“⸂What do you mean you don’t know what happened to it!?⸃” Emilia yelled while simultaneously messaging the same to Rin and Boundary. How did an entire building collapse, only to leave no one with any idea as to how it had happened!?
She had awoken to a swarm of messages, both from her group chat with Boundary and Rin, as well as from Honey, wondering what in the world had happened.
Evidently, the destruction of one of the Clarity City System’s four buildings had been so powerful that even the Risen Guards who hadn’t been officially informed that some sort of siege was occurring had felt it, gossip and conjecture now flying and becoming all the more absurd as time went on. A couple of the buildings above the city system’s cavern had also collapsed, and while they were thankfully too dilapidated to be inhabited…
Well, as much as Emilia knew about collapsed buildings and the far-reaching consequences they could have in her world, thanks to soldiers needing to be aware of whether the entire area was about to disappear into a puddle of metal and concrete, this world was completely different. From what she’d seen, on both her descents into this city system, buildings of this world weren’t held up by impressive foundations, stretching deep into the ground. They didn’t even seem to have below ground levels, as far as she could tell.
If they were in her world, she could have easily said they needed to get the fuck out of there, the world above them could come down any second!
In this world, she had no idea. No one did, it seemed. The Risen Guard had called in some architects, to discuss the situation with them—much of the debris from above-ground collapsed buildings were now leaning against other buildings, and everyone was worried about a domino effect—but no one was even sure why the buildings above the city system had collapsed in the first place.
As far as anyone could tell, it wasn’t like there had been an earthquake, more an insane release of power before the building began to crumble. On top of that, the main city system itself was the result of a blessing—it was unclear what had created the Clarity City System, or even how long it had been around for—and the architects were only passingly familiar with their structure from working on projects within city levels.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, the building that had collapsed had been the one Key had been searching with the rebel Clarity member. In other words, it was the building that had most likely housed V and the kids. Rin had tried to message Key, but something had been interfering with their ability to communicate before they even entered the Clarity City System. While his name had yet to disappear from her contact list, there was no saying if that was accurate at this point. The rebel Clarity member, on the other hand, had gone dark some time before the building collapsed.
Emilia was trying not to think about any of that—trying not to think of Caro and Gale, buried under the rumble and bled out, their blood just waiting to be swiped up by the first visitor who decided the dead were a good way to make a weapon of mass destruction. If she stopped to think too much about the kids potentially being dead, Key killed while he was trying to reach them, she might fall apart.
As much as they had already decided the lives of everyone within the Clarity City System were expendable, the idea that any one of the trio was dead—
Well, she wouldn’t think about it. She couldn’t fall apart, either from grief or memories of a thousand regrets from this raid and her entire bloody life.
Hence, she wasn’t thinking about it. Nope. Totally wasn’t. Instead, she was racing down the stairs, vaulting over railings and risking her ankles because someone was going to get to the ground level and create a blood weapon from the dead, and so far, there had been no indication someone had done so. The last thing they needed was for someone under Ajarni’s control to be the one to do so.
Realistically, the fact that she was potentially one of the last visitors without ties to Clarity left was… a problem, to say the least. Sure, the Risen Guard still had tons of visitors confined—although some amount of them had indeed been killed after her escape from the Risen Guard compound—but they wouldn’t be any use. None of them even knew about labyrinths or the blood curse. How could they help, when they knew nothing of this world and had no gifts or magic and Emilia would rather die—real, physical death—than risk more people being contaminated by the heartcores anyways?
So if V was gone, Astra, too… that just left her.
A part of her hoped that maybe a few of the Clarity’s visitors could be convinced to side with her, if she happened to run into any. In the end, however, it wasn’t like she would be able to trust any of them. The same went for any Enclave visitors. None of those visitors were coming, though. A Risen Guard envoy had already asked, as had Honey.
The Enclave families wanted a blessing, and they wanted their harbinger to be the one to gain it. Each of them was currently pushing their harbingers to do this or that, hoping to change the world in the few hours they had left. They probably hadn’t even told their visitors what was happening, not that Emilia thought many of them would care either way.
What visitors—so-called heroes from her world—cared about was the prize, not the lives of the AI inhabitants of this world. If the Enclave sent them, they might try to help, but maybe not. It didn’t matter. The Enclave would send no one; only Key had been left to represent an organization that was supposed to care about the whole of the world. Now, there might not even be him.
Time was ticking, and the world was—quite literally—collapsing around them, and the Enclave wouldn’t be sending even a modicum of help. Emilia wondered if they didn’t care to help because they didn’t care to continue living in this world of fear, of overly thick clothing and childhood squeezed smaller and smaller until it wasn’t a childhood at all. Perhaps to them, living in a world with the blood curse was no longer worth it, at least not to minds that had been extremist under the pressure of the heartcores.
Jumping another railing, Emilia was relieved to see that she’d finally reached the point where city levels transitioned into the odd, maze-like hallway levels. From what she’d seen during the night she’d spent there, staring out into the dark while V confessed his fears to her, there were somewhere between thirty and fifty lower levels.
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That was… still a lot. A whole fucking lot, but considering she had no idea how many levels existed for city levels—although she suspected it was at least fifty city levels, each at least ten flights each—it felt like the end was nigh.
Hopefully, when she exploded out the door that must exist at the bottom of the stairwell—and stars help the building if there wasn’t, she’d be blasting a hole in the outer wall getting out there!—things wouldn’t have already devolved into a mess. Well, technically things were already a mess—had been so for a long time and just kept getting worse and worse—but they could be so much worse!
If Ajarni—with his stars knew what goals—got a hold of a weapon that could easily wipe out an entire building or two…
Emilia cursed to herself as she read back over the messages that Rin had sent, explaining what had happened while she was unconscious. Unfortunately, she’d been inside that strange dream for several hours—several hours that she didn’t have, both because it was inappropriate to be sleeping at this juncture and because time with the raid was rapidly running out.
At the very least, she wanted to get any new blood weapon away from Ajarni and his plans, and hand it over to Boundary before she disappeared from this world. That was the least she could do for this world, because at this point, she wasn’t holding out hope that she could figure out how to receive a blessing or even be able to find Ajarni, let alone kill him.
In all the time she and Conrad had spent within her {Blood Ball}’s barrier, she’d searched through it, as had he—although he’d already looked through it quite extensively in the time wrap that had occurred when they first received their system access.
Neither of them could find anything. If the key to unlocking a blessing was inside their system access, it wasn’t obvious—or worse, was like the silly delivery game Emilia had taken to playing when she had a moment: hidden behind accidental presses and chance.
Annoying—this world was annoying! Why did people enjoy this!?
A voice inside Emilia's head—one that sounded suspiciously like a mix of Sil and V’s voices—told her that this wasn’t the kind of raid most people enjoyed. This was a miserable raid, meant to torture heroes so that the company behind Ship o’ Stars could attract players to act as more-or-less free labour.
In reality, most raids were designed to be more enjoyable than this, she’d just fucked herself over joining an exceptionally unpleasant raid—so unpleasant that even the phantom voices of her more knowledgeable friends seemed hesitant to call it a normal level of unpleasant—as the first one she’d ever played for such an extended period of time—and non-stop, no less.
Definitely not something she assumed most people would recommend.
Oh well, too late now. All she could do was try her best, and hope that when she returned to her own world, she didn’t have too many regrets.
If she never found out what happened to Key, Caro and Gale, however, she was sure she’d have regrets, no matter what else she managed to do in this world. In theory, V was still with the kids, and she supposed that, if she never saw any of them again, she would at least be able to ask him, when they met up in a few months, what happened to everyone.
…
…
…
Yeah right, like that was going to fucking happen!
Either she’d meet up with V in this world, or she’d be figuring out how the fuck to track him down in the real world! There wasn’t a chance in the whole mother fucking universe that she was going to be leaving the question of his mental state to dig at her for months on end! Was there much she could do, if his brain had melted under the heartcores—and oh, stars above, was that a terrible, terrible thought to have while she was supposed to be working on not having a fucking panic attack on her way to potentially fight over a weapon of mass destruction! No. There wasn’t much she could do for him, if he’d been wiped away by what had happened here.
Not much, except burn Hail and the entire raid system to the fucking ground. If V was gone, his smile and the happy, carefree nature he had clearly worked hard to gain erased from the world, she would be tracking down whoever was responsible for it and making them pay.
Granted, she’d be making them pay no matter what, because even if whatever had happened in this raid were an accident, someone had fucked up. Even if there were no real-world consequences for affected minds, the entire situation only an illusion, that didn’t erase how terrible the strain of this situation had been. It was unacceptable—unethical.
Emilia was going to get to the bottom of things, no matter what. The only question was how much she would be torturing whoever she found on her search. There were so many horrible, cruel things that someone could do to another person, and if her friend—if someone who, were she being honest with herself, she could easily see coming to feel more for—had been irrevocable affected by this…
Well, she’d never actually had a chance to use some of the more terrifying things she’d learned in Rafe’s family’s library. Instead, she’d tucked those techniques into a corner of her mind, and having never come across a situation where more than a little cruelty was needed to get answers out of someone, she’d left them to gather dust—to seep into the fabric of her mind; a knowledge of potential terror she hoped she’d never have opportunity to use.
The more Emilia thought about it, her feet landing soundly on each step, the more she was convinced that no matter what, this was the sort of situation where such depraved methods were warranted. Even more importantly, she was sure she could manage to do those things to another soul, and that was slightly concerning… and strange.
Frowning to herself, Emilia assessed her mental state. It was, admittedly, a little off. It could be stress, or even residual effects from the heartcore—although she hoped to the stars above it wasn’t—but something about the feeling of cloudy apathy in her mind felt both off and familiar.
Had Payton given her a black knot?
No, not quite. Something about the favour of apathy and anger racing through her wasn’t quite the same as an additive black knot. Granted, she’d only had one a few times, and never with traumatic knots, but it was close enough that she knew Payton had added something to her. The question was why?
Not that she was complaining at the moment, not when she pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and found dozens of visitors and Clarity members fighting over who would be creating the blood weapon. Emilia still would have fought and killed them, even without this strange knot of hatred within her, but doing so with it was going to be so much easier.
Once she was back in the real world, she’d worry more, if the knot was still swirling within her. For the moment, it was a blessing, and a sadistic smile spread over Emilia’s face as she stepped out of the stairwell, weapon already in hand, mind already picking out whom to kill first.