Arc 9 | Chapter 521: Imma Just Choose To Think of This As A Playground

“A little to the left.”

“Isn’t that the right?”

“What?”

“It’s her right, your left?”

“Wait… were we supposed to be giving directions from her perspective?”

“Yes? What sort of instructions have you been giving?”

“Not ones from Emilia’s perspective, clearly.”

“I thought it made more sense this way!”

“How?”

—that one was two voices, overlaying one another; Vern and Jerrial’s voices joining together to ask Clemence how she had come to decide that using her perspective was better than changing her instructions to suit Emilia’s current position.

Emilia was also curious about this—not in any real meaningful way, as she was mostly ignoring their

instructions.

Instead, she had set one of her functions to manage what they were saying, and all that function required to work properly was for whoever was screaming instructions to give her

consistent

instructions.

Clemence was

consistently

using her own perspective in her instructions.

Vern and Jerrial were

consistently

using Emilia’s current position in their instructions—although Vern’s instructions tended to come a few seconds late, resulting in the function needing to match his words up with where she had previously been located or looking.

As she was using the word

instructions

lightly—she was more taking them as suggestions she was mostly ignoring—it wasn’t generally anything actually useful to them… not in this particular location, anyways.

“Well, Emilia moves, and I don’t?”

“So?”

“So… like, doesn’t that mean my directions are always accurate?”

“But she also has to compute them in her head?”

“I don’t super understand how the little computer in her head works, but shouldn’t it be able to do that for her?”

“Couldn’t it do it the other way as well, then?”

“What does that mean?”

At another spot in the murder machine—which Emilia was increasingly inclined to think of as a murderous playground—Jerrial had been able to boost Clemence onto his shoulders, allowing the girl a better view of the section Emilia had been working through. From that position, the teenager actually had been able to let her know where some shards of something similar to glass were located along the bar she was climbing through, hidden from her view.

It was not a good climb, and while Emilia had her Censor running, recording her trek… Yeah… she probably wasn’t going to be sharing these videos with anyone because seriously? She was an idiot, this particular section—which had been booby trapped, littered with sharp objects, and

may

have featured a pit of spikes under it. Considering that some of the bars had given out under her while she climbed, risking her plummeting to her death if she didn’t grab another bar fast enough—and avoid grabbing one with one of those shards she couldn’t see attached—this recording would be staying safely tucked within her mind where no one could ever see how much of an idiot she was. It wasn’t a new thought, that she was an idiot, but the current amount of stupidity that was racing through her blood was definitely leading her to think herself stupider than usual.

As she had been running a few skills as they moved through both the upper levels of the holding cells, and this torture dungeon, Emilia didn’t

think

they had been poisoned by some gas or another.

The lack of confidence she had in that sentiment was a little concerning, to say the least. Really, her only reason for

not

thinking she’d been poisoned was simply that no one else was acting any stranger than usual—although, they

had

let her come into this playground without much pushback? So, maybe they really were breathing something in that was making them all stupider?

That… wasn’t a good thought, and Emilia brushed it aside—or tried to. Her brain just wasn’t meant for brushing things aside, okay? And she was already using so much of her available brain power to continuously analyze the murder playground—in this case, she was solving the sliding puzzle it had given her—and to

not

think about

the thing

lingering beyond the playground. The last one was by far the hardest, using so much of her mental space at the moment for the simple fact that it didn’t feel like

the thing

was in the playground with her. One would, therefore, think it okay to consider it, just a teeny, tiny bit?

According to Rayleen, in the only bit of

instruction

she had personally given Emilia when her mind had begun to wander towards thoughts of

the thing

, no, actually, it wasn’t safe to think about

the thing

even when it wasn’t nearby. Annoying. Aggravating. Dragging at her nerves and neurons and—

And the puzzle clicked into place and Emilia fell to her stomach, making herself as flat as possible as a blade exploded out of the centre of the puzzle, where there had very clearly been a hole. Not all such holes had shot things at her, but enough had.

“Fuck!”

“Shit. It doesn’t matter how many times that happens—”

“—it’s always a jolt to the system.”

“At least Emilia is good at noticing where they come out?

The holes that contained projectiles were better than the hidden shards of not-glass—an analysis of one piece had revealed it wasn’t actually

glass

but some sort of material that was virtually devoid of aether, containing about as much aether per square inch as the air itself. This made them virtually impossible to feel, and while her Censor had gotten better at noticing their presence, instead using echolocation to map the area and line it up with a map of the playground’s aether density. It was a slotting together of two skills that hadn’t been meant to work together, and the echolocation skill was in no way optimized for, well, anything. Instead, it was a silly skill that she had created for Simeon’s birthday back when they had been teenagers. Rather than being designed for actual use, it had been made for use inside a man-made cave that a bunch of them had set up for him. Basically, it was designed to indicate where the next hold in a pitch-black cave system was—in a highly controlled environment, as again, they had made the

cave

themselves.

They had all gone through the cave, after he was done, so they could compare completion times—although a few of them had tested the cave system and the skill beforehand. Regardless, Emilia wasn’t sure the skill had

ever

been used since then; it was therefore over ten years outdated and terrible. A baby-hacker-Emilia skill, and fuck did it show.

Had it saved her from slicing her hands and knees open a few times? Yes, but also, her brain was burning, the skill having never needed to be optimized for use with other skills because the entire point of it had been for Simeon to use

only

it to get through his birthday gift.

It had been a good gift, Emilia thought—some silly, youthful lark, which had taken so much time and effort from all of them. They’d needed to rotate who was working on the cave, who hanging out with Simeon. They hadn’t been subtle, and Simeon had definitely known something was up. He had 100% known something was up when the giant metal tubes they eventually created the cave system within were delivered to the wrong address—an address right in the middle of town!

It had been a whole mess—the owner of the business they had been wrongly delivered to was annoyed and already hadn’t liked them, and had insisted on sending them back. Of course, delivered to his business or not, his name wasn’t on the invoice, so there was little he could do. At nineteen, however, there was little she—the person whose name

was

on the invoice could have either, and really! Why did the company even let her place the order if they then wouldn’t accept her authority over said order!?

In the end, it had become one of those rare moments when Halen had tried to help, claiming they were for something he was working on, but that he had ordered them in her name in an attempt to annoy her. This had become an accusation that she was trying to

steal

them from him, and become another huge thing. Luckily, everyone—save the poor delivery people—knew that they were always messing with one another, and the delivery people, being quite done with the crazy Penns town they had been assigned to that day, had let Halen’s mother sign for the delivery as long as she gave them an address in her name.

The cave system still existed in the Mhrina’s backyard, as none of them had been inclined to try having the pipes moved to where they had originally wanted them, at the treehouse, partially because while some of the adults knew they had a

secret hideout

somewhere, no one knew where it was. As the pipes had been delivered to the Mhrinas, moving them to the treehouse would have required hiring a local company and they were already receiving suspicious looks from a lot of people. Having the pipes delivered to the treehouse would have not only revealed its location, but also alerted their parents that they had built an entire house, with running water and multiple power sources, on someone else’s property.

Hence! The Mhrinas had the cave system, which Alaric and Cyan had since turned into a less-than-secret hideout of their own.

To this day, her father still asked her both

where

she had actually been intending to build the system—she refused to tell him—and how she had afforded it—Loren had given her the money, after she and the triplets had asked nicely. Loren, on his part, had simply said that next time, she should order such things in his name, then have one of the triplets pretend to be him. While Loren was significantly older, and any fake identification the triplets used had to show that age, they had found that few people had the guts to question the clones.

Was any of this relevant to her current circumstances? No, but she needed a distraction that was good enough to keep her from panicking, and yet not so deep that she would lose track of herself as she crawled through the tunnel the playground had led her to—and well, she supposed the whole

crawling

thing made their man-made cave system a little relevant? Not that they had made any of the passages quite so squishy in that thing—they hadn’t wanted anyone to get stuck and die in it, after all!

Emilia… currently felt a little like she might get stuck and die, the passage so tight that she was sure her arms and legs would be scraped down to muscle by some of the screws and rivets her skin was catching on. Metal caged her in on all sides, some sort of mechanism or computer attached to the puzzle she’d just solved having opened a space barely big enough for her to fit—and Emilia was sure she would fit, just as she was sure nothing would actually try to kill her as she was crawling through it.

There was a reason she was increasingly thinking of this thing as a murderous playground, rather than a machine designed to murder: it seemed to be more of a game. It was a difficult and deranged game, yes, but it was a game nonetheless and games were, in the end, designed to be beatable.

They had rules and goals. They had hard and easy parts.

Games had to be winnable—not easily winnable, but winnable.

So, Emilia was pretty sure that this particular part wasn’t going to have a death trap; instead, it was a panic trap—a place where she was her own enemy, her mind at risk of spiralling into despair and claustrophobia until she was gasping and wheezing and unable to move. As long as she could remain calm—and thankfully, this was one of those things her Perfect Balance and Awareness Levels were great at, while her Censor could also force the breaths into rhythm if needed—she would be fine.

Out she would pop, deep, bloody scrapes over her body, but overall fine.

Then, she’d move on to the next part of the playground, the next, the next.

Eventually, she’d get to the other side and get to learn if this was a complete waste of time or not. Was it all for nothing? Were the people they were looking for—and perhaps others—over there, or was she wandering into a den of people deformed by their time down here?

Emilia wanted to think that it wasn’t going to be a waste of time—wanted to believe that the little gut instinct within her that had said she

had

to see herself through this place wasn’t wrong.

There was no way to know until she got through, and assuming she wasn’t crazy, this wasn’t a playground designed to be unbeatable.

Of course, she

could

be insane; alternatively—and perhaps more worryingly—whoever had designed this thing could be aiming to trick those who found themselves within it into thinking everything would be fair.

It could be a monster, playing nice, until suddenly, the box of squishy death around her could slam shut and turn her into human mush and Emilia

really

needed to stop thinking about this!

So, as she wiggled herself out of the tunnel and into the next section of the playground, a chorus of relieved sighs coming to her from beyond the playground’s barrier, Emilia pulled her mind to this new challenge.

Onwards. Unless she pulled her willbrand free and tried to cut herself to freedom, there was only onwards, the tunnel squeezing shut behind her, leaving nothing but a solid wall of metal… except—