Emilia was rushing. She knew she shouldn’t be—she’d already seriously injured herself rushing once in the last several hours, after all—but she couldn’t help it.
She needed to get out of here.
She needed to get back to the kids.
Astra could die—would hopefully die protecting the kids, if necessary, but that wasn’t a given.
⸂Emilia doesn’t want you hurt, so I won’t hurt you.⸃ That’s what the girl had said—she wouldn’t hurt them. Emilia had, of course, left her with instructions to fight if necessary, but she’d mostly just been saying that; she hadn’t actually thought anyone would come alone. None of that was fair to the girl, either. Her consciousness would return to her body, yes, but there was no way to guarantee she wouldn’t be traumatized by her removal from this world.
Why hadn’t she thought anyone would come along? There must have been people chasing them through the labyrinth—Risen Guards who could pop out of the exit at any moment, and—
Emilia shook herself as her fingers moved, typing as rapidly as she could over the physical keyboard that had awaited her in the first challenge.
The last true challenge, if she had anything to say about it.
Fuck this game. Fuck the platform and the raid and whoever was maintaining—manipulating—this thing. She was a hacker, and even if she got booted out of the raid for it, she was going to do her best, trying to get out of this place and back to the children who needed her—the children who she had stupidly left alone—as fast as she could.
Code flashed across the strange tablet in front of the keyboard. It appeared to be stone, and when Emilia had reached out to touch it, the text had been chiselled into the stone despite constantly shifting as she typed, divots and grooves dancing under her fingers.
This challenge was strange, and as she pressed deeper into the platform, Emilia wondered whether its existence was an oversight or not. It was odd, for the maintainer to have not banned the labyrinths from putting out hacking challenges. It just seemed like asking for trouble—trouble that anyone with the skills to program or maintain a raid platform shouldn’t have been stupid enough to risk.
Stars knew that the training system she and Halen had designed would never have allowed anyone to hack it from the inside. Seriously, they’d spent a significant amount of time having her and Rafe—and later Helix, brute force master that he was, as well—hack it from the inside, only letting it be distributed to other units once they were sure that no one could fuck with the code from the inside. It was nearly impossible to guarantee anything couldn’t be hacked from the real world, of course, but most virtual raids had an excessive amount of security features, trying to ensure that didn’t happen.
Yet, this code could be fucked with from the inside, and Emilia wasn’t convinced it was an oversight.
The hacking challenge itself had been relatively easy, and had this challenge come in any of the previous labyrinth, Emilia might not have realized the small security hole. As it was, she was panicked. Dozens of times through her life she had used her hacking skills to gain an advantage, and as a result, her first thought hadn’t been to hurry through this challenge and the next and the next. Rather, it had been to keep an eye out for such holes and then poke at what she found and hope it led to a shortcut.
Emilia still wasn’t sure if it had, the code for raid platforms being something else entirely—something complicated and beautiful and terrifying to look at. She and Halen might have designed the system that had spawned raids, but they were well over twenty real-world years—and likely thousands of Virtuosi years—away from that. If she wanted to actually understand raids… well, she’d ask an expert—would hunt down Helix and make him teach her about them.
Stars knew she had taught him enough about hacking that he owned her.
Still, what she knew about systems and hacking was still useful. As she dug deeper, Emilia became almost positive that the hole was a small, purposeful secret, written into the challenge, just waiting to be unravelled and exploited.
Hopefully, she was correct. Hopefully, this was something meant to be found and exploited and there would be no consequences for her actions.
Even if there were, she really didn’t care. All she needed was to get back to the kids before something happened to them. She’d rather die here, trying her best to get to them, than run through a labyrinth that could take hours—if not days—to complete and—
And Emilia really couldn’t understand why she hadn’t thought about someone else coming along! It was like a black spot had appeared over that very real worry, rendering it an invisible impossibility, until Honey’s words had snapped her back into reality.
The most she could think was that it had been due to the labyrinth, its magic affecting her brain and encouraging her to enter. That alone was a terrifying thought, and she was quite looking forward to being out of this place and never, ever entering one again and—
“YES!” Emilia cheered as she found the controls for the challenges.
Five challenges were marked off for her, a collection of variables indicating that she was the only one within the labyrinth and therefore the only one affecting which were chosen. The code led further and further inwards, a spiral of variables and equations and functions that would be used to create challenges for her based on… a lot of stuff.
What her base level and skills were—apparently the system had indeed been lowering her level, and it now sat at a respectable 75.
What gifts the previous labyrinths had given her, whether she had system access and how well she could use the magic system. Rudely, the labyrinth only listed off the two gifts she knew about. The other two were blacked out, probably because she didn't know what they were, so they were irrelevant to the calculations. It had noted she could use the Risen Guard system, although access had been blocked the moment the labyrinth opened up around her, as well as that she was ‘hopeless’ with the magic system. Rude.
How tired she was—which, it was nice that the labyrinth took that into account? It also confirmed her suspicion that the labyrinth wanted to be beaten. It was designed to be difficult, but not impossible. Somehow, that was comforting to her—that for all the terrible things in this world, at least whoever had designed the labyrinths didn’t want them to be the last place heroes saw before being ejected from the game.
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How difficult the previous challenges had been—both inside this specific labyrinth and all the previous ones she’d entered—also seemed to play a part, as did what sort of challenges they had been.
Surprisingly, there was also a set theme for the labyrinth’s run. Looking back, the library labyrinth had definitely been inclined to physical challenges, while both the Livery and the previous labyrinths had leaned into being fun and child appropriate.
Had she more time, Emilia definitely would have dug in and found more information. She didn’t have time for that, and instead she set to work altering the layout of the labyrinth.
No more five challenges. She couldn’t completely remove them, putting heartcore into the next room, but it only took a little digging to turn the two challenges she couldn’t remove into purely physical ones—ones she could conquer with little exertion and time. Another wall to climb—simple with her {Blood Armour}—and a battlefield. That one she had hesitated on, but the description of the challenge indicated it was “veterans only; simulation of a battle from the war; includes access to all skills and abilities their real body currently has; current, real-world D-Levels are utilized.” Emilia could work with that.
Several minutes of pushing code around later, and Emilia had created an easy—if slightly horrific—battlefield for her to face. It would be awful, but facing… that would be infinitely better than returning to find the children dead.
Emilia was about to push back into the room’s actual challenge when something caught her eye: a small line of code that affected what the gift the labyrinth would give her. Working her way through it, she discovered a long list of potential gifts. Annoyingly, her current gifts weren’t greyed out possibilities, but completely obscured. Still, it meant she could potentially choose what gift she was given, and she quickly selected the ability to speak the local tongue.
To her surprise, a second gift option popped up. One of the children had mentioned a story about a labyrinth giving multiple gifts, but everyone—including Honey—had said that wasn’t a thing. It was just a myth from an ancient story. Apparently, not so much.
Then again, it took Emilia several minutes to figure out how to actually unlock the double gift option, so perhaps it had been disabled by the platform maintainer. Not anymore—at least not here. It was unclear from what Emilia had seen whether the changes she made would reverberate through future labyrinths, either inside this specific labyrinth or all of them.
Only time would tell, although as previously stated, Emilia had no desire to ever step foot inside one of these things again.
With any luck, the labyrinth wouldn’t decide to fuck with her and remove her chosen gifts before she got out of this place. From what she had seen, the labyrinth could choose gifts after each challenge, based on what it currently believed would be the most useful gift—although a few strange lines led Emilia to believe that it could also choose gifts that would fuck with the person the most. While its previous choice could be overridden at the end of each challenge, the labyrinth seemed inclined to favour the gift chosen after the first challenge, only serious events inclining it to override its decision.
While she couldn’t completely remove the chance her picks would change, she could override the labyrinth’s first choices with her own. Then, they just had to stick.
Emilia pushed out of the labyrinth code, back to the challenge and finished it up, immediately darting to the door. The rock wall behind it was almost identical to the first one, and Emilia flung herself into climbing it, relying on her {Blood Armour} to support the insane jumps and holds she was shifting between.
The first time, this challenge had taken her hours. She wouldn’t let it take her anywhere close to that this time, her augmented strength letting her fling herself higher and higher, skipping over metres of wall at a time.
Halfway.
Gotta go higher. Gotta go faster.
The bouldering half was even easier than it had been the first time, save at the end, when she’d almost fallen—when she’d met V. She missed V. She even missed his terrible double dimples and the fact that he was subtly teasing her about them knowing each other in the real world. Someone forgotten—did he hate her for forgetting him? Emilia didn’t think so. Something told her he was so different from the person he had once known that he was fine with it.
She could understand that. There was something freeing about being so different from your past self that no one would recognize you—not unless they had watched you grow and change.
Would her own friends remember her, if they met like that? Passing ships in a raid, her appearance altered enough that they couldn’t recognize her on sight? She hoped they would recognize her, for the most part. The person she had been most of her life… she liked that person. It wasn’t like she hated the person she was now—she loved who she was now too! Despite that love, Emilia hoped she hadn't lost so much of her former self so as to render her an entirely different person to those she had left behind in her trauma.
One day, she could find out. One day, perhaps sooner than she’d thought before she entered the raid, she would return home and see how the people she had once known viewed the her of now. Hopefully, they wouldn’t hate her.
Emilia hauled herself up on the landing, chest heaving. Her stomach rolled, her muscles shook. Too much—she’d pushed herself and now she was going to be sick. She straightened, her vision blurring and rolling. For a moment, she thought maybe she wouldn’t actually be sick. Then, she was hurling, what little food she had eaten splattering over the ground. Gross.
“Fucking stars,” she mumbled, tugging out one of the few non-weapons she hadn’t left with the kids and taking a long drink of water.
Lanaira hadn’t been too happy about getting her a water bottle—something about it being suspicious. Thankfully, Gale had interjected. Everyone was stressed. They’d spent days with little food and water—especially water, which they had only been able to steal drinks of in the kitchen challenge. The teenager had demanded everyone get a water bottle, to sate their nerves.
⸂Besides,⸃ the local girl had growled at the Risen Guard, ⸂there are so many visitors running around. What’s to say they won’t invade this place and force us to run again? Either give us some security, little as it might be, or I’ll be taking the kids and leaving.⸃
There was no way, of course, that Gale could leave without the Risen Guard’s permission—no way they would have willingly let her leave with all the kids, even if they let her leave. Those kids respected her, though, and Lanaira had eventually relented, procuring black, metal bottles with what appeared to be a Risen Guard logo etched around it. Impressively, the bottoms featured a water array, capable of summoning water from the aether into the bottle.
Not that Emilia could use it. Astra’s crash course in how she had figured out how to quiet her brain while they travelled to and from the last heartcore having done nothing to help her quiet her own mind.
Emilia sprinted down the hallway that connected the second and third challenges, the same grotesque, vibrant red flesh like substance that had occasionally covered the outer corridor’s walls surrounding her. It was disgusting, and her energy surged through her legs and {Blood Armour}, offering her the smallest speed boost so she could get out of there faster.
The walls fluttered, flesh rippling as thought the hall was actually the insides of some deformed monster. Vessels pumped with blood, the sound revolting and visceral through her body, raking a shudder out of her. Every flutter of the flesh, Emilia could feel her own body trying to shrink itself.
She needed to be smaller.
She needed to be out of here.
Fucking stars, this place was worse than basically anywhere she’d ever been.
Something gurgled to her left, and Emilia was not going to be thinking about what it could have been or how it sounded like a stomach growling, thank you.
Door, door, Emilia tried to skid to a stop in front of the door, but the fleshy floor was too slick and springy, and she instead slammed into the flesh door instead.
Emilia released a disgusted cry and pushed herself off the door, rubbing at her exposed flesh, trying to fight off the memory of what the stuff had felt like.
“Absolutely revolting,” she breathed out, cursing herself for not checking on hallway design when she’d been hacking the labyrinth as she pushed her way into the next room—into what would hopefully be the final challenge and feature significantly less flesh walls.
The world beyond the door was black, but there was no going back—no branching flesh tunnel for her to go down. Forward it was, into the dark.
Into her nightmares.