(AFK WORM) CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For a long moment after the last of them had fallen still, Shemira remained where she was, her breath slow as the silence settled over the street once more.

The absence of movement should have brought relief, yet what lingered instead was a question that refused to leave her.

Should she not be afraid?

By all reasonable standards, what she had just done should have unsettled her deeply. She had reached into another living person and taken something from him, something essential and irreplaceable, and used it to mend her own body as though it were nothing more than a tool at her disposal. There had been no ritual, no preparation, and certainly no hesitation once the instinct had taken hold. It had been effortless.

That was not the power of a hero.

Even in a world like this one, where capes wielded abilities that defied logic and morality in equal measure, there were still lines people expected to exist. Powers that protected, powers that destroyed, powers that controlled, each one framed by the intentions of the one who carried them. What she had done did not sit cleanly within any of those categories.

It felt… parasitic.

And yet, for all that she understood how it should appear, for all that she could articulate the reasons why such an ability ought to horrify her, the expected fear never came.

She searched for it, if only out of obligation, turning her thoughts inward as she stood there in the dim light of the broken streetlights, but found nothing that resembled true revulsion. There was awareness, certainly, of what she had just done, and what it implied, but there was no instinctive recoil, no deep-rooted dread at what she might become.

Only understanding.

Why, she wondered, should she be afraid of herself?

The answer did not come, or maybe it was already there in the stillness that followed the question. She had crossed death once already, had spoken the words that severed her from the life she had known and bound her to something new. Compared to that, this felt less like a corruption and more like a continuation, another piece of a nature she was only beginning to comprehend.

Eventually, the moment passed.

She stepped away from the men, her movements unhurried now that the tension had fully drained from the encounter, and made her way back toward the streets that led home. The spirit orb followed, its faint presence settling once more at her shoulder like a silent witness, and the city resumed around her as though nothing of note had occurred.

By the time she returned to the house, she had already begun to see the experience as something manageable, something that could exist alongside the rest of her life without tearing it apart.

Because life, as it always did, continued forward.

The next morning found her once again standing at the front of a classroom, chalk in hand as she guided her students through passages of text that felt almost absurdly mundane in comparison to the night before. The normalcy of teaching returned easily enough, her voice level as she spoke, her mannerisms composed in a way that gave no hint of the violence she had stepped into only hours earlier.

Part of her had expected whispers.

Brockton Bay was not a city that ignored unusual events, and even incidents involving the Merchants occasionally found their way into conversation if they were strange enough to attract attention. She had half-anticipated hearing snippets of what had happened, maybe in passing remarks between students or in the careful observations of someone like Crystal Pelham, whose awareness extended beyond that of an ordinary civilian.

Yet nothing came.

No one mentioned a confrontation in the streets. No one spoke of a mysterious woman dismantling a group of would-be attackers with unnatural ease. The world carried on as though her actions had slipped entirely beneath its notice.

She found herself slightly surprised by that, though the reason for it became clear the more she considered it.

The Merchants occupied a strange place within the city’s hierarchy, too insignificant to command attention unless they disrupted something larger than themselves. Their struggles rarely mattered beyond the immediate circles they affected, and incidents involving them often vanished into the background noise of Brockton Bay’s daily troubles. Unless they became a problem for someone more powerful, they were simply… ignored.

It seemed she had remained beneath that threshold.

The realization brought with it a sense of relief.

For now, she was still unseen.

That suited her purposes well enough. She had no desire to draw the attention of capes or authorities before she understood the full extent of what she could do, and the lack of scrutiny gave her the space she needed to continue exploring the boundaries of her power without interference.

Because what she had discovered the night before could not be the extent of it.

Leeching life from another person to heal herself was only one expression of something far deeper. The spirit orb alone was proof of that, a fragment of a soul bound to her will, carrying with it the weight of a life and a final desire. There were connections she had yet to trace, abilities that had not revealed themselves simply because she had not yet reached the circumstances that would draw them out.

She would have to continue. Carefully, and always with the awareness that each step carried consequences she might not yet fully understand.

As she dismissed her class and gathered her notes, a quieter realization settled beneath those thoughts, one that did not concern power or secrecy but something far more personal.

The part of her that was Annette recoiled.

It did not manifest as panic or outward distress, but as a deep, aching sorrow that lingered beneath the surface of her thoughts. Annette’s memories, her values, and her understanding of what it meant to be human, all pressed gently but persistently against what Shemira had done, and what she was becoming.

There was grief there.

Grief for a line that had been crossed without ceremony, for a piece of humanity that had slipped away so quietly it had barely been noticed in the moment.

And though Shemira did not feel fear, she could feel that sorrow.

It lingered with her long after the classroom had emptied, a silent reminder that whatever she was becoming, she was not unchanged.