The world was red, but wrong. She blinked around, eyes landing on the stairs that would lead her back towards the stars, the black metal bent and twisted but still standing, then to the door. It hung limply off its hinges, the dull red metal bent but never broken. There was nothing sharp in this world—nothing save those forks, and her nails.

The world was still splattered with her blood. Gory paint pressing against the blackness that vibrated beneath it, trying to reach out towards her, but held back by her sacrifice.

She pushed herself up, stared up into the stars, before making her way out into the hallway. Her shoes snapped against the floor—that was wrong, too. Shining red met her feet, slippery and sharp, not tacky and squishing. There were no windows. Just a long red hall, splattered with her blood—how had it made it this far outside the stairwell?

Her blood, illuminating the world. Light vibrated out of it—out of her, too, she realized. Her entire body glowed, straight through her clothing. Her red shuddered out of her, cutting through the air and bouncing off everything in sight. A stream of gold raced after it, swinging carelessly through the world.

She ran a hand over the bare walls, her red nails glowing as they left slices in the thing that had eaten her. How huge it must be! To have an entire city inside—

✮ ✮ ✮

Emilia pulled in a gasping breath, eyes flying open as she returned to the world of the raid. She shuddered. Inside something. What a horrible nightmare thought that was.

She groaned as she shifted, arms stretching far above her head. She’d been sitting too long. However long she’d napped for the first time. The hours she’d spent messing around with her blood. Then, however long she’d been passed out for.

Her neck cracked as she rolled it. She felt stiff, but surprisingly awake. Hopefully that would last once she got up. Blood loss was no joke. Then again, this wasn’t the real world.

She looked around, hoping to perhaps find some sign of the system—some sign that she hadn’t just nearly bled out for nothing. There was no system, no Censor. No blood spattering over the world—although the damage to the stairs and the door remained. Nothing else to show for her trouble, tho—

Emilia’s eyes caught on a long, flat red stone, tucked under her knee. It was pretty—heavy in her hand when she picked it up.

It was also sharp. Sharper than the forks or her nails, although using it as a weapon would be difficult, given its shape—the shape of a blade without a hilt… or any other covering. Just carrying the thing around was going to be a massive pain in the—

“Fuck…” Emilia muttered, pushing herself up as slowly as she could. The world, surprisingly, did not spin. Her stomach did not roll. Her head didn’t even ache. Either she’d been out for a long fucking time, or the effects of her blood loss had healed itself. Hopefully, it was the latter. She really couldn’t do with losing more time, especially since she was going to have to drag her ass back up at least one flight of stairs and search for something to store her morbid weapon inside.

She held it gingerly as she pulled herself up the stairs, groaning at the effort. This was why so few people had joined this raid. No one wanted to be this weak. Even Pria’s pretty damn deficient Physical D-Levels were better than her current body’s, her chest heaving as she climbed, lungs burning, and by the time she reached the top, Emilia was half-tempted to sit back down. Somehow, she doubted she’d be able to get up anytime soon if she dared.

This floor was ravaged far more than any of the upper ones. Probably, heroes had returned here, either having realizing they had missed something, or searching for any clue they could find when they got nowhere. All the forks were missing—not just the sharp ones, but literally all of them. Which, fair. People needed to eat. Maybe the local restaurants didn’t supply utensils? Or people had to hunt their own food?

Emilia grabbed the one normal fork she did happen find. Just in case.

She looked around the dusty, destroyed little rooms. Worst-case scenario, she’d use something fabric to at least keep her {Blood Dagger} from slicing through her, or worse, her clothes. She might heal, but she wasn’t about to test if her clothing would as well. Something a little more sturdy than fabric would be better, but…

Emilia frowned, looking between several of the rooms, all of which were missing their bathroom drawers, even the one that had been present on every other floor—at least on the ones she had checked. She’d stopped checking when the dust had gotten too thick, every step kicking up particles that her body did not like.

An entire bathroom drawer, missing, was weird. She searched down the hall. All missing.

“Fuck…” she sighed, grumbling as she went up another flight of stairs, and then another, and another, until finally, she found a bathroom with its lone drawer still there.

She wiped a hand across her nose, running under the oppressive dust because this body had fucking allergies. Awesome. Just what she’d always wanted. Allergies were one of the few genes the government tested for from birth. There were a whole collection of knots and genes that gave you allergies to any number of things. The government was not having it. That shit was knotted out of children as soon as it showed.

Emilia sneezed, coughed, cursed and grabbed the drawer, retreating back into the relative safety of the stairwell. Relative, because the dust was stuck to her now. Stuck to her clothes and her nose, and life was horrible.

“Kill me now,” she muttered as she looked over the drawer, rubbing the back of her hand absently over her nose again. Drawer, drawer, what was special about this drawer?

Nothing, as far as she could tell. It was just a drawer, made of some material she couldn’t even guess at. Not quite wood, not quite metal. Definitely not any plastic she’d ever seen. It bent slightly in her hands if she exerted enough pressure. It popped back into position when she let it go.

She pressed harder, willing the seams that connected the five sides together to break and—

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Nope. The material snapped back with more force as she let it go, the sound of the snap echoing into the stairwell. Emilia slammed her hands against her ears as it vibrated around her, growing louder and louder and louder until she was sure her ear drums were going to burst and—

Yep, fuck. There once went. It didn’t particularly hurt, but when she pulled her hands away as the sound finally began to fade, her palm dripped with blood.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

A drop hit the drawer and melted a hole straight through it. The material sputtered, and when she went to touch it, her body wouldn’t let her get close for how hot it had become. It sizzled, and the smell of something melting reached her nose. Spicy and burning and making her want to sneeze.

Well, time to make herself a hilt of blood and weird ass substance, apparently.

Once, when she was in her late teens, she’d been given a grumpy old man as a babysitter. By that age, her parents had figured out why she was such a nuisance, always causing fights and getting into trouble, never paying attention in school, favouring the same two friends that their entire neighbourhood avoided.

She was just bored. People knowing she was bored was so much better than when they’d thought she was ungrateful or traumatized from her childhood.

Out went the old babysitters, mostly SecOps like Sasha—or whatever her name had been at the time—or actual babysitters. In came the new ones, people whose job it was to keep her entertained. Some had done better than others, but she’d erupted from those years with So. Many. Skills.

Not just skill skills, but more normal things—things sub-30s generally didn’t bother teaching their children. How to cook and clean. How to play way too many instruments and sports. She’d learned how to hack and program her own skills during her teens, too. Granted, she’d already been quite a skilled hacker, but that particular babysitter had been one of her favourites. He definitely hadn’t been meant to teach her hacking, but you didn’t become a hacker by following the rules.

Emilia was also certain that no one, not even her parents, had known he could program his own skills.

Her grumpy babysitter, Master Shaw, hadn’t been meant to be her babysitter. Her actual intended babysitter had been trying to teach her how to arrange flowers, the rules strict and boring. She’d run away—okay, so figuring out that she was just bored hadn’t completely fixed her parents’ problem child issues, whatever—and run into Master Shaw.

He had not liked her, but you didn’t say no to her dad, and her dad didn’t say no to her. She wanted to learn from Master Shaw, and while she hadn’t realize it at the time, Master Shaw was practically a slave to the family they were visiting. He hadn’t even been asked himself whether he would teach her.

You didn’t ask slaves what they wanted.

She’d felt bad about that later, knowing they’d been visiting with people—liking people—who kept indentured servants, people who had sold their lives away in desperation. Technically, they could always request their debt and freedom be returned to them, but very few ever did.

Thankfully, it wasn’t as common in Baalphoria as Emilia knew it was in some of the Free Colonies, with only a few sub-30 families in the Grey Sands and the far north keeping any—at least as far as she knew. It wasn’t exactly public record who kept them, and she’d never had the heart to ask Beth if she knew of any sub-50s who kept indentured servants. She wouldn’t put it past some of those families to be keeping their own private army of indentured servants, especially after all the poverty the war had caused.

Master Shaw grudgingly taught her how to forge weapons, over that long summer, his grumpy demeanour slowly growing on her, even softening a bit. It had been so hot, the forge burning away in that tiny shop—too tiny for someone as skilled and valuable as him—but she had known, even then, that she would never get a chance like that again. A chance to learn how willbrands were forged, back when only the rich and powerful bothered having them. Even then, very few had known how to use them properly. There was no war. There was always the potential of one, yes, but SecOps and Baalphoria’s tiny, standing army would handle any skirmishes at the border.

Then there had been a war, and Emilia’s willbrand, forged for her that summer, ripping the world apart in ways the world hadn’t seen in generations.

Forging a willbrand was most certainly not the same as repeatedly cutting her palm with a fork to melt whatever the fuck this drawer was made of into a makeshift hilt, but it definitely gave her an edge.

Emilia laughed at her own joke as she formed the hilt. She’d started off with basic weapons, just like this one. You didn’t jump straight into forging a willbrand—that shit could get you killed. There had been so few remaining willbrandsmiths back then, five decades ago now. Master Shaw had trained so many since then, after he had revoked his servitude during the war to join the military. Those students had trained more and more students of their own, and then they had corrupted the craft. The willbrands that had once required blood and sweat, transformed into weak weapons that the government gave out like candy for raids.

The government paid them so much, even for those sloppy weapons. Now, the only families in Baalphoria who could hope to win the contract of a truly skilled willbrandsmith were far and few. The de la Rues, the Laprises, the Daymarks, her own family. There were more families with wealth enough to do so, but she didn’t know them well enough to know if they bothered keeping a willbrandsmith on staff, just in case.

The hilt Emilia managed to make for her {Blood Dagger} was shockingly good, if she did say so herself. The scabbard was a little more suspect, but that was mostly because she’d tried to be a little too fancy making it—tried to add unnecessary details and ended up making it look more than a little mangled.

Ah, well, such was the life of a creative person! You were going to fuck shit up in the search for beauty!

All in all, she thought her master would approve of the weapon she had created, even if the blade making part had just sort of happened. She pushed herself off the floor, cursing as her back ached. Seriously!? How did ex-300s live!? This was horrible. Aches and pains just from sitting on the floor too long? What even was that.

She flipped the dagger through the air, testing out its weight, just as the man who had taught her how to fight had drilled into her.

“Know your weapon, Emilia,” his soft, ancient voice whispered in her ear. His robes had blown around them, black as always, even though it had been centuries since he had needed to camouflage blood covering him. “Unless you are about to die, never use a weapon that you do not know as you know your soul. It must be part of you.”

His phantom hands guided her movements, even as she wanted to laugh. This weapon was most certainly a part of her—probably a bit too much, in fact. It was perfectly imperfect. The weight strange and fitting. Every slash rippled through the air. The air screamed around it, as though her blood were cutting the universe itself—as though every move she made, the blade was trying to make the aether bleed.

She spun and danced. Years of practice flowing through her, ghosts of the past flashing through her mind as she cut them down, perfecting her movements as much as she could in such a flawed body.

Her cloak flew wide around her as she sliced through the neck of an invisible enemy, blood splashed over her and for a moment she was back on the battlefield, bodies collapsing around her. Fresh food for the monsters that chased them. One of her supports was killing themself—burning their core out, getting the blood off her. She’d been sloppy. She’d saved another support’s life, stepping between them and those deadly teeth. Now another support was going to die anyways, and all she could do was watch because they all knew the truth: she was more valuable than a thousand of them.

The world sputtered back into existence, and Emilia stood alone in the stairwell, dagger outstretched. She blinked at—blinked at the tiny line of black it seemed to have cut in the world. Then the cut was gone, and she had no idea what was real. What was trauma and memory and the platform purposefully fucking with its residents.

She sighed, sheathing her dagger and frowning. Where the fuck was she going to store this thing, anyways?