Chapter 670 - 21st Zuri

The two of them shot into the air like a fired bullet, the ruined ground falling away beneath them in an instant.

Strong wind tore at their clothes and hair as they covered a good distance away from the rest of the group in only a few seconds.

The broken cityscape below shrank rapidly, the glowing crater becoming a distant orange wound in the earth. The others grew smaller and smaller, their faces turning upward, their voices lost to the distance.

Zuri’s hair began to shift wildly between different colors. The strands changed hue with every second that passed, cycling through shades too quickly to name.

Her eyes turned pure white, the usual color vanishing completely. The air around their rising bodies began to crackle with building energy, small sparks snapping into existence and vanishing again.

"Uh-oh."

Benjamin reacted immediately.

He wrapped his entire form in an [Imaginary Barrier] just as a miniature thunderstorm erupted around Zuri’s body.

Raw bolts of energy lashed outward in every direction, tearing at the barrier and scorching the air with the sharp smell of ozone.

The bolts struck the barrier and broke against it, scattering into sparks that rained down toward the distant streets.

To stop the chaotic damage from spreading any further across the district below, he angled their path downward and used her body as a cushion when they finally struck the ground.

The choice was not gentle: it was meant to end the storm.

BAMMM!

The impact shattered the surface beneath them. Long cracks raced outward through the stone in every direction, branching and splitting like the roots of a tree that had grown in an instant.

Blood was forced from Zuri’s mouth in a sharp, sudden spray that spattered across the broken ground.

And for a brief moment her hair settled into a uniform, deep brown, the wild shifting colors fading under the sheer force of the landing.

Her body went limp beneath him, the storm dying as quickly as it had begun.

"Geez, stop resisting already..." Benjamin pouted down at her, the expression boyish against the violence of the moment. "It won’t take more than a minute."

He caught both of her wrists in his hands and pinned them firmly above her head while he straddled her waist, holding her in place with the weight of his body.

The position was practical: but was also, Zuri clearly believed, very improper.

"No.... My ch-chastity...!" Zuri’s face flushed a deep red.

She struggled lightly beneath him, the words coming out broken and thick with embarrassment as she turned her face away as much as the grip on her wrists would allow.

"WH-WH-WHAT DO YOU MEAN CHASTITY?! I JUST WANT TO HAVE PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH YOU!" Benjamin’s own face colored as well.

He spoke the protest quickly, almost flustered by the accusation, the words tumbling over one another.

The tips of his ears had gone red. His voice had risen slightly.

But the soul link started snapping into place between them with a finality that settled deep in both of their minds.

***

He found himself once more inside a reality of pure, endless white that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.

There was no horizon to break the expanse. There was no sky above and no ground below in any meaningful sense.

Only the blank, featureless white that went on without end.

The moment the soul link fully completed, color began to bleed into the white space. It started softly at the distant edges and then grew stronger, the blank world slowly painting itself in the memories that belonged to the girl called Zuri.

Shapes and shades emerged one after another, filling the emptiness with the weight of a life already lived.

Unlike Zanya and Hawthorne, Zuri had started her life already intimate with suffering. The memories did not begin with laughter or warmth.

It was still worlds better than the life poor Sekhmet had endured, but it was terrible nonetheless.

She was part of a household of twenty-five children, a poor family that lived far from any town or road.

The house stood alone in a clearing that the forest had reluctantly allowed, its walls weathered and its roof patched in more places than it was whole.

Every child in that house had been born for a single purpose: to serve as workers on their father’s farm so that the land might turn a profit.

The purpose was not spoken aloud, of course. It was in the way the children were fed, in the way they were counted, in the way their father looked at them the way a man looks at his workers.

From the earliest age they could walk, the children labored like giants from before sunrise until the light failed.

But they ate like ants.

Meals were thin, measured, and never enough to fill the hollow in their stomachs.

A bowl of thin soup, a heel of bread, or maybe a few bites of whatever vegetable had grown misshapen enough that it could not be sold.

But none of them truly understood that they were tasting poverty. They had never been privileged to set foot outside the lonely house that stood alone in the middle of a dense forest.

The trees formed a wall around their world. The farm and the house were all they had ever known. The children did not dream of other places because they did not consider that other places might even exist.

Zuri was the twenty-first child out of those twenty-five. The number mattered, and it meant something in that house. It meant she was not the first, not the last, or the favorite. She was just another pair of hands.

Her birth came with so little preparation that no one in the family had even chosen a name for her. The midwife had other things to do, the mother had other children to feed, and the father had a field that needed clearing.

A kind stranger who happened to be passing through the forest and asked for a few days of refuge in their house was the one who finally gave her a name.