Emilia hugged her legs closer, trying to bury herself further out of view as a group ran by, someone screaming at the others that no one in the raid knew shit about how to fight mech invaders.
“Give everyone a break,” one of the boys—and he truly seemed to be a boy, probably only a few years into his 20s—said softly as they skidded to a stop just within sight of Emilia. “Mech raids have only been around for what? Two, three seasons?”
“This is so fucking stupid,” another boy hissed. The oversized sword in his hand clunked to the ground, too heavy for his level, even this late in the season. “Why’s everyone so fucking stupid!”
“Even the vets and top heroes can’t handle mech,” the first boy said sensibly, eyes widening when the other boy turned on him, berating him for making excuses for incompetents.
Emilia pushed herself further backwards. She didn’t need a bunch of children calling her incompetent or asking why she was hiding—why she was so pathetic that she’d bolted the moment she realized this was a mech raid. She hated mech raids. So did most veterans. Humans weren’t meant to fight machines. They were nothing like the enemies they had fought in the war that these stupid raids were supposedly meant to keep them prepared for a repeat of. They had fought monsters, not mechs or anything else made by human hands—not on purpose, anyways. Everyone who had survived long enough had taken out allies on the front, though. Blasted them out of the sky by accident or to stop crashing units from exploding across their own troops.
No one wanted to be reminded of the times they had killed one friend to keep more safe.
The group’s voices rose around her, their argument about whether mech really were that different from biological invaders—whether they really were that much harder to fight—intensifying and growing a little too personal. They were obviously friends, come to the raid together and hoping for a fun time. This was most certainly not fun—not that Emilia generally enjoyed raids, but this one was going spectacularly badly for everyone. That strain and tension was adding up, and by the sounds of it, this group was going to be getting out of here with some hurt feelings.
Emilia almost wished she could pop out of her hiding spot to set them straight, to tell them that yeah, actually, mechs were that much harder to deal with. Give them someone external to argue with, so they could leave just as happy and ignorant as when they entered.
Almost.
Instead, she tilted her head upwards, watching as an electric skill spliced through the aethernet and connected with an invader. Its limbs sputtered and steamed. For a moment, it looked like it might split apart, burst into a thousand nuts and bolts—pieces of aether the system had gathered together, twisted and mangled to create this game for them. Then, its eyes bulged, violent purple beginning to burn black, and it was exploding forward towards the hero—the stupid designation for people participating in raids—who had attacked it.
Mech raids were too new, too rare. Even the people who lived and breathed for raids hadn’t figured out how to consistently defeat them with more than a handful of difficult to master skills. Easier to use, mech focused skills were being released slowly—too slowly—but even they barely took the edge off these fights. Almost no one’s willbrand could make a dent in those things either—especially not the shit-tier willbrands that the government had been dolling out to everyone since the war ended—and when Emilia peaked forward, watching the boy with the too big sword slide towards an invader, it collided harmlessly across the thing’s too wide chest.
The boy yelped in surprise, tried to bolt backwards, but his slide was too sloppy. The invader’s thick, metal tail collided with his torso and he was sent slamming into a wall.
[???: HP 0%] popped up across her Censor, and Emilia swiped it away in annoyance. It didn’t take a genius to realize that kid was unconscious. The system had cushioned the blow enough for him to have not sustained any serious damage, but he was definitely going to be sore for a day or two.
She glanced at the stats in the corner of her vision, her own HP untouched as more and more heroes fell. There were too many invaders left, too few heroes. At this rate, the raid was going to last late into the evening, the system resisting letting the raid end until it was convinced there weren’t enough heroes for a potential victory.
Would it even let them leave, with her here and untouched? Her current level might be pretty pathetic, but it knew her. Knew she was powerful and skilled when she wanted to be.
She didn’t want to be. Not here, not now.
She never wanted to be forced to be powerful again, not against things that her instincts told her contained friends, even if she logically knew they didn’t.
Emilia clamped her eyes closed as a scream echoed from somewhere in the distance, bouncing off the sides of the towering buildings. She had just wanted a snack, some sweet food she couldn’t afford with her measly student paydrop, not a trip into a nightmare—into a raid she couldn’t opt out of.
“Breathe,” she reminded herself, sucking in a shuddering breath as the world began to bend and break, the tall buildings of Piketown giving way to the rubble of memory. Blood and gore and the screams of dying comrades because there were never enough supports to do more than protect those still alive and moving.
“Move,” she hissed at herself. “Move.”
“Move, Emilia,” another, deeper voice called to her, death already twinning through his voice. “Don’t die here, protecting me. Go.”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Emilia scrambled up, heart slamming in her chest as she ignored the warning from her Censor about Balance Levels. How surprised would he be, to know she was listening to him now, of all times? She hadn’t moved that time, almost a decade ago now. She had stayed to die beside her friend and torn the world apart keeping them safe.
Torn a hole in her soul itself, keeping him alive.
Another scream rang through the air, and Emilia sucked in a long breath, exhaling the tension back into the aether, her core shuddering with effort. She wasn’t saving the world today, but those were still people out there, dragged into the government’s stupid raids just like her. Children who didn’t know better. Veterans who wanted to be anywhere but here.
She could do this. She so totally could.
✮ ✮ ✮
[You have defeated Mech Lo—]
[You have gained—]
Emilia swiped the notifications away as she let {Starshine} scatter through the air towards another invader.
[You have def—]
[You have—]
“Shut up,” she mumbled to herself as she lined up another shot, aether gathering through her willbrand before she let another shot of {Starshine} go. More notifications flashed across her Censor, which she resolutely ignored.
She really couldn’t understand why you could mute communication within a raid, but not the over-the-top notifications. It was generally pretty fucking obvious when you’d killed an invader, a notification about it was redundant. She cared even less about whatever she’d gained. Any item drops from invaders this weak wouldn’t be worth much, and she didn’t need or want the experience, stacking up until it rolled her level down, closer to the perfect 0 top heroes craved so badly. Even if she had cared about her level—which she most certainly did not—it was too late in the season to bother actively trying to level down. She’d be lucky to be sub-100 by the time the season ended in a few weeks.
She sighed, looking around for another invader, but she’d cleared out this area, the little map on her Censor indicating she’d have to travel a bit to get to the next swarm. Annoying, and as much as she’d connected to the communication network before muting it, there wasn’t anyone in the raid she knew and could bum a slide or spark off of.
Emilia pushed herself up, her willbrand shifting from giant ass gun into a smaller, handheld one that she could easily travel with. It wouldn’t do much, if she was forced to use it against an invader, but it would fare better than a close combat weapon.
She turned, making for the upline she’d used to get to the roof and clumsily connecting to it. Her D-Levels were too high to let her ease down it, and instead she half-crashed to the ground. She cursed, watching as her HP lowered a bit, the raid system making a judgment call that her crash had lost her 10% of her HP. It hadn’t—the system was just making shit up, like it always did. The only time its HP counter was accurate was when it said 0% because the hero was unconscious.
She really hated this. Not just the raid part—that part sucked to begin with—or the feeling like she was killing allies part, but the inane boredom of fighting mechs. She was a get up close and personal fighter. Barriers! Swords! Close range skills! That was where her passion—limited as it was—and skill lay! Well, that wasn’t quite true. She was just as skilled at shooting enemies down, but the monotony of aiming and firing, aiming and firing, aiming and firing—
It was going to drive her insane, especially against mechs, which required so much aiming it wasn’t even funny. Most mech invaders required precise shots, shots fired at just the right moment and angle to slip between sheets of metal to hit their internal structures and trigger explosions—big ones. Emilia had already accidentally taken out a few dozen heroes who had chosen to get in her way and been a bit too close to the mechs when she shot them down.
The irony that she was perfectly okay taking out stupid heroes and not mechs because they felt like they contained friends was not lost on her. That said, the heroes would be fine, the raid system protecting them from most damage and disallowing any skills that would cause real damage to them—unfortunate, given Emilia had a few, real-world-only skills that could have easily taken out most of the raid’s mechs in a single shot. Granted, she’d probably send the majority of the heroes to hospital as well, but sometimes you just had to accept that collateral damage was unavoidable.
That was another reason she hated these mech raids more than the more standard, biological ones: they normalized collateral damage. Even connected to the communication network now, ordering people to stay out of range of her attacks, people were still ignoring her, putting themselves in danger in an attempt to earn a bigger paydrop—in an attempt to lower their level just a little bit so they could get bigger season rewards.
Emilia didn’t need any season rewards, not unless they were offering heroes the ability to leave raids at will. Now that she would rank #1 for, thanks.
Emilia sprinted from tree to tree, watching her surroundings and map for invaders as she went. Usually, invaders showed on the map, but black sites and aether enhanced objects could screw with the aethernet and erase things. More heroes were taken out because they were relying too heavily on their maps than much else. Emilia wasn’t going to be one of them.
Around her, heroes who had been taken out sat dazed on the ground, their eyes empty as the sound of the few remaining heroes fighting mechs a few streets over surrounded them. Emilia had always thought the raids stupid, the government's proposed reasons for them weak and questionable, but at least people had been able to find joy and amusement in the biological ones. Fighting monsters you could beat was fun, fighting ones you could not was war. What good was leveraging raids to keep people prepared for another war if you traumatized everyone in the process? If you trained them to view machines as the most dangerous thing on the field—machines that would contain their allies in a real war?
Emilia skidded to a halt in front of another upline, listening for the sound of anything too close before clasping her hand around the aether filled bar.
[You have attempted to connect to Piketown.upline#736]
[Warning: Records indicate you may be unable to use uplines solo]
[Do you still wish to connect to Piketown.upline#736?]
Emilia mentally chastised her Censor for being too cautious as she told it, “Yes, I do fucking want to connect.” It had been having issues recently, and while she had been mostly ignoring the errors and sarcasm, it was getting a bit excessive—
Emilia stumbled as she reached the roof, nearly falling to her knees as the world spun.
[Your records have been updated]
[Inelegant exit from Piketown.upline#736 added to records]
“Seriously?” Emilia hissed at her Censor as she peered off towards the next batch of mechs—a group of 15 fighting at least two heroes, by the looks of it. They were a bit far off, and she wasn’t connected to their communication network, but they would figure out they needed to get out of there after the first mech exploded.
She squatted down, willbrand shimmering back into a large, metallic purple gun. Aether immediately began gathering inside it, the clear casing on top beginning to glow faintly golden.
[Skill {Starshine} Activated]
“Sorry,” she whispered to the unknown heroes as her skill connected perfectly, and the mech exploded into a cascade of blinding golden light around them.