"How are you feeling?"
With the immediate course of action now more or less settled, I finally could turn my attention back to where it belonged.
"Ever since you... did something, it's as if that suffocating feeling was nothing but a dream..."
Still shaken by the experience, Fay continued to cuddle up to my chest, seeking warmth to repel the fright over what just happened.
Her low mood didn't last long, though. Before I myself could get enough of cuddling her, Fay's thoughts already swirled, latching onto a different detail of the discussion that happened just before.
A detail she could easily feel herself through our bond...
And a detail that I found affecting Fay in a strangely intense way.
"More importantly," Fay pulled her face away from my chest and raised her eyes to lock stares with me. "You are just one step away from turning supreme, huh?"
The usual, dim blue of Fay's eyes... was a bit more intense than I remembered it.
"It's affecting you too, isn't it?"
From what I could tell, my growth... in one way or the other, started to propagate on Fay too. And while it was a great thing if she could usher in the benefits of my system...
Was it an intentional service that I've only now just unlocked? An aspect of my mysterious gift that refused to elaborate on any of the points I held great interest in?
Or was it a bug, something that wasn't supposed to happen, a result of the particular set of circumstances that was more of a curse than a boon?
"Huh? What? No, you dummy!" Fay at first asked, taken aback by my suggestion, even though she could clearly feel it brewing in my soul. "I mean..." This time, the girl hesitated a little, twisting her neck to steal a quick glance at Makary, currently busy covering the entire area with a concentrated fire of non-stop orders.
"I still can't wrap my head around your growth. But regardless of its origin, your growth will... synchronize...?
Fay pulled her eyebrows together, putting on an adorable look of intense focus as she jogged her memory in search of the right words for what she wanted to say.
Bit by bit, Fay's face gradually deteriorated from just focus into anxiety and annoyance.
Snap.
Reaching her mental limits, Fay shot her eyes up with a dissatisfied pout on her lips. She then simply... fell forward, crashing face-first into my chest and hiding her face from my prying eyes.
"You are my mate," Fay muttered right into my breast, her warm breath caressing my skin and sending tingles up my spine. And when she started to rub her forehead left and right... "So I'm growing with you...?"
Despite her best attempts at explaining what felt obvious to her, Fay couldn't dress her thoughts into words that would make it easy for me to understand.
"Maglev two, I'm marking the zone for you to clear. Maglev one will keep the graphing on his own."
Before he even finished speaking, Makary's hands already shot into the holographs rising up from the surface projector of the holodesk. Bit by bit, the man's fingers drew out several lines that divided up all of the area currently represented on the display into two parts.
The majority of the retreating human army found itself in the much smaller zone in the shape of a cone, starting at where the battle just took place and spreading out towards the edge of the forest.
With the commanding truck's battle processors kicking in, the demarcation line between the two zones flared up for a second... Only for all the red dots beyond the said border to flash up and change their color to black.
"Targets acquired," the voice of the Maglev's pilot filled the truck's cabin once again. "Will do, boss."
The jump from strict military lingo to a sentence that had no regulatory right to appear on the battle comms was enough to make Makary's face twitch in slight displeasure.
"Be on your way, then," he threw back into the comm before closing the channel and finally turning his head to properly face Madam.
"It won't be necessary for you or any of your men to put themselves at risk," he announced, before pointing out at the holodesk. "Just wait for a second and you will see."
For a moment, nothing really happened. No noise of distant explosion reached our ears, and no sudden shockwave of said explosion shook the truck.
And then...
The black dots started to appear one after the other, at a pace that made Madam raise her eyebrows.
She saw just what firearms were capable of in a pitched battle when enemies all conveniently grouped together to make themselves an easier target for the gunners.
But now?
Whatever Makary did led to all those who were unlucky enough when picking the direction to run off from the battle to... Whatever Makary did, caused all those people who were running in every possible direction... to die one by one, without as much of a single noise appearing within the forest.
"Now then," Makary muttered under his nose before taking a step back away from the holodesk when only about half of the black dots remained on the display.
In his eyes, the task was done, even if roughly half of the people marked for death were still alive and kicking. After all, in this world, hardly anything could challenge Maglev's supremacy in the sky. And without a worthy opponent within its element, the magnetic gunship was free to rain terror and death from above unhindered.
"We will need to make a list of people allowed to..."
As if not enough has happened in the last few hours, right as we were about to close the chapter of the battle and move on to the aftercare and actually press our advantage... something just had to go fucking wrong.
"Boss!"
One of Makary's soldiers jumped right through the open doors of the commanding's truck, invading the sacred space of the field headquarters without any care for the hierarchy and the chain of command.
"There's trouble back at the garrison!"