A splatter of colourful aether exploded over the face of the woman who had been attempting to ambush them, curses erupting out of her as Emilia laughed.
âSorry~â she cheered, as though she hadnât just hit the woman with the weakest, most stoppable attack that could be used to take heroes out in a PVP raid. âBetter luck next time!â
The woman turned, intent to demand her companions avenge her, only, Emilia had already taken them out with the same skill. Each of the foursome blinked in a confusion that Emilia could appreciateâas much as the woman had clearly been underestimating her, not bothering to activate even the weakest of defensive skills before coming for her, the men had been a bit behind her, already knowing she wasnât just an empty-headed silverstrain.
They
should have known sheâd already taken out the woman and set their own defensive skills rising to block any attacks, and to be fair, they had been!
It was never going to be enough, not with Hyr watching the aether for gaps, their vision of the world overlaying with her own, guiding her to unleash {Spattered ON} through the weak points in their defences, in the aether itself. The syn sharing their sight with teammates still needed some workâhaving it on too long was giving her a headache, although some of that might have been the lack of sleepâbut it was still So. Fucking. Cool.
Emilia hadnât really been a believer in the things the synat claimed to see before meeting Hyr. Now? Being able to see bits and pieces of what they saw? Yeah, she was a firm believer in this whole sight thing now, reality written through the world, just waiting to be seen.
And! Hyr had confirmed that what she and Conrad were seeing wasnât exactly what they themself sawâEmilia assumed Hyrâs reality was closer to what sheâd seen back in Silâs room, when sheâd been trying to push her energy into Hyr and been pulled into their overwhelming existenceâbut with some more work and testing theyâd get there. Fuck, was she excited to get there. It would probably take a bit, especially since Hyr would eventually have to go homeâŠ
Yeah, there was a good chance she was going to be dragging them into training rooms to test out their skill throughout the trip. Her brain would definitely end up hating her by the end of the trip, considering how many hoursâyearsâshe was liable to need within the Virtuosi System in order to adapt her hack for everyone else, code them all a few sweet skills, and tweak the ones sheâd designed for Hyr and Conrad, but it would be worth it.
It was nice, that she thought it was worth it now, her brain reminding her yet again that she needed to do something nice to thank Payton and that she was missing something about him.
Seriously, what was she missing!?
âYou⊠how did youâŠâ one of the other members of the group, a too-skinny man with scraggly blonde hair, was saying as they wandered away.
Unfortunately, he had the energy of one of the
raid obsessed
people who were occasionally featured in the news. Someone who cared only for raids, barely taking care of themself so they could jump from virtual raid to virtual raid, only leaving the house to fight in real-world raids, hacking their Censors until they could spend every hour of their life raiding and burning their brain out.
Chances were he was another hero who had won tickets onto the ship. Not every hero within this raid would be like that, but they would definitely skew that way. Some regular guests would certainly join the few PVP raids that the ship offered, wanting to prove their worth against the heroes the ship was sponsoring to make their stays more enjoyable, but they wouldnât be particularly numerous.
Real-world PVP raids werenât exactly popular with the masses, most people finding it too difficult to actually attack another flesh and blood person, despite the fact that many of those same people wouldnât hesitate to kill an AI inside a virtual raid. In theory, skills like {Spattered ON}, which simply treated colourful shots to various locations on the body as
killshots,
were meant to lessen the unease those heroes felt at attacking another human. As previously noted, however, it was a straightforward skill to block. Aside from hitting someone without a defensive skill running or using Hyrâs sight, there was no way it would hit anyone. Most similarly pacifistic skills were the same.
Generally, the more aggressive the skillâthe more likely it was to leave scrapes and minor wounds or even knock the victim outâthe more difficult it was to block, and most of those skills, while limited in power for the raid, were perfectly capable of killing someone if used outside a raid. That shit messed with heroesâ heads, hence, not super popular.
While Emilia was quite enjoying hitting people with {Splattered ON}, enjoying the shocked faces on the so-far twenty-five people sheâd taken out in the first level of the raid, Conrad was testing out various skillsâhe had yet to use the same skill more than twice, logging his notes on their usage for her to look at when she got to tweaking his skills laterâwhile Hyr was using enough passive core abilities that the raid monitors must surely be ringing their hands, because as much as their systems couldnât stop Hyr from using their abilities, the systems sure as fuck would be able to see the syn was doing
something.
The northerner wasnât doing anything against the rules, was the fun part. They watched the world, reading the ripples of the present and the future, using a combination of their alpha-version of the Censor function that would eventually allow them to guide the group using what they saw without much thought, and their voiceânot to mention what theyâd managed to learn of Emiliaâs sign languageâto guide her and Conradâs movements. All the while, the syn was seemingly pulling the aether around the three of them, helping to lessen their presence.
According to Hyr, this was the first time theyâd really extended their presence hiding skill to other people. According to Conrad, they were doing really well for it being their first time!
âTwo of my nephews can do something similar. It takes a lot of effort just to do it to themselves alone when theyâre standing still. Either their ability sucks, or youâre just more impressive by the minute.â
âIâm betting its more the latter,â Emilia agreed, nudging Hyr with her shoulder. It was probably pretty silly, but it made her smile that despite the lack of effort and weight she put into it, the syn still swayed with the movement. âYou are a fucking monster~ Oh! Wait! Nephews? Was the younger one, Jeremy, one of the ones who could do that?â
Striking down another group with {Punctured Heart ver. messy messy}âa skills whose normal version caused the targetâs heart to explode, while the raid version simply caused an explosion of red over their heart to simulate the killshotâConrad agreed, laughing when she told him that finding him had been a pain.
âWas he traumatized by being killed?â she asked, watching Hyr guide Conrad through the raid, searching out heroes so he could test his skills out. Evidently, the Free Colonier might like virtual raids, but heâd only participated in a handful of real-world raids over the last decade, rarely actually spending time in Baalphoria. As a result, heâd never used most of the standard raid skills, and many of the skills heâd used during the war had been updated since then. It wouldnât take him long to get the hang of all the new skills, but the fact that virtually none of them were tweaked to his specifics was leading to a lot of misfires, his skills not quite hitting the place he had intended on his targets.
That said,
not quite hitting
for Conrad and the skills he was using meant the hits were off by a few centimetres. Nothing too impressive, but it still bothered Emilia that his strikes weren't perfect. The fact that it bothered the Free Colonier as wellâŠ
As he was complaining once again about his hit being slightly offâthis time it had fired a fraction of a second too slow, which actually could make a difference if the target were sparking or microsparking, neither of which many people were comfortable doing on a moving vesselâshe circled her arms around him.
Cheek resting on his back, she squeezed. âI love that this bothers you.â
Even during the early part of the war, it had often been a nuisance to get members of their unit to care that their skills werenât perfectly tuned. There had been a handful of them who had cared, and they had constantly been left to track down the ones who couldnât be bothered to come test their skills out. Almost everyone could understand
why
so many hadnât cared, particularly during the pre-training system days: testing was tiring and time-consuming, the payoff for those wasted hours minimal when half the time soldiers were firing shots under circumstances that werenât exactly conducive to perfect shots.
In Emiliaâs opinion, that had made it more important to tune skills as perfectly as possible: in a moment of crisis, a skill being off could mean death, especially when compounded by stress. Still, many people had continued to blow off testing their skills and allowing their hackers to tweak the settings just so.
Unsurprisingly, people had died due to that avoidanceâmembers of their unit, tens of thousands more in the military as a wholeâadding a whole new aspect of frustration to her feelings about the people in their unit who had refused to be tested. Unlike most units, theirs had had the manpower to not just test and improve skills but create all new ones. Unlike most units, where there was no one around capable of tweaking skills, there had been numerous people willing to do so in their unit.
Yet, their attempts had often been turned down, and it had been frustrating enough that even now, decades on, the arguments sheâd had with those idiotsâmost now deadâstill made Emiliaâs blood boil, Hyr naturally reaching out to press a hand to the nape of her neck, pulling her anger apart before it could explode into the world.
âWhyâre you so pissed when youâre telling me you love how finicky I am?â Conrad asked, his hands wrapping around her forearms, his nails digging into her skin in a way that made her think that he rarely had anyone touch him, hug him, give him any type of affection.
âAnnoyed at people I knew during the war for not caring, for dying because they didnât care, for spitting in the faces of every person who died because they had no one to tweak their skills by refusing our help.â
âLeaving people to their stupidity is difficult, but necessary.â
Emilia and Conrad turned as one to look at Hyr. The syn blinked back at them, all sagely energy.
âVery wise, little syn,â Conrad said, letting her go so he could surge around another corner and take out more unsuspecting people. Within her, Conradâs energy pulled taut, a little hug of his own, perhaps.
Hyrâs hand remained on her neck, {Iced Access ver. Gentle Hand} sliding between them. It wasnât necessary, but the northerner had clearly noted how much she liked the feel of it cooling her Censor and had taken to activating it whenever they had a momentâusually when Conrad had raced off to take various heroes out, his own body count in the low hundreds and quickly creeping up on the levelâs top killerâs 139. Considering that hero been in the raid for over three hours and still not moved on to another levelâŠ
Well, either they were doing something similar to Conrad and testing out skills in a less hectic environment than would be found on the other levels, or they were just enjoying taking out any hero who got too close. Emilia was betting it was the latter, her eyes latching onto the level mapâwhich gave vague indications of heroes locationsâwhere a particular hero never moved too far from the entrance to the next level, killshotting any hero who got too close, she assumed.
Due to the general lack of heroes interested in PVP raids, they tended to have rules that allowed heroes to
die
and return to the raid, either after they had recoveredâif theyâd been knocked outâor after a set period of timeâif hit with a more passive kill shot. Even having only been in the raid for a little over half an hour, their group had seen and killed a number of heroes several times over, many of them actively seeking their group out. Many of those heroes were growing increasingly annoyed; there was just something far too aggravating about repeatedly being taken out by a silverstrain with the weakest skill or a cute Free Colonier who was using the most insane skills on everyone he came across.
Then, there was Hyr, who just sort of appeared out of nowhere behind their victims, fingers pressing into pressure points, their new skill {Meridian Pool} vibrating energy into the target, simulating their bodies in different ways, depending on the point. In the case of the oneâs Hyr usually pressed, it straight up knocked the poor heroes out.
In terms of the skills Emilia had created for the two so far, {Meridian Pool} was perhaps the one that was most clearly a core ability. Honestly, she was surprised it had even been approved for use, because while it didnât actually leave any of Hyrâs energy within the targetâsomething that definitely would have resulted in it not being approved by D-Tectâit was still clearly interacting with the other personâs energy and meridians.
It would have both made sense for it to be rejectedâor at least banned from use in PVP raidsâbut that was mostly due to prejudice; there were normal skills out there that worked similarly, interacting with the targetâs meridians, energy and core. According to Rafe, he was expecting that eventually some higher up or another would question his approval of the skill, but he was already compiling of list of similar, aetherstore based skills to bring up when that happened.
If D-Tect was going to be banning {Meridian Pool} they were going to be banning dozens of other skills as well. Emilia didnât really care too much if it was bannedâwhile it was a cool skill, she could reprogram it into an aetherstore version, and she really didnât foresee Hyr joining too many PVP raids in the future, the only place the ban would actually matter.
Actually, it might even be a good thing if it was banned, assuming Rafe pushed for all those other skills to be banned alongside it: {Purged of Fate} was a truly terrifying skill that never should have been brought into the world, let alone approved by D-Tect. While a ban wouldnât erase it from the world, it would at least make regular people think twice about even having it installed.
Wouldnât stop criminalsâor people like herself, who werenât stupid enough
not
to have it installedâbut it would be nice to know that fewer people were wandering around with potentially deadly skills installed, most of them not even realizing just how dangerous it was.