The Simulacrum

~Chapter 138~ Part 3

"Come on! End it already!" Penny yelled from the side, clad in the Unicorn Knight armour. "It's been more than an hour!"

I glanced over at her, and then back at the guy currently wielding two of those magic hand-blade things and heaving like a dog, still squaring up against me even though he looked like he just ran a marathon. To be fair, I wasn't exactly minty fresh either, but at least I paced myself a little better, and even if I didn't, I was too stubborn to admit it at this point.

"Tell Mister 'I can do this all night' over there," I said, gesturing at him with one of my nicked and beaten training swords, which he took as an invitation to lunge at me again.

We exchanged a couple of blows, mostly in the parry-counter-parry-dodge format, and it caused my sister to stomp her feet at the side.

"Argh! At this rate, I'll never get my revenge!"

"Your attempt to take revenge, you mean," Zihao responded at her side, earning himself a glare.

"Shut up! As soon as Brother is done, I'm sooo going to beat you up!"

"You can try!" he responded with a provocative smirk, and that was all I caught before Josh leapt high into the air and dive-bombed me again.

I stopped his momentum and we locked blades for a while. It was a pretty unrealistic thing. The whole 'blade-lock', I mean. Sure, it was also pretty cinematic, as it put our faces close to each other, meaning it was the perfect opportunity to exchange a few dramatic quips and whatnot, but as far as practicality was concerned, it was the worst.

That said, I had no reason to push myself at this point, as I was getting pretty exhausted by the whole affair. This duel was technically for the sake of Josh, so I drew it out a bit, not only so that he could get more practice, but also to throw a wrench into the whole 'battle against the mentor' trope's gears. Or so I hoped, but honestly, it was such a vague trope that no matter who won or lost, or how, it would still somehow apply.

"Hey?" Josh suddenly whispered, his breath belaboured and weak. Apparently, his quick-fire healing hymn couldn't fully restore his stamina after all. Or maybe it tired him out in another way. Whatever the case might've been, he tilted his head to the side, and hesitantly asked, "Draw?"

I gave him a flat look, and then shifted my weight, then the angle of my blades, and with just those small changes, Josh's magic blades began to slide down the flats of my training swords, creating a cascade of sparks in the process. This caused him to lose his balance for a moment, which I used to slip by him, and before he could turn around, I tapped the back of his neck with the weapon in my left hand.

"Nah, it's not," I told him, I flourished my armaments. "Next round?"

Josh turned his head to face me, and a beat later, he dispelled his magic blades and his outfit shifted back into his usual school uniform. His forehead was drenched in sweat, and while he tried to hide it, I could see the dissatisfaction in his eyes.

"In the end, I couldn't get you to use that flash-step of yours."

"Oh, cry me a river," I said as I also undid my Leoformer, and returned to my casual clothes. "Don't be a sore loser."

"I'm not. I'm just annoyed that I couldn't get you to fight me seriously."

I awarded my friend an extra flat stare.

"Dude." I pointedly wiped my own forehead and showed off the sweat on my palm. "Do I look like I was playing around with you?"

"Ew!" Angie exclaimed on my left, and I just realized that she quietly snuck up next to us while we were talking. Then, she glanced at her boyfriend, and let out another, "Ew! You're even more sweaty!"

"Of course I am! I was doing my best here!" the guy sulked, and she moved behind him and started pushing him out of the sparring ring.

"Yes, and you were really cool, but it doesn't change that you're drenched! Come on, the next bus is coming in ten minutes, so hurry up!"

"But…" he tried to object, but she had none of it.

"No buts, mister! I still have homework left to do, so we should go home and take a bath ASAP!"

I watched as the two of them left the ring, and was soon approached by Judy.

"Good work, Chief. Here, have a cookie."

"It's a candy bar," I said as I stared and the bright yellow package.

"Don't sweat the small details."

Honestly, after that workout, I did feel a little peckish, so I accepted it without further ado. However, before I could open it, we were shooed off the training field by my knightly sister and her equally eager opponent. It was only once we were standing on the sidelines that I noticed the conspicuous absence of my other sister.

"Where's Snowy?"

"She left a while ago," Judy told me as she led me to the lounge area, watching as I was trying my best to open the stubborn packaging. "She said she had something important to do."

It was only at this point that I realized that I could've just Far Glanced at her, but at this point, there was no point anymore.

"Right. She did say she wanted to have one last talk with the old man."

In the meantime, we reached the counter, where I was welcomed by Karukk, for a change.

"Good show. Impressive boss."

He flashed a grin at us and handed over a soda bottle without even having to ask.

"It was fun to watch. I much prefer you doing this than real combat," my dear assistant commented on the side, her phone already in her hand and her fingers dancing on the screen with the wild abandon of a drunken ballerina. "I'll have to re-evaluate Joshua's ranking."

"Are you still doing that power-ranking thing?" She didn't answer right away, too focused on the screen, so I opened the bottle and took a swig first. "What's even the point?"

"Don't be dense, Chief." She accentuated that by pinching my cheek, without even looking up from her phone. I'm not going to lie, that was a little impressive. "Considering the genre, power-scaling comparisons are not only natural, they are inevitable."

"I don't see what's so inevitable about them, but have it your way," I said and finally managed to tear the packaging of the candy bar and bite into it. It was sickeningly sweet, but I needed the sugar, so I didn't mind.

"Staying on topic, from a range of one to ten, how would you rate Joshua's performance?"

"Eight," I answered off the cuff, then alternated between taking bites from the snack bar and drinking from the soda bottle while I explained, "He's less reliant on raw power than he used to be, but he's still too eager to get into close quarters combat without a good way to get out of it when necessary."

"Angeline told me they've been practicing using his Celestial abilities in a way that doesn't resonate with her powers, so you've most likely seen the results of that."

"Probably. In any case, he's good. Better than the Praetorian Guards, at the very least, though it's admittedly a low bar to clear."

"Chief. Those people are trained professional soldiers." When I only gave her a 'so what' kind of look, she shook her head. "Your standards are too high. No wonder Joshua is frustrated."

"Hey, don't peg that one me."

Ignoring my protests, Judy tapped her phone a few more times and finally put it away with a twinkle in her eyes that immediately put me on guard.

"The Feilong clan is already in the process of organizing another auction."

That wasn't a question, but a statement, and I cautiously nodded.

"Yes. The final touches of the secret project still need some extra funds and rare materials for the finishing touches. The last time I showed my face in the Federation's meeting room, I asked them to hurry it up and get it together by the weekend. Why?"

"Since we're having another one of those, I think it's only fitting that we should hold another tournament."

"… Dormouse? Are you messing with me right now?"

She shook her head and looked me in the eye.

"I know that you have an adverse reaction to tournament arcs, but holding one is necessary to finalize the power rankings," she insisted with an expression that said she was extremely serious. "Penelope has been training with Ms. Yamako for a while now, which should affect her performance, the rest of the Ordo Draconis also changed their combat style to adapt to their new circumstances, and Joshua is a rapidly evolving wild card. A tournament is the simplest and easiest way to collect all the necessary data on them to update the rankings."

I really, really wasn't in the mood for this, but she looked especially adamant, so I leaned towards a compromise.

"Let's say I let you organize it in my name," I started, but before I could get to the actual point, my girlfriend gave me a thumbs up.

"Deal."

"… I didn't even—"

She put a finger on my lips to seal them, as if afraid that I would ruin something, and then she took up her phone again.

"I'll tell Elly the news, and we'll get back to you later." With that, she rose to her tip-toes to give me a peck on the lips, and then immediately turned around to dial my other girlfriend.

…

Seriously, why was she so into power rankings like that? It was a mystery for the ages.

Anyhow, Karukk was grinning at me, so I handed the empty bottle and wrapper over to him to keep him busy. Seeing that Judy was occupied by the phone call, I decided not to bother her and I beelined towards the stairs leading to the second floor instead.

On the way there, I once again passed by the training area, where Penny and Zihao were still going at each other. This time, my sister had the clear upper hand, due to the higher specs of her armour, but the Draconian guy held his own admirably. I glanced at the cheering Squires and other assorted onlookers, and with a shake of my head, I continued on my way downstairs.

Honestly speaking, I was pretty tired. A full day at school, an extracurricular diplomacy class, and two duels would've exhausted anyone, even if the second one wasn't an endurance match. I really, really wanted to just go home and rest for a while, but I promised that I would check out the progress on the homunculus project today, so I figured I'd quickly get it out of my system, pick up Judy, and then spend the evening watching a bad movie together, or something.

First thing first though, I stepped into the main workshop, and I was immediately welcomed by Fred's… I wanted to say 'grating cackle', but I've been so used to it at this point, I no longer found it annoying. Humans were truly adaptable creatures, weren't they?

Philosophising aside, our head of the mad science department greeted me with an ear-to-ear grin, and he was closely followed by Peabody and Sahi, all wearing matching white lab coats.

"Kihihi! Good evening, boss! I've heard you had some trouble with the kid up there?"

"Trouble is an overstatement," I answered, and the three of them chuckled in unison. Thankfully, Sahi didn't have her own version of the weirdly consistent cackle. But then again, she had her own thing going on.

"So, like, I totally wanted to check out your duel, but I was, like, totally busy? Did you win?"

"Yes."

"Hah!" She exclaimed and hit Peabody on the back. "You see? Like, if we actually made a bet, I would've totally won!"

"O-ho-ho… Young lady. I'm fairly sure we all agreed that Leonard would be victorious."

"Yes, but I totally called it first," she insisted with a pout. "And, it's like, totally irrelevant anyway, right?"

"We can agree on that," I cut in and walked off.

The three of them followed after me, completely ignoring my mood. Just what was so interesting about by sparring match with Josh? I mean, I had a feeling it had some narrative strings attached to it, but from these guys' perspective, there was nothing special going on. It wasn't the first time I've trained with him, and probably wasn't the last either, so why was such a buzz made about it?

Ignoring my misgivings, we reached the back of the workshop, and the huge apparatus I funnelled much of my time, money, and effort into over the past couple of weeks.

It was a setup right out of a retro-futuristic sci-fi movie, with a whole lot of blocky heavy machinery beeping and booping and flashing around me. Embedded in the middle of all of that was a huge glass cylinder filled with a light green artificial amniotic fluid. The tube was lit from the top and the bottom so that its contents could be clearly seen.

In the middle, there was a small body. The size of a prepubescent child, the nascent homunculus was naked and hairless, curled up in a fetal position, their arms and legs positioned to hide their chest and crotch. Not that it mattered, as at this stage of the development, they were still androgynous, with the 'sculpting' of the final appearance only taking place not long before the incubation was over.

Looking at it, I couldn't help but be impressed. Just a few days ago, the homunculus in the tube was only half its current size, and if we looked back two weeks, it was just a literal fetus, just without a placenta. Speaking of which, apparently homunculi had no belly buttons, because they had no umbilical cords either, and Sahi even demonstrated this by showing off her flat stomach. That made me wonder; did the class rep also lack one? And would asking her about it constitute as sexual harassment?

"The specimen's development is proceeding as predicted," Fred told me, tapping on the glass.

"We were a little worried about the bone density," Peabody chimed in with a big grin, "But recent readings show that everything is well within the acceptable parameters."

"Kihihi. We might just break the record of creating a fully-fledged homunculus at this rate!"

"It's not fully fledged though," the portly nurse turned temporary mad scientist lamented, but then Sahi stepped up.

"Like, chill. The housing array is totally going to be done by the time the body is ready."

What she referred to was the same kind of grand enchantment as the one that housed her own soul in her youthful replacement body. Incidentally, said arrays were based on the ones inside her, and it was my share of the work. She had already made a copy of the remote-control array she originally used to pilot 'Sahi' while 'Saahira' was still alive, and my job was to slowly expand and upgrade it based on the version she currently had in her chest. It was long and meticulous work, but we were already done with the lion's share, so with some luck, we'd finish in a couple of days. Which meant…

"Are you saying that the body will be finished soon?"

"Soon is a… relative term," Peabody said, sounding awkward all of a sudden. "Growing a homunculus body to adulthood normally takes up to a year, depending on the methodology, so accomplishing it as swiftly as we did is—"

"What Uncle's trying to say is that it'll be done in about two weeks," Fred came to the rescue. "Or more like ten days, plus a few more for testing and installing the array you want."

Two weeks were neither long nor short. However, I knew full well how much things could change in just a few days, so I was still a little uneasy. That said, maybe I was overthinking things. While the Directorate was a pain in the ass, after personally cowing them due to their recent stunt, I hoped they would sit still for a while and won't cause any more problems. While there were a lot of other things in play, I just had to wait out those two weeks, make sure to avoid any escalation of the plot, and then… well, maybe it won't be 'smooth sailing' per se, but so long as I had my back-up plan up my sleeve, I could at least rest a little easier.

With those thoughts in mind, I gestured for Sahi to follow me, so that we could continue our work on the arrays that would be the linchpin of my whole plan. I sat down by the usual workbench with the carved blue stone on it holding the half-finished enchantment, and we began the usual routine. She would lie down on the nearby bed, and then I would poke her with a phantom limb to take a look, and then poke the stone to see where I could implement what I just saw. It was a slow but necessary process I couldn't half-ass.

Yet, I've only just started getting into the groove of it when I was literally shaken out of the non-Euclidian enchantment space by Sahi poking me with her finger.

"Leonard? Earth to Leonard? Like, your phone is ringing!"

"Got it, got it." I shook her off and reached into my breast pocket. "I just got too immersed in the work, and…"

My words trailed off when I saw the caller ID. Snowy rarely called me on the phone, so if she found it necessary to do so, it meant she must've made some serious progress with Percival. I wondered what he could've said to prompt her to dial me right away, but I kept my expectations low and picked up the phone.

"Hi, sis. What's—?"

"Leo!" Her panicked voice made me jump up from my seat. "There's trouble! You need to come, quick!"

"What happened?" I asked as I was already rushing out of the workshop, surrounded by the alarmed glances of everyone present at the scene.

"We… We were attacked, and we need you here before things completely get out of hand!"

"Slow down, sis." I just reached the first floor where Judy was waiting for me, but when she noticed my expression, she also became tense. After a brief moment of hesitation, I told her, "We have a situation. Get ready to act as central command again, just in case."

"On it."

She immediately turned on her heels, while I dashed across the main hall, towards the reception area. Once I got there, I closed the door behind me and raised the phone to my ear again.

"Okay, I'm here. Now, start from the beginning. Where are you?"

"At the hideout," she answered, sounding slightly less panicked but just as rushed.

"Who attacked you?"

"The Fauns. Tajana's Fauns."

"Why?"

"I… I don't know. They just did, and we fought back, but there was an explosion, and now Mr. Walker is here, and I don't know what to tell him."

"Mr…? Do you mean Barnabas?"

"Yes. Please, hurry."

I let out a long groan and told her, "I'll be there in a moment."

Then, I cut the line, pocketed the phone, and I was there in a moment, not yet realizing that the dominoes were already tumbling, and I was too late to stop them.