“Hey there, Em.”

Emilia stilled, refusing to look towards the voice at her back. “You aren’t real.”

A laugh, just the same as always. Filled with love and a healthy dose of something else—something that a younger version of herself had been unable to name. Although, maybe it had more been that she was unwilling to voice any definition for the terrible emotion seeping out of the man she loved—out of the man who was supposed to love her in return.

No wonder Olivier had disliked the man enough to come to blows with him.

“As real as Halen was,” her ex said, his steps soft over the invisible ground.

“Halen wasn’t real either,” she whispered—why was she whispering? Had she whispered when she spoke to him during their life together? Had she feared his moods the way she did now? It seemed like she hadn’t, but her memories from those years before Alliance Ridge were always blurry with the strain of grief and trauma.

“You sure talked to him like he was,” he said, closer now. Right behind her, a threat of… something. This wasn’t real, there was nothing he could do to her here in this world of red nightmares.

Emilia’s lips twitched as she turned to look at him. Unhappy eyes blinked back at her, all but hidden under unruly red hair. “You fit in here,” she said, one of her placating smiles pulling across her face, although she had no idea which body she was currently inhabiting, how well such a recently unused smile would translate onto her features.

She didn’t even use this carefully manicured smile on her teachers these days. There was no one she cared about enough to placate—no person or consequence she feared enough to humour in such a way.

“Oh?” he asked, blackish eyes flicking between her own. “Here? In your mind?”

Her head shook, long hair whipping around her—her own body then, or something closer to it than the one she’d created for the raid. “In this raid—I assume since you were eavesdropping on my conversation with Halen, you don’t need me to explain the details to you?”

Blank eyes blinked back at her. Not even humouring her then. Emilia would have liked to say the man in front of her wasn’t her ex—that he’d almost always been the smiling, snarky man he had faced the world with. She couldn't.

Originally—naively—Emilia had thought seeing all the aspects of the man she had come to love was an honour—something only given to someone he loved. Like so many things about their relationship, she now looked back on those secret sides of him with vacant, aged eyes. Where she had previously seen truth and honesty, she now saw burden and… and she didn’t want to say abuse, but it certainly felt like it at times.

When the man you love is only ever a handful of moods in front of everyone you know, it can be hard for people to accept he has other sides—darker sides—and while the man had never hurt her, never raised a hand or skill at her… there had certainly been times when Emilia had worried he would. There had been mood swings and cruelty of other sorts. Cruelty of silence and isolation, of nights spent out with his friends, coming home drunk and snide.

“I should have let Olivier hate you,” she found herself telling him, unsure where the honesty was suddenly coming from. This man wasn’t real. He didn’t care about her opinion of him. Then again, maybe that was why it was so easy for the words to slip out of her. “I worked so hard to make him like you, or at least tolerate you. Two of the people I loved most. I needed you to like each other as well.”

Those empty eyes sharpened, something unkind entering them—that part that he had never let anyone else see. Even when he and Olivier had been fighting, their skills shuddering through the base and blowing difficult to replace equipment up, only Olivier had been upset—irate, practically.

“Fighting over a girl,” one of her ex-lawyer’s bodyguards had been saying as she came to check on him, tucked away in a little prison cell, far from the cell where her ex was being held.

“That man isn’t good for her,” Olivier had replied, tone just as hard as when he’d been speaking to her ex. It had been a long time since she’d heard it that cold, and other than a few times during her court case when he’d been questioning officials who had spoken badly of her, she’d only ever heard him speak so coldly to her, although that had been decades past by that point.

The moments after that were faded in Emilia’s memory, but she knew whatever she’d said to him had been bad. They’d made up, of course, and Olivier had come and tried to make nice with her ex. The two of them hadn’t even spoken to each other that night, behaving like immature children as they held independent conversations with her between. Terrible.

Then, her ex had been dead and Olivier had been there, helping to pick up the pieces of her—helping the remains of their unit pull themselves together so they could keep going.

A snarl ripped across her ex’s mouth, for the barest of moments before it flattened back into that blandly unimpressed face. It was fast, but not fast enough, and before he could react, Emilia was letting skills she didn’t know she had rip through the aethernet. He slammed into an invisible wall, a gasp escaping him as she sparked forward to glare at him. Skills felt strange, without her Censor there to guide her, but whether due to the system or the dreamscape or the raid itself, she could feel them gliding through her body. Ones and zeros that the aether had etched into her core.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

No, that was crazy. Whatever the reason for her ability to use skills was, it certainly wasn’t anything like numbers and data scarred into her.

Probably.

“Who are you?” she asked, more skills racketing through her as the man struggled.

“You know who I am, Em,” the phantom clone of her ex said, all empty annoyance with her gone, that mask of carefree happiness suddenly pulled over his voice and features. His lips quirked up, that smile that had always had all the girls swooning—even she had been able to admit, back when they hated each other, that he was an attractive man.

A scream broke free of him as she squeezed her skill. “You are not… him,” she said, voice and brain skipping over his name, just as it had done since the moment the dust settled over Alliance Ridge, their coms remaining dead as they screamed for someone—anyone—to respond.

His smile twisted, turning from charm and beauty into something she had never seen him wear before, even in the darkest moments of the war. “Says who? You? Because you knew me so~ well.”

The aether shuddered and suddenly the man—the thing—was free, its own skills throwing her across the empty, invisibly walled space. She was better at defence than both this thing and the man it had been modelled after, though, and thankfully her skills and instincts were in top shape at the moment. That was strange—should have been impossible, given even raids were not an escape from knots and trauma, but it was happening regardless.

Dream, then.

{Patterned Love} exploded out of the thing’s fists, the reality that she was seeing the techniques of someone she had once loved—techniques that she had designed for him, no less—thrown at her startled her, only her feet falling out from under her saving her from the attack plummeting towards her.

Just a dream.

Her core? Meridians? Something inside her shuddered as she rolled, sparking further out of the thing’s reach. {Rupturing Love} automatically found its way through her, out of her. Mirror skills, designed together—designed to be each other’s companion in war. They weren’t meant to meet like this.

A dream she could wake up from.

They were going to meet like this. There was no stopping it. The two skills collided, not converging upon a shared enemy but upon each other, each of their users thrown back by the explosion that rattled their invisible fight cage.

You need to wake up!

Emilia spatted into the clear wall, her insides smushing and grinding against her bones. The world blurred—was her brain spatting, too? If her brain was flattened within a raid, would she die? What a way to die, killed by a creature masquerading as her ex.

“Emilia!” the thing hissed at her, its limbs pulling inhumanly off the wall it had crashed into. Too long—its limbs were too long, like a nightmare had forced itself into human flesh. That flesh bubbled and broke, a galaxy of sparkling ones and zeros breaking across the surface. “You think you know so much,” it spit out, its body wobbling towards her.

Was one of its legs longer than the other? It certainly seemed that way.

The thing sparked, and suddenly, it was right in front of her, her own body still trapped against the wall. She tried to pull away from it—from the monster, from the wall—but she couldn’t. Blocked from avoiding the monster, her body stuck to the wall behind her.

Prisoner—she was a prisoner.

“Just so fucking smart,” it sniffed, its visage suddenly falling back into her ex, the conversation falling into one that she had always imagined her ex wanted to scream at her but had never had the backbone to. “You aren’t that smart, you know.”

“I know,” she agreed. Emilia knew she wasn’t that smart—wasn’t as smart as she’d often felt she was before the war, or worse, been told she was by well-meaning adults.

She hadn’t been expecting her words to appease the thing, but she hadn’t been expecting it to explode in rage either. Burning black eyes widened, that snarl crashing across its face once more, all resemblance to her ex lost under the vitriol and jealously that he’d never been able to voice, only poke at with snide remarks and silence.

Please! Wake up!

Then, that sneering look was gone—vanished back under the mask yet again. The mask of her ex or the thing before her, she had no idea where one ended and the other began. “Please, don’t lie to me, Em,” it said, voice sparkling sweet, meant to coax confessions out of her like she was an ill-behaved child.

All the confessions her ex had ever wanted to force out of her rattled through her head, stupid and draining—it was easier to confess to the sins of nothingness than argue with the man or face his wrath.

We need you!

“I’m not,” she said diplomatically, years of training herself to be smaller rising back up until they snapped to pieces inside her, “but I am smarter than you.”

That mask shook, lips wobbling with barely controlled rage.

We?

“Is that you, or him? Raging inside you, I mean.” Her ex had never been good at being second best.

He was always second best. Third. Fourth. Fifth. Six. Always the weakest of them all.

“Bitch,” it growled, hand slamming across her throat. Breathe cut off. It wouldn’t take long for this nightmare to turn to blackness.

What ‘we?’

Herself. Olivier. Charles and James. Half a dozen others.

They were always better, even if within their unit so many of them had softened that superiority for him.

Hadn’t she been talking to herself?

What had he ever done for them? Even in those last moments, it had been Halen, rushing back to his death when he could have saved himself, who had made the biggest impact.

Still failed, but at least he tried. Halen had faced death head on, while her ex had—

Emilia’s brain cut off, those fine details of that day shuddering away from her, just like always. She couldn’t blame herself, though. Practically everyone had been that way: unable to reconcile the people they knew and loved with their actions in their last moments.

Hadn’t her brain been creating a web of dreams?

Some of those actions were worse than others, of course. Yet, they were all treated like war heroes, even those who deserved to be treated like the cowards they had proven themselves to be.

What had this man ever done for them, though? Even before those final moments, he hadn’t someone worthy of the praise piled upon him. He had smiled and drank and manipulated. Inspired a confidence they didn’t earn or deserve in them. Thrown tantrums in private and denied, denied, denied in public. Stood in front of cameras and told their story, because no one else was interested in the glory.

Perfect man. Public face of the unit. Betrayer.

Dreams to drag herself out of a nightmarescape.

Creator. That was what he had done—the one good thing. He had created her and the others. Dragged them through the mud of training and the front lines. They’d come out the other side with bruises and cracks and the brutality needed to face monsters head on.

Too bad so many of them could never leave that brutality behind.

“I’m going to kill you,” the monster before her sighed, all anger dissolved into the aether as its free arm ripped up, the lightning of a skill crackling over the peeling skin, and something grabbed her arm. Not the dream, not the monster in front of her, but—