Chapter 472: About Children

Having healthy children born safely here was considered a miracle. A child conceived the natural way, without a single lab between two bodies, was rarer than that.

It was a thing most couples saved a decade to even attempt. The price this era paid to have long lives and healthy mixed-race babies.

It might look like a large number of children were being produced due to a large number of children waiting to be adopted in the orphanages.

But it wasn’t true.

Because those in the orphanages were defective children. One way or another, those children were abandoned and probably came from planets far away from the Imperial Star.

Those children might have problems in their biology, their gender, risking the possibility of secondary differentiation. Or they wouldn’t be able to live as long as the normal people in the era would.

They could also have problems with their powers. For example, spiritual powers that could help them earn a job, help them control their pheromones, and potentially make them more susceptible to zerg invasions.

They could also have problems with their beast forms. For example, they wouldn’t be able to hide their ears or become more susceptible to diseases like rabies.

All sorts of things could happen when a child was thrown into the orphanages. Therefore, they weren’t looked at favorably by those born healthy.

But a child was still a child in the end. Therefore, the government took care of them without fail.

However, the government couldn’t take care of them forever that luxuriously. That was why the problem came when the children from the orphanages came out of the orphanage. They didn’t have a way to live in a society that looked down on them.

Still, regardless of how Chronos would keep his unborn baby. If it were going to be born healthy or even be kept alive and born safely into this world, that would still be decided when they got out of this situation alive.

That was why, when Chronos had decided to fight, Thiago didn’t stop him.

The one thing—the only thing—Thiago could not get behind was the silence.

Because Pete was right there, his heart in his throat as he held and gave that gun to Chronos.

And the poor man had no idea, none at all, that he might be sending the person he loved and their child that he had never been told about straight into hell.

It was a wound waiting to be exposed. If the worst came—if they lost the baby tonight in the smoke and the fire—then Pete deserved to at least have known it existed. He deserved to grieve it.

In all my years in the hospital, you don’t carry that kind of loss alone and hand your partner only the aftermath. You face it together. So that if it breaks you, it breaks you together, side by side. That was what being a couple was for.

Thiago opened his mouth to say it.

To say, Chronos, tell him, tell Pete now, he—

But Chronos beat him to it.

Chronos had gotten to his feet, both pistols up now, the tremor in his hands stilled by sheer mulish will.

He said it to Pete—quiet, steady, almost gentle, the most serious Pete had ever heard him:

"I’ll tell you when we get back alive."

Pete blinked.

This was unlike Chronos.

"What’s that supposed to—" he uttered.

Pete was about to ask again, but Chronos had already deflected and slid sideways out like a slippery eel.

BOOOMMMM!!

The second mine went up in a fist of white fire, and the ground vibrated harder than before. Debris and dust were falling all over the place, making it harder to see.

Salia had aimed her acid wrong—or maybe she aimed it right, but she didn’t know that there would be another mine in there. The glob of corrosive spit hit the pressure plate, and the charge underneath threw a wave of heat across the ground.

Shrapnel began to land all over the place, joining the debris. The blast clipped Salia on the rise, and her left forewing caught the edge of it.

The membrane crisped, and pain bloomed white-hot, right above the hindwing.

SKRRIIIII!

A shriek tore out of her throat.

"Damn it!" Salia cursed.

She had only just managed to knit back together after the last detonation, and she was hit by another.

Furious, Salia hurried through the blur of dust, fire, and debris and went out of the building.

As she successfully got out of the building, Salia found Keres.

Inside the body, in the drowned-out place where another person’s consciousness went, Lilianna was screaming too.

Mom. Mom. MOM.

She couldn’t move a finger. She couldn’t twitch an eyelid. After all, Salia held the wheel now.

Lilianna could only press her face against the glass of her own eyes. She watched the world go by, but she couldn’t see. Through her eyes, she saw her mother.

Catalina hung half a meter off the ground, suspended in the grip of a huge grasshopper zerg.

Keres stood up, in a deadlock stare with Grayson and Ciel. In one barbed forelimb, he held Catalina by the throat.

Catalina might look meek, but she was slowly but surely fighting his grip in her semi-transformation.

But her clumsy, clearly untrained, semi-transformation was not useful in a fight like this. It was just desperation with extra steps.

Against a high-ranked zerg like Keres, Catalina’s struggle was a sparrow beating itself against a window. She would not get free.

At least, not on her own.

Meanwhile, Sarah and Iris were managing the larvae approaching the living room mindlessly, while the others were catching up to Lilianna.

Sarah, who fired and successfully created a clearing to safely get out of the building, was prepared to get out and follow Salia.

"Sarah." Iris grabbed Sarah by the sleeve. "Sarah, you can’t go out there."

"I need to go there," Sarah said flatly. "If anyone’s killing her, that’s me."

"I know you wanted to avenge Lily, but still, you can’t go—"