“That… is one huge ass door.”

Emilia’s head tilted back, her neck pinching and energy slowly swirling out of her core towards the ache. It was strange how naturally her body had begun to use her core to heal the parts that weren’t affected by the system’s healing—even her knees now hurt significantly less. It was also strange, how similar her real world core felt compared to this virtual one—not that she used her core enough to say definitively how similar they were. Still, she was interested to see if any of her newfound ability in manipulating her virtual core would translate to her real-world one. Even if what she achieved in the real world was a pale imitation of this, any extra edge she could get was—

Was what? It wasn’t like they were at war anymore, and she certainly wasn’t out using her skills to hunt echoes or even participate in raids.

It was an odd feeling, this return of her curiosity and intense desire to learn and expand herself, even if what she learned was useless information. She had so much useless information rattling around in her brain already—or, more accurately, information that she had once deemed useless. The war had shown everyone that you never knew where your seemingly silly hobby would come in handy.

Old habits die hard, but Emilia had murdered hers with knots. Those habits rising from the grave wasn’t exactly bad, but it was like reuniting with a long-lost friend, and it was awkward. Half of her wanted to embrace her returned desire to learn and expand her skills, the other half wanted to get the fuck out of there, to return to safe ignorance—not to mention all the partying and drugs and sex.

“Maybe I can combine them all together,” she mused to herself as she and Cade examined the door. “I always did like trying new things in bed—before Alliance Ridge, anyways…”

“There’s a keyhole,” Cade said, sounding more like he was speaking to himself than anything.

Emilia glanced towards Cade. His innocent act had all but fallen away as they walked. His eyes were too sharp now—too assessing of the environment. She couldn’t exactly tell if it was simply the abilities of an avid raider showing or those of someone far older than the thirty-one he’d claimed to be.

She sidled up beside him, peering at the humorously small hole, barely a speck compared to the towering door, so tall it disappeared into the darkness above. The hole looked about the size of the keyholes she’d seen on other doors in this world, ones on the front doors of businesses or in her spawn building—even if those doors had all been unlocked. There had also been the doors in the Risen Guard building. Her little room there had had a key, one seemingly made of blood and currently tucked into her bag along with her other blood items.

Cade barely looked at her, instead fumbling with the blood weapon he'd attacked her with when they first met. It didn’t actually look like a weapon, instead being a small red vial that Emilia assumed was filled with blood. Indeed, when Cade popped the stopper off the top, a drop of blood rose out of it. Another, another, another, more blood joined the first drop, forming a key shaped object, which the boy grabbed and slotted into the lock.

His face scrunched in concentration, the aether rattling erratically around him as he tried to, presumably, force his blood key to adapt to the shape of the lock. Even without being the one holding the key, Emilia could tell it wasn’t working. The aether vibrated and shook, but it reminded her of the night she had used the {Blood Orb}. Yes, she’d gotten the thing to work, but for the most part, it had been haphazard and outright dangerous to everyone in the room. Key had been the one to control it, and in hindsight, she imagined he had been using a combination of magic and his core to guide the orb’s {Blood Bubbles}.

This—Cade trying to force the key into the necessary shape—was just as shaky and uneven. Given the way his jaw clenched, his teeth grinding together as aether shuddered away from him, she was sure he knew that as well.

Emilia was extremely thankful she’d been, for one thing, closely watching her suspicious companion, and for another, had never really trusted him. If she’d been paying less attention or been even a little more trusting of him, she likely wouldn't have noticed his fake-{Blood Key} shifting into an arrow. She shot backwards, and the arrow spiked through the spot she had just been standing.

“Ah~ I’m sorry,” she sighed, smiling mildly at the boy. “Did I do something to upset you?”

Cade’s faux innocence dropped fully away. “I believe I will need another blood object to open this door.”

“And I’m your sacrifice? You know, either of us could bleed in a more sensible way trying to make a key. Why resort immediately to murder?”

The boy’s head cocked. His eyes were so dead. Emilia hoped the kid’s actual personality landed somewhere between naive child and cold-blooded killer. “Do you not know? Simple bleeding of us heroes only grants simple weapons.”

Emilia’s eyes flickered to the {Blood Vial}, which she definitely wouldn’t classify as a simple weapon. “Got your hands on a local’s blood, then? Or maybe you bled out another hero?”

“This is from the Risen Guard who tried to kill me. Do you not have one as well?”

“Sure, but it's a bit cumbersome, so I’d rather not bring it out.”

Emilia took a step back as Cade stepped towards her, his movements slow and calculated, while her own were jerky and uneven. “Do you have access to the system?” she asked. As much as she was playing up her own incoordination, the other visitor seemed shockingly skilled at moving, even though he also would have arrived in this world at level 300.

She hadn’t expected a few days to make sure a difference—not until visitors gained access to the system, anyways.

“No, but I’m not an irregular like you.” His voice wasn’t filled with the judgmental hatred of a purist, nor even that of those who viewed irregulars are a mild nuisance. Instead, it sounded more… matter of fact.

Emilia had never understood that generalization of irregulars as lesser, even if she’d experienced it more often than outright hatred. Yes, there were a number of physical irregularities that were always accompanied by mental deficiencies—at least, that’s what they were officially called. She’d known a few such people over her life, especially when she had been very young, still living at her first home. They weren’t deficient, just different from the regular population. Sometimes those differences made life a whole lot more difficult, but more often, they just made life something else—something unique to them.

There was nothing wrong with that.

Also, for every one of those physical irregularities accompanied by mental differences, there were dozens without any exact correspondence. If you had one irregular deviation, there was a significantly higher risk you had suffered multiple genetic spasms in the womb, yes, but there was no guarantee. Yet, people had looked at her her entire life and immediately assumed she had more wrong with her than simply silver hair and eyes.

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She’d never really been able to understand that easy assumption either, even if it came in handy at times like these. It really was too easy to act the foolish irregular when half the people you met automatically assumed that’s what you were on sight, and the other half wouldn’t question you if you started acting out.

“It shouldn’t make that much of a difference,” Emilia replied, throwing a little whine of complaint into her voice as she stumbled backwards, not quite falling over but coming close enough that she could see Cade briefly tensing to bolt towards her.

His lips twitched. “It does.” Again, there wasn’t exactly anything malicious in his words, more quiet acceptance that the world was what he believed it was. “I am sorry it has to be this way,” he continued, face and eyes softening for a moment, and Emilia hoped that was the real him—that the real person behind this boy was soft and kind and only playing the killer for the sake of the game.

He could have also been playing up that innocent act a moment more, however, and when he surged towards her, eyes once again icy sharp, Emilia was unsurprised. Still, she forced out a squeak of surprise, skirting out of the way and fumbling with her bag. That part, the fumbling, wasn’t on purpose—she didn’t actually want to get hurt or die, but the bag wasn’t familiar, and she had barely gotten in open when she was forced to drop to the ground, Cade’s arrows shooting through the place her head had just been.

Emilia swore as she rolled to the side, then rolled more as his {Blood Arrows} turned on her. Down they shot, slicing through the ground she had just been occupying. The only good thing was once his blood weapons hit something, they splattered back to liquid, which Cade seemingly couldn’t wield again. He’d left the drops from his initial attack, during their first meeting, littering the ground where they had fallen, and these ones similarly lay inert across the ground.

Emilia’s wisp of energy slipped out of her. It slithered across the ground, probing at the droplets before bolting up to wrap around another of Cade’s {Blood Arrows} midair. Thankfully, she was able to roll out of range again, but she had been herded by enough raid invaders to know he was doing exactly that: herding her towards a wall. Eventually, she’d run out of places to roll and—

The wisp shuddered back into her, confusing information surging through her mind.

“Please be reading this right,” she thought, sucking in a breath before rolling out of another arrow’s path, except this time she rolled back the way she had come. Droplets of blood stuck to her clothing, disturbingly hot even through all her layers. Luckily, all they did was burn slightly, no arrows shooting up through her, just as her energy’s information, garbled as it was, had assured her.

Her enemy hadn’t been expecting her to reverse course, and Emilia took the chance to get her feet back under her. By the time Cade snapped back into the moment, she was right in front of him. He cursed when her palm collided with his nose, and she was suddenly extremely thankful for the self-defence lessons her father had made her and her siblings take. They might have eventually figured out her D-Levels made normal self-defence relatively pointless for her—why know how to defend yourself as the weaker party when you are so rarely the weaker one—but it was suddenly extremely relevant to protecting herself in this world.

Too bad the one time she could have used it to protect herself in the real world, nearly a dozen years after those first lessons, she’d been too out of her mind to make use of it.

Cade staggered back, gripping his now bleeding nose. He spit out a few more expletives as he tried to keep his distance from her darting approaches.

She forced him back, back, his watering eyes and bleeding nose impeding his ability to stop her from herding him.

“Why isn’t it stopping?” he spit out—literally spit out, blood and saliva spraying out of him and forcing Emilia to once again bolt backwards.

“No idea,” Emilia replied, taking the separation as a chance to snatch her {Blood Dagger} out of her bag. She slipped it out of its sheath, stuffing the ugly thing back into her bag as she flipped the blade lightly in her hand. She hadn’t seen Cade use anything other than his {Blood Vial} to fight, but since he’d known that weapon’s forged from the blood of visitors were limited to physical weapons, she couldn’t rule out that he had something else on him. “I tripped while we were running from you and your friend. Scuffed my knees. They took a hot minute to clot.” She was also pretty sure they were bleeding again, after their rough treatment as she rolled across the floor.

Cade glared up at her, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose in an attempt to stop the blood. His eyes caught on her blade. “Yours, or some other poor sap’s?”

Emilia shot him her most dazzling smile. “Mine.”

“Impressive,” he said, truly seeming to mean it before bolting to the side.

Red slashed through the air and Emilia barely had time to block the arrow he flung towards her, her dagger slicing through the air and shattering it, just as it had the first. She knew her senses were off, but she was pretty sure that one had moved a lot faster than Cade’s previous attacks had.

The boy appeared before her, her balance not quite stabilized from her block yet, his eyes wild as he sliced upwards with some weapon he pulled from the pocket of his pants.

Pain erupted through Emilia’s cheek as she brought her own dagger down on him. Her frame was too small, though, and the Cade easily blocked her attack, their forearms crashing together. Fortunately, the jarring force of it was enough to send his weapon clattering to the ground. He yelped as she wrapped her other hand around his arm and tilted them backwards. They both crashed across the rough ground, Emilia gasping as his weight landed wholly on top of her.

Mostly, she was just thankful he had decided on the form of a young adult, still not quite fully matured. She was light, but so was he, and it barely took a moment before her breath returned, and she was tugging her arm and {Blood Dagger} out from between them—she was also thankful she hadn’t impaled herself accidentally when they fell.

That would have sucked and been terribly embarrassing.

Cade cursed, reaching to grab her wrist. He didn’t quite grab her, but the move did deflect her attack—instead of slicing into his shoulder, she instead got his forearm. His efforts to stop her were enough, however, and through his howl of pain, Cade managed to pin her wrist and weapon above her head.

“You…” he said between panting breaths. He swallowed, blood from his nose dripping across Emilia’s shirt. “You… are a lot of work.” He smiled down at her, something a bit too real in the cruelty of it. Even if he weren’t a killer in the real world, Emilia was sure that he did truly enjoy the blood and chaos of raid platforms.

“You have no idea,” Emilia replied, tugging ineffectually at her wrist and fighting down memories from too long ago—memories she had long thought healed. Her other hand shot up, palm once again colliding with the boy’s nose.

She hadn’t broken it the first time. This time, she most certainly had.

Cade screamed, although it sounded more outraged than pained. His other hand came down across her face, his thighs tightening where they rested against her hips. “Bitch.”

Well, if anything, the fact that he was stupid enough to let his fingers get anywhere near her mouth was a testament to the fact that he had no experience with manhandling women to the ground. Her teeth latched onto his hand, his howl of rage shifting to one of pain and outrage.

“Let go!” he yelled as he tugged his hand free, not that she had particularly been trying to keep hold of it.

“You have five seconds to get off me, or I’m going to kill you,” Emilia spit up at him, the hand pressed above her head twisting and tugging while she rammed her free hand into the base of his jaw, blood from his nose slowly leaking down her arm. “Five.”

“Fuck you,” Cade bit back, ignoring her countdown. He shook out the hand she had bitten before reaching for his dropped weapon. “I’m going to win this, even if I have to kill to do so.”

“Two. One—last chance to move.”

Cade glared down at her as much as he could, what with her hand forcing his head upwards. “Sorry,” he said, sounding like he actually meant it. “I hope your mind isn’t stuck alone in here until the raid ends.”

His weapon came down, and Emilia let the magic of the {Blood Ring} Zach had given her crash upwards.