When Benjamin was finally ready to start performing surgery on his psyche, he decided it was probably time to bail. He’d been in here too long and left in the tiny universe of his own mind, he was definitely going too far down the rabbit hole.
He didn’t believe that was because he thought trying to splice in pieces of other people’s souls into the broken sectors of his own was a good idea, though, even though it almost certainly wasn’t. It wasn’t even because he dearly wanted his friends to talk him out of it, but he hoped they would.
Despite how crazy it sounded, none of those misgivings were actually stopping him. The only thing that was the fear that if something happened, he’d be locked in here forever with Miku. That was truly terrifying.
She might have been sitting there quietly, slowly going mad from the lack of stimulus because he ordered her to, but he was certain that she was trying to find a way to escape her bonds, exactly as he would have done given the circumstances, and on a long enough timeline she’d almost certainly succeed.
So, instead of making such a dumb decision, he finally put away his research he’d been obsessed with for so long and tried to shake off the years of inattention as he looked across at his bound Rakshasa. We aren’t really here, he reminded himself.
Both of their bodies were actually sitting at a table in a house that looked a lot like his house, even though it wasn’t. He took a moment to remember where everyone was. Miku had already sent her orders, and even though no one had moved yet, they would as soon as time restarted. Emma, by contrast, was already jumping over the table.
They needed to be warned, but more importantly, the demon locked in here with him didn’t. In the end, the warning he sent his friends was a simple one, though he had to rewrite it several times to keep shortening it. He’d had all the time in the world to overthink everything, but a wall of text would be an impediment, not an advantage.
In the end, he settled on sending “This is fake. Spare Ethan, Kill everyone else” to their heads-up display. That might be enough to stop Emma from removing the man’s head. If she did, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, he supposed, but he would prefer to talk to the man without using the demon that had been possessing him all this time as an intermediary, and that couldn’t happen until they’d sprung and escaped the trap.
When all that was done, Benjamin took a deep breath and steeled himself before readying his first vampiric bolt, and then spoke to Miku for the first time in months. “Cancel this spell and bring us back to the real world.”
After that, everything happened at once. For Benjamin, it was disorienting. He was supposed to be in there for days or weeks until she’d broken him. Instead, he’d just spent years of subjective time outside reality, and now that he was back, it was suddenly too much.
The smells of the food, the sight of his friends and parents, and, of course, the knowledge that none of these people were who they seemed to be. Even as he stood there frozen while his mind took it all and remembered how to deal with the sudden stimuli, Emma twisted in midair, barely missing both him and Ethan as she pivoted off the wall behind them and leaped toward whoever it was that was pretending to be his mother, delivering a quick kick to her face.
That didn’t seem to do the other woman any damage. It was enough to crack the facade of her illusion, though. Slowly, the magic fizzled and then melted down off of her face before cascading down her chest, revealing a much younger and more well-muscled woman with Mediterranean features. She might have been the right shape, but other than that, this stranger looked nothing like the woman that had been standing there a moment before. Only the killing look in her eye was unchanged.
That was enough to banish the urge to run to the older woman’s defense, butif it hadn’t been, the moment the monster produced and threw a meat cleaver at his friend would have been enough to kill any remaining sympathy, even before she used blade storm or something like it. The magic made her blade multiply into eight whirling knives in midair, in the same way that Raja so often multiplied his shots.
It didn’t matter, though. Whether it was one blade or ten, Emma didn’t need any help. She wove between each blade almost too fast to see, like she was walking between the raindrops. While she did that, Matt likewise moved to attack his father.
Benjamin backed away with Ethan in tow even as the graying man produced a large bronze claymore from under the table as he flipped the whole thing over. After that, it was pure chaos as he and his friends exchanged blows with the things that had, at least for a few minutes, been his parents.
No, it was crazier than that. It was madness. He’d planned to hit the man with a spell, but he found that he couldn’t, and the certainty that the man wasn’t in any way related to him didn’t make that easier.
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Instead, Benjamin rushed outside with Ethan in tow to find someone he could hurt and, more importantly, try to stop the reinforcements that were being called even now. Outside, he found half a dozen Emmas running down the strip of dirt masquerading as a road.
They’d produced spears and blades from somewhere, which made the fact that they were wearing otherwise normal street clothes or waitress outfits that much more surreal. The very first thing that he did was take the tiny one-carat ruby out of his pocket he’d been carrying for just this sort of moment and throw it up into the air as he charged it with mana, where it exploded in midair in a flash of brilliant red.
It wasn’t fully dark yet, but it was dark enough that such a display would be visible for miles, and there would be no mistaking it. He’d had another ruby and an emerald just in case. Both of them were signal flares intended to let Raja know that it was time to send the army this way. The only difference was that green meant everything was fine, but red told his friend that they should be ready for killing.
It was only once that was done that Benjamin finally cast the vampiric bolt that had been on the tip of his tongue for the last minute to knock the closest assailant into the dirt, but he only used the spell at level two because he couldn’t bear the idea of hurting her too badly.
Even that was enough to feed him the briefest backwash of memories. He saw an orange orchard and a city by the beach that looked almost but not quite modern, and then it was gone. He pushed it out of his mind. He’d always hated these strange snapshots of other people’s lives, but after all the research he’d done, he understood that he was either stealing or copying little pieces of their souls with this attack.
That’s where the mana that was returned to him actually came from. As far as he was concerned, that made him worse than a vampire on some level.
Benjamin didn’t dwell on that, though. Instead, he ordered Miku, or Ethan, or whoever it was he was dealing with, “Stop this. Order them to shut down or whatever.”
“I can’t,” Ethan said with a smile. “These are not my servants. They are my master’s, and I have no ability to unring the bell—”
“Then put them out of their misery,” Benjamin interrupted, feeling sick at the order. Part of him wanted to find a way to save all of them, but even as their disguises began to fade as the fighting intensified, he couldn’t entirely suppress his urge to find a way to restrain and save them.
None of them are Emma, he reminded himself, but they were still people, and it was still a waste of lives.
“Gladly,” Ethan smiled.
Even as he did so, the hydra began to appear. It was an ugly thing with ebony scales and glowing green eyes, and even as the charging furies tried to go around it to strike at their primary target, they proved no match for their primary target, and the large serpentine heads grabbed them no matter how much they tried to dodge or fight.
Benjamin didn’t watch, but the screams and sounds of bones crunching were enough to make him flinch as he proceeded to the house at the end of the street. It was supposed to be the place he’d rented his last year of school. It was just another front, though.
In his interrogation of Miku, he’d learned that most of these were empty. They lacked the information to give them the same compelling interiors. That one had the mirror and the messenger that was already sending word that the operation was blown.
He didn’t even try to go inside it. God knew what trap awaited him in there. Instead, he cast fire spray at level 4, engulfing the whole side of the building.
It wasn’t enough, though. He told himself that whoever was in there might still be able to escape as he hit it again and again, tapping his own life to refill his mana each time he depleted it.
Once that building was fully engulfed, he moved on to the next one and the one after that. Somewhere deep inside Benjamin, he’d bottled up all the anger from this screwed-up situation, and now that he’d opened it even a little, it all came pouring out.
A demon had built a little diorama of his life, and he couldn’t even remember enough to be sure that all the pieces were correct, and it sickened him. Even as he saw a green pyre flare in the distance, he still couldn’t pull himself away from the carnage until every last building on this side of the street was in flames.
He only snapped out of it when Matt finally walked up to him and said, “They’re coming.”
“They are,” Benjamin agreed, “but so is Raja. It will be fine.”
Benjamin looked over his friends and saw a mix of expressions, but none of them were good. Even Emma, who was usually thrilled to be spattered in so much blood, seemed pensive. “You know, these would have made great cover for whatever it is they’re going to hit us with next, idiot,” she said sourly when she caught his eye.
That made him smile. He felt like he hadn’t seen either of them in a long time, and he missed them terribly. “Cover?” Benjamin asked. “Why should we take cover from them? They’re the ones that are going to have to take cover from us.”
Both of them looked at him with confusion, and that confusion only deepened when he called Ethan over and forced him to banish his slavering hydra. “We’re going to call out the big guns and see how they like it.”
“Big guns?” Matt asked. “But your focus or whatever you call it is miles away. I didn’t think you could use it from here.”
“Nah,” Benjamin said with a smile, “That thing will never make it in time. Raja probably won’t either, but that’s fine - I learned a new trick during dinner.”