of times, so it didn't surprise me when I managed to shift a little and throw my free arm around her without waking her up.

As I did so, I took stock of my body.

Bits of me, particularly my back, felt a little off, like the skin there was more tender and sensitive than it should be. Other than that, though? Well, it paid to have a prodigious ripper for a girlfriend. Especially one with access to weird eldritch healing powers.

Then again, there actually was a bit of me that was aching a little. Namely my arms. Ironic to have my attention drawn to the limbs so shortly after reflecting on their usefulness, but I drew my free arm out from under the covers for inspection.

The sight was not very pretty.

While the rest of me had clearly been treated and restored to prime condition, my arm still looked like someone had taken either a grater and a power grinder to it, depending on the part of it you were focusing on.

And yet…

Thanks to my prodigious mind stats and the excellence of my eyesight, I knew for a fact that my arm was healing. Sure, it looked all messed up, but it also still looked like a functional limb. Its previous condition would have rendered it a pile of scrap metal if I were using regular cybernetics.

Lost at I was in my mind, I made a minor mistake. Solely based on habit, my fingers slipped under Amelia's shirt and started making small circles there the way she liked. Except, this time, her response was a flinch, followed quickly by her eyes fluttering open to land on mine in a glare.

"Really?" she demanded huskily, not bothering to hide her annoyance. "I carry your ass in with Mela, put you back together again, and you repay me by waking me up? And by trying to scrape the skin off my back?"

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"I… ah… sorry?" I asked sheepishly, pulling my hand away and bringing it up for inspection again.

Sure enough, the state of my fingers probably made them highly uncomfortable against skin.

I flexed them on impulse, wanting to see the condition of my claws. Then I blinked in confusion when all of my claws came out, looking pristine.

"Huh…" I mused. "Well, I guess we know what the weird healing process prioritizes, now."

"You're immensely lucky with those arms of yours, you know?" Amelia's exasperated question made me sneak a glance at her, thankfully finding an amused smile there instead of a frown. "If I had to fix those, we'd need access to some highly illegal material. If I could fix them, that is. Might have helped with making them, but I'm not exactly a techie."

"Yeah…" I trailed off. Guilt swamped me like a punch to the gut at the sight of her sprawled out in bed, looking at me with that gentle gleam in her eyes. "I'm sorry. I really, really am. I didn't think something like that would happen, and I just wanted —"

"Adrian."

She cut me off with that single, gentle word more effectively than if she'd shouted. She sounded so sad and tired…

"It's not fine," she went on slowly. "And I'm not okay with it. But I get it. I don't approve, but I understand why you did it. We just need to actually plan and learn how to do these things properly, okay?"

"Okay," I mumbled, then gave into the need to smother her in a hug of my own.

Now that I was paying attention, I felt the way the damage to my arms snagged and tugged on stuff, and I didn't like the sensation at all. A quick focus on my other, weirder senses also revealed that I was definitely still drawing in Essence, but it was coming in at a slow trickle instead of the rush I typically experienced.

"What's wrong now? You have the 'focus' look on your face."

Amelia's question made me chuckle and press a kiss to her forehead.

"Just feeling stuff out. I think my cybernetics were drawing Essence in to heal, but that seems to have slowed down."

"Well, duh. You've been in Essence suction mode for a long while now. You've drained all of it from the vicinity. It's slowly trickling back in, but you're just snatching it right up."

I blinked, then shook my head at my stupidity. I must have still been sleepy or something, because that was obvious in hindsight.

Wait, though…

"How long was I asleep?"

"Let me check… eleven hours, now? You passed out, I fixed you up as quickly as I could, and then I wiped you down and did my best to disinfect your… everything, really, with that fall into garbage you had. Washing your hair was a pain, let me tell you. Then Mela and I carried you up here, and we've been sleeping for about seven hours, give or take."

My face was burning at her little summary. I could only imagine how embarrassed I'd have felt if Amelia hadn't already seen all of me. Still, there was something deeply unsettling and humiliating about forcing her to look after me like that. Maybe my feelings weren't exactly logical, but shame still boiled inside me.

"I'm sorry. I-I'll definitely do better, from now on. I just… I'm sorry. And thank you. Let's not forget thank you."

She must have caught onto how uncomfortable her story made me, because she gently cupped my cheek and forced me to look at her before leaning in for a kiss. It was a hungry, possessive thing that made my head spin and scattered all my thoughts, good or bad.

"I love you, and while I hate seeing you hurt, I'd still rush to help you every time. I love being able to do that, too. It's a relief to know for a fact that I can put you back together, no matter how damaged you return to me. Just… try not to do that, okay? It was still stressful, especially seeing you pass out like that…"

"In my defense, I think it was seeing you that did it." My voice was thick with emotion, so I definitely failed to make the words sound vaguely teasing like I'd intended.

Amelia still picked up on what I was going for, though. "Oh? Was it my great and stunning beauty?"

I opened my mouth to fire off a quip, then reconsidered. I settled for the simple truth of things instead. "You made me feel safe."

Her flush was adorable, as was the way she ducked her head to bury it in my chest. "Oh…"

I pressed a kiss into her hair, just enjoying the sensation of her warmth and scent enveloping me.

We spent a precious few minutes like that before all the other thoughts, the ones doing their best to swamp my head, won out.

"So… both of us have absolute assholes for fathers, huh?"

She sighed the sigh of the resigned, then squirmed to make a bit of distance between us so she could look me in the eye.

"Yep."

Single word. So many emotions packed into it.

"Fun. Fun, fun, fun." I licked my lips. "They're also kind of working together already, if we assume your daddy dearest has switched over to the Zerx for test subject acquisition."

"And we should assume that, because Patch has received exactly zero answers to all the messages I made him send."

"Mmm. Double fun! Especially since I bled tar all over the place, openly did weird shit, and then escaped. Fuck. I'm such a fucking careless idiot, it's a wonder I didn't die in the slums as a kid."

She shrugged, not really able to defend me. "There's a good chance they won't know who you were. You were using Stealth the whole time, right?"

"I was." I stared at her. "How'd you know?"

"There was a weird, I don't know… glitchy? Static? Some kind of visual thing affecting the quality of what we were seeing on our end, every time you were being sneaky. It wasn't really all that bad, and it didn't give us headaches or anything, but it was there."

"Huh… some kind of interaction of Stealth with my body, do you think? I mean, it makes sense that it affects my eyes, cause it hides those as well."

"Probably. More importantly, if no one saw your face, then they might not connect us to the whole mess. Not immediately. It helps that the kind of shenanigans you can pull off now aren't what we expected was possible when we made the cybernetics. I don't think so, at least. If my father suspected all these abilities, he didn't share the details with me or put them down in his notes."

"That's… good? I think?" I glanced down at my mangled arms. "I'm not sure how to feel about being even weirder than you thought someone using the cybernetics would be."

"Yeah, well, we can take it as a win for now."

"True."

We both fell silent, until Amelia snorted unhappily and snuggled into me again. "We'll worry about all of this once we're out of bed. For now, arms around me, mister. It's comfort snuggle time."

I chuckled, letting go of the worries for the moment. "Whatever you want, love. Whatever you want."

"I want a lot of things, Adrian." Her voice was smugness itself. "You shouldn't make promises you can't keep."