The room—the entire fucking universe—held its breath as Gale and Miira slowly removed their hands from the miniature water slide. Every piece was so delicate, moulded over hours and hours of work. Half their group’s hands were stained with dye, ingredients caked under their fingernails—into their fingerprints themselves. Remnants of stolen bites streaked everyone’s cheeks, evidence of their theft laying under heavy eyes and dark circles. Where both inspirations for this challenge had had time limits, this one had not—one of several alterations that had both made their ordeal easier and longer.
Thankfully, as everyone watched with bated breath to see if their edible glue would hold, it also seemed their efforts wouldn’t be wasted.
“Thank the stars,” Emilia sighed to herself as a buzzer went off, excitement of a job well done screaming through the aethernet. Their host—who had popped in occasionally with snarky commentary and unappreciated jokes—had refused to tell them what would happen if their design wasn’t successful, but the potential consequences had not been something Emilia had hoped to experience.
Having to try again.
Being given a penalty challenge.
Everyone who participated vanishing and leaving the smallest, weakest members of their group to try again, or continue on alone through a suddenly open door.
Nope, nope, nope. Emilia hadn’t even been letting herself contemplate potential consequences for losing as they worked. Her heart knew their loss would have had terrible repercussions, her brain hadn’t needed to know as well.
⸂Congratulations~⸃ the host cheered, streamers exploding out of the aether. ⸂Now, tha~t was a good show of creativity and perseverance! Why! I thought that when the little klutz broke the whole damn thing, ya’ll would have thrown in the towel! Ah~ I do like being surprised by these things!⸃ it continued, sounding very much like it didn’t actually like being surprised.
The host was… an oddity. While it could simply be another construct of the system, Emilia wasn’t so sure. Something about it—about the words and phrases it sometimes used, the references lingering under its jokes…
No. It could be a construct of the system, but those constructs were usually designed to meld into the world of its creation. While she could admit that the labyrinths existed somewhere outside of this world’s reality, they also hadn’t felt completely foreign, the way she and other visitors did. Labyrinths felt like an extension of this world, strange and other, but still connected to it.
This thing, which had spent the last dozen plus fucking hours harassing them, didn’t feel a part of this world. It felt separate, like it was either a creation of the platform maintainer themself.
That—even the possibility of it—was pissing Emilia off. She knew people often viewed the residents of raids as nothing. Their lives meant nothing to so many people. Just meaningless ones and zeros someone had carved into the universe for bare breaths of time. They were not breathing, living things, even if they breathed and lived and loved in their own fucking way. For someone to sit around and watch these children suffer, however. To have had an active hand in their misery? Emilia—
Emilia sucked in a slow, grounding breath as they listened to the voice go on and on about all the mistakes they had made, her rage bubbling. The host, regardless of what or who was behind it, sounded like it was enjoying this—enjoying making children feel like they had failed when really they had just succeeded. They should be celebrating, and yet this cruel, hateful little thing was seemingly trying to make them feel like they should be apologizing for every little fuck up.
Everyone had done so well, been so strong. They had messed up and started over, taken breathers and passes. Cried and curled into little balls of shame, other children appearing over them to pull them out of their misery because it was ok. Mistakes happened. No one was hurt or bleeding, and they could try again.
The way the host was speaking, it was like it thought trying again—not giving up—was a defect in their personality and—
Energy exploded out of Emilia, filling the aether so profoundly that even she froze in shock. The voice of the host disappeared, not because it had grown silent in shock—although it may have done that as well, for all she knew—but because her energy had filled the world of the kitchen so entirely that it had been blasted out. There was no room here for it anymore, her power and presence filling everything so entirely.
There was only her.
The children stared at her with wide eyes, even the youngest aware enough of the flow of the aether to know something strange was happening, and it was because of her.
⸂Emilia…⸃ Gale said, the children having finally learned her name after they were bestowed with the ability to write to one another. ⸂You… you’re…⸃
⸂You’re so bloody bright!⸃ Benny said, eyes wide and shining with a glow that Emilia realized was coming from her.
Gold seeped out of her, her meridians stuffed with too much power. She hadn’t touched her core since they entered the labyrinth, save when the first children had disappeared. Both she and V had sent wisps of energy to search the area for any sign of where they had gone. Neither of them had found anything, but Miira had given her a funny look. Only her, and even though the girl had said nothing about it, she could guess: energy wasn’t meant to glow the way hers was now doing more often than not.
V’s could glow, but only when he wanted it to. During those moments of search, it was a silent, transparent existence, winding its way through the world in search of any clue as to what had happened to the children who had vanished. Hers glowed fucking golden. Loud and proud. Before, in the moments she had used it in the library labyrinth, it had mostly been clear, with occasional strands of gold escaping her. She had assumed it was the energy she had reabsorbed, following its accidental escape from her body while being chased by Cade’s babysitter. Something about it had changed during that chase, and whatever it was seemed to be spreading.
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Emilia didn’t feel any different, but she didn’t really think being capable of filling a room with her energy by accident was normal, especially not when her level was still so high—was it still high? She had been assuming all the visitor’s levels would stay at 300 until they gained access to the system, but had the rules actually said that? She didn’t feel different, but she was. That in itself felt wrong. Every knot across her genome she felt, like a stitch through her soul, and the fact that she couldn’t tell what was happening inside her now? It could be Payton, knotting and unknotting her as she went. It could be the system, dragging over her artificial levels, making her more skilled as time went on, or it could just be whatever the fuck she’d done to her core.
Hopefully, whatever she’d done wasn’t permanent. Given V could use his core as well, her ability to use her own was unlikely the result of a faulty entry point. That didn’t actually rule out that it was faulty, however, and that something of her experience was echoing back into her real body—or that her brain would remember how whatever this difference was felt, and then emulate it in the real world. She’d have a nebulae of a time explaining her glowing energy if anyone saw it in the real world.
A strangled breath escaped her—had she been holding it? No wonder she couldn’t stop her core from going nuts when she wasn’t even breathing. That wasn’t just the first thing teenagers learned in her world about controlling skills, but it had been told to her by Zach of this world as well.
“Breathe. Your breath is the light of the universe—of the aether—filling you up, connecting you to creation and all the power it bestowed upon us. Use that gift of connection to ground yourself—to fill this world of ours with your power in return.” Those were neither the words of Zach, nor of the grumpy teacher who had been responsible for drilling their first skills into them as teenagers. They weren’t even words from her swordmaster, calm and soothing and murderous presence that he was, seeming to slide into the mystery of the universe without conscious thought.
They were words from a book, one of the ones she, Rafe and his brother had secretly read during their childhood. She’d heard it reiterated a thousand times over since then. Teachers of skills. Her graviplex coach. Mentors for the thousand other sports she had learned. Doctors, other soldiers, Olivier the first time he’d fucked her ass.
Always fucking breathe. You’d think, after a lifetime of reminders to do so, she’d fucking breathe. Maybe that was why people were always reminding others to breathe? Didn’t matter how many times you were told to breathe, somehow it was always falling to the wayside. Fill your lungs—the entirety of them. Don’t be afraid to look fat. Get those yummy chemicals inside you, seeping into your blood and—
Emilia sucked in another shuddering breath, willing her brain to chill out—seriously, there were more important things going on! Chill! Focus! Thinking about breathing was all fine and good, except her meandering thoughts on the origins of breathing instruction weren’t helping! Another breath entered her, her lungs shaking with the effort. They needed to stop that, or she’d never get her core under control.
Fortunately, only she and the annoying host seemed to have been affected by her core going haywire. While all the kids could certainly tell something was going on, only the older ones seemed to be able to feel what was happening, and they appeared more concerned for her than themselves.
It was only a matter of time before they panicked. Not because of the absolutely insane amount of energy her core was letting loose, but because eventually, it would hit them: if her core burned out, they’d be alone. These three children, only on the cusp of even being teenagers, would be responsible for getting the others out, for figuring out what to do with them once they escaped this place. Gale, Miira and Sawyer might be responsible—might have stepped up to a challenge most kids their age would have balked away from—but they would never be able to manage all the younger children by themselves.
Fuck managing them, they wouldn’t even be capable of moving most of them. Forget the kids who were barely conscious of the world. The little ones? The ones like Astra and the nameless child who they’d had to cannibalize some of the missing children’s clothing to create clean diapers for? Gale, Miira and Sawyer wouldn’t be able to move those children. There were too many to carry between the five of them, Gale and Emilia weighing themselves down with as many children as they could manage because there were too many. They might have extra help now, as more of the children came to their senses. There were still too many little ones.
Too many.
Too many children.
Too many things to manage.
Too much trauma and sadness.
Too much hunger and sleep deprivation.
Too out of control.
Emilia’s finger snapped backwards as she forced herself to chill—forced herself out of her looping thoughts by force of pain and shock. It had been years since she’d been forced to use such brutal means to calm her heart and head, and yet here she was, doing so twice in so many days—or were they on the third day now? The library labyrinth and all she had experienced there felt so far away now, yet simultaneously, it felt like it had barely been any time since their escape. There had been a few days in between, but time was so stuttered and uneven in this place of dreams and nightmares.
⸂Emilia!⸃ someone gasped, her vision and mind too blurry to recognize who. One of the younger children, assuming the small figure who appeared in front of her, grasping her hands and tugging them away from each other, was the one who had spoken. ⸂Your hand!⸃
“It’s broken,” she mumbled, relieved that she could speak. Her eyes floated unevenly over herself—over what little of her skin was visible to her. She’d pulled up her sleeves to cook, but her {Blood Armour} still covered most of her arms. What skin she could see, however, was beginning to fade back to normalcy, the energy within her cycling back into her aching core.
Her uninjured hand moved, reaching for the bent digits that the child—Caro; she could see them properly now—was diligently examining.
⸂What are you doing?⸃ Caro asked, tugging her injured hand away from her searching one.
“I need to set them,” she said, attempting to sign something along those lines to the child. An impossible task, given the language barrier and her single-handedness.
They glared, although she was unsure whether they understood or not. ⸂Why did you break them!?⸃ they demanded instead, startling when Benny and several of the other, younger and homeless kids popped up beside them.
⸂That was so cool!⸃ one of them cheered. Emilia had learned nearly everyone’s name, save the few who weren’t speaking to anyone and no one knew, but there were too many children, too many potential sources of the young voice. ⸂Just like Carne, right?⸃