[Undisputed Master of the Electromagnetic Spectrum]
[Lieutenant General of the Alhamisian Adventurer Army]
[Commander of the Seven Amendments]
Human Champion
Luxeme Vi Engarde
Lv. ?
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t speak. Luxeme’s heterochromatic eyes were constantly changing in color. Red and green, then blue and yellow, then purple and black, then white and red.
“Ah, didn’t see you there.” Her voice was a pitch higher than I expected. I placed her age from it and her appearance. Mid-twenties at the very latest.
“Silly me, have so much on my mind. But I can’t go around bumping into recruits… no no, Lux, don’t bump into the recruits. Cause then they’ll freeze up, and then they’ll start apologizing, and some of them start to wet themselves and ah – this and that and this.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak. Would it be suspicious to not say something, anything? Would it be more suspicious to end up saying something, something that revealed my identity as a nightmare?
“Hey, you…”
My breath hitched as her eyes narrowed.
“You have such smooth skin!”
“Thank… you?”
“Can I touch it?”
“I would rather you didn’t.”
She blinked at me. A laugh tore from her lips. “Wow! You refused!”
We seemed to be drawing a small scene. Several soldiers were looking in my direction, more than I was comfortable with. I don’t need an audience damn it –
“Ah, you’re the shy type! I understand. Let’s fix that.”
She snapped her fingers.
“There! Now – ah – what are you doing?”
Instinct. It was instinct that told me that whenever someone powerful snapped their fingers, I should simply prepare for the worst. Hoplite’s snap summoned a black hole that had engulfed me. When Luxeme snapped her fingers, I dropped to the ground on instinct, preparing for a meteorite or something similar.
“…Ah… I…” Ah, fuck it. “I thought you were going to kill me for a moment there.”
She frowned. “I wouldn’t kill a recruit just because they didn’t let me touch their skin.” She crossed her arms. “Don’t tell me those rumors are still spreading. It was Cori wasn't it? Damn it, Cori, it was just one time!”
There was a story there that I was just dying to know. “I… see.”
I noticed nobody was looking at us anymore. It wasn’t that they were ignoring us. It was as if we weren’t there. They were passing us by, completely as if nothing strange was happening.
“You made us invisible?”
“I noticed how tense you were,” Luxume said, smiling. “I get it. I used to have the worst anxiety. I mean, look at me, I was born with rainbow-colored hair! People kept thinking I dyed it to make myself appear special, but no – they would never believe it’s natural. After a while, the staring got annoying. But like a fairy-godmother, I figured out a way to make it all go away. Just refract the angles of light accurately enough – and ta-da! No more stares.”
Refract light to turn invisible?
“If you did that, you wouldn’t have light hit your eyeballs, and wouldn’t be able to see.” The words slipped out of my mouth before I realized who I was talking to.
Luxeme merely waved her hand and laughed. “Someone’s a clever cookie! It used to be that way, true, but you see – my eyes are special.” She pointed to her eyes, the orbs that were flashing with two different colors. “I can see a lot of stuff that normal people can’t. I can also see tons and tons of more colors that most can’t. I can even see through objects!”
Luxume’s eyes stopped changing color. Her left eye turned white. Her right eye turned black. She blinked at me, several times, and I cursed underneath my breath. Did she figure it out –
“Oh wow.” She said, looking up. “You have really large genitals. That’s awesome!”
“…You…” I couldn’t help it. I snickered. I laughed. “Hahaha!”
“Oops! Sorry! I forgot some people don’t like it when I do that.”
“No, no, it’s fine.” I kept my laughter under wraps. She can’t see through my disguise. “Although, if you go around saying things like that, people might get the wrong idea.”
“Wrong idea?” She placed a finger on her lip. “Oh! They’d think I want to have sex with them!”
“That’s the one.”
Luxeme laughed, lightly tapping me against the back.
[CRITICAL DAMAGE TAKEN]
Sweet mother of god –
I resisted the urge to scream to the high heavens from Luxeme’s ‘tap.’
“Don’t be silly, silly! I’d never have sex with someone weak! If I squeezed my legs, you’d snap like a twig! Like snap!”
I could believe it. I could genuinely believe it. Her tap had sent my HP down into the triple digits. This was worrying considering my HP was over six digits normally.
“But hey! You’re pretty interesting. No one thinks about not being able to see when you refract all the light away from you. I learned that lesson the hard way myself. You should have seen me, invisible, stumbling around and shouting ‘I’m blind! I’m bliiiiind!’”
Against my better nature I found my lips turning upwards, all while trying my damned hardest to hide my pain.
“Though, thanks to that experience, I learned to do super cool stuff with my eyes. Now I can just blink and then pew-pew!”
“Pew…pew?” I repeated.
She nodded. “Pew-pew!”
“Pew-pew.”
She can’t seriously be talking about what I think she is…
“Hmm… You’re Neo right? Neo Saintarelli. Looking over your records. Your numbers are still low. You’ve got to work harder Neo! Work hard and one day you might take my number one spot for most nightmares killed! Wouldn’t that be great?”
“Yay.”
“With more enthusiasm!”
“Yay!”
Luxeme laughed. I noticed she did that a lot. She was completely unlike what I expected for the person with the record holder of the most nightmares killed.
This cheerful, hyperactive ball of energy, was the person who had killed more nightmares than
