Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 260: Chapter 260: What She Does Instead

Chapter 260: What She Does Instead

The heavy wooden bucket handle dug brutally into Estella Everdawn’s palm.

It was day seven of the famine gap in Bastion Seven. The freezing morning air bit at her face as she hauled the water up from the deep Vanguard well in the outer ring. The massive iron distribution pumps had failed an hour ago due to a lack of maintenance, and the civilian line wrapping around the block was dying of thirst.

Estella hoisted the second bucket onto her opposite shoulder. She marched toward the distribution center. She focused intensely on the physical burn in her muscles.

Draven Mordis had been gone for four days.

She was not pining. She was not sitting in the private courtyard staring at the southern horizon, waiting for a ghost to return. She was furious, she was exhausted, and she was working.

But the thoughts still came.

’It hits me when I am not looking,’ Estella realized grimly, setting the heavy buckets down on the wooden counter.

It was not a constant, overwhelming grief. It was an intermittent ambuscade. She would be hauling water, and suddenly she would remember the exact, cold finality in his voice when he refused to teach her. She would catch the scent of pine from the distant World Tree, and she would remember the white porcelain mask turning away from her in the dark.

It was worse this way. She could not brace for it.

She handed a wooden ladle to a shivering civilian, her face a rigid mask of Vanguard discipline. She kept her hands busy so her mind would stay quiet.

By midnight, her shift ended. She did not go to the barracks to sleep.

She walked down into the subterranean training facility. The heavy iron doors shut behind her, sealing her inside the massive, scorched arena where the squad had forged their disciplines.

She stood alone in the center of the dark mat.

Estella raised her right hand. She closed her eyes. She reached deep into her core, searching for the exact frequency she had used four hundred miles to the north. She remembered the dark foundation cavern beneath Bastion Six. She remembered the dying emerald cutting, and the way she had fed it with warm, radiant starlight.

She exhaled slowly, trying to project life instead of death.

FWOOSH.

A blinding, hissing beam of condensed cosmic radiation erupted from her palm.

The laser struck the heavy stone training dummy across the room. The stone did not warm. It instantly turned to glowing, molten slag. The explosive thermal shockwave knocked Estella backward onto the mat.

She sat in the dark, her chest heaving.

She stared at her shaking hands. She had found a miracle in the dirt of Bastion Six, and she had no idea how she had done it. She had found a way to heal, to create, and now the frequency was gone.

’I cannot find it because I do not know what I am looking for,’ Estella thought, slamming her fist against the mat in pure, raw frustration.

She had no master. Nyx was embedded in the Capital. Seraphina Vance was managing the triage wards. And the one person who could have explained her own magic to her had walked out of the city.

Estella pulled her knees to her chest.

She looked at the molten slag burning in the corner of the room. A cold, suffocating dread settled over her. It was the deepest fear she harbored, and she finally admitted it to herself in the empty arena.

She was afraid of being useless.

Reina Frost could control a battlefield. Aegon Logcheville was a heavy commander. Bram Stonehelm had anchored a failing gate against a Cult Elder. Lucien Vaelmont had held a collapsing ceiling to save their lives. Lyra Voltaire was keeping the city alive with the sap harvest. Cole Rust was building the future in his forge.

Every single person in the squad possessed a function that could not be replaced. They were architects of survival.

Estella was just artillery.

She was a gun. You do not use a gun to feed a starving city. You do not use a gun to build a wall. You keep artillery locked in a dark box until you need to point it at something you want to destroy. If she could not recreate the life-giving starlight, she was nothing but a bomb waiting for a target.

The heavy iron doors of the arena groaned open.

Reina Frost walked in. The Cryo-Berserker wore her padded training gear. She stopped at the edge of the mat, looking at the glowing puddle of melted stone.

Reina did not offer a warm smile. She was her mother’s daughter, and she was not built for soft comfort.

"You are forcing the output," Reina diagnosed flatly.

"I cannot find the frequency," Estella snapped, her voice tight with exhaustion. "I am trying to replicate what I did for the cutting. I just keep burning the room down."

Reina walked over and sat on the stone bench. She picked up a ceramic cup from the rack, spinning it idly in her fingers.

"My mother taught Aegon how to lead," Reina said, her voice devoid of sympathy but heavy with truth. "Seraphina taught me the cup drill. Gunther taught Bram the bedrock. Draven taught all of us how to survive."

Reina looked directly at the Star Mage.

"But you are the only one of us who has ever done something nobody taught you," Reina stated.

The words hit Estella harder than any manufactured sympathy ever could. It was not pity. It was cold, empirical respect. Reina stood up, set the cup down, and walked out to begin her own patrol.

Estella remained on the mat for a long time.

She stood up. She did not try to cast the light again.

She left the arena and walked through the dark corridors of the bunker. She headed for the alchemical laboratory.

Lyra Voltaire was sitting at her wooden desk, grinding dried silver root in a mortar. The Mythic Apothecary looked exhausted, her blonde hair tied back carelessly.

Estella walked in and stood on the opposite side of the desk.

"I need to know what I am, Lyra," Estella requested quietly.

Lyra stopped grinding. She looked up, her expression careful and guarded.

"I was locked in a basement," Estella continued, her voice steady but hollow. "For months. I stopped counting. I was fed raw, corrupted monster cores instead of food. I need to know what that did to my biology. I need to know if the radiation in my blood can be measured."

Lyra set the heavy pestle down. She did not offer false hope. She told the brutal truth.

"Nobody has ever studied someone like you, Estella," Lyra answered softly. "Because there has never been anyone like you. The Vanguard medical texts track standard mana deviation. You are a biological anomaly. The science to measure you does not exist in this city."

Estella absorbed the failure. She turned to leave.

"But," Lyra added, standing up.

Lyra walked over to a heavy iron safe in the corner of the lab. She unlocked it and pulled out a stack of thick, black leather ledgers. They smelled of ozone and dried blood.

"These are the Cult field logs we recovered from the command post in Bastion Six," Lyra explained, setting them on the desk. "They detail the Eclipse’s biological experimentation division. If you want to know what the Cult did to you, you will have to read their methodology."

Estella stared at the black books.

She sat down at the desk. Lyra quietly left the room to give her privacy.

Estella opened the first ledger.

She read about herself. Her name was not written on the pages. She was listed only as Subject Seven. The documentation was clinical, sterile, and sickening. She read the brutal feeding schedules. She read the caloric deficits used to force her body to consume the monster cores for survival. She read the exact pain thresholds required to trigger a mana mutation.

She read for hours, tracing the nightmare of her captivity through the meticulous handwriting of the monsters who had built her.

Near dawn, she reached the final volume.

She turned to the last recorded entry regarding her specific cell block.

She found a term written in heavy red ink. It was a classification. The Cult had not been trying to build a Vanguard soldier. They had a specific, intended end-state for her biology.

Designation: Astral-Collapse.

Estella stared at the words. The Cult had wanted to weaponize the raw cosmic radiation. They wanted to feed her until her core destabilized, turning her into a living, walking supernova that would detonate and wipe a Bastion off the map.

She was never meant to survive the process. She was meant to explode.

Beside the red designation, a Cult overseer had scribbled a frantic, messy note in the margin.

Process interrupted at stage four. Cell breached. Subject lost.

Estella traced the dry ink with her finger.

Stage four. There had been more stages. There had been an end they were walking her toward, and she had come within weeks of reaching it.

She had always known she got out of that basement.

She had never once known what she got out of.

He had been down there with her. He had been standing in the same dark, in the same stone corridor, on the night the cell was breached.

’Did he know?’ Estella thought.

She turned the question over once, and then she put it down, because there was no version of the answer she could use tonight.

She stared at the words Astral-Collapse.

She closed the heavy black book. The leather slapped sharply against the wooden desk.

The fear of being a weapon evaporated from her chest. The dread of being useless was replaced by a sudden, freezing clarity. The Cult of the Eternal Eclipse had tried to forge a bomb out of her flesh. They had wanted to burn the world with her light.

Estella stood up.

She walked out of the laboratory. She did not go to the barracks.

She walked straight back down into the underground arena. She stood in the center of the scorched mat.

She did not reach for the warm, life-giving starlight. She stopped trying to be a creator. If she was a weapon, she was going to be the most terrifying weapon on the continent. She was going to find the terminal phase they had tried to build, and she was going to learn how to control it.

Estella raised her hand in the dark.

"Let it collapse," she whispered to the empty room.

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