[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia could taste the flavour of Olivier’s blood in the cell, the few specks of red littered over the floor holding the same energy as the blood she’d come across when she’d first been searching for him inside the tunnels. It was nice to know that she hadn’t been wrong in assuming the blood was his, nice to know he hadn’t bled out. Still, she didn’t like that he had been injured, a part of him seeping into the stone floor where he’d been left until it became a part of the terrible building’s story.

It was a story that just got worse and worse, the lower they went.

At first, it had been a slowly rising horror. Each level had been worse than the last—this slow removal of rights and doors changed from opening and closing without keys to ones that had more and more locks. Once they’d passed Olivier’s group, they had found evidence of their travels through doors burned off their hinges.

“Cravena,” Jerrial had confirmed, Emilia’s Censor having already pulled up information on the woman.

There were a number of people Jerrial had warned her about, Cravena being one of them. Overall, the people Jerrial had told her about had fallen into several groups: people who would almost certainly aid her, if she happened across them; people who might aid her or ignore her, as long as someone important to them weren’t being threatened; and people who could not be trusted, ever.

Rayleen had been in that last group, but even before Emilia had literally run into her, Jerrial had offered the caveat that the woman was just unpredictable. She might aid Emilia and betray Fräthk, just as she might suddenly betray anyone. So don’t trust her, but don’t blow her off as easily as other people on the list either. Vtraní had also been on that do not trust list, though, and despite having only seen them from afar, Emilia couldn’t shake the feeling that they should have had a caveat as well. What sort of caveat, she had no idea; still, it felt as though they needed a footnote beside their name.

Cravena, as well as a number of people who Jerrial thought were missing from the cells on the lower floors—although he had no idea if they were with Olivier or had just been taken out on missions—were thankfully in the first two categories. A few had been in the do not trust category as well, but Emilia was glad that Olivier had at least a few people with him who could be trusted and were highly dangerous.

Certainly, Emilia wouldn’t want to go up against Cravena in battle, the woman apparently possessing some sort of irregular deviation that allowed her to control flames and heat—so much heat, that it was capable of melting through hinges made of a metal that required a lot of heat to damage. Emilia was pretty sure even her most powerful defensive skills wouldn’t save her from the woman’s abilities; thankfully, it seemed that Cravena needed to focus her abilities in order to not accidentally hurt herself or her allies, so running from her abilities was a possible defence. Emilia still hoped they wouldn't come up against one another.

Still, the reality that Fräthk had been able to keep someone so powerful locked away was terrifying. Likely, a big part of it was that there wasn’t really anywhere for their little bugs to run. They could live on the streets, but most had been taken during their education and Lüshan had little to no system for helping students catch up on missed coursework—it was actually something of an issue for people who ended up with illnesses that kept them from school for extended periods of time. For those who had perhaps not had the ability to potentially escape for a few years, there would be no catching up in their education, no careers to be found. So, they would live on the streets and very possibly be swiped up by Fräthk once again—that, or they’d have to seek out the scary man and join his empire.

It was terrible, especially considering the desolate state of the last normal level of the holding cells. It was cold and dreary. Only a few of the rooms had any bedding, and several of the people they had found in the bottom two levels were so sick Emilia was surprised they were even still alive. Still, they had been given barely anything to help them recover.

No extra blankets.

No extra food or water—and seriously? What was the harm in giving these people water? Instead, the people who lingered in the cells were thin, their skin papery dry, their lips cracking and brutalized by this terrible life.

So, the fact that Emilia could feel more horror lingering under their feet churned her stomach. So much blood, escaping the bodies to which it belonged. So much pain that her own Perfect Levels in every Category were enough to allow her to feel it. Normally, feeling such things was the territory of Dyads alone—at least, within Baalphoria it was. For there to be so much suffering under their feet… Emilia knew she was more tuned into the aether than most people. One did not spend so much time messing around with their core when they are small, nor learning under Free Colony warriors, nor experimenting and theorizing about the aether and skills, and not come out of it with a deep understanding.

Barely a moment of her life passed where she wasn’t having some thought or another about the universe and the energy that made it up. Yet, Emilia had still found herself shocked as they descended. Looking back, the feeling of all the people suffering under their feet had been just as slow growing a thing as the horror of the holding cells themselves. Even those topmost rooms had been rather dreary—and apparently, the most loyal of Fräthk’s people tended to have their own homes elsewhere, only staying in buildings like these on a rotating basis to act as guards. Those top floors were practically luxurious compared to these cells she now stared into, but it had been a slow removal of things to get here.

Food had become scarcer. The temperature of the floors became more intolerable as they moved, shifting between too cold and too hot at random. Paint became chipped, bedding threadbare. Toilet paper had gone from being stocked in cupboards to being limited to a single roll a week for a floor that, were it full, could have had dozens of people living on it because Fräthk was forcing these people to live in their own filth.

This bottom floor stank of humans—sweat and piss and shit missing together until it was just as bad as the sewers, and yet all the worse because this wasn’t the sewers. This wasn’t a place that should be dirty, the sparse bedding smeared with remnants of every bodily fluid because there was barely any toilet paper and the options were limited—either clean yourself with what you have, or let it smear over everything naturally.

Still, what was beneath them felt worse—so much worse that Emilia’s mind kept skipping backward. Up it went, replaying the horror of each level until it returned to this level, noticing a thousand tiny new tortures as it went. Then, it would remember the torture beneath her feet, and slam back to the surface.

There had been people here with more of a connection to the aether than her, her mind unhelpfully reminded her. At least two of Fräthk’s little bugs who possessed abilities that could feel out emotions and minds had been confined here for so long, feeling every ounce of horror occurring beneath them, just hoping they wouldn’t become so useless that they too were pulled lower to face the same fate as those whose pain must have been an even more visceral thing within them than it was within her.

The first time she’d vomited, back in the tunnels, Vern had held her hair, Candence gently patting her back and trying to cheer her up and failing spectacularly at it. This time, as she spewed what little she’d eaten of the food Nivel had given them over the floor, Vern once again held her hair back, Clemence demanding to know what was wrong. There wasn’t a lot for Vern to hold back, what with how much of it she had braided out of the way. A few wisps of her bangs had escaped her attempts to tame them, however, and Vern diligently—gently—held those back.

Somewhere, Jerrial asked what was wrong, Vern calling back something about her being sick again. Clemence demanded to know why she’d thrown up before, Vern snarking back at her something that seemed to be a mixture of none of your business and I don’t really know.

Laughing as her stomach continued heaving was not a good feeling, and the next thing she knew, she was gagging on nothing. Her stomach was empty and clenching, trying to spew nothing over the world and she couldn’t stop heaving. Fucking muscle memory and reflex. Her gag reflexes were all triggering—her throat an itch, her abs stuck clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, clenching and—

Automatically, Emilia’s Censor suddenly activated a skill Halen had designed for Polianna, forcing her body to stop trying to empty her already empty stomach. It was one of those skills that had been repurposed, shifting from something meant to help Polianna with her eating disorder into something that could help anyone who was sick. Honestly, Emilia had no idea how she’d ended up with it. There were a few skills like that—skills and functions that, somewhere in the last fifteen years, had crossed the line between their sides of the class.

A bunch of them had been swapped between her and Halen when they trashed Coral’s previous school. With a mutual goal, they had let each other have this or that skill because some things were more important than a then-decade-old grudge, and Coral would always be more important—making horrible people suffer would always be more important than such pettiness.

How other skills had been exchanged was more mysterious. Some had been shared during their years of classes together, but those skewed towards combat skills. So, how in the world had a skill for controlling and tamping down on a gag reflex ended up swapped between them?

Emilia’s Censor had automatically activated the skill—and maybe it had been meant to forcibly stop Polianna from making herself puke, but had been altered to only stop other people from throwing up once it reached a certain point of being too much? There were, after all, plenty of good reasons to throw up. Bad food, for instance, could be rejected by the body and it wouldn’t do for the skill to keep poison down. A quick glance at the skill showed her that it could also be used to force someone to puke, and oh—that was why she had it.

Levi—because of course it was Levi—had accidentally poisoned himself last year. Codeth had been mushroom hunting, and while plenty of the mushrooms that grew in the forests in the southern Penns were perfectly safe, some were not, while others could only be consumed cooked. Levi had come across Codeth and eaten one of the mushrooms that was poisonous while raw. Codeth had likely given him skill so he could force it out, and what reason would he have for demanding it be deleted? Hence, at some point, she had updated Levi’s Censor and ended up with the skill. Most likely, they all had a copy now, passed on without much thought. Probably, she or Halen should update it to have more conditional activations—she really could have been cut off from puking far sooner.

Behind her, Vern and Clemence were continuing to argue, while Jerrial had appeared with a bottle of water—gifts from Nivel, which they had refilled on one of the floors that actually had water—for her to clean her mouth out with. Fortunately, the pair weren’t arguing so badly that it seemed they were likely to attack one another—Emilia had made it very clear to the teenager that arguments weren’t enough to kill someone over. There had been a moment, of course, where she had hesitated because there were, in fact, caveats to that—mostly that if the person were arguing for genocide or some shit, and it wasn’t just hypothetical, it might be okay to kill them. Clemence had noticed her hesitation and demanded she explain. It had become a whole thing that had ended in the teenager agreeing that, for the time being, if she thought someone were actually arguing for killing innocent people with the intention of doing so, she would report it to Jerrial or Emilia; then, they would deal with figuring out what to do.

Really, Emilia had a new appreciation for all her black knot friends. Either through their friendship with so many normal people or their parenting—probably some mixture of both—they were all reasonable people who knew right from wrong without being told—although, they often reminded Baylor not to do this or that because really, the guy might just snap one day. Regardless of Baylor’s peculiarities, having connections to people who would be upset if they did unethical things might help control their baser instincts, but even without such connections, they all knew how to behave in the world. This—having to explain to a teenager why she couldn’t just kill people who annoyed her—was not on her list of things she’d wanted to do today. Granted, a lot of the things she was doing today hadn’t been on her to-do list—definitely, descending into what effectively seemed to be Fräthk’s murder and more overt torture levels was not something she wanted to do.

Unfortunately, Jerrial—and as it turned out, Clemence as well—had people down there being tortured—or perhaps even already rotting away to dust and aether. Either way, they wanted what was left of them back. So, down they would go.

At the very least, with her stomach so empty, Emilia wouldn’t be throwing up again!