Theresa
The sunrise over St. Freya was spectacular. It painted the land in soft hues of bruised purple and burning orange, the kind of morning that poets wrote about and photographers woke up early to capture.
Sadly, Theresa did not have the time or energy to enjoy such a sight. She was currently occupied with the blinking red notifications flooding the holographic screen, which hovered three inches from her nose.
[INBOX: UNREAD MESSAGES (47)From: Oceania Branch Command Subject: URGENT: ILLEGAL ACQUISITION OF ASSET W-G Priority: HIGH]
[From: Oceania Logistics Division Subject: RE: Return our Valkyrie immediately Priority: HIGH]
[From: Schicksal HR (Automated) Subject: Personnel File Update: Wendy Garrett (Status: DISPUTED)]
Theresa sighed, a sound that seemed too heavy for her small frame. She rubbed her temples, trying to massage away a headache that had started the moment they landed back at St. Freya and hadn't stopped since.
Her legs, too short to reach the floor from her oversized chair, swung back and forth in a nervous, rhythmic tempo.
"They are furious, Himeko," Theresa mumbled, scrolling through a particularly venomous email from the Oceania Branch Director. "They're accusing us of poaching an S-Rank asset—not that they're wrong… They're threatening to file a formal grievance with the Overseer."
"Let them cry, I don't care." Himeko Murata replied from the window.
The Major was leaning against the sill, bathed in the morning light, nursing a mug of black coffee like it was the only thing tethering her soul to the mortal plane.
She looked surprisingly smug for someone who was technically the architect of an inter-branch diplomatic crisis.
"They had their chance," Himeko said, taking a sip. "They lost her. They tried to turn a girl into a battery, failed, and then lost the Gem. They can't accept that it was Wendy's decision to come here herself."
Theresa tapped a file on her screen, bringing up Wendy's current—and controversial—profile.
[ST. FREYA FACULTY REGISTRYName: Wendy Garrett Role: Specialist Instructor (Teaching Assistant) Department: Applied Physics & Combat Theory Supervisor: Maj. Himeko Murata]
"The 'Teaching Assistant' loophole," Theresa muttered, reading the designation. "I still can't believe you got this past the system. Using the Rehabilitation Act to hire a walking WMD as a member of the faculty? It's absurd."
"It's legal," Himeko corrected with a grin, obviously proud of her actions. "Clause 4, Section C. Any asset deemed 'psychologically compromised' can be placed under direct supervision for rehabilitation work. If Oceania wants her back, they have to file a transfer request through HR. And with the current backlog, that takes three months."
"It's a house of cards," Theresa warned. She closed the angry emails from Oceania and opened a different window—the communication log with Schicksal Headquarters.
It was empty.
That was what terrified her.
"Oceania is practically having a meltdown," Theresa said softly, staring at the blank log. "Logistics is screaming. Even the budget committee sent a query about her salary. But Headquarters? Nothing."
Theresa spun her chair around to face Himeko.
"Grandfather... he hasn't said a word. No cease-and-desist. No override codes. No Amber calling me to politely threaten my funding."
Himeko frowned slightly, the smugness fading. "You think he's planning something?"
"I think he's watching," Theresa admitted, her grip tightening on the armrest. "Otto doesn't ignore people like Wendy. If he's letting us keep the Fourth Herrscher as a glorified teacher's aide, it's because he wants to see what happens. He's curious about her... or maybe he's curious about him."
She didn't need to say the name. Himeko already knew who she was referring to.
"Well, let him watch," Himeko said, turning back to the window to watch the sun fully crest the horizon. "As long as he stays in his tower and leaves us alone, I don't care. Wendy is safe. The kids are safe. That's all that matters."
"I suppose," Theresa sighed, turning back to her screens. "But it feels like the calm before the storm. Usually, by this time, Kiana has broken something or gotten into a fight with someone."
"Kiana is asleep," Himeko waved a hand dismissively. "I checked the dorm sensors an hour ago. For once, everything is peaceful. Just accept the win, Boss."
Theresa closed her eyes, letting herself enjoy the rare quiet. The hum of the servers was soothing. The warmth of the office was cozy.
"You're right," Theresa murmured. "Maybe things are finally settling do—"
As if the universe had been waiting for that exact sentence to punish her optimism, the red light on her desk phone began to flash.
BZZZT.
The intercom crackled to life, cutting through the peaceful atmosphere.
"Principal! We have a Situation Red in the H-P dorms!"
The security officer's voice was distorted by static and panic, screaming over the speaker.
Theresa sat bolt upright, the exhaustion vanishing instantly as adrenaline flooded her system. Himeko spun around, her coffee forgotten on the windowsill.
"Sensors are picking up an unauthorized Honkai discharge! Structure damage reported on the third floor!"
"Is it an attack? Anti-Entropy?" Theresa barked, slamming her hand on the desk.
"Negative! No external breach detected! The energy signature matches—"
THUD. THUD. THUD.
The report was cut off by a sound much closer than the intercom.
It was the sound of heavy, frantic footsteps pounding down the corridor outside the office. It sounded like a stampede of one.
Himeko grabbed her communicator, her expression shifting from relaxed to combat-ready in a split second. "That sounds like trouble."
"That sounds like my niece," Theresa corrected, her eyes narrowing as the footsteps grew louder.
CRASH.
The heavy oak doors of the Principal's Office flew open as a bare foot slammed into the center of them. The lock shattered, and the doors bounced off the walls with a deafening bang that shook the picture frames.
Theresa jumped up on her chair, her face flushing red, ready to scream.
"Kiana Kaslana! You can't just kick down my—"
The words died in her throat.
Theresa froze. Himeko froze.
"Oh god dammit," Himeko whispered.
The moment the dust from the shattered door settled, the atmosphere in the office shifted from annoyance to emergency.
Himeko didn't say anything else as she immediately rushed to the girls.
Theresa vaulted over her desk, landing with a heavy thud and rushing to join them. "Kiana! What happened?!"
"I don't know!" Kiana gasped, stumbling forward. She was barely holding Wendy upright, her knuckles white as she gripped the wool blanket wrapped around the smaller girl. "Theresa, please, I don't know what to do!"
The group was a catastrophe. Mei stood slightly behind them, shaking violently. She held her arms out stiffly, fingers splayed wide like claws.
A thick arc of violet electricity snapped from her thumb to the metal doorframe, scorching the paint with a loud hiss.
"Don't touch me!" Mei cried out as Theresa reached for her. Tears were streaming down her face, evaporating into steam before they reached her chin.
'What's going on? Why are they like this?'
Theresa skidded to a halt inches from Mei, feeling the static raise the hair on her arms. She pivoted instantly to Kiana.
"Talk to me, Kiana," Theresa commanded, grabbing Kiana's shoulder to steady her. "What triggered this? Was it an attack?"
"No," Kiana choked out, shifting her weight as Wendy sagged against her. "It was a bird. A stupid bird landed on Mei's balcony. She tried to shoo it away, and she vaporized the entire wall. She said it was too loud."
'She vaporized a wall because a bird was too loud?'
"Sensory overload?" Theresa whispered, the diagnosis clicking into place instantly. She looked at Mei's dilated pupils, the way she flinched at the sound of Kiana's voice.
'Oh no. Please don't let it be what I think it is…'
"And Wendy?" Himeko asked, dropping to one knee to check the girl in Kiana's arms.
"She's freezing for some reason. But it's warm in the dorms, I don't know why she's cold." Kiana said.
Himeko reached out, brushing the back of her hand against Wendy's cheek. She hissed in pain and recoiled immediately, shaking her hand.
"That's cold!" Himeko hissed, looking up at Theresa with wide, alarmed eyes. "It burned me. Her body is sucking the heat right out of the air. She's in critical hypothermia."
"Unnatural body temperature? Could it be the gem?" Theresa theorized. "Maybe it's using her body heat as fuel for the convection currents. She's freezing herself from the inside out."
Wendy's eyes fluttered open, glassy and unfocused. Her teeth clattered together with a sound like rattling dice. "H-Himeko... c-cold..."
"I've got you, kid. Stay with me," Himeko said, grabbing the blanket where it was thickest to avoid skin contact. She scooped Wendy up into her arms effortlessly. "Theresa, we need the lab. Now."
"Move!" Theresa shouted, slamming her palm onto the biometric scanner on her desk.
The bookshelf on the far wall clicked and slid open, revealing the sterile white gleam of the private medical bay.
"Himeko, put Wendy in the hyper-thermal unit," Theresa ordered, rushing toward the open passage. "Radiant heat only! If you use direct contact pads, you'll shock her heart into cardiac arrest. Crank it to forty degrees!"
"On it!" Himeko didn't hesitate. She rushed past the desk, carrying the shivering girl into the light of the lab.
Theresa turned back to Mei. The Raider of Squad V was backing away, staring at the scorch mark on the doorframe with terrified eyes. Another spark popped off her elbow, singing the sleeve of her coat.
"Mei," Theresa said, softening her voice but keeping the urgency. "I need you to follow Himeko. We have suppressors there. You need to stand on it."
"I might blow up the servers," Mei rejected, shaking her head.
"You won't blow up anything," Theresa promised, stepping closer despite the arcing electricity. "But you need to ground that energy before you melt your own nervous system. Walk to the mat. Do not touch anything metal on the way."
Kiana stepped up beside Mei, hovering just out of range of the sparks. "I'm right here, Mei. Don't worry."
Mei nodded jerkily, squeezing her eyes shut. She shuffled forward, a walking storm of uncontrolled voltage, following Himeko into the lab.
Theresa watched them go, her heart hammering against her ribs. Taking a deep breath, sprinted after them, the heavy steel doors of the lab sealing shut behind her.
/ — /
"Stabilizing," Theresa muttered, her fingers flying across a holographic keyboard. "Grounding mat is active. Siphoning excess voltage now."
In the corner of the room, Mei stood on a heavy, rubberized platform. The terrifying arcs of violet lightning that had been snapping off her skin were now being drawn downward, flowing like liquid into the conductive mesh beneath her feet.
Mei wasn't moving. She stood with her eyes squeezed shut, her hands clenched into fists, breathing in shallow, ragged gasps.
"Her heart rate is 140," Theresa noted, glancing at the biometrics. "Adrenaline levels are through the roof."
"Wendy is stabilizing, too," Himeko called out from the other side of the room.
The Major was standing next to a hyper-thermal containment unit—a glass tube filled with radiant orange light. Inside, Wendy sat on the bench, wrapped in thermal blankets. The blue tint was slowly fading from her lips, though she was still shivering violently.
"Temperature is climbing back up to thirty-five degrees," Himeko reported, reading the display. "She's thawing out, but she's exhausted."
Kiana stood in the middle of the room, looking between the two stations like a lost child. She wanted to run to Mei, she wanted to check on Wendy, but she was terrified that touching either of them would make it worse.
"Auntie," Kiana said, her voice trembling slightly. "What is happening to them? They were fine yesterday. Mei was cooking dinner. Wendy was... well, she was pretty quiet, but she wasn't freezing to death."
"They weren't fine. We just didn't see it." Theresa said, swiping a hand through the air to expand the main holographic display.
"Their bodies are panicking right now." Theresa pulled up Mei's current biometric chart. It was a mess of erratic red spikes.
"We knew Kenji was acting as a sponge for her excess energy," Theresa explained, overlaying the data with an older chart from a month ago. "But we underestimated how much her biology had come to rely on that service. Look at this."
She pointed to the baseline neural activity.
"For a long time, Mei's body didn't have to regulate her Core. It got lazy. It stopped building up natural resistance because Kenji was doing all the heavy lifting for her. Her nervous system acclimated to having an external stabilizer."
"Now that he's gone, the stabilizer is missing. But her body doesn't know that. It's trying to function as if the safety is still on. It's overcompensating. It's frantically trying to adapt to a high-voltage environment without any insulation."
"So it's… uhh…" Kiana struggled for the word.
"It's similar to withdrawal," Theresa said bluntly. "Think of a heavy smoker who suddenly quits. The body screams. It shakes. It malfunctions because it has chemically adapted to the nicotine. Mei's 'dimmer switch' is broken. Her senses are dialed up to maximum because she expects Kenji to dampen the input. When he doesn't... a bird chirping sounds like something's grating on her brain."
Kiana took a moment to swallow her words, making sure she understood correctly.
"Okay… I get Mei," Kiana said, gesturing to the glass tube where Wendy was huddled. "They've known each other for a long time... But what about Wendy? She only knew Kenji for a few days during the rescue. Why this happening to her?"
Theresa hesitated. She pulled up a separate window, zooming in on the data from the day Wendy awakened as the Fourth Herrscher.
"I wasn't sure at first," Theresa admitted, tapping her chin. "But look at the timestamp of her awakening. Who was the closest person to her when the Gem activated?"
"Kenji," Kiana whispered.
"Precisely," Theresa said. "Wendy's awakening was unstable. Kenji was there at moment zero. He absorbed the initial shockwave of her power. Her body imprinted on his energy signature immediately."
Theresa looked at the shivering girl in the glass tube with a mixture of pity and scientific fascination.
"Wendy never learned to control the Gem on her own. Her 'normal' state—the only state she knows as a Herrscher—is a state where Kenji is stabilizing her. Now that he's gone..."
Wendy's hand instinctively went to her chest.
"Her body thinks something is wrong," Himeko finished, crossing her arms.
"Without regulation, her body is doing all sorts of things to 'fix itself.' This results in the unnatural body temperature." Theresa explained, pointing to the green swirls on the chart.
Kiana stared at the screens—the red warning lights, the erratic spikes, the biological chaos.
"So… what you're telling me is that they are like, bonded to him?" Kiana's voice was barely a whisper.
"Biologically dependent is the word I would use. But yes," Theresa said, turning off the display and looking at her niece with tired eyes.
"They are in chemical withdrawal. And Kenji's passive absorption isn't working ever since the rescue, so we can't rely on that either…"
"…"
"…"
"So, how do we fix it?"
Kiana's question hung in the sterile air of the lab. She looked from the holographic charts to Theresa, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.
"You know what's wrong. So can't you just... give them something? Give them a shot. Put them back to normal."
Theresa sighed, swiping the biometric displays away. She walked over to a secure medical cabinet on the far wall and punched in a code. The heavy steel lock clicked open with a hiss.
"It's not that simple, Kiana," Theresa said, reaching inside. "If this were a bacteria or a virus, I could just flush it out. But this is their own biology turning against them. I can't cure their own nervous systems."
She turned back to the group, carrying a small metal tray. On it lay two items.
The first was a pair of heavy, black metal bracelets. They looked like shackles, lined with glowing blue circuitry and thick insulation padding.
The second was a violently orange autoinjector filled with a thick, viscous fluid.
"These are band-aids," Theresa said, setting the tray down on the examination table. "Not cures."
She picked up the bracelets and walked over to Mei, who was still standing on the grounding mat, looking exhausted and terrified.
"Mei, give me your wrists."
Mei hesitated, flinching as another spark popped off her thumb. "Theresa, I don't want to break them."
"You won't," Theresa assured her. "These are Gen-3 Inhibitor Cuffs. They won't stop the energy from being produced, but they will siphon it off before it can arc out and blow up a wall."
Mei slowly extended her trembling hands. Theresa clamped the cuffs around her wrists. There was a sharp click, followed by a low hum.
The violet sparks vanished instantly. Mei let out a long, shuddering breath, her shoulders sagging as the constant buzzing sensation under her skin finally dulled.
"Better?" Theresa asked gently.
"A little…" Mei whispered, rubbing the metal bands. "It feels a bit heavy, though."
Theresa nodded, then turned to Himeko and handed her the orange injector.
"For Wendy," Theresa instructed. "Thermal-regulatory nanobots. It's a cocktail I developed for Sie— S-some people fighting in sub-zero environments. It will force her body to retain heat, artificially constricting the blood vessels near the skin to prevent the Gem from siphoning it all away."
Himeko took the device and walked over to the thermal unit. Wendy was sitting up now, looking pale but conscious. She winced as Himeko pressed the injector against her neck, hissing as the fluid entered her system.
"That should stop the freezing," Theresa said, crossing her arms. "For about six hours. Then you'll need another dose."
Kiana watched the process, relief washing over her. "Okay. So they wear the cuffs, they take the meds, and they're fine. Right?"
"Nope,"
The relief vanished. Kiana blinked. "What? You just said—"
"These are band-aids," Theresa interrupted, her expression hardening. "I can stop Mei from blowing up the dorms, and I can keep Wendy from freezing to death. But I am not going to stop the withdrawal."
"Why not?" Kiana demanded, stepping forward. "If you have stronger stuff, give it to them! Knock them out if you have to! Why make them suffer?"
"Because they need to adapt," Theresa countered, her voice ringing with authority.
She gestured to Mei, who was staring at her cuffs, and Wendy, who was rubbing her neck.
"Their bodies got lazy, Kiana. They relied on Kenji to do the work for them. If I completely numb them, their bodies will never learn to regulate on their own. They'll be dependent forever."
Theresa looked at the three girls, her gaze softening just a fraction.
"This pain? The sensory overload? The cold? It's their bodies realizing they are unprepared. The only way to build up a tolerance, the only way to rebuild the 'callus' that Kenji provided, is to endure it."
"We have to tough it out," Mei said softly, understanding dawning in her eyes. She looked at the heavy cuffs on her wrists.
"Exactly," Theresa nodded. "I will give you enough help to keep you alive and safe. But I'm not going to take the burden away completely. You need to feel the weight of your own power, or you'll never control it again."
Kiana looked at Mei, who looked tired but determined. She looked at Wendy, who was nodding slowly, pulling the blanket tighter around her.
"We just... wait it out," Kiana murmured.
"We endure," Himeko corrected, placing a hand on Kiana's shoulder. "That's what Valkyries do."
Theresa picked up her datapad again, the doctor replacing the mentor.
"Now, get them back to the dorms. Wendy, you are strictly confined to quarters until your core temp stabilizes. Mei, keep the cuffs on 24/7. And Kiana..."
Theresa looked at her niece, seeing the dark circles under her eyes.
"Try to get some sleep. You can't help them carry the weight if you collapse first."
Kiana nodded, though she knew sleep wasn't an option. Not with the nightmares waiting.
"Let's go home," Kiana said, turning to her broken squad. "I'll make breakfast. Or... I'll try."
Mei managed a weak, exhausted smile. "Just... don't burn the kitchen down, Kiana. One explosion a day is enough."
"Oh, so now you can joke around!"