Arc 5 | Chapter 171: The Blood of the Universe

The aether screamed.

It did not like this, the entire universe seeming to rage and shake with every featherlight touch of the Clarity members forcing a giant slit through it. The blackness of the room they had chosen, the ritual requiring hard to find, pure darkness as one ingredient in it—shuddered and shook, a faint line of glowing red stretching, tearing through the fabric of the world.

Of the raid?

Or did this aspect of the raid reach deeper—reach into the actual, real world aethernet?

Emilia didn’t know. Certainly, she and the others had dreamed of not only creating a simulation of the aethernet, but of dragging a microscopic amount of it within their training system—of bringing something from the real world into the raid through the minds and souls of the people training within it, as well as the machines running it.

There had been reasons to do so, reasons to not. The only thing that stopped Emilia from breaking into a panic while she watched a hole crack into what might very well be the aethernet that held the universe together—not just within the raid but through the entirety of existence—was that all their theories on the

how to do it

had ended with the

small

. Even if this was the universe itself, it should only be the smallest drop of it.

The aether existed everywhere. Most of their musings had dwelled on ideas of

how hard could it be

to pull the aether that existed inside the computers running the training servers—the raid platform—into the simulation, along with the aether within the minds of all those connected into the fabric of the world?

Well, it had turned out to be hard, and more importantly, time-consuming. They hadn’t had time to mess around with something that had been so purely

Can we do it?

rather than

We need to do it!

during the war.

“Fucking stars,”

Emilia hissed to herself as she stared down the innards of the universe, red and oozing out into the world as the Clarity members strained themselves keeping the hole open.

“I really should have at least kept up on what Helix and the others were doing with the raids.”

That was, perhaps, the most annoying part: she was part of a group chat that included all of the people who had worked on the training system during the war. Helix had eventually joined Hail and risen to be their Head of Raid Design—although he’d recently left that position—while Simeon ran a willbrandsmithing business that collaborated quite often with Helix in his crazy schemes. Rafe contributed to the raid system as well, when he wasn’t busy with his own work. Other people occasionally offered advice or anecdotes on how one part of the original system had been designed, or how they’d thought of one solution or another.

While the core of the project had always been her and Halen—at least before Alliance Ridge—there had been dozens of people contributing all sorts of knowledge over the years. Helix had been more an annoying child who had suddenly found a passion he knew next to nothing about, and Simeon had been the sort of obsessive person with enough knowledge of willbrands to make them work within the system.

Others had contributed facts on how each of their skills worked—how they felt within their bodies or how the aether responded to them. Dozens of people had offered brain scans, Virtuosi System records, analyses of their bodies while activating one skill or another—and that was to say nothing of the Free Coloniers who had offered up what was often considered secret information about their cores and training methods to them.

As a result, the group chat where Helix tossed out information about how they were currently changing the raid system was huge, every comment he made treated like that of a celebrity—which he ostensibly was—bestowing secret information on them. When he’d first created the group—before anyone realized how big Hail’s project to gamify the system would become—she had tried reading through his messages, the contents of them turning over the then overwhelming trauma inside her.

The training system was war, turning data into a world where they could die and be reborn, over and over again. There was no true death. There was only mounting trauma, forced upon them by a desperate need to get stronger, faster, better—by the desire to not die on the field, or worse, see those they loved die.

Ripped apart.

Burned alive.

Cores snuffed out.

The aether exploding, taking everyone on the battlefield with them.

Attacks spraying over the world and killing everyone in its path because the caster was desperate to stop an oncoming attack.

Emilia had seen all that and more, not just on the front, but in the training system.

In some ways, especially once it had been distributed to other units, their system was more curse than anything. For many people, it allowed them to hone their skills to a deadly point, yet for so many others, the system was the point—the point at which they burned out or realized their control wasn’t nearly as good as they thought it was.

If it took a thousand battles for a person to crack—for their desperation to rise up and shatter their self-control—it could easily only take a few hours within their system to crack them just the same.

A thousand runs through a terrible battle.

A thousand times watching the people you loved fall.

Over and over and over and over.

An unending cycle that forged or broke, depending on the person.

Emilia had known that, and she had looked at the game system Helix and the others were creating. A part of her had known it could be fun. They weren’t at war anymore. There was no reason to worry that people would burn out under the strain of the system if they were truly choosing to use it.

She had still worried, though, and turned her eyes away from what Hail was doing.

Now, she rather regretted that because she’d already pissed off the aethernet once, when she ended the war—when she scarred the universe itself, forcing what would only ever be a temporary end to the war, even if she hoped that end would last long after she was gone—and she really didn’t like being a position where she might very well be stealing blood from the universe.

That just seemed like asking for it.

Unfortunately, the most she knew about what had been happening with the underlying code of the raid system was that Helix was constantly telling his bosses and colleagues they were dumbasses. As much as he was technically only a designer, creating many of the real-world raids she hated, he was also one of the original contributors—who, if her vision of Halen had been correct, should be a stakeholder in Hail just as much as she was apparently meant to be—and he also served on the panel that managed the way the raid system was changed and updated.

More than once, in their unit’s group chat, she had read arguments between Helix and the others over what Hail was doing—over what they were letting the government do with the training system. Helix had assured them on multiple occasions that he had a hand in the way the raid system was being changed.

According to him, they didn’t need to worry. As much as there were definitely people at Hail who had shit for brains, there were many more keeping them in line.

That was all well in good, except Helix didn’t work for Hail anymore, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that the

people keeping them in line

was mostly just him. Everyone knew Helix, top ranking hero and popular raid designer that he was. He was also fearless. If Hail had started going too much in a direction he didn’t agree with, he 100% would have popped out and told the entirety of Baalphoria about it.

Fuck the consequences. He’d run off to one of the Free Colonies run by their friends and former teammates. Both Halvery and Norvel were lovely most of the year, even if Norvel was also home to one of the most dangerous pastimes in the world—one that Helix was very much a fan of.

Were the few weeks that Helix hadn’t been working for Hail enough for them to have put features he would have disagreed with into place? Mind manipulations that could affect heroes and potentially follow them back into the real world? The aether really being affected by what was done within a raid? All of those little tears from the thousands of raids running at any given moment would add up, even if they were mere pinpricks.

Sparking, for as minimally invasive as its own sparkmarks were, could still become dangerous if too many people sparked in or out of the same area at once. There were guidelines which, thankfully, largely weren’t needed outside of emergencies because most people still preferred slide lines and bubbles to sparking—it was difficult and made most people violently ill the first few dozen sparks. The only people who sparked tended to be vets, who had forced themselves through the worst of the consequences for the sake of safety on the front.

The marks created by what they were doing now would be next to nothing, but how many people had already done this ritual? And would locals perform it again, once everyone was gone? Without visitors, there might be no point, but… but then there were the scars that Carne and the others followed—marks that, if the aether here were the same aether as in the real world…

Emilia shook herself. She needed to stop thinking about this—she needed to stop catastrophizing. Until this moment, there had been no indication that the aether of this world and her own were one and the same. This world was a simulation. There was no reason why she should suddenly worry about the unlikely

what if it’s not.

She still worried, though. Not because anything had outwardly changed about the aether—it still seemed the same as it had a moment ago. The outside of it, anyways.

Emilia had only seen the inside of the aether a few times. It was never a pretty sight, and the reality that what existed around them was more monster than the empty blackness of the stars was… disturbing.

So, she’d never told anyone about what she’d seen within the aether. Why did anyone else need to know about the time when she’d found a hole as a child, and seen inside the universe’s soul? Why did anyone need to know that the time she’d come out of a sparking test run covered in fleshy red goop, it was because she’d been stuck inside the terror of the universe’s stomach for far longer than she’d been gone? Why did anyone need to know that when she’d torn the aether apart, in desperate desire to end the battle so she could get Olivier to a medic, that she’d seen what it was, perfect and horrific in equal measure?

Short answer: nobody had to know those things. Plus, she wasn’t completely sure she hadn’t just imagined each of those incidents. Other records of people seeing into the aether indicated it could be red, black and purple, depending on the location and time of year. Stars above, even the types of skills the person favoured seemed to affect their perception of the universe’s insides, some of the records noting multiple people had stared into the same tear and seen nothing remotely similar.

So, the aether of their training system had simply been a sparkling, idealistic sky. Their most powerful shots had been beautiful, lighting up the world with constellations that in the real world would have usually been black. The universe was black, on the surface, red a little deeper down. It was only deeper that you found more, and even the most skilled soldiers had rarely harmed the aether more than skin deep.

Maybe Helix had—perhaps he had seen the terror under its skin and muscle, and added his two cents into the grotesque world staring back at her from within the hole the others were holding open.

That, or this was the real universe, ripped apart for the sake of people who didn’t need to exist, even if Emilia would do everything in her power to help them. She just really hoped this wouldn’t come back to bite her, that she wasn’t actually hurting the universe for the second time in her life.

Well, third. That whole sparking into the universe accident had definitely ended in some hurt to it as well, just much less intentionally on her part.

⸂Are you ready?⸃ someone asked, Emilia sliding back into her body and trying to shake off all her worries.

At her feet, globs of the aether’s blood had formed into a shiny, dense blob of reddish black.

Emilia stepped forward, hoping this wasn’t a mistake—hoping that taking this thing into herself, in an attempt to find a way to give this world a better future, wouldn’t fuck up her own future.

The universe already resented her for harming it, how much would it hate her for stealing a part of it as well?