Arc 3 | Chapter 84: Easier the Other Way

Someone was fighting, but even shifting in and out of consciousness, Emilia could tell it wasn’t their group fighting the targets.

This was simply their group fighting within itself.

Had that been her fault? Had she stepped between two people about to snap, and instead of them simply sputtering out, it had become the mess cascading through her ears?

“EMILIA!” someone yelled—V, maybe. He sounded so far away, his voice not quite right. She’d need to hear it a bit more, to figure out what was wrong with it.

Or, what was right with it. His voice hadn’t been wrong, she realized, passing from one moment laid across the grass to another in someone’s arms—although they weren’t V’s. How odd was that? To have spent enough time in the man’s arms that she could recognize them by the feel of muscles under her?

Who was it then? He’d been the only one she truly trusted in that group of visitors and misfits and renegades. Everyone was so focused on the mission, they would let her die before saving her.

Someone

was saving her, though.

Stupid. She didn’t need saving. All she did was cause problems.

They should have just left her to die.

✮ ✮ ✮ One Week Earlier ✮ ✮ ✮

V was good at climbing, which shouldn’t surprise Emilia, but somehow did.

“Of course I can climb,” the man sighed, too dramatic as they hoisted themselves from hold to hold.

The wall was wide enough that they were able to climb side by side, which was fortunate, as the light emanating from V’s hand was the only light available. Emilia’s own attempts to activate the light gem attached to her armour had failed—apparently she still needed someone local to activate them for her, despite her increasing control over her energy. With only V’s light, they still couldn’t see the top of the wall, but they’d climbed far enough at this point—not to mention past more than a few holds that would be difficult to descend—that Emilia was hoping they’d see an end soon.

“Climbing and caving go hand in hand,” V told her solemnly, before breaking into a story about the first time he’d had to climb in the caving raid. “It was totally unexpected. I think the person who created it originally intended for it to just be caving, but after a few months, they added in the climbing. I wasn’t prepared at all. I spent hours trying to get just a few feet off the ground, trying to get the hang of things.”

“Did you eventually get anywhere?” Emilia asked.

“That time? No. I starved to death.”

Emilia’s hands stalled over the rocks. “You what?”

V blinked owlish blue eyes at her. “Oh. Another thing you didn’t know? A lot of blackaether raids don’t allow logging out unless you’re at a hub or there’s an emergency in the real world.”

“So you’re just… left to die, if you can’t get out?” Emilia asked, blinking wildly back at him. “How does that work with Virtuosi limits?”

V hummed as they moved further up the wall, as though he wasn’t exactly sure what to tell her—or perhaps how to tell her the truth. “Do you know how inaccurate those limits are?” he asked, tone implying he already knew she did. “Most people who play blackaether raids have highly hacked Censors. I know a few people who have completely overridden their Censors with blackaether breaks that have no limits. Although, most of those people have put their own limits into place. Most blackaether raids let you preset a logout limit, but for most people, it’s far past the point where you’d starve to death.”

Emilia’s fingers dug into a stone, jagged enough that she felt her hands begin to bleed. The magic down here was powerful, though, and between one hold and the next, the cuts had sealed over.

The prick of pain wasn’t enough to distract her from either the climb, where one slip would mean certain death at this point, or the fact that V could have just said the last bit. He could have just told her the system would kick you after a limit was reached, but instead he chose to throw in the bit about heavily hacked systems being common among blackaether heroes.

“So, what? People could log themselves into a raid and just leave themselves inside it until their real-world body dies? Or their brain melts under the pressure?”

“That’s highly unlikely,” V laughed, explaining there were groups that helped newcomers find a more realistic limit for themselves. “Usually, it’s a few dozen times higher than the legal limit—sometimes even hundreds in the case of sub-30s and ex-300s.”

“Really?”

“Yeah!” the man cheered, head tilting back as he frowned upwards. Apparently, he was also hoping to find an end to the climb soon. “Someone in that group has done research on it—I actually think they’re doing research for their university, and using the newcomers to find research subjects. Ex-300s are apparently more likely to have brains that can tolerate more stress?”

Emilia tossed that over in her head, thinking about the ex-300s she knew in Alver. They lived stressful lives from the moment they were born—before that, even. Where every over social class generally did all they could to reduce stress and remove knots while pregnant, not wanting to risk passing along trauma to their unborn children in the womb, ex-300s often didn’t have that option.

The government ran children of ex-300s through knot therapy to remove as many reductive knots as possible, but there was only so much they could do when the lives the children led caused more to build up over time. The fact that the lifespan’s of ex-300s weren’t significantly shorter than sub-30s was quite impressive. She could definitely see all that stress leading to ex-300s handling large amounts of time in the Virtuosi System better.

“Yeah, that’s my understanding of it,” V said as she finished explaining her thoughts on the matter—although she left out the specifics of knowing people in Alver, lest the man decide to try tracking her down if she backed out of meeting him in person. He glanced over at her as he waited for her shorter limbs to catch up to him, his expression one of the ones she couldn’t quite interpret. “Have you read any of their research?”

“Nah~” Emilia said, before being struck by a note of intense sadness. Her fingers shook as she sucked in a breath.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” V asked, suddenly so close.

Emilia looked away from her vibrating fingers, finding the man had indeed moved slightly closer to her. A waste of energy. There were no holds for him to continue up on from so close to her, and he’d have to move back—and if her fingers let out, there was no way he could catch her. She still appreciated him coming to check on her, stupid as it was. She’d feel pretty fucking back if he died one to two holds from the top—assuming they ever found it—now, though.

“I just—” Emilia broke off, swallowing around her cracking voice. Why was she so emotional? She didn’t feel like Payton had done anything dramatic to her knots in the last few moments, but she certainly hadn’t been this emotional the day before, when she’d mused about missing being the person who loved learning. Yet, here she was, crying because she

hadn’t

read any of the research V was talking about. Crying because she wished she hadn’t lost a decade of knowledge. As much as she could catch up—a not so little part of her screaming that she

would

catch up—it was still sad to think of all the time she had lost.

“It’s difficult to explain,” she told V. It was, and it wasn’t. She could explain it, if she really wanted, but not without explaining her knots and how much the war had driven her into a ball of shame and depression.

V’s beautiful eyes met hers, over a nose covered in freckles so faint she hadn’t noticed them until that moment, with the man’s glowing hand hovering right next to his face. “Maybe some other time,” he said quietly.

She smiled weakly back at him, willing her breathing to even out. “Yes,” she sighed, eyes dancing between his. “I’d like that,” she whispered back, shocking herself when she found she really did mean it.

The rest of their travel up the wall was silent—not because they suddenly had nothing to say to one another, but because only a few holds later, the world suddenly opened up. Except, it opened up on the other side of the passage up, some seven feet behind them.

“Well, fuck,” Emilia muttered as V laughed.

“I think you’ll have better luck with it than I will,” V commented, tone much too morbidly amused for Emilia’s liking.

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?” V asked, shit eating grin plastered over his face.

“Like you’re going to try and make the jump and fall to your death,” Emilia hissed back, limbs already teasing under her clothing to make the jump. Beneath her stolen clothing—stolen from one of Zach’s neighbours, after they had determined his were big to the point of potentially being unsafe, even if V had insisted she looked adorable in the too big clothes—Emilia had her armour active. The extra boost of strength it gave her was more than enough to let her easily make the jump.

Now, she just had to make sure her friend made it.

“Do you think you can make the jump? Or, at least come close enough for me to grab you?” She really,

really

didn’t want to have to watch V fall to his death, even if it wouldn’t be a real one.

“Maybe?” V asked, which was very much not encouraging. “I can load some energy into my limbs, but fuck, is that far. Plus, twist.”

Emilia sighed, wondering if she could jump back, grab the man and either toss him over or just jump with him. Neither of those options seemed doable, what with how small the surrounding holds were.

Even if she had thought herself capable of doing it, the decision to try was taken out of her hands when a moment later V was tensing, his shuddering meridians the only warning Emilia had before he was flinging himself across the passage.

V’s fingers scrapped over the edge of the ledge. Too short—his jump had been too short, and Emilia lurched forward to grab him. The man let out a pained breath as his stomach and face collided with the wall, but at least Emilia had managed to grab him.

Now, she just had to get her friend up.

“Fuck, you’re heavy,” she muttered as she tried to get a better grip on him. Unfortunately, the rock wall on this side of the passage was all but perfectly smooth, and V had nothing to find purchase for his feet on, leaving her holding his entire weight up.

“You said that already,” V laughed, despite the fact that he was currently suspending from her hand.

“Now is not the time for sex jokes,” Emilia muttered back, trying to get her other arm over the ledge so V could grab it and take some of his weight off her one arm. She didn’t like this, hanging half off the ledge while someone far heavier than her was using her as their lifeline. “Can her grab my other hand?”

V tried to not yank on her arm as he reached up towards her other hand, but he couldn’t completely stop the pull, and Emilia was forced to bite back a yowl of pain. At the least, V had a pretty good gasp of her, and even if her hands gave out or her shoulder dislocated, she just had to focus on not letting herself get pulled over with him.

She doubted that would happen—chances were the man would let go before bringing her down with him.

The fingers of V’s other hand brushed hers, and between tolerating him pulling his weight up by her arm and her reaching a bit further, he was able to grasp her hand.

“Fucking stars,” she wheezed. Even with her enhanced strength, it wasn’t enough to keep everything about this from hurting. “This was much easier the other way around,” she noted, thinking back to the way they had met. Her being the one hanging had been far easier than this reverse of circumstances.

“Definitely,” V huffed, each of them using the moment to catch their breaths before they were going to have to try and get him onto the ledge. “I got to see your ass last time.”

Emilia laughed, looking down at her friend. “I’ll show you when you get up here,” she promised, smiling painfully.

“Oh~ you’re bribing me into living?” the other visitor asked, face tilting up slightly to meet her gaze.

“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

“Well, in that case, who am I to let you down?” V asked as he began to climb her arms, just as she had his.