After a couple of hours, or, in real terms, the rest of the day, Tom realised that, despite being in the pseudo-system room, he was feeling a sense of dread every now and again. It was subtle, and, if he hadn’t spent weeks actively training his skills in the trial, he wouldn’t have noticed it. But all the effort he had put into gaining both his precognition and living wood skills had left a mark on him.
Somehow, he was being affected by an emerging skill. Understanding rushed through him in a flash. He felt like an idiot for not recognising it immediately. Danger Sense, or at least the ability that had partially formed against the bats, was what he was feeling. He leapt to his feet, and the comfortable couch vanished as the room reverted to the austere, plain metal walls that he always found soothing.
His mind racing, he paced up and down, trying to tap into the skill.
Nothing.
The threat was not currently present. A massive metal table appeared and on it a map of the orphanage was displayed. From now on, he was going to pay more attention to where the feelings occurred, to quantify it. At worst, it would let him do some training while he was stuck in here.
Tom suddenly felt tired, and, though he wanted to work on his map, he found himself falling asleep. With a mental curse, he looked at the dark screens and the vitals that showed even breaths. His body was asleep, and he couldn’t resist the compulsion.
Before he could help it, the blackness took him.
He woke when his avatar did, and was annoyed by the whole experience. Apparently, sleep in the pseudo-system room was dynamically linked to that of his body.
This time as his avatar went through the day’s routine, Tom tracked exactly what his senses were telling him. Just like when he was fighting the bats he would feel a prickling of fear. He started to place pins on his map.
A day passed, then a second one, and every time he went to the main gymnasium, he noted the persistent red banners.
Things got weirder. The atmosphere became more tense; everyone knew the assassins were out there, invisible, watching, plotting, and leaving signs of their presence.
He entered an isolation room and saw a prominently displayed note.
Reincarnators. This room has been verified as clean. It’s safe to train here.
It sent a chill down his spine, especially since Danger Sense was triggering at a low level. Dimitri had explicitly warned them of ploys like this, but to see it with his own eyes was terrifying.
The intelligence controlling his avatar went straight to the note, ignoring Tom’s instinct to flee.
Inside the pseudo-system room, he shivered and was paralysed to indecision. A small part of him wanted to interfere to make the avatar walk away, to create space from the threat, but most of him held a different opinion, and common sense prevailed. And little Ta, sort of the person he would have been without his soul keeping his memories ,stood in front of that sign and tried to sound out the words. He struggled with three words: reincarnators, verified and safe, and gave up after less than a minute of puzzling each of them out. But those long seconds of watching his body interact with what was clearly a trap horrified Tom, even when logically he knew the true trap would close on those who ignored it, not those who engaged with it innocently.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
His body opened toy boxes and started playing with stacking blocks. They were a mix between Lego and animal parts and served a similar purpose, but with slightly less uniform results.
Tom’s half-developed skill was screaming at him the whole time. It put him on edge. He was not safe.
He was locked in a room with an assassin, or at least a recording device they would later get access to. A mistake here was death, but he was not that concerned. His own safety was dependent on anonymity, and the reincarnator title gifted him with perfect acting skills to achieve that.
Safely surrounded by metal walls, he felt like screaming, but his nerves were too much on edge to succumb to anything so as childish as that. He hovered in front of the screens, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. His mind recalled that note, the duplicity of the attempt. It was a ham-fisted approach that he couldn’t see a reincarnator falling for, but if someone had the right mix of arrogance and stupidity, then possibly they might be just foolish enough. Tom prayed to DEUS that no one had made that mistake.
Forcing himself to stay passive in the pseudo-system room was surprisingly difficult, so he was genuinely worried for the others.
Their enemy had to know that the note was unlikely to work, but it was not a genuine attempt. It was a misdirection. A method to soften them up so they would make a mistake later, because they assumed the enemy’s traps lacked subtlety.
The day continued, and he kept adding pins and notes to the map. There was always a watcher in the Gymnasium. Another was in the room they practiced dodging in on the first day, but not the next one. Some of the enemies were moving around. None had been watching the obstacle course. As for the isolation rooms – when it came to Tom personally, one had been present only that one time, and that hadn’t been an assassin. It had instead likely been some form or recording device.
That was the same thing as far as Tom was concerned, but it didn’t help with his counting of the number of probable enemies.
It was a strange existence, watching the world go by. Observing a child’s life through screens was even more boring than going through the routine personally. With the few interesting moments that occurred, Tom took the time to experience them at normal pace. He used them to skip the entire time spent in the isolation room. It was clear the situation was affecting everyone, irrespective of the effort to maintain the routine. Laughter was almost non-existent, and the frequent speeches imploring reincarnators to stay in their system room were draining the joy from everything.
The preaching was overblown, in Tom’s mind. They were adults. They didn’t need the continuous reminders, but they got these anyway.
“Unless the red banners are replaced by green ones, stay a hundred percent in the system room.”
“Don’t come out for anything, not even for a moment. Assume you’re always under observation.”
“Nothing is worth exposing yourself, and there is no possibility of being a hero against the enemies arrayed against you.”
“If you witness something, it’s a trap. Stay in the pseudo-system room and let it do the work.”
“If you can see them, even if you think you’re hidden, you’re not. If you see one of them, then they’re watching you.”
The speeches were continuous. But they all contained the same message. Play it smart and don’t be lured out. Another two days passed, and the number of pins on his tracking map increased. Some of the enemies were migrating around, while others remained fixed. The gymnasium, the five-year-old dorms and the main classroom had a permanent presence, while all the other ones continually shifted their location. From what he could tell, there were between five and ten roamers in the area Tom had daily access to. There might be more elsewhere, but he was confident that the total number of individuals was lower than the upper limit of Dimitri’s estimations. Still, his exploration put their numbers at over ten. That was a fair force, especially if they all truly were rank-seventy stealth specialists.