> See here, this mystery of the universe. It exists. They exist. They twist and turn in this world around us. We have not gods, and yet we know of their existence, cruel and winding. Fear them, for they have not but the evilest of designs on this world of ours.
>
> Fear them, and strike them down where they stand, whenever the opportunity is presented to you.
>
> Remember these words—remember that behind the evil of those who trod upon this world lie the kindest of beings, unseen but for the briefest of moments.
>
> A touch of time, a touch of knowledge: that is what these benevolent spirits, who dare not touch our world with more than the lightest of hands, offer to us.
>
> Do not fear their power. Do not feat the opportunities they afford you.
>
> Seize their gifts, fearless and strong, lest the world be torn asunder by your hesitation.
>
> — from the Record of Salset, last known copy lost during the destruction of the Salsetrun Library, during the XXth visitation
✮ ✮ ✮
⸂There are others at work here.⸃
Emilia wanted to glare at Carne—Ash? Fuck, did it even matter at this point!? “Shut up!” she yelled instead, and even though she knew he couldn’t hear her, she still felt a little better for it.
⸂You are exceptionally bad with magic,⸃ he continued, and Emilia was going to strangle him. The fact that she and Carne were unable to communicate because, despite their abrupt separation from Conrad and Boundary, the other visitor’s aethervoice suppression was still going strong would have been funny if not for the Clarity members lobbing magic at them.
Mostly, they were just annoying. Between her core defences, Carne’s ability to move through the world avoiding attacks and the occasional explosion of her {Blood Ball}—and seriously, why had the thing knocked out Phlostra’s aethervoice suppression but not Conrad’s?—they weren’t in much danger. Still, having piping hot fire magic thrown at her was not fun.
Carne bolted to the right, slipping between two buildings. He was only out of Emilia’s sight for a moment, her own thoughts focused on blowing up the assholes who had attacked them in the middle of their descent and forced them into two groups. A {Blood Needle} shot out of her hand, seeking out the one person who wasn’t currently overwhelmed with the hive mind. It landed squarely in their chest, but the others were already teleporting away—they’d seen her use her {Blood Needles} already, and the whole hive mind thing was allowing them to pass on information to each other. Annoying, and while she still had other weapons and fighting styles they hadn’t seen, she was quickly going to run out of new ideas.
She rounded the corner, and where did Carne go?
“Uh…” she breathed out, cursing the fact that she couldn’t even scream his name—not for anything but herself, anyways.
[Emilia: i lost carne]
[Boundary: How did you lose him?]
[Emilia: well, technically, he ditched me]
[Emilia: which is totally rude!]
[Emilia: i was defending us, and he rounded and corner and vanished!]
Boundary sent back a query—in the group chat he’d finally deigned to set up for himself, Emilia and Conrad—as to where she’d ended up, their groups having been forced into different city levels. He and Conrad were still together, rather begrudgingly, but Emilia had promised that if either of them ditched the other she’d kill both of them. It probably wasn’t the most terrifying of threats—Boundary had a family, so she wouldn’t actually kill him, and Conrad couldn’t actually die—but the men had stuck together nonetheless.
Their magic was palpable even through the layers of material that separated them, their energy vibrating under Emilia’s feet as they fought. She wasn’t sure why most of their attackers had chased after the two men, but she could guess it was either because Boundary was clearly a Risen Guard or because Conrad had brutally questioned a few people in their hive mind state, and it was pissed.
Probably a bit of both.
Convenient for her, though, as her own pursers were few, and after they ran off, unwilling to be blown up and used as fodder for another blood weapon, they didn’t return. A few moments later, she received a message from Conrad telling her more people had shown up, and while they could be other people, Emilia was inclined to believe they were her missing attackers.
[Emilia: sorry, might be the dudes who were chasing me]
[Emilia: good luck!]
Conrad sent back a halfhearted complaint about how she was leaving them with the heavy lifting, but she could tell he was enjoying himself. Usually, the man didn’t have permission to go crazy in a raid, rules from his brother hanging over him. These people were dangerous, their minds increasingly possessed by a monster that was willing to do whatever Ajarni—or perhaps the Enclave? It wasn’t exactly clear who controlled the hive mind—ordered it to.
The fact that she recognized a few people from the mission, knew that they must have learned the truth about Ajarni’s position with the Enclave, and yet were still going along with him… or perhaps had been so profoundly overtaken by the hive mind that they couldn’t resist…
Yeah, Conrad could go to town, killing all the Clarity members he found. They were dangerous, at least the adults who had gone through the labyrinths so many times were. Emilia didn’t want to consider the children or the adults, who were just living their normal lives in these city levels because circumstances had led them here. Something for the Risen Guard to deal with, perhaps. They had experience with these things, and would hopefully have some sort of solution that didn’t simply involve destroying the entire Clarity City System and killing every person who had ever set foot inside it.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
That said, they had all agreed before they had been ambushed that if they had to, they would kill anyone who got in their way. Rescuing the kids was a priority, but even more so was killing Ajarni and the other leaders of Clarity, not to mention any Enclave members who were complicit with their manipulations. Anyone who could restart the group and its mission needed to go. As much as some Enclave families wanted what was best for the world, their potential to become so militant in their beliefs while having access to a hive mind army ready to follow them was terrifying.
No one needed that amount of power, and they were all smart enough to realize that that power needed to be snuffed out, before it could fester into something even worse.
Emilia swerved in and out of the city level’s streets. This level was oddly empty, yet there were clear signs of recent use. Presumably, the ambush had been planned for this level and the one where the men were fighting below her, the residents evacuated to other levels.
Occasionally, a person would light up on her map, but they would quickly vanish. Someone teleporting in and realizing something was wrong, she assumed. Convenient that no one was around, but it also meant there was no one for her to question—although Conrad would have been much better at that than her. Carne was gone as well, vanished off her map after his rude ass remark about her inability to use magic.
Asshole. Of course, one of the few things he’d ever said to her would end up being about her pathetic magic abilities.
“Okay. Okay. Where to go?” Emilia muttered to herself as she pulled to a stop. No one was coming for her at the moment, and she needed to not waste that opportunity.
Her map was a mess of grey buildings and roads, without any discernible staircases. Even the one they had exited out of wasn’t marked, and with her shit sense of direction, there was no way she was finding her way back to it. So, what to do.
Sighing, she bolted towards the nearest wall. Hopefully, if she kept an eye out, she’d find a stairwell entrance—although who knew how many there were or how hidden they were. That had been a thing in her world, before the war, to hide emergency exits until they were needed. In theory, an emergency would trigger mechanisms that opened them—in theory.
In practice, too many people had died during the war because those mechanisms had failed to activate. There was just too much they were watching for. Fires, skills, attacks from criminals, bombs and toxic chemicals. The war had often featured all of those things and more simultaneously, and the systems had often been overwhelmed—or just straight up destroyed by the skills burning through the aethernet.
A lot of people had died.
These buildings could be like that. Stars knew she hadn’t exactly been looking, but she’d certainly never seen any emergency exits. The closest was the exit they’d used to escape the building they’d been held in at the Risen Guard compound, but that had seemed more an external access ramp than anything, and attached to a building, and—
Emilia’s thoughts stilled as two red dots appeared on her map, just outside the bounds of the city level. Bingo.
[Emilia: hey, are you guys in a stairwell again?]
[Boundary: What? No? Why?]
[Emilia: oh, there are a few dots on my map]
[Emilia: they seem to be in a stairwell]
[Emilia: wanted to know if i’d be meeting up with you or someone else]
[Emilia: gotta be prepared!]
[Boundary: What? Why would you go meet them?]
[Boundary: They could be the enemy!?]
[Conrad: I assume they are. Who else could they be? Unless only two of the others escaped.]
Well, it could be that. Emilia wouldn’t put it past V and Astra to separate from Caro and Gale, sending the locals off in search of safety while they fought. That would be nice, no matter which group she met up with, and her steps sped up as she raced to meet whoever it was. Still, she wasn’t stupid, and was already pulling out another {Blood Needle} by the time the wall that likely hid a staircase came into view.
[Emilia: well, i guess we’ll find out soon]
[Emilia: and, i’m following them because i can’t find a staircase]
[Emilia: are they hidden in the walls?]
Emilia pressed her hands to the wall as she crashed into it. It was composed of the same metal looking, but oddly textured material that the other city levels were made of, and she grumbled in frustration that she could see people behind the wall but had no idea how to open it.
[Conrad: It’s probably like the exit I was going to lead you to when I grabbed you from the Risen Guard.]
[Conrad: You have to use your energy to trigger a locking mechanism inside the door.]
There was a moment of silence as Emilia cursed and tried to reach her energy into the door, finding nothing but blackness, not even the seemingly unmoving dots—well, not completely unmoving. They actually seemed to be moving in circles, and after a moment of glaring at them—and then Conrad’s follow-up message that said he wasn’t sure if she’d be able to find the mechanism from the outside, as it might not be directly inside the staircase access—she realized the dots were going around and around as they moved up or down the stairwell.
Well, at least she was in the right place, even if it wasn’t going to be any use at the moment. For all she knew, the kids were inside, running for their lives. They’d get to the roof and find nothing; no way to reach the cave that would lead them out of this place. They’d reach the lower levels and be killed by the first Clarity members they came across—or, perhaps worse, be taken hostage to use as leverage against her and the others and—
Emilia let her mind melt away into the panic and anger and frustration vibrating through her, images of the staircase flashing through her mind, of the mechanism popping open, her energy reaching out with perfect precision towards it. More images floated through her head when that did nothing. This world’s magic was imagination, and she’d always had a good one, even if it took the form of words and skills. If this were her world—if she needed a spur of the moment skill to blast a hole in a wall—what would she do? What would she make?
{Hidey Hole}, obviously. She’d already done this one—forced the aether to create holes for her easy movement as a naughty teenager. A hole, straight through the aether, molecules and essence reforming around her will.
Suddenly, she was a teenager again, activating the skill for the first time and hoping she didn’t blow up the house—hoping that the damage she inflicted on both her bedroom wall and the aethernet would seal up behind her as she crawled through the dark.
She had been so excited when it worked, shared it with all her friends so they could sneak out and party night after night. Simeon had made the skill a bit better, a bit more specific in his glorious, obsessive way. A perfect hole for people to slip away with.
A perfect hole to go meet friends and enemies alike.
Emilia blinked, the formerly flawless wall suddenly sporting a hole just big enough for her to crawl through. On her map, the dots continued their circles, and she had no idea how far from the hole—from her—they were. A single flight of stairs. A dozen.
Either way, she didn’t have time to waste, and Emilia slipped into the hole, silently praying that whatever magic she’d done wouldn’t suddenly collapse and kill her in a crush of not-metal. Hopefully, it hadn’t altered the integrity of the entire building, either. It would kinda suck to be responsible for accidentally collapsing the entire building.
Popping out the other side, she looked around and listened. Closer than she would have liked, was the sound of feet, tumbling over each other as they descended the stairs. Interesting. While she had considered that whoever it was might be descending, she’d thought it more likely to be someone ascending—there were only a few city levels above this one, all of which had appeared empty during their own descent, likely evacuated as well.
So, who in the world was coming down, from the secret entrance, most likely?
Emilia slid to as good a position as any, preparing to attack if whoever appeared was her enemy. The problem was, when the pair did appear, she actually had no idea if they were her friends or her enemies.