Arc 5 | Chapter 202: From the Without

⸂So… you’re the little girl who has been causing all this trouble?⸃

Emilia gazed up at Ajarni, from where she had been tied up with some sort of suppression rope, both her sad attempts at magic and core locked away from her use. She had contemplated refusing to look at the man, but she’d never been one for not looking evil or death straight in the face.

Hopefully, as the man had pegged her as being the most troublesome of their group, he would be leaving the others alone, especially Gale and Key. She, V, Astra and Zyrex could die. No big deal. The two locals…

Maybe three. Their kidnapper hadn’t reappeared with Hyr or Caro, but that didn’t mean the pair hadn’t simply put up a fight and been brought in after she’d been dragged away by Ajarni’s men.

Emilia… could still hear V screaming for her, his physical and aethervoices overlapping in true terror.

Personally, she was trying to not think about the source of that terror, either in regards to herself or the others—trying to not think about how easy it would be for Ajarni to take his revenge on them by forcing them through labyrinth after labyrinth until they returned home with destroyed minds.

“Am I?” she asked, her aethervoice disappeared along with all her other abilities. She smiled innocently up at the man, simultaneously trying to figure him out and piss him off enough to kill her—not that she would be happy to be ejected from this world, leaving Key and Gale in this man’s hands. There were no good options, only mind control or friends she would never know the fate of, and hoping that the others were having better luck than her.

⸂Do not play dumb,⸃ the Clarity leader said coldly, all of the shifting friendliness and manipulation she had witnessed the one other time they had met, during the meeting before the Ingogia mission, gone. ⸂I know you have been organizing people against me. Such an impressive little girl, to be able to bring the Risen Guard and Enclave together.⸃

“What can I say?” Emilia laughed, smiling brightly as she imagined splitting the man’s head away from his body. “I’ve always been a people person. My unit during the war was filled with friends from all over the continent. What I managed to do with that unit…” she trailed off, shrugging before adding that

that

was even more impressive than it would have been, had she’d managed to bring the Enclave, Risen Guard

and

Clarity together into one group. “I suppose I did do that here, though, didn’t I? Or did you not realize a bunch of your people said fuck you and joined us instead?”

Ajarni’s jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. Actually, it was so slight that Emilia knew her level must better pushing non-dev territory now, for her to have seen it, V’s information about how blackaether heroes believed that raids could push their D-levels below their real-world levels sliding back through her head. She had thought him insane, but while this definitely wasn’t a blackaether raid—although who knew what Hail or raid designers were doing with raids at this point—she certainly felt… lower than she would have expected, even with Payton’s ongoing efforts to unknot her.

Well, probably not ongoing anymore. This close to the end of the raid, her classmate was likely done, just waiting for her to awaken sometime in the next few real-world minutes.

So little time, one big bad dude to kill. A couple people to get the fuck out of there. Hopefully, Hyr and Caro were okay. The syn had been connected to their group message, but neither Boundary nor Villy had known whether her gifted system access would continue to exist if she were disconnected from Boundary. Given her entire message system had gone black, she wasn’t hopeful about her connection to anyone remaining.

Images of Caro burning to death seeped into her mind, searing themselves in her as Ajarni did… something. Maybe he hadn’t realized so many of his people were joining their little group? She’d mostly heard about it from Boundary and Rin, but their group had definitely been pulling in a lot of Clarity members, intent to help them evacuate as many residents as they could before inevitably being detained by the Risen Guard.

Emilia’s eyes flicked to the Clarity member standing mutely in the corner, staring into the abyss… Well, she had come to think of the thing inside these guys a bit like a computer program, hadn’t she? During her times with her mission group and fighting the swarms that had come after her and the others, she’d definitely gotten the sense they were more than a little mindless, intent to fulfill their mission and nothing else. Most likely, that was why they let their real personalities surface at times: the hive mind didn’t have the capacity for more complicated thoughts and plans. The Clarity members she had fought, on her way through the city system, had felt janky—incomplete, and while they were a pain to deal with, due to their numbers, none of them had been as powerful or skilled as they should have been, given the whole human weapons thing.

They moved. Talked. Did what was needed to the best of their abilities. They didn’t question their orders. Maybe, they couldn’t do more than that? A simple mind that wouldn’t have the sense to relate what was going on to their leader? Emilia supposed that was the downfall of a single mind controlling hundreds of people: there were no outside opinions, not unless they let their minds fall back into their normal state

and

let that mind know what was happening.

Actually, it had been a while since she’d seen any Clarity members not walking around under the control of the hive mind. The people Boundary and the others were working with weren’t far enough along to be forcibly pulled into the hive mind, but those who could be? As far as she could tell, they’d been firmly under the hive mind’s control for a while.

Probably, someone had realized information about the disaster at the Ingogia estate was circulating, and anyone who found out what Ajarni had allowed to happen wouldn’t be too happy about it, the same way Phlostra and the other members of the rebel Clarity group weren’t. The members who couldn’t keep themselves from being pulled under, like Phlostra’s group, wouldn’t be able to do anything about it this very moment, but they would still remember, for whenever the hive mind let them go.

“Can I ask a question?”

Ajarni’s eyes took a moment to focus on her, far longer than she’d seen nearly anyone within this world or without take, not unless they were new Censor users or on their way to a mental break. ⸂You may ask. I may not answer.⸃ The man’s eyes seemed to say,

⸂Especially since you’re being a pain,⸃

but he didn’t actually vocalize it.

“Well, I was talking this whole situation over with Phlostra and the group who can fight the hive mind?”

⸂Is that what you refer to it as?⸃

“Yeah? What do you refer to it as? Ah! Don’t answer that if it’ll count as my question. That isn’t the question I wanted to ask.”

The Clarity leader blinked back at her, and Emilia had the sense he wouldn’t have told her what he referred to the hive mind as regardless. Strange for something like that to be a secret.

“So, anyways, we were all wondering why even send us on the mission to the Ingogia estate? Everyone at that table was willing to die to give a few of us visitors system access. It would have made more sense to ask them. They would have done it even without the hive mind’s control. So why send a bunch of young people in to die? Did you not realize their relatives would be pissy about it?”

Ajarni blinked back at her and fuck.

“You don’t know. You aren’t the one in control of this situation.”

⸂I—⸃ he started to say, before looking away. ⸂I am but a vessel for the without.⸃

The without?

“Someone outside of this world is giving you orders?” Emilia asked, slightly dumbfounded, until the worries she had had when she first entered the raid came flooding back to her.

Anything goes

. She had worried about what that would mean, worried about how much the platform maintainer or raid designer would be interfering in this world. Nothing could be trusted. Anything could be a forced creation of the system, or an employee in disguise. When she made that first {Blood Dagger}, she had wondered: was the set-up of that building just a creation of the system, or had a thousand years of heroes woken in those rooms and been forced to search through them in search of—

In search of something to make a blood weapon, for a curse that had existed for only two visitations—only one or two hundred years.

It was a small thing, to know those first moments within the system had been a set-up—an introduction to this world, to see who could figure out what to do. Perhaps when there were more people, at the proper start of the raid, to see who would willingly draw blood with their hands or a fork swiped from their room.

Still, it seemed important, to know that the platform maintainer had been forcing things into this world that didn’t belong. She’d already known that they were messing with labyrinths and challenges, but that had seemed more personal. That beginning… this…

Ajarni hadn’t answered her question, but he looked unsure about something, eyes once more unfocused as he did something with the Clarity system.

Distracted was good, especially when Emilia needed him not pay attention to her as she searched through what little still existed of her own system access, looking for anything that could help her escape—or at least get out of these ropes so she could do something.

Luckily, the system access’ inventory control was still accessible—most of the system access was, actually, save her messaging system—and even better, and when she requested one of the forks she’d collected from that first building be dropped into the hands trapped behind her back, it did exactly that. Realistically, it was a worse item to use than Conrad’s {Blood Dagger}, but something told her it wasn’t meant to be used here—that if she brought it out, Ajarni or perhaps his guard would notice. That made sense, inside her head: blood items had magic inside them, and as much as she’d really only even felt the power of the {Blood Hoop}, she had no training in such things. Worse, due to its magical nature, the {Blood Dagger} might not even work on the suppression ropes! Strangely sharp fork it was, then!

Sawing away at her bindings as subtly as she could manage, she watched Ajarni have a crisis. He paced and muttered, swallowed and scratched at himself, eyes flicking wildly around the room, never landing on one thing for longer than a blink. Clearly, the man had realized something, but what? Her mind flashed through the conversations she’d had about the altered personalities created by the heartcores. Carne’s personality, the Clarity hive mind, the creature that took hold of Risen Guards. Until now, Emilia had assumed they were part of the raid. Some god of this world, or something like that. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Maybe Ajarni was being dragged around by a god, which while still a creation of the raid designer, wasn’t quite as disturbing as being manipulated by a living, breathing person, pulling the strings of this world like the game it ostensibly was.

It was off-putting, even to Emilia, who had already experienced the labyrinth host’s cruelty and knew that some raids featured heavy interference by the platform owners and their employees, as they tried to control the flow of the world’s story.

For this man, though? Ajarni, who perhaps had assumed he was doing the bidding of some god, only to find out it actually might have been another human—a platform maintainer or raid designer who fashioned themself a god, lording over the residents of a world they would erase from existence, the moment it was no longer of use to them?

Yeah, that was pretty fucked up.

“Why did you decide to follow them? Did you think them a god?” It might have been a cruel thing to ask, but she needed to keep the man distracted, and he’d definitely been starting to come back to himself—had that same gleam in his eyes that she’d seen on other people, as they decided to just avoid the truth of the matter for their mental health.

With someone like Zyrex—innocent baby that he was—she’d let him slide back under his false hopes about Eruzia for a bit, although eventually, she’d rip those lies away from him and help patch him up. Regardless of whether someone from the real world had been manipulating Ajarni or not, the man had still gone along with it. He didn’t even have the excuse of a hive mind or other manipulation of his actual mind to defend himself with.

He had just gone along with it. He had had the opportunity to fight back, much like Phlostra and the others had. He had chosen not to fight, and he didn’t deserve her sympathy or kindness, especially not when the universe seemed to be telling her that if he slipped back under his falsehoods he would kill her and any of her friends that he got his hands on.

⸂They wished for the world to change,⸃ he finally said. ⸂This terrible world, forsaken by the people who created it. Left to rot and wither, our lives destroyed by a curse that was designed to make this⸃—he motioned around them, to the world and universe itself—⸂a living torture. Why would I and my father before me, my grandfather before him, not accept help from—⸃

“From a god?”

The man turned away, his shoulders pulling straighter as though he refused to accept that he had fucked up—that somewhere along the way, he should have stopped and thought about what he was doing.

So, either an actual god of this world—although Emilia was rather suspicious of that one—or some employee of the platform owner had decided that something in this world needed to change. Emilia knew some raids did include gods in their worlds, she knew full well from listening to Sil rant about a particular raid he used to like how often those

gods

were actually just the avatars of platform maintainers, used to change the world in a more

organic

way than abrupt updates to the raid design.

It didn’t matter. Whether a

real

god or not, someone wanted to change this world—set the world on the path to change for the next round of the raid, she assumed. Perhaps that made sense: they’d seen how the world had changed between the blood curse coming into being, the last, failed visitation, and now. Maybe this world was on the verge of being deemed not worth using as a raid platform anymore?

The fact that hardly any visitors could use magic—not unless they were from the Free Colonies, anyways—nor could they escape the Risen Guard or figure out they needed to utilize blood to create items—she’d asked Boundary about that, and he’d confirmed the visitors they kept confined never figured out the whole blood curse thing. Those things added together to make a messy, not super enjoyable raid. Chances were, a number of the heroes within this raid would leave it and complain.

Anything might go, but people still expected a good—or at least interesting—time. For the people who were stuck as Risen Guard prisoners the whole time, unable to even kill themselves to spare themselves the annoyance of being a captive… Yeah, they definitely wouldn’t be happy, and the very nature of this raid meant the majority of people to join it would either be desperate or confident in their skills—the sort of confident that meant they were likely to have a record of success behind them. If they stepped out and said the raid was shit, that Ship o’ Stars—and whatever company was behind the raid—had given them a terrible experience, and to avoid their raids in the future...

The first time, those words would be brushed off, but if people kept saying the same things? Had people come out of the last, failed visitation with criticisms? Probably. This second round of negative feedback? That could be enough to make people start staying clear of their raids, and that might be enough to force a platform maintainer to try to change the world themself, to try to—

“Did they want you to destroy the Risen Guard?” she asked. That was all she could think of: that whoever was guiding Ajarni along wanted the Risen Guard gone. Unite Clarity and at least part of the Enclave—probably more than anyone realized, given attempts to gain their help with even containing the evacuees had been met with staunch refusals—and then take out the group who was causing the most difficulties for visitors, the one group who wasn’t actively supporting their mission, but instead stopping it before it could even start.

Then, manipulate Ajarni and his group to create a better, more enjoyable raiding experience for the next visitation. Simple, until visitors start getting involved… in which case, why do all this now? Why not change the world before this visitation? It wasn’t like the platform maintainer couldn’t speed up time and leave more time between the visitations… It would be expensive, sure, to pay employees to fix the situation, but certainly that must have been better than yet another miserable visitation?

Unless—

Ajarni’s muscles tightened, just the slightest bit more, and even when he told her he would say no more about it, stomping off and leaving his guard to watch her, Emilia knew she was correct. The Risen Guard had been the target. The question, however, was whether Ajarni had known about the other goal of his god, the only thing that would have required this plan take place during a visitation: only a visitor—a real one, for whatever reason—could remove the blood curse.

Something—perhaps a line of code or legal contract—had backed the platform into a corner, and this man—this visitation—was how they were trying to fix it.