After a long day, and an even longer night, Erik woke to the sound of Emma’s voice. Emma had had a few drinks herself, and went to bed around 1 a.m. The rest had been up until past 3 a.m, enjoying a small afterparty in the siblings’ room. Their room had been the furthest away from Emma’s and Angela’s room.

  Luckily, the hotel didn’t have a lot of guests in the middle of the week in the midst of a monster invasion. Few were travelling at this time, and most of the hotels around the world were catering for government officials and military personnel, along with some others that were more or less important to the proceedings of the war.

  “Morning!” Erik said, having slept like a rock for a few hours. He felt completely fine. All the tiredness in his muscles and bones had already gone, and his mind was clear. He did feel like the alcohol he’d drunk that night didn’t impact him as much as it normally would, and that might be because of his magical nature.If he was stronger, faster and healed quicker, it was practically a given that alcohol wouldn’t be as bad for him anymore.

  As Emma left to wake Jessie and Sophie, Erik got dressed, brushed his teeth and headed straight down to the lobby. Angela arrived shortly after along with Emma, Angela looking the worse for wear out of the two by a mile. When Jessie and Sophie joined them, the same could be said for Sophie as her tangled hair, baggy and reddened eyes cried out for more rest.

  “I just realised I don’t have to join you guys,” Sophie said in a yawning voice.

  “That’s… actually true,” Emma realised. “Alright, you can go back to sleep.” Without further ado, the ragged girl turned around straight away, and marched back to her room.

  Jessie looked as well-rested as Erik did, so the magical constitution-theory was holding its ground for now.

  After planning the morning out, the four left the hotel in order for the two Remnants to gain more strength. Emma and Angela entered a taxi they had summoned from the hotel lobby, while Erik and Jessie entered another.

  As there was a war raging, they had to use their resources as effectively as they could, and splitting up made more sense as they could visit more places in the same amount of time. That said, Erik and Jessie were to visit the closest places they could find crystals, gemstones and minerals, while Angela and Emma were tasked with places further away.

  The idea was that they didn’t have to bring back a haul that same day. The Remnants had been told that they would get a sense of what gemstone would fit them well, so they had decided to gather up a large amount of them, see which ones were the best fit for either, then absorb them.

  As they weren’t able to do this at Afterlife, this had only been described to them, and they didn’t yet know what that feeling was like.

  Erik and Jessie visited their second rock shop for the day. The elderly man who owned the store gladly helped them look around, though the abstract nature of what they could tell him they were looking for didn’t make it easy for him.

  Jessie had discovered a part of her Core power she hadn’t understood until the first shop they visited.

  Along with the four spells, nature could talk to her. She’d thought it to be a description more like a flavour text than anything else, but as she gazed upon an amethyst geode in wonder, it talked to her. This wasn’t like a voice she heard, or a sense of the amethyst’s will, but she got a sense of what it was. It described its own nature to her. ‘Nightglow Harmony’ it said.

  Erik and Jessie didn’t understand what that meant, but a lot of other minerals and crystals gave a similar description. A few didn’t, and the Remnants figured those were either fake, or not powerful enough, for lack of a better word.

  The same ones that didn’t talk to Jessie, didn’t give either of the Remnants any sense of power either. The rest felt either like a small trickle running back and forth between the Remnant and the mineral, a small river or waves from the sea.

  They instinctively knew that the more strength in the push and pull between them, the greater the match. They bought the ones with the greatest bond between each of them, leaving the weaker ones behind. Luckily, Major MacLeod had given them a credit card they could use, meaning everything was bought and paid for by the United Britain Air Force. Even so, they had no reason to buy the ones with a weak link to either of them.

  At the second store, Erik found a gem with the most powerful link he’d sensed yet, Jessie naming it ‘Sovereign Faith’. The owner of the store called it an imperial gold quartz, a quartz crystal coated with iron and titanium. It had an almost rainbow-like sheen of gold, orange and pink.

  The push and pull he felt from the quartz was that of a massive waterfall pushing down on his entire body, quickly retreating back to the crystal before once more pushing him down.

  It was an intense feeling unlike anything he’d felt before, with the possible exception of that first time he reached out to his magic to save the young boy in the forest. He knew he had to have that crystal, and so the owner collected it for them. Jessie didn’t sense more than a slight trickle from the thing, meaning it was definitely his for the taking. He wanted it now.

  Jessie didn’t get a similar sense before their fourth and final stop that day. They had already spent hours and hours travelling from shop to shop, as these stores weren’t to be found just around the corner.

  Hers was a diamond, rough and uncut, but quite large. It cost a small fortune, but she felt the same as Erik had with the quartz from earlier, though she likened it to being strapped to the front of a submarine as it dolphined under and above the surface of the sea repeatedly at massive speeds.

  As the difference in their perceived links mostly differed, Erik’s trickle was thought to be much like Jessie’s cold breeze; they didn’t know which were the stronger links. Still, the UB military getting the eventual tab, they bought that as well. The diamond gave her the name ‘Brightless Bond’.

  All in all, excluding the two they felt the strongest bond with, they had gathered twelve additional crystals or gems with what they called high affinity to either of them. As the pair had a total of nine major slots to fill, it was barely enough for just those, but seeing that there were even higher affinities out there made them doubt whether or not to fill them all out at once.

  Additionally, if they only got one or two of them filled out immediately, they could start training with their new abilities, getting a sense of what their eventual style of fighting would be like while getting used to their powers. As it was, Jessie had only fired her spell on one actual target, and it was caged.

  Erik had been up close and personal with several beasts by now, but had already stuck to his protective shield and tesla bomb-combo most of those fights. It worked in given conditions, sure, but he would definitely end up in situations where sticking to that one tactic would be the end of him.

  They also had to learn how to fight. While Erik wished he would get a magic sword, he still didn’t really know how to use one. Jessie, if purely based on her Core ability, could develop into a mage-type Remnant meaning she had to stand back and throw spells at the enemy from afar. That didn’t mean she could stand still all the time, however.

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  They were only just starting out, and needed to train in combat situations. Hopefully the UBAF could help with that as well.

  Things were different with the second group. Angela and Emma had visited only their second place for the day when they were wrapping up, ending up in a hotel room for the night.

  Emma was lounging around in her pyjamas, sorting their haul on the corner table in their room. Having no idea which mineral was which, she purely sorted them based on looks first, then size. She had a problem with the ones that looked the same, but had slightly different colours.

  Were they different types or not? This was a huge problem, as the pair had procured over two hundred different gems and crystals, some of them costing more than Emma had ever had in her bank account at one time.

  She hummed to herself happily as she sorted through the gems, paying little to no mind about the girl laying in her own single bed across the room. She only looked over at Angela occasionally, immediately getting annoyed at the sight, then turning back to sort some more gems.

  Why did that woman have everything? Angela lay on the bed in only a buttoned down shirt and her underwear, listening to music or audiobooks or whatever from her phone and in-ear earbuds.

  Her legs were long and beautiful as she stretched one of them into the air occasionally. Angela was relatively tall, not too skinny, and was nicely toned all over. Emma wasn’t interested in women in any way, but if she had been, she would’ve been all over Angela long ago.

  They were about the same age, Angela being a year or two older. Emma didn’t know Angela’s sexual orientation, either. Why would she assume a girl like her even would’ve had a chance? She was short, skinny and without those beautiful curves.

  She’d been told she had a really attractive face, but that sounded more like a thinly veiled negative comment on the rest of her. ‘At least your face is okay’.

  She had never even had a real boyfriend, only a few flings that didn’t amount to much. As soon as she gave them what they wanted, they grew bored. Emma shook her head in an attempt to shake the thought out of her head. She took a quick look over at Angela before refocusing her efforts on getting the gems in order.

  One thing she had always been good at was getting, and keeping, order. She had to keep playing to her strengths. Maybe she’d find someone after the war was over. Her military career might crash after that, but the boys she’d grown up with were all military boys. Maybe she needed something else.

  Angela noticed Emma’s red face intermittently looking over at her, or more specifically, her legs, whenever she stretched. Emma’s face quickly grew red, and when she turned away again to sort all the stuff they’d bought, the redness would slowly dissipate. Angela wasn’t sure what it was about. Maybe she was mad Angela wasn’t helping out? She had asked before she jumped into bed, but Emma said she wanted to do it alone.

  Angela really believed that, as Emma had always been a very orderly girl. She was super independent, and always cleaned up the messes of everyone around her, both literal messes and otherwise. She was by far the strongest person she’d ever met, including all her superior officers over the years.

  That didn’t mean the girl didn’t have problems, one of them being that same independence. A few of the men at Bridgefort were interested in her, but they didn’t dare to approach her, as her strict personality and ignorance of such things made her practically unapproachable.

  If anyone did approach her, the flirting and wooing would fly straight over Emma’s head. Some thought she might not be interested in men at all, but Angela personally knew one of the girl’s exes. He said the problem was mainly because Emma was too focused on her career, and didn’t show any interest in him, even in private and off-duty.

  Maybe, when this war was over, if they couldn’t return to the military, she’d get her priorities straight. Angela was just as involved in her own military career, but she knew it wasn’t everything, and personal relationships were just as important for your own future, whether that was just friends or something more.

  That said, she wasn’t feeling very lucky in love the past while herself. She was sick of military dogs, everyone wanting to be an alpha. She wanted something else, though she didn’t know what. Still, this wasn’t the time. She was still young, and this war would have to end for other stuff to start mattering. Angela pulled out one of her earbuds as Emma looked over at her once more.

  “You need help, Emma?” she asked with a genuine smile.

  “I got it, don’t worry,” Emma responded, facing back towards the table.

  “Why don’t you take a break? We can see if we find something on the telly to watch?”

  “The TV is on that wall, and my bed is there,” Emma said, pointing to the objects in question. “I wouldn’t be able to see anything.”

  Why the TV was hung on the wall to the side of one bed instead of facing both from the front didn’t make any sense in a two-bed hotel room. Emma huffed and went back to sorting.

  “Come on, we can both watch from here. We’ll cuddle!” Angela tried, patting her hand on her bed, gesturing to the younger girl to come over. Emma’s face flushed a little, but she eventually, after a few more back and forths, gave in.

  Twenty minutes into the boring TV-program they started watching, both had fallen asleep, Angela the big spoon in the narrow bed.

  “So, how are we doing this?” Erik asked, both him and Jessie having returned to Jessie’s hotel room. Sophie was right there with them, looking through all the crystals and gemstones and whatnot. There were dozens of them, though her sister had explained that most of them wouldn’t even be used, as they didn’t feel right to either her or Erik.

  “Maybe just put it up there?” Jessie responded questioningly.

  “Who first?” Erik then asked.

  It didn’t really matter, but both of them were nervous, and eventually, Erik was chosen to be the first to try to absorb his chosen quartz. He removed his shirt and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  Jessie couldn’t help but notice, just like last time in her own apartment, that he looked healthier and more fit after he returned to Earth. She had noticed it on herself as well. She hadn’t become skinnier like Erik had, but had grown similarly toned. She was far from muscly, thank god, but her stomach, breasts, ass and legs were all firmer. She enjoyed the new youthful body. It was like she was sixteen again, though luckily more matured still.

  The red glow from the centre of Erik’s chest truly reminded Jessie that Erik, and even herself, weren’t technically human anymore. That’s why Jessie didn’t much enjoy the look she saw her sister give Erik in her peripheral vision.

  Erik was a good guy. He was super kind, always wanted to help, and could really listen when you talked to him. Sophie’s last few boyfriends weren’t. Her previous one broke it off with her a few weeks after Jessie died because she didn’t care about him anymore.

  The girl was heartbroken and mourning the loss of her sister, and that jerk went on and broke her heart twice over. Jessie never liked her little sister’s boyfriends, but in her defence, they were always jerks.

  Sophie, being as beautiful as she was, had always been popular, much more so than Jessie. She had a thing for the bad boys, who hurt her over and over again, but still found new ones to crush on, giving her heart to them so they could crush it in their hands and return it to her as soon as they were bored of her.

  Erik would be a massive leap forward for her sister. But he wasn’t human. Was that fair to her sister? Jessie herself wasn’t human anymore. Did that mean she had to stop being her sister? Of course not!

  She decided not to meddle. If they wound up together, they would. Given her sister’s massive attractiveness, Erik probably didn’t stand a chance, unless he was crushing on either Angela or Emma by now. Both were strong and beautiful women, and had decided to join him without even knowing him.

  “So, that didn’t work,” Erik said, forcing Jessie out from her own thoughts. Erik was placing his quartz against one of the larger hexagonal slots on his Crest.

  “Just, like, suck it in!” Sophie exclaimed.

  “I can’t ‘just suck it in’, I don’t have lungs in my chest!” Erik complained, quickly realising his mistake. As Sophie laughed flirtingly, Jessie considered a different way. “I mean, I don’t have blowholes or something like that. You know what I mean!”

  “Try holding it there, and focus on the link. Your magic tends to feel like water for you, right? The ‘sea of magic’ inside you, the rivers and streams and waterfalls the gems feel like? Try soaking up that water, letting it inside of you. Drink it, submerge in it, let it pull you with it or maybe try to let the water run into your ‘sea’,” Jessie thought out loud.

  “Okay, I’ll try all those thousands of things you just said,'' Erik joked half-heartedly, rolling his eyes.

  He shut his eyes, focusing on his link with the quartz. The massive waterfall threatened to crush him, or rather, his spirit, seeing that there was no real pain involved. Erik then focused on his sea, visualising himself between the waterfall and the sea, standing in the middle of the dark void between them.