The Extra's Rise-Chapter 208: Northern Sea Ice Palace (9)

Emotions, in their most basic form, are glitches in an otherwise functional system—chemical reactions, electrical impulses, misfiring neurons that make humans irrational. They serve no tangible purpose, no logical advantage. And yet, they dictate lives, rewrite destinies, drive people to greatness or ruin.

I had no use for them.

At least, that was what I told myself.

I existed, nothing more. An orphan, with no name that mattered, no place that was truly mine, no connections tying me to the world. Survival was my only priority, and survival didn’t require happiness, or sadness, or anger. It required efficiency. And so I trained myself to be precise, calculated, detached.

Pain? Pain was irrelevant. Loneliness? That was simply an absence of people. Suffering? A temporary state of being.

I was grey.

Not black, not white, just grey—a shadow blending into the background, watching, observing, learning what made the world spin.

I made an effort to fit in. Humans demanded it. If you did not act correctly, they noticed. So I tried. I spoke when spoken to, I mimicked their words, I calculated the correct responses. But I was always off. Just slightly. Enough for them to see the gaps, the pieces missing from whatever it was that made people people.

And so, I became an outcast.

Then she came along.

Emma.

I remember the moment exactly. A simple event in a school hallway—familiar, predictable. A boy’s hand grabbed the collar of my shirt, forcing me against a locker. He spoke, though his words hardly mattered. A threat? A demand? An insult? All of it was data—input with no real consequence. I did not react.

That was incorrect, apparently.

The second boy swung his fist. I calculated the movement, the trajectory, the speed at which impact would occur. It would hurt, but pain was just a signal, a thing to be noted and ignored.

Then, she intervened.

Emma stepped in between us, her expression unreadable for a fraction of a second—before she smiled. Not a friendly smile, not a kind one. It was calculating, as though she was measuring her options, assessing the risks.

She was not a savior, not a hero stepping in for justice.

She saved me because she had something to gain.

I knew it. I could see it.

And yet…

Even if her reasons were wrong, even if they were selfish, she had still extended her hand.

Kindness.

Not the idealized kind found in old stories, not the pure and selfless kind people liked to believe in. No, this was practical kindness, transactional kindness. It was the first time I had encountered it so directly.

Up until then, every human interaction I had observed was self-serving in one way or another. People lied, they manipulated, they used others to advance themselves. Kindness, I had thought, was just another weapon, a tool to gain something.

But receiving it—even in its flawed, imperfect form—was different.

I wanted to understand.

What did it feel like?

What was kindness, when you were on the other side of it?

So, I took her hand.

Because in the end, despite everything, I was still human.

Even if I didn’t always feel like one.

And from that moment on, everything changed.

I became Emma’s friend.

It was not something I had planned, nor something I had particularly wanted. It simply happened, like a glitch in the system, an anomaly that I hadn’t accounted for.

She was—by every metric—different from me.

Bubbly. Loud. The kind of person who could walk into a silent room and fill it with sound and movement, as if existence itself had granted her the ability to make spaces brighter just by being in them.

She was also popular, the kind of popular that wasn’t just a result of looks or talent, but sheer persistence. People liked her because she made liking her seem effortless.

She was always smiling. Always happy. Always bursting at the seams with unnecessary excitement over the most mundane details of the world.

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’Like a dog,’ I thought.

A particularly energetic retriever, wagging its metaphorical tail at everything—the weather, a new type of snack, an especially fluffy cloud.

I observed this, waiting for it to wear off, for the enthusiasm to falter, for the gears beneath the mask to show.

But Emma was persistent.

And when she saw my lack of reaction to one of her particularly long-winded explanations about something that, as far as I could tell, had no relevance to anything important, she hesitated.

Then, quite suddenly—her lips pushed out slightly.

Her eyebrows scrunched together.

Her expression darkened, but not in anger—in something else.

I narrowed my eyes.

Was this… pouting?

I analyzed the microexpressions, the subtle shifts in muscle movement.

Yes. It was pouting.

Interesting.

A human reaction designed to invoke sympathy. A nonverbal cue meant to draw attention or elicit a response. A technique often used by children to get what they want from adults.

Tactically effective.

But why use it on me?

"Don’t stare!" Emma yelped, cheeks flushing a very distinct shade of red.

I blinked.

Ah. Blushing.

I ran through the biological explanation quickly. Involuntary reaction. Blood vessels in the face dilate, increasing circulation, causing visible redness. An evolutionary trait meant to signal embarrassment, attraction, or social discomfort.

Simple. Predictable.

And yet—

Why was it interesting?

It was just excess blood. A physical side effect, nothing more.

And yet—

I wanted to understand it.

I wanted to see it again.

I wanted to know why something so biologically insignificant felt like it mattered.

Even though Emma was faking all of it.

_________________________________________________________________________________

"Why do you spend time with me?" I asked Emma once, during lunch. Just the two of us.

The cafeteria was noisy—laughter, voices, the clatter of trays and utensils, a chaotic backdrop to a conversation that, for once, actually interested me.

Unlike me, Emma had friends. A lot of them. She was the kind of person who could sit at any table and be welcomed, like a particularly enthusiastic stray cat that everyone just accepted as part of the scenery.

She didn’t need to be here. With me.

Emma blinked, mid-bite, then shrugged. "I just want to."

A dodge, not an answer.

She didn’t even try to make it convincing.

She was lying.

I could tell—the slight pause before she spoke, the flicker of something unreadable in her gaze, the way her fingers tensed just slightly around her fork before she forced herself to relax.

There was an intention behind it. A reason.

But I let it go.

Because this was interesting.

I had something to play with.

A human puzzle. Layers to peel.

What was the right word for it?

Ah. Toy.

Emma was an interesting toy.

A human who acted happy, yet was clearly pretending. A girl who lied to me, who got close for an unknown reason, but wore her smile like armor.

She was so happy, and yet—she wasn’t.

That contradiction was fascinating.

And, most importantly—she was fun to play with.

Puzzles were boring. Video games were too easy. The world rarely presented anything worth the effort of solving.

But this?

This was new.

Emma made a good toy.

That was how it began.

Just a toy.

Not something to care about. Not something to get attached to. Just an interesting puzzle, something to pull apart and study, to test and watch.

But over time…

The world—the one I had always known, the one that was dull and grey and lifeless—changed.

It was subtle at first. The way Emma’s voice, loud and insistent, broke the monotony of my thoughts. The way her laugh—ridiculous, unnecessary, too much—filled the empty spaces between the ticks of a clock.

Colour seeped in.

A little at a time.

I didn’t notice it at first.

Until I did.

And by then, it was too late.

She had dyed my world in colours I didn’t know how to name. Bright, sharp, messy things that didn’t make sense but made everything feel… more.

And it wasn’t just me.

Emma stopped lying.

At first, they were small cracks—hesitations in her perfect, easy-going mask. A look held just a second too long. The way her smile faltered, like a puppet’s strings pulled too tight.

Then, one day, the mask shattered entirely.

And there we were.

Just two kids, standing in front of each other—no lies, no pretenses, no shields.

Two kids who had found something real.

And then—

Everything fell apart.

I remember the exact moment I learned the truth.

Emma—Emma, who had saved me, Emma, who had laughed with me, Emma, who had filled my world with colour—was not real.

A child spy.

A carefully constructed lie, built to win my trust, to pull me in, so that I could be delivered to some nameless, faceless national intelligence agency.

I had been a mission. A target.

And when the truth came out, she panicked.

She chose duty.

For just a moment, she hesitated.

And that was all it took.

The agents closed in—closing the trap, boxing me in, taking away the one thing I hadn’t realized I needed until it was already slipping through my fingers.

Emma ran.

And yet—

At the very last second, she chose me instead. Explore more adventures at novelbuddy

We ran together. We tried to escape.

But she was injured.

The wound was bad. Too bad. Blood soaked her clothes, seeped into the cracks of the pavement as I held her. Her breathing turned shallow, her fingers clenched weakly around my wrist.

I begged her to hold on.

I promised I would find a way.

I promised I would fix it.

I promised—

But promises don’t stop people from dying.

In the end, she died.

She would be a disgraceful spy, remembered as nothing more than a failure—someone who betrayed the very agency that created her.

And I?

I lost the only light that had ever coloured my life.