⸂Yeah,⸃ another child agreed. ⸂Just like Carne.⸃

Emilia tilted her head in silent question, several of the children lighting up and beginning to explain who Carne was over each other. Loud and overlapping, Emilia only managed to retain a few details about whoever they were referring to.

⸂You!⸃ Gale growled, pushing her way into the group and glaring down at several of the animated children. ⸂You aren’t supposed to associate with that… that… that… ugh!⸃

Several of the children looked shyly away, their cheeks lighting up as they realized they’d been talking about something they knew they shouldn’t have been. The excitement had gotten to them. Most of the kids, who Emilia abruptly realized were all homeless children, or at least from unstable homes, simply rolled their eyes at the teenager.

⸂Come on, Gale,⸃ Sawyer sighed, arms crossing over his thin chest as he glared the older girl down. ⸂It can’t really be a surprise we’ve been hanging with Carne. You must have guessed as much, when you learned we were messing around in here.⸃

Gale glowered at Sawyer, the de facto leader of all the homeless children, at least until they got out of this place. ⸂Carne is bad news.⸃

⸂Maybe,⸃ Sawyer agreed, shrugging like it was nothing, ⸂but they’re also cool.⸃ The boy’s eyes flicked over Gale, a smirk tugging at his lips. ⸂Not that you’d know anything about being cool.⸃

Emilia snorted—she just couldn't help herself. Children were just so funny! Obsessing over what was cool and what wasn’t. She’d been the same when she was little, although not quite so young as them. It hadn’t been until her teens and twenties that she became stupid enough to care about things like what was cool and what wasn’t. The cool things to wear and do, to listen to and watch.

Thankfully, she’d never been as obsessed as some of her friends were, only generally finding interest in things that were cool because, most of the time, they were cool for a reason. Not always, of course. Sometimes things that were cool just had fantastic marketing, or got some added prestige from being expensive or difficult to acquire or do.

The same went for things that were uncool! Sometimes, a common understanding that something wasn’t cool meant it really wasn’t. More often, it just meant some cool person hadn’t liked it, and that feeling had echoed out through their friends. Halen had been considered cool at their school. Halen hadn’t liked action movies, and half their class had avoided ever watching them, simply because they worried what the cool kid would think of them if he found out.

Luckily, by the time they’d had to spend swathes of time around each other during the war, Halen had mostly grown out of his penchant for teasing people for being into things he deemed uncool. Not completely, but the tone of his teasing had definitely shifted from the maliciousness of a teen into something that simply… was by the time of his death. Something gentle and friendly with most people—those he hadn’t grown up with, anyways.

His teasing, both when they’d been classmates and teammates, hadn’t personally bothered her. She’d spent the majority of her life being judged by outsiders. Besides, if she had been concerned with only liking and interacting with cool things, she would have had to drop being friends with Rafe and his brother. They were not cool—well, Rafe wasn’t. His brother had become cool, in his own odd way, over their teens and into the present. Her caring about being cool as a teenager would have meant ditching them. They had been her best friends—her rocks and support system more than she’d even realized until her late teens—and as much as she’d effectively ditched them after the war, it wasn’t because they weren’t cool.

Still, having been even vaguely interested in things just because they were cool was kinda embarrassing now. Then again, it was a bit embarrassing looking back on all the things she’d been into as a teenager. Being young was just a long stream of embarrassing moments, interspersed with joy and freedom and breathing in the world’s knowledge like it was the source of life itself—at least, that’s what it had been to her. She knew many people found no joy in their childhoods, no freedom, only the prisons of their parent’s rules.

Not to mention all the people who not only hated learning but had somehow managed to pop out of their compulsory education knowing absolutely nothing. That alone was an impressive skill—usually the government stepped in to make sure students learned at least the basics of the fundamentals of life and science before they graduated. Those people who had somehow managed to slip through the cracks were rare, but she’d met a few during the war. Just like everyone, they could be sweet or terrible. Just because someone hated learning, it didn’t make them a bad person! That said, it had often meant their usefulness on the field was lacking, given most couldn’t… you know, remember the strategy for assaults or be relied on in emergencies.

Regardless of what things had filled a person’s formative years, however, from the stories she’d heard other people tell, it seemed as though practically everyone looked back on their youth through the glasses of time and common sense they’d lacked at the time. Young brains were still developing and were often unable to gasp how terrible some of their interests and decisions were.

This? Bickering over whether this Carne was cool or dangerous, whether Gale was uncool or not, was one of those moments that would be a stain of embarrassment for at least one of them later in life.

“I just have to make sure they actually make it out of here and to that later,” Emilia grumbled to herself as she slowly slipped her hand away from Caro and moved to snap her broken fingers back into place. She’d only had to deal with the consequences of this sort of forced grounding a few times over her life, mostly when faced with terrible raids and trauma. Usually, she’d just book it to the nearest clinic. They asked questions, sometimes. Usually, the nurses were too tired and done with whiny patients to bother with her. She was quiet, considerate, and generally patient, things that meant she got bumped ahead of everyone else regularly, even when other, even less serious injuries brought her in.

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…

“Should I be concerned with how often I end up at the clinic?” she wondered as she sucked in a grounding breath. Realistically, the fact that she kept herself so knotted up meant she was more likely to be injured than most, her body often trying to move in ways it was no longer quite capable of. Then again, even when she’d been younger, she’d been a constant sight at the clinic in her hometown. That hadn’t been the result of too many knots, so much as too much confidence and not enough common sense. She liked to think she had more common sense now, but then again…

Her finger tightened around her finger. “Count to three and…”

Luckily, the sound of the children arguing covered up the sound of her fingers cracking back into place. They might not be able to hear the sound, but Emilia had never been a fan of hearing her own bones break—anyone’s really. There had been more than a few times during the war—and occasionally during her daredevil youth—where she had been forced to listen to the bones of her allies snapping.

Hiding under dead bodies, hoping the enemy wouldn’t see her as they ripped the body of someone she had known apart. Bones snapping in their giant maws. Blood dripping out across the world. Sinew and flesh ripping apart and—

And she really shouldn’t be thinking about this. Life was already hard enough, at the moment. The last thing she needed was to be either panicking—again—or losing her lunch… or stolen bits of questionably prepared food.

“We should make some food to take with us,” Emilia signed at Miira, who was blinking awkwardly between Gale and Sawyer. The younger girl had tried to intervene in their increasingly mean-spirited argument, but neither had seemed inclined to listen. Given neither were letting magic spiral out of them, Emilia wasn’t particularly concerned. The two weren’t friends to begin with, so ruining a friendship with awful words wasn’t a possibility.

That said, she had no idea if they were actively choosing to keep their energy and magic contained, or if it was a residual effect of her own energy encompassing the room. The host had yet to return, even the small spark of life she had identified as belonging to the thing having remained absent from her senses as her energy slowly dissipated from the room. Her energy was still there, even if it was lessening, following the natural flow of the aethernet as it circulated the room.

That alone was strange, being capable of feeling that natural flow, her connection to her energy highlighting those the aether’s movement. In her world, Censors largely did that interfacing for their users, but even then, most skills didn’t require such finicky calculations. Only the most powerful and complicated skills required such information, melding their code to the world from use to use—even second to second, if the skill was long-lasting—to optimize it. Those skills, rare and destructive, were what made sub-30s the power they were on the battlefield. It didn’t matter how much Censors could take the burden off a person’s brain and core; unless they had the innate core strength and aetherstores required, the person wouldn’t manage to let the skill loose—or worse, kill themselves in a backlash. Sub-30s didn’t always satisfy those requirements, but those who did…

Well, there was a reason why their division, composed entirely of sub-30s, had been the most powerful unit during the war—had been the only reason the war was won, as far as most people were concerned.

Still, even in all her years on the front lines, working alongside Baalphoria and the Free Colony’s most powerful soldiers—not to mention designing many of their most powerful skills—Emilia had rarely seen the aether etched in this much detail. This—magical as it was, not just in the literal but the metaphorical sense—was not something that happened in her world without something having gone terribly wrong, or someone from one of the Free Colonies—the ones that utilized their cores—burning themself out.

Emilia pressed a hand to her core as she, Miira and several of the other children—those who weren’t egging Sawyer or Gale on in their bickering—worked to prepare food for their travels. They could very well push open the next door and find the heartcore and exit. They could be popping out the exit in moments, and find themselves surrounded by people who would help them—people who would feed them something that wasn’t the suspect food they were putting together.

That certainly could happen, but Emilia was a soldier, and soldier’s prepared for the worst. Better to waste time over-preparing than step out into a firestorm when you hadn’t put on pants.

…

There may have been at least one time when she had gone into battle without pants, but there had been extenuating circumstances! There had been people dying! And she hadn’t gone far from base. She could have always popped back in and gotten pants if things got worse. They hadn’t, and thankfully, during The Flaming, all picture evidence of her fighting nearly naked had been destroyed… probably. Emilia had some suspicions that Olivier, who she had drunkenly sent a photo to, might still have a copy.

Olivier had been one of the fortunate people, during The Flaming. There had been a handful of people, herself included, who had been outside of the attack’s reach, their own abilities and records untouched. The entire world had been lucky they were, when the flesh and blood attacks had come soon after. Nearly everyone had been left scrambling to rewrite skills that had been blown across the aethernet, remnants of them only found in the memory and code of those who had been spared The Flaming.

⸂This should be enough, I think,⸃ Miira said as they finished packaging up the food.

Some of the younger children sat nearby, eating quietly, along with some of the most despondent children. A few of them had avoided eating, determined not to interact with anyone, determined to reject any attempts at kindness. They could only avoid their hunger and thirst for so long, however, and apparently the time to crack was now.

Thankfully, eating also seemed to be snapping a few of them out of their stupor, and several of the more observant children had plopped down near them to try and drag them further out of it.

That was good. Just like in the first labyrinth, each subsequent challenge appeared to be more difficult than the last. This one hadn’t exactly been difficult, but it had certainly been time-consuming and laborious. The more capable, moving hands they had, the better.

Plus, Emilia couldn’t shake memories of the last challenge—couldn’t ignore the fact that the labyrinth may very well give them another challenge with a penalty like the water slides: an unavoidable challenge, unless others risked themselves for those who couldn’t participate.

They really couldn’t afford to lose more of their group, especially not when she couldn’t split herself in half. If more children disappeared, she wouldn’t be able to chase after them without risking those who remained in this realm.

Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to make sure a decision.

Not now. Not ever.