Tom entered the isolation room and immediately felt his emerging Danger Sense go off. If he had a connection to a physical body, he would have recognized that the hairs on his neck would be rising, and his breathing hitching. Luckily, the protection of the pseudo-system room meant that his body went on with life as normal and didn’t give away the physical tells.

This time, there was no recording device. By the intensity of his developing skills reaction, there had to be an assassin present.

Instinct screamed at him to run and do something dramatic, but Tom did neither as he sat on a hard seat in the middle of the pseudo-system room.

He was alert, but not alarmed.

The tension was almost enough to make him break out in hives. This was real. A creature that could kill him with the equivalent of its little finger was in the room, assessing everything he did; watching him, waiting for a mistake, anything that would confirm his true status and allow it to attack.

The whole time his externally controlled body played happily, completely indifferent to the internal turmoil, his adult mind was trembling. Ta grabbed a practice hammer and proceeded to swing it with a form which was worse than what he managed in the weekly lessons. The attempts were clumsy and unimpressive, and the rigorous training lasted barely five minutes before his avatar got distracted and started pushing buttons on the ritual status contraception, trying to get it to display text.

The body failed, and for the last four tries, it couldn’t do anything because the device was out of energy, not that his younger self apparently would have noticed. His body started playing with the Lego equivalent once more. In the system room, Tom smoothed the hairs on his neck and wondered what to do.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of movement in the external screen displays.

Within the pseudo system room, Tom froze, as his danger sense went into overdrive. His avatar had scooted over to a wall and was staring with wide eyes up at the corner of the room.

Tom responded by studying the two screens he had set up for his main view. One showed smooth plaster, and the other, where his illusion breaching ability was active only the cupboard doors. There was no sign of anything being there, but his body stared at the point like it had been hypnotised. Then Tom glanced down at the vital monitors and almost jumped in surprise.

There was an escalating heartbeat, it was already at a hundred and seventy beats per minute, and there were increased adrenaline levels as well. They were also spiking into the extreme range.

Something had happened. A stimulus of some type had occurred.

And his Danger Sense was screaming at him.

There was nothing Tom could do but observe, and he wondered what was happening. His mind recalled the spike of threat and his body’s instinctive reaction. Something nasty and observable to a normal kid, but the question was what was it? The screens remained fixated on that empty corner of the room. His body, with its perfect acting, thought something was there.

Tom tapped the screen that showed his heart rate and then the wall. Nope, he couldn’t ignore this. Something physical must have been drawing the body’s attention to that point.

“What was it?” Tom asked, and then delved into his memories. While sharing all senses of his body, he replayed the moment before the body had moved. He had been creating a cannon, and…

Tom froze the instant and rewound it for half a second.

This time he played the recording back at only a quarter speed of real time. There was a flicker out of the corner of his eye. A brief sense or something hairy and massive, along with a psychic attack. A spike of compulsive fear than his true self had negated instantly, but his avatar had been forced to react to in full.

That was a very good reason for his body to be staring at that spot.

Something terrible was there.

With a sense of dread, Tom investigated deeper. He could slow things down, so a real time second took a subjective minute to pass, but it didn’t help much. That flicker of presence had only lasted for a tenth of a second. It had been out of the corner of his eye, and, no matter how he dissected the moment, the attempts failed to reveal any extra information. There had been a hairy leg with alternating bands of black and brown hair, one that had been about as long as Tom was tall, and mammalian in structure. It had been out of focus and only there for an instant, and he couldn’t say much more about it.

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Suddenly, there was a movement in the real time monitors. A break from his body staring fixedly at the one spot.

What now? He thought in alarm.

His body was playing once more… It made no sense. It was a like a switch had been flicked. Confused, he re-inhabited his body’s senses and replayed the seconds where his body transitioned from fearfully transfixed by the wall to active, happy play.

Instantly, he was experiencing all the senses, and he felt it when another psychic attack struck him. This consisted of a wave of disinterest, a desire to forget that twenty minutes had been spent catatonically staring up at the corner of the room.

The monster had done a reset.

It was unacceptable. If he was a normal kid, then he would have just been played like a marionette. That was wrong. His mind had been tweaked and controlled so casually, and Tom could not accept that.

Mentally, he froze, and at a thought everything went pitch black. He suppressed all stimuli to prevent the anger from grabbing hold of anything. The rage was seething within him, demanding he relent and allow him to throw things at the corner to kill whatever was there.

No! Tom screamed at himself. He recognised the clear and present danger.

This was not an injustice. He told himself desperately.

It had done a test and had not injured anyone. Those words calmed him.

The words felt weak even to himself.

There was no issue here. No harm done, no damage. Tom chanted in his head.

The rage faded, and Tom stood there, shivering.

That had been beyond dangerous, and then an idea occurred to him: a way to get something from the hopeless situation. It was in the corner, and his body had stared intently at it for twenty minutes. Was it possible that the perfect sensory recording he had available in here could be used to break the illusion? If it was a perfect playback, like he suspected it was, then there was no reason that it wouldn’t work as if he was doing it in real life. He remembered the ferret experience, and the title that had come with it. Hope filled him. That would be proper revenge for it manipulating him like it had, and Tom didn’t have to kill it personally. He could get others to do it for him.

He replayed the experience from the start.

Once more, he experienced the glimpse of the hairy leg and the compulsion that had struck his body. He was a passenger in a body that stared intently at one point. He couldn’t interfere with anything directly, as this was in the past. But he applied every part of his senses to try and pierce what he knew to be an illusion.

Effort and focus had got him the title with the ferrets, and he hoped it would do the same here. Where was the monster? He could see through the illusions that the orphanage had put in place effortlessly. Surely such a mysterious and powerful ability would help against stronger deceptions, too. It didn’t need to be instant - he just needed time to erode his way through it, and, if it was a true recording, he could repeat it as many times as he desired.

He wanted to see. There was something there, and if he looked hard enough, it would be revealed. He remembered the hairy leg and searched for it. He concentrated, attempting to perceive a shadow or a pixilation, anything.

The session ended with the psychic attack focused on turning his attention away from the wall and trying to make him forget.

With a start, Tom noticed that his body had exited the isolation room already, and the trio was in the dodge room practicing against the combat dummies.

That eight times time dilation was a killer, Tom realised, but a lot of him wasn’t concerned. He wanted to see what was hunting them. He immersed himself back into the scene and replayed it. His focus did not waver for a moment, as he sort to pierce the protection that shielded it from view.

When the twenty-minute session completed, his body was just finishing dinner. Tom didn’t care - he was sure he was making progress. He threw himself back into reliving the scene, starting with that first glimpse of the hairy leg. This time he was sure he caught a glimpse of its shadow against the white paint, an impression of its size. Its torso was about that of an adult human, but the legs were longer.

It was a breakthrough, but there was no ding to indicate the success he was looking for, and he had not pierced the illusion fully. When he checked the monitors tracking his body’s location, he was surprised to see it getting ready for bed. Unfortunately, that meant there wasn’t any time to do another deep dive.

He took a break and observed the trip through the cleaning loop, then them chatting in the middle of the room as the second stage of dimming triggered. Within a minute of his time in the pseudo-room, the body would go to bed and Tom would be forced into sleep.

Danger Sense screamed at him.

In their group of seven, every single one of them was looking right at the top of the door.

There was a ding.

The space was no longer empty, and it was a different species, if the leg in the isolation room had been real. This assassin clung to the wall like a geko. It had four legs with sprayed pads and then two arms coming out of its side. One of which held a long, thin sword, which looked like it had just been drawn.

Tom suspected that the noise of pulling it out of the sheath had been what had attracted everyone’s attention. That was something he would have to check later.

A different type of alarm was ringing, one that relied on his years of experience rather than abilities, but was all the more terrible for it.

Danger Sense had fallen silent. The implicit general threat the assassin’s presence represented had vanished, because he was not the target, and that was what his instincts had noticed before the conscious mind caught up with the details of the situation.

It was looking to his right. Which meant Bir was not the target. Kang or the boy Ba stood there instead.

It was going for one of them. Fear grabbed at Tom, and the creature leapt too fast for his eyes to follow.