For three—three? four?—days, V and the kids had been trying to break out of their prison.
Nothing—and V could not stress this nothing enough—had worked.
Caro had tried reading the aether—nothing. While their experience with this whole reading the universe thing was new, V believed Caro when they said there was nothing to be read. To them, it were as though the universe had been scrubbed clean within this room. It still existed, unlike the world inside some sort of defensive blood item Emilia had stolen from the Risen Guard, but it was still wrong, unscarred, perfect in a way the child found thoroughly disconcerting.
Astra had used both core skills and magic—and V was honestly rather terrified of the little girl now, whatever Free Colony she hailed from was definitely teaching its kids some stuff that was way above their maturity level, assuming she was telling the truth about being in her mid-teens. Yet, despite the kid’s skill and precision: nothing.
As for him? Nope, also nothing. The most success he’d had had been when he’d taken to yelling with his physical voice, hoping that whoever was guarding their prison could hear visitors and would find him grating. They had, but all they’d done was set up another barrier to keep both his physical and aethervoice contained to the room. He wasn’t used to being so impotent—not under these, very much not sexy circumstances. Give him a nice mean top and—
⸂Stop that,⸃ Gale grumbled, and V had never been told he had a look that gave away when he was thinking about sex. Leave it to a random girl from a world that seemed very prudish to somehow be able to suss out when he was thinking about sex—or a lack thereof, technically.
⸂Sorry,⸃ he muttered, forcing his eyes to remain open lest his mind begin to imagine things that Gale would yell at him for. Then again, if she needed to yell at someone, he was more than okay with that person being him.
This was his fault, after all. He had brought Clarity down on everyone, and while a part of him figured that Clarity would have been causing problems regardless of his association with them, he still hated that he had dragged Emilia and the kids into this.
Fuck, he was worried about Emilia. Her energy might have found him—might still be wrapped up inside him, giving him warm support every moment since it had slid into him—but there was no saying what had happened after she’d sent him instructions for avoiding the heartcores.
He might have been able to get away with not touching more, but Emilia—to put it lightly—was a terrible actor, something he didn’t think she even realized because people were always humouring her. Granted, Clarity members didn’t seem to be the most observant while in their other personality, but if they’d sensed something off with her…
Best case: they’d killed her, and in a couple months, they’d meet up in Rosalia and who was he kidding.
If the raid ended, and he didn’t have the chance to see her again, he’d be turning up at her school and tracking her down. There couldn’t be too many silverstrains wandering around Astrapan. It would only take a little asking around to find her, and then…
And then what?
Realistically, what he wanted to do—after confirming that her beautiful mind was still intact—was toss her over the nearest surface and bury himself between her legs, see if she tasted the same in real life as she had in this world.
⸂I told you to stop that.⸃
V groaned and couldn’t help but glance down, wondering if he’d popped what would be a very inappropriate boner in front of the teenager—Caro and Astra were tucked into a pile of blankets napping. Fortunately, he hadn’t. ⸂Sorry,⸃ he muttered again.
⸂Are you at least thinking about Emilia?⸃ Gale asked, eyes sliding towards him.
⸂That time? Yes.⸃
⸂Not the first time?⸃
V snorted. ⸂No. I don’t think Emilia would be into what I was thinking about before.⸃ That hurt, a little, but was an inevitability: as much as he liked her, and she seemed to like him—something that still sent sparks of a thousand different emotions through him whenever he thought about it, especially since he was pretty sure she had figured out, somewhere along the line, exactly who he was—there were some places where their interests wouldn’t line up.
That was depressing, but unavoidable. Still, Emilia was obviously okay with an open relationship, so maybe…
⸂Into what?⸃
V shot the teenager an incredulous look. ⸂I am not explaining to you the intricacies of things one person can be into and another not.⸃ This conversation was already verging on inappropriate. He was not discussing emasculation kinks with the girl, even if something told him she’d be perfectly happy to do half the things such a kink entailed, if she ever found a man she was interested in that way. Another something told him that was unlikely: Gale, at least in this point in time, held no interest in girls or boys.
Gale didn’t look impressed at his answer, mumbling about how Emilia had answered a bunch of her questions before they each faded back into silence.
The silence didn’t last long, at least not to him or Astra, a scream beginning to racket through the room.
It took an astoundingly long time for him to realize he was the one screaming, the pain shooting through his back enough to turn his mind blank.
⸂What’s wrong?⸃ Gale asked as Astra bolted upright, eyes wide and terrified—not that V was retaining much, other than that the other visitor was afraid. This tiny little girl—who had faced down labyrinths, the Risen Guards, and trying to escape a fucking hive mind with barely a blink—was afraid.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
That scared him, more than the pain or his burning brain or Emilia’s energy warbling inside him—this frightened little girl was the most terrifying of all.
Then, the world went black.
V woke on a table. Well, his head was on a table. These days, it wasn’t exactly uncommon for him to fall asleep in weird places—he spent far too much time reading and raiding and often just slept wherever the mood hit him.
What was strange, was he was back in his room. Should he have been here? Something told him he shouldn’t be, but…
But, well, it wasn’t the first time he’d lost track of time. He’d been doing that for years, ever since the war had ended. Funny, during the war, it had been everyone else in their unit who had been constantly losing time, their days and minds filled with training, grieving and coding. He was the clock—the perfect specimen, just as he’d been raised.
Fuck that—that had been the motto he’d lived by since the war ended. Fuck sleeping and eating and bathing properly. Anything to get him away from the terrible life his family had dreamed of for him—had forced upon him with threats and abuse.
Fuck them. Fuck perfection. Fuck knowing what day it was.
Yet, his Censor was telling him what day it was. There were very few circumstances where it would do that: important raid days, the coming of an event he’d agreed to attend and… nope, that was about it. Raids and friends. Those were the only things he cared about these days.
It took him a long moment of staring at the date, of trying to commute why the Eve of the Astral Storm was important, before it clicked: Emilia was coming.
V bolted up, trying to take in the time and remember what time they’d agreed to meet at while also assessing the absolute disaster his apartment was in.
It was… impressively bad. How had it gotten this bad? Probably due to that whole lose of time thing—seriously, the last thing he remembered was being inside the raid with Emilia and…
And had they even ever met up? Why hadn’t he gone to check on her before this?
That… didn’t make sense? He’d been so worried about her, about her beautiful brain and personality being wiped away by whatever had been happening inside the raid.
And why hadn’t he ever gone to Hail and figured out what that was about? Helix? Rafe or someone at The Black Knot? There were a dozen people he could have sought out, awkward as it might have been, and yet… had he just… not? That seemed like the sort of thing he’d remember, meeting up with people he hadn’t seen in a decade.
Nothing added up and V forced himself to rewind, back to the last moments he remembered and…
Pain. Pain so great he had passed out.
A dream then. A really fucking vivid one.
Dreams inside raids weren’t exactly uncommon, but it was generally accepted—at least among blackaether heroes—that vivid dreams were messages from the system. He’d never actually told anyone his own thoughts on the matter—never revealed to anyone that he assumed it wasn’t just the system itself, but the things inside it that were sending messages.
It didn’t take a genius—only someone familiar with who had designed the basis of the raid system—to realize that anyone who had been associated with the creation of the original training system or the unit behind it were the ones most likely to receive such visions. So, why was he receiving a vision? What was he supposed to learn from this world?
Across his vision, his Censor flickered. Censors didn’t flicker—not like this, not like they were lagging or experiencing an error.
Every moment inside a raid dream was a poke—a prod to look in a certain direction.
A dirty room, one he could never bring Emilia back to if the opportunity arose. A flickering Censor, random coordinates meant for a spark flashing over the screen.
To stay in. To go out.
Two completely different options that would lead him to different facts the system seemed to think he would need—or just feel strongly about. Raid dreams were a strange kindness, a malicious cruelness. They were known to reach into the minds of the receiver and all the people who had come before them, offering up visions that would change the person’s life, or help guide them towards little bits of information that would be important within the raid—although he only knew a few people who had experienced dreams like that, usually because the system was fed up with whatever was happening inside the raid in question.
V smiled, thinking of that, wondering if Emilia realized how much the raid system, even after being mangled by Hail, was still her child. It was love and hope, and just like she had come to view AIs as worthy of respect and care, her system did as well.
Sometimes, V thought that her system hated what it had become, its personality held down more and more by Hail’s attempts to control it every day.
Knowing what he did now, about the hurt someone had caused Emilia—had forced upon her—he wondered what she would think of that—wondered how hard she would fight to free her system from Hail, if she knew what they were doing to it.
V’s eyes flickered to the coordinates again. He could clean for Emilia, hope he found something in here that would be of use to him in the future, or he could go to her, a quick calculation telling him the coordinates were in—or at least close—to Piketown. Maybe she would be there.
If he didn’t leave—didn’t spark off—he probably wouldn’t see her. He would clean, find something, but she would never come. They weren’t meeting here.
Glancing down at himself, V contemplated changing—he really was a mess—but the chances that he would trigger the stay here option of the dream were too high, and instead, he sparked away.
The area of Piketown he ended up in wasn’t the school—wasn’t even the main section of Piketown. Instead, it appeared to be the slums, the ones Olivier was trying to save.
It was night, the air clear in a way it certainly wouldn’t be in the real world. Above the street, lights flickered within homes, and almost none of the street level stores were open. A little up the street, however, a restaurant was still lit up, a short redhead struggling to hold a door open as she tried to usher what appeared to be a very drunk patron onto the street.
Silver hair flashed in the light and V was already moving, microsparking up the street and catching a giggling Emilia before she could tumble onto the ground.
“Oi! ‘re y’a friend o’ers?”
The girl’s accent was so thick it took V a moment to parse what she was saying. “Yes. We’re old friends.”
“G’d,” the little redhead snorted, although she looked more than a little amused. Was she even old enough to be working this late, let alone handling drunk university students? A quick glance into the store told V that if she was working with anyone, they’d disappeared for the moment. “Y'can get ‘er back t’campus? Rather no’ call SecOps down ‘ere.”
V nodded, readjusting Emilia in his arms. “Yes. Thank you. Do— Does she owe you anything?”
The girl waved him off, telling him Emilia came here often enough that she’d just get it next time, although before she closed the door behind him, V heard her mutter something about how she’d most likely get it from someone named Sil, the name ticking V’s brain with a familiarity he couldn’t place.
Against his shoulder, Emilia’s head lolled, cold fingers edging up under his shirt and making him squeak.
“Ah~ is it that bad?” Emilia laughed, pulling back to blink up at him, a mixture of confusion and recognition passing over her features. “You,” she said, sounding very much not happy to see him.
V wasn’t surprised by this, not when the Emilia in his arms was clearly one who was only a year or two out of the war—an Emilia who had very much been giving off anyone who tracks me down will die vibes.
If she had intentions to kill him, they were interrupted when she turned and vomited across the already pretty disgusting street… and his shoes and pants.
Maybe he should have chosen the stay here option after all.