The Empath Alchemist {Edward Elric X Reader}

32

Olivier Armstrong sat with her fingers intertwined, her conjoined hands shielding her nose down to her chin. Her elbows dug into the wood of her desk, and her boots grounded her beneath the surface. Her eyes were sharp, piercing into the veil of nothingness as she sat wordlessly in her office. The two men that stood before her were practically figments of her imagination as she glared off into space. Her long, baby blonde strands of hair swooped over her eye, and she didn't bother lifting a single finger to move it, for she never had so there was no reason to start picking up the habit.

Rage would have been beyond the emotion she was feeling, therefore it was no longer relevant to keep in her vocabulary. She was beyond all forms of anger and vexation. She was simply stunned, at this point.

The Armstrong disliked being left out of the loop, for she was always the officer of higher status that kept information from subordinates and other people. Taking a step back and recognizing that the events occurring around her were hardly in the realm of anything she was aware of hadn't been a warm, fuzzy feeling. This uncertainty, this secrecy, it was spreading like a wildfire from one person to the next, and it had all started as soon as that giant child made out of metal walked through her doors.

No. The shit had begun when the little Mustang arrived. And her uncertain, secretive crap had plagued her two best men.

Major Miles and Captain Buccaneer stood militantly before her desk, staring forward, awaiting Olivier's next words. It had been a rough day, for all three of them. Buccaneer and Miles tried their best to remain stoic, but they could not render the worries in the back of their heads speechless. Ever since they'd stepped outside of the Fort that morning, chaos and devastation had ensued.

Returning to their Major empty handed, without any of the children that had previously begged to stay within the security of the walls, had been bad enough as it was. Olivier hadn't even had the time to question where the hell everyone had gone off to, for her hands had been full with intel she'd received word of intel from underground.

Five men had been tasked with trekking through the long, dark tunnel that the now frozen monster had dug the previous night. Only a few hours had passed before one of Armstrong's men claimed he'd heard a series of screams erupt from the hatched tunnel entrance. No one had any clue of how long the tunnel was, where it led to,or how far it stretched beneath the ground. Therefore, none of them knew whether the group's lack of response when Olivier had opened the hatch and shouted out to them had been due to distance or... something else.

After receiving no reply, she closed the hatch and hoped for the best.

Not even an hour following, frantic pounding could be heard from the other side of the thick door. Olivier swung it open, prepared to give the soldier a piece of her mind for returning to the surface eighteen hours earlier than she'd planned. She stopped herself, though, after getting a good look at the man's face.

The soldier's face was splattered with red, making the green irises of his blown eyes pop as they widened with fear. Sweat mixed in with the metallic stains, his own lip split due to the possibility of stretching them apart to scream too often. The traumatized man's words were hardly coherent. He spoke erratically in between harsh gulps of air, constantly turning his head to look back and ensure that something hadn't been chasing him. Olivier had asked him where her remaining four men were, and the soldier entered a state of hysteria as he attempted to rehash the events and failed.

Four of her men had been brutally mutilated by something they'd encountered in that tunnel, and coincidentally, (Y/n) and her little friends were nowhere to be found.

What made matters worse was that neither Buccaneer or Miles had yet to give the Major General a proper explanation as to why the kids weren't with them any longer. It had seemed as though each of the teenagers dispersed into different directions, and Olivier had no way of knowing why. At first she wanted to be angry with the Major and Captain, for holding back information, for taking after (Y/n) and keeping their mouths shut unrightfully so when their superior asked them for a further explanation. Eventually, she found that it wasn't that they were necessarily trying to hide anything from her, but that they hardly knew what was going on either.