[Can’t Opt Out]

“Burning aether! It’s Codeth Runsk!”

“Codeth Runsk is in the raid!”

“Did you see him?”

“Fuck… he’s so much prettier in person.”

“Those blue eyes are fucking to die for.”

“Do you think he augments them with a skill?”

“No way! Those babies have got to be all natural!”

“Hottest. Man. Ever.”

“No way! Do you hear yourself? Olivier de la Rue is way hotter!”

“Plus, like, the way you put it—the hottest man ever—would totally include Halen Mhrina too, right?”

“Oh yeah, Halen is definitely the most beautiful man to have ever walked the mortal realm.”

“The mortal realm? Where in the world did you pick that up?”

“Probably some trash lynie book.”

To the benefit of the last girl to comment’s friends—were they friends, or just people teaming up for the raid?—they did look rather horrified at her blatant purism.

“You can’t say that!”

“What? It’s true,” the purist girl sighed, rolling her eyes high to the sky. A hand planted itself on her hip, cocked out, something within it reminiscent of the way teenagers from the Penns acted—or had acted, back when he was still in compulsory school. It was an odd thing, but something he saw often enough—this picking up of the habits of public Division 30 members, so many of whom had either grown up in the Penns or spent enough time with so many of them that they had picked up a few of their habits.

Little quirks of speech. That sloppy, lazy body language they were so known for. The calmness to just breathe and move through life. The tenacity to push and push, learn and learn, and to never ever give up—although, Codeth had often found those latter traits for more a faking of those things, rather than an internalization of what made them, well, them.

Oddly, Codeth had never really thought those things to be anything special—not until he had entered his gap decade and realized that no, actually, a lot of the people his age from the Baalphorian mainland were nothing like the people he had grown up with. It wasn’t that they couldn’t be motivated or relaxed, nor that they were all purists—although, back during their gap decade, they had certainly discovered purist-leaning beliefs were much more common outside the Penns. It was just that so many little things separated the people who grew up within the sphere of the Penns and those who did not.

That general inability to easily connect with other Baalphorians was a big part of why their friend group had stayed together, he thought, even during their gap decade. From what he had heard over the last few decades, even before the war, it had been relatively rare for compulsory schooling friend groups to stay together. Instead, they grew apart as they figured themselves out during their decade of freedom, then made new friends in university and got sucked into work, and then often married life. Life moved on, and they all moved apart.

Then, the war had come and brought death and destruction with it. It had led to people finding new friendships with people from all throughout not just Baalphoria, but the continent itself.

Life moved on, people and their friendships snuffed out along the way. So now, more than even before, they were an outlier friend group for still clinging on to one another. They made new friends, but those of them who had grown up together, been connected by Emilia’s travels with her father, fought in Lüshan together, then spent eight wonderful years being free before war broke out, would always be each other’s number ones. Then, of course, there were the people they brought in during the war—although, admittedly, that list was relatively short compared to all the names who had already been part of their inner circle.

There were a handful of people who had been added since, but as Emilia had once put it, they were a giant puzzle without edges, always willing to snap more pieces onto their collective existence. Now, some of their pieces were missing, only the memory of them lingering between other pieces, everyone puzzled together to make sure those people who had been bridged by a single, now-missing piece had retained a connection to them because in the end, they were all important, even people like Polianna.

“Why are you even here?” Codeth asked, peering over at his old classmate, trying to ignore the purist girl and her rising argument with her friends—or, at least one of them was her friends, anyways, the other girl having stated that if she had known the purist girl had such beliefs, she never would have befriended her.

Things with the group were tense, and despite having managed to pull himself out of sight, he was still running a recon and emergency barrier skill near the group, in case one of them decided to attack another. Generally, the raid system would stop lethal attacks, but there were ways to attack other heroes in non-PVP raids. Better to just monitor them and stop anyone from attacking—he neither wanted the twenty-something-year old girl to be attacked and hurt for telling her friend off, nor allow her to end up being banned from raids or questioned by SecOps if she decided that attacking the purist girl was a good idea.

Another member of the group had attempted to deescalate the argument by bringing the conversation back to how attractive Halen had been. Codeth thought it was a good thing that purism had become such a quiet, insidious thing over the last few decades that the young man hadn’t realized that there was a good chance the purist girl wouldn’t think Halen attractive based solely on his Grey Sander heritage. As a result of the purist girl’s knowledge of Halen’s heritage, however, the boy’s attempts to shift the conversation had only made the situation worse. Ironically, the purist girl had gone on to state that Olivier was far superior to Halen in looks, not realizing Olivier also had Grey Sander heritage, if significantly removed and definitely not public knowledge.

If she and all the other purists found out, would they try to backtrack any positive thing they had ever said of the non-dev? Most likely—not that Olivier was generally popular with purists to begin with, due to all the lawsuits he filled on behalf of people they hated on principle.

In the same vein of purists being exceptionally untrustworthy, it had been common to see, as purism had fallen further and further out of favour, many purists backtracking their negative beliefs about Free Coloniers and those with irregular deviations.

Just grew up that way.

Normalized.

Didn’t really ever think to question the beliefs.

I know those beliefs were wrong now.

Some of the people, Codeth knew, had truly managed to discard their purism. Zavala was like that: someone who had grown up within one of the more low-key purist families of the Penns. When she had been suggested to Division 30, due to her expertise with recon skills—which had still been notoriously difficult to master, during those first few years of war—there had been growing pains, but she had eventually become someone who realized her family’s beliefs were wrong, then cut them off with brutal finality—seriously, since the war ended she’d even had Olivier’s firm file lawsuits against her parents for trying to use her fame to their benefit.

Unfortunately, Zavala’s situation had been something of an outlier in their unit. Where she had tried to grow and understand all the people of their unit who were different, many members of the regular military side of their unit had barely pulled a cloth over their purism, aiming passively purist remarks at everyone they could, then whining and denying their purism whenever anyone dared complain. Colonel McIntyre had always smiled when anyone complained, telling them he would look into it. It had taken a long time for many of them to realize that while he appeared to be looking into it, in reality, it had all been lip service. The piece of shit was just as bad as the rest of his unit, taking any chance he could to kindly, graciously offer to take credit for those on their side of the unit who hadn’t wanted fame, always being more pushy with those who were different.

By the time any of them had realized all the power he was amassing, it was too late. He had made himself into their unit’s most powerful and valuable member, most of their glory belonging to him when he had barely contributed. Emilia had belonged to him as well, several of them understanding the reality that she was trapped. If she left him, Colonel McIntyre would throw a fit—possibly break up their unit. Codeth still thought that most of their side of the unit would have sided with Emilia in any break up, but it was that most that had been a problem.

With their unit one of the few that had been gaining any ground in the war—and those early years had been comparatively easy when seen through his eyes now, what would come in the final years of the war a million times worse—how was Emilia supposed to prioritize herself? How was she supposed to not just risk a rift in their friend group, but a loss of access to their bleeding-edge Virtuosi Rigs and research and every other thing they were getting from the military? The best that would happen was they could become a unit unto themselves; the worst that the military would spread them between a dozen other units, their members who were different dying due to the lack of support they would receive. His childhood friend had never been good at prioritizing herself, even when it was over small things, and this had been no small thing.

So, Emilia had made herself smaller and smaller, so many of them hiding the reality of the situation from the people who loved her most, knowing that if they knew the truth, they wouldn’t care for any consequence to themself or the world. They would prioritize Emilia when she could not do so herself. There were so many people who would have killed that piece of shit without a second thought, had they known the truth. So, they hadn’t told. Coral had spent most of her time as far from Emilia and all her pain as possible. Julian had offered her comfort where he could, often letting her hide in his rooms because no one would ever look for her there, and he would not be intimidated by a Baalphorian colonel when he was, by this time, Emperor.

It turned out to be a good thing, at times like that, that as a group, they had decided to keep their stalking function—which had never been given a proper name, all of them simply accepting that they would be stalking each other for the rest of their lives—to themselves. Had that terrible man had that function—had the ability to track Emilia anywhere she sought to hide from him…

Worse, had she wanted to turn the function off—more than she already had, as she attempted to hide the situation from as many people as she could—in order to have a little time to herself, Codeth knew how it would have ended: with blood and bruises. Then again, Colonel McIntyre had shown how physical his anger could become eventually…

“I don’t know,” the Coral of his memories said, there in his mind alone, records of this conversation gone to the aether under the oppression of the Flaming, “I think he’s just controlling? Emotionally abusive? I don’t… I don’t know if he would hit her? Look, this isn’t something I’ve ever really felt before? Usually, Censors report abuse to the authorities because they want to get their owner help, but either Emmie has disabled her Censor from telling, or it agrees with her and Julian and knows that Emmie leaving him might very well doom us. It should prioritize her safety, but if it thinks that breaking up with him will get us all killed when we can’t win the war…”

It was stupid, Codeth thought, that physical abuse would be the line too far for some of them. The emotional abuse, he thought, must have had a much more profound effect on Emilia—more than the war or the death or anything else. To have to be with someone who was intent to make you smaller and smaller, all so they could feel bigger, stronger. Colonel McIntyre had been a small, petty man, and while non-devs couldn’t have black knots, that man had proven that there were worse things in their world—worse things that could crawl through the minds and genetics of humans, turning them into monsters far worse than those near-mindless monsters of war.

Codeth’s eyes slid to Polianna’s unanswering form. She wasn’t looking at him, her gaze instead trained at a collection of small invaders who were appearing a little ways away. The invaders had arranged themselves in a mosaic of colours, any that were taken out by a group of nearby heroes respawning near instantaneously—near being the operative word.

“Gonna go intervene?” he asked, wondering if the woman would answer him this time.

Polianna had almost always belonged to their group because Coral had been there. Coral was gone, but Polianna had stayed, her life so wrapped up with theirs that he doubted she would have even known where else she could go. A few people had managed to befriend her over the last few decades, most notably Wyren and Moriana, while she had already been relatively friendly with Hanalea and her Gloria. Still, things with Polianna were nearly always as strained as they had been since they were children, the bossy little girl having grown into a bossy woman who spent most of her time running Julian’s household and caring for the children who often swarmed through his palace. That was perhaps the only time the woman became soft: when dealing with children, and even then, it was nowhere close to the softness he had occasionally seen in her while Coral was alive.

“No. Are you going to go tell that group off?” she asked in return, tilting her head towards the still arguing group.

“Not unless I have to,” he said, shrugging and leaning back against the building.

The group who were attempting to take out the invaders weren’t together, it seemed. At least one person had figured out it was a puzzle of sorts, the invaders needing to be taken out in a specific order for them to not respawn. They weren’t sharing that information, however—or, if they had, the people they’d told weren’t friendly enough with them to give them the glory of defeating the swarm. So, instead, at least that single person was managing to take a few of the invaders out before another person—or their own erroneous shot—took out the wrong one and then BOOM! All the invaders would respawn.

On the whole, the invaders in question were rather weak, but Codeth had received a message from Moriana, before their self-imposed silence—in no world would they allow the raids to silence their communication the way it did other, non-emergency relays, but they didn’t want to tempt fate by messaging each other too often through p.xl, the catchy name for their alternative communication protocol which may have been a joke, as Axelle had been the first one to insist they needed a way around Hail’s communication limits. She absolutely hated the name, and had eventually forced Helix to program a function so she would stop looking up like her name had just been spoken when someone was actually saying paxel.

Unfortunately, while the people working at Hail might mostly be idiots, especially now that Helix was gone, they would eventually notice if they messaged each other too often. The bitch who ran Hail now was already bitter about their ability to use their sign language and several virtually unknown languages to communicate within raids. If she found out they had ways of getting around Hail’s communication rules… well, Olivier might be always down to fight that woman in court, but even he had advised them to use not use p.xl too much, especially with so many of them within a single raid.

Regardless of all that, Moriana had informed them of having made contact with Emilia’s ex, as well as his two older siblings, while the sister was being attacked by an invader. Apparently, it was far more powerful than she usually saw until the last day or two of a season. It was also apparently in the midst of respawning—something that, until proven otherwise, Codeth was going to assume was related to the pattern-based method of defeat the nearby invaders were subject to.

It was possible that, due to raids continuously raising in difficulty as the season went on and the nearness of said end of the season, the invaders of this raid were just more difficult to begin with. Codeth didn’t think so; instead, it seemed as though this raid had become something of a mishmash of weak and powerful invaders, with some puzzle elements mixed in.

The result was that even after several minutes inside the raid, not a single invader had been killed.

It was going to be a long night, Codeth thought. That was okay—after all, it wasn’t like he would be able to sleep until the night’s episode of Above the Clouds aired and the continent reacted.