Spaceships and Magic, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

[ Yr'Arl has been defeated! ]

[ 10,000 XP has been gained! ] 

While I had gained some experience from the fight, it hadn't been anywhere close to enough to actually level me up again, and by taking a cursory glance at the system readout that let me know how much my abilities were gaining their own levels of experience so that I could use them by themselves, without the assistance of BB, I could tell that those had barely gone up either. 

Whether it was because the fight I had been in was just a friendly spar, or if it had something to do with the debuffs that were being used against me by the system because of the two days I had spent unconscious I didn't know. 

Either way, those debuffs were actually still present. The fight with Yr'Arl had only taken around a half hour to get done, which meant I was only halfway to my manna practice limit. If I wanted to get rid of the debuffs once and for all then I was going to have to find someone else to fight against before the day ran out. 

Luckily, I had the perfect person in mind. Akash. I was sure that he wouldn't mind going toe to toe with me, he'd never give up on the opportunity to beat down a human after all. 

"So, what do you wanna do now?" I asked Yr'Arl as the two of us walked toward the exit of the training room. 

"Before you served us the poison that you refer to as food, Akash had said that he wanted to visit the on-sight bar to relax, it had been my intent to join him," Yr'Arl said. 

That was a lucky coincidence considering Akash was exactly the person that I wanted to talk to. Well, talk to and then beat into the ground repeatedly, anyway. 

<It's not like your fight with Akash in the battle royale could exactly be called 'beating him into the ground',> BB said as he emerged from the depths of our synchro mode. <I'm not sure what makes you think you'll be able to do that this time around.>

Will BB was right, the fight with Akash hadn't exactly gone to plan in the Battle Royale, I had gained a lot of experience since that showdown and even Yr'Arl had said that I had improved in leaps and bounds. Considering the state that we had found Akash in, I was certain that he couldn't have had anywhere near as much time to prepare as I had. 

"Do you think he would mind if I joined the two of you?" I asked. 

Yr'Arl pondered for a moment before replying, "I don't believe he would be too against the idea." 

xXx

The on-site bar had a completely different vibe than the bar that we had confronted Rin in the main city. While that had been a dark and dingy affair, clearly the Prespian City equivalent of a dive bar, this looked far more like some kind of gentleman's club. 

The floor was covered in a deep royal blue carpet with golden swirls lined through it. The chairs looked comfortable and weren't just your run of the mill bar stools. Instead, they looked as if they could actually morph to the body type of whatever alien was sitting down in them, which was probably a very basic bit of magical matter manipulation, but to me, any form of matter manipulation was still impressive. 

The bar itself seemed well stocked, and working behind it was yet another type of alien that I had never seen before. They were about half the height of an average human, but made up for that lack of height by being able to flit around thanks to four insectoid wings jutting out of their back. In the brief moments that they weren't flitting from customer to customer I could see that their face was also vaguely insectoid, covered in a green chitinous exoskeleton. 

Akash was sitting in the corner of the room, a glass of half-empty liquid in front of him. His head, or what passed for a head for an Eldrani, was hung low as he listened to the Lyrin that sat next to him. 

But it wasn't just any Lyrin, it was Fal, with no Pax to be seen. Surely, now that the two had been reunited, they should have been able to bond together once again in their romantic hive mind. If the heaving sobs from Fal were anything to go by, clearly that was no longer an option for some reason. 

Yr'Arl and I shared a wordless glance and made our way over to last of the Eldrani and the sobbing Lyrin. 

"Hey you two, is everything okay?" I asked as we sat down in two of the free chairs. 

Fal looked up at the two of us, but couldn't bring herself to say anything as she devolved into another bout of wordless sobs. 

I looked over to Akash, hoping that he would explain the situation. 

"Pax is unable to reforge a bond with Fal," he said, his breath a solemn sigh of wind rustling through the leaves of a tree in Autumn. "During our time held captive, Lara experimented on him. Experimented on his brain. She removed the part of his neural makeup that allows him to make telepathic connections with others of his species."

My stomach turned and I fought to keep the bile out of my mouth. I had known that Lara was doing some messed up experiments wherever her base was, but I hadn't expected something like this. Experimenting on Null Space Invaders and creatures like spiders and beetles felt nowhere near as bad as experimenting on a sentient life form like a Lyrin. 

"She took him from me," Fal sniffled, "I got him back, I thought everything was going to be okay… but now it never ever will." 

I didn't know what to say, because she was right. It was never going to be okay, not for her and not for Pax. No matter what they did, the doctors wouldn't be able to heal something that literally wasn't there anymore. 

This just steeled my resolve even further. We were going to take out Lara if it was the last thing I did in this world.