[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia let herself fall backwards, taking Clemence with her. The stairs bit sharp into her back, her shoulders—although, thankfully not her head, the emergency catch me when I fall skill she always had active managing to fully activate by the time their heads and necks would have collided with the stairs. Unfortunately, her elbow wasn’t spared; instead, it cracked against the edge and fucking fuckity fucks did that hurt!

Diligently, her Censor popped up with an explanation about a specific nerve that was stupidly easy to hit and why was it so close to the surface? Shouldn’t nerves be under more muscle and bone?

Diligently, her Censor popped up with an explanation about other nerves that were close to the surface, existing between bones and under little strands of muscle and tendon and why was it bothering her with the information when something had just attacked them!?

Time to mute that shit—she’d already fucked up by reading through the drama that was happening with her friends and been delayed in erecting a defensive barrier. It was probably more than fair that she would be distracted by Baylor and Darrian almost falling to their deaths, but still! She needed to focus! Fortunately, for as much as there had been a delay in her barrier and she’d been required to topple her and Clemence backwards, in order to make sure they weren’t hit by whatever had just tried to attack them, it was now up and no one was hurt.

Well, her elbow was hurt, but it didn’t count as a person. Technically, that meant that she was hurt, but according to the actually useful information her Censor had supplied her with, the pain should pass in a few minutes—if it didn’t, she’d probably fucked it up in more of a months to heal sort of way. Emilia was going to believe that wasn’t the case, even if she was already activating a function to send more hormones and chemicals spiralling through her body in order to deaden the pain a bit. Was this the sort of function that only The Black Knot was supposed to have and she’d only gotten through hacking, and then been forced to promise she’d only ever use for emergencies? Absolutely. Wasn’t going to stop her from using it, despite not yet knowing whether this would constitute an actual emergency.

Really, for as old as the function was—it was yet another thing that had been designed by the mysterious designer who had created {A Private Moment}—it was amazing there wasn’t more research on the potential negative effects of using it. It wasn’t exactly uncommon, though—most of the skills and functions that had been designed for The Black Knot’s near exclusive use before she came along were like that.

“A normalized acceptance of the risk,” someone had once called it, in a rare paper document she’d happened across while looking for old records on all the skills and functions their mysterious designer had created.

Once, the majority of The Black Knot had been viewed as disposable—the clones especially. As a result, somewhere along the line, someone had decided to stop doing much testing on the things that were designed for them. Somehow, even when less insane people gained control of the organization, testing didn’t pick back up—possibly because there was always pushback against change from the older clones.

Fuck them. Emilia would find her own people to test these skills on—Doctor Vickers was always happy to help her test out skills and functions! Okay, that was a lie. He wasn’t happy, even if she knew he secretly loved doing research and didn’t get to do nearly as much as he wanted to these days. Mostly, the poor man would like to be doing his own proper research, rather than insane research led by a bunch of children where his main goal was more to make sure they didn’t kill themselves. Still! Doctor Vickers would cooperate with her! And if she was going to be coming away from this experience with anything—other than several new friends who needed settling in other nations and a possibly cannibalistic black knot stalker—it was the knowledge that they needed to properly test and expand the capabilities of a number of skills. They also needed more skills and more power!

There was a list, filled with skills and functions and all sorts of other things! Emilia was sure Halen had a list as well! Fuck, even Doctor Vickers might have a list, and—

Another barrier exploded out of her, blocking yet another attack, and where was that shit even coming from!? As far as she could tell, there was no one in the direction the attacks were coming from, and originally, she had assumed it was the result of a trap, but no. Instead, the attacks seemed to be coming from a person, but also just seemed to be popping out of the abyss.

“Arinesi?” Jerrial asked, from behind her—and fuck if Emilia wasn’t grateful that Rayleen had insisted she and Clemence go first. It had started an argument, sure—almost everyone wanted Rayleen going first—but Emilia wasn’t sure anyone else would have been able to stop that attack.

“Most likely,” Rayleen replied. “I was not aware she was still alive.”

“Something even you can’t see?” Vern asked, snark dripping through his voice as he helped haul Emilia and Clemence up.

The woman barely spared him a glance, although unlike the other times she had ignored most of the probing and pointed questions about her abilities, this time, Emilia couldn’t help but think the woman looked nervous. That was new, and Emilia didn’t much like it. It was one thing for the woman to look unsure about what they should do next, but nervous?

“Who’s Arinesi?” Emilia asked, erecting one of her better barriers around them before sending a scattering of aether outwards.

The one good thing about someone—presumably someone in Olivier’s group—triggering the security system was that she no longer had to worry about triggering it. Yes, it was terrible that eventually someone was likely to show up, looking to see what was happening in the building, but both Rayleen and Jerrial had assured her that the system was so outdated that it wouldn’t even be able to tell anyone what had triggered the system.

“This is why we left that fake evidence of someone having escaped the building above,” Jerrial had told her around when it first went off. “Unless someone in your Olivier’s group noticed it and disrupted it—and really, you would think then they might have realized something else was happening if they did, because why would someone plant fake evidence like that?—it is likely anyone who comes to investigate will assume someone escaped.”

This was also why they closed the secret passage into the torture chambers they were now within behind them: so it would be harder for anyone to guess they’d come this way. Realistically, once Fräthk’s people realized a bunch of the people who inhabited the lower levels were gone, there was a good chance they wouldn’t actually notice anything as obvious as an open doorway into the dark abyss; rather, they’d just assume someone from down there escaped as well, or something similar. Someone coming down after them didn’t seem the sort of fate to tempt, however, as they were already going to have a hard enough time as it was.

“Arinesi is one of the people Fräthk brought down here. It’s been several years, though,” Jerrial explained, an edge of excitement in his voice because maybe, if this Arinesi was still alive, the person he wanted to find down here would be alive as well. It was a big maybe, in Emilia’s opinion.

That was the painful thing: her new friend was looking for a person, and while Jerrial doubted she was still alive, he didn’t want to leave the city without at least trying to find closure—without trying to confirm he wasn’t leaving a still living person behind in these torture chambers. The poor guy wasn’t even sure how long his friend had been down here for, the holding cells a place without time. The lights turned on and off at random intervals. Food was sparse and given in strange drops of too much and far too little. People came and went, and even when people were allowed to leave the holding cells to do jobs, Lüshan’s subterranean nature made telling time difficult.

Vern could tell Jerrial how long they had been separated for, but Jerrial could only guess at what point he had found friendship with the person he was looking for, at what point she had been brought into this dungeon.

“So… this Arinesi has just been living down here for years?” Emilia asked, mildly horrified.

Spending more than a few days in Lüshanian cities wasn’t something she generally enjoyed, due to how closed up everything was. As beautiful as the cities could be, they did have a claustrophobic aura. That aura was nothing compared to the misery of this place, which seemed the jaws of a monster, closing in around them the longer they spent within its maw. Perhaps she was more sensitive to the aether than most—and certainly, a few instances over the last few hours had indicated that yes, she was, in fact, more sensitive to weird fluctuations in the aether than most.

It was an odd thing to realize so suddenly. Partially, she thought it was because she knew several other people who were just as sensitive—if not more so—than she was. In hindsight, all of those people were low-devs and Dyads, and really, she was an idiot.

Still, as Jerrial explained what he knew of Arinesi’s abilities—she had disappeared into these chambers shortly after he had been taken by Fräthk, so he mostly knew about her through rumours—Emilia thought that, assuming the rumours had been true, the woman had to be a low-dev? Unless… maybe Baalphorians were so much weaker than Free Coloniers that Baalphorian low-devs were on par with Free Coloniers with higher D-Levels? It wasn’t exactly a secret that Baalphorians had far less training than most Free Coloniers, so if she had been comparing the general Baalphorian population… sure, she could believe that. In her mind, however, were her classmates and friends. Some were low-devs, but many more were sub-30s, and few of the latter group had the sensitivity to aether that the low-devs and Dyads among them had. Plus! She knew tons of Free Coloniers, so she thought her ability to judge everyone’s innate and trained ability in such things had to be pretty good!

So… was she wrong in thinking that the scope of this Arinesi’s abilities, which leveraged a lot of aether awareness, likely made her a low-dev? Or were the rumours wrong, and the woman actually had a more standard level of aether awareness—although, if she was able to fire attacks at them from fuck knew where, it seemed like she must have a lot?

Unfortunately, it seemed more likely—not to mention infinitely more horrific—that this Arinesi did have a high level of aether awareness. It was unfortunate, as it meant she must be perfectly aware of the rotting sink of aether and corruption in this place, and yet, had been forced to live within it. Even after only a few minutes within this place, Emilia could feel the terror and death that filled this it—that seemed layered through every realm of existence.

Over the mortal realm.

The aether.

Time itself.

Hundreds of years of torture and blood and wishes for death layered upon each other until the very air itself was a broken thing that burned with every gulp she sucked in.

Emilia had only felt something this terrible once, in the old and unused dungeons buried far beneath Dion’s Summer Palace. There were other dungeons still in use above it, make up of cold grey stone. Those long unused dungeons, on the other hand, had been dyed black with all the blood that had soaked into them. It was a cursed place, once used for ancient rituals of some sort, all records of the exact details erased from even the Royal Archives because whatever those rituals had done, they had worked—they had worked, and countless Dionese citizens and captives of war had been sliced apart performing them over and over and over again.

It was a horror that could not be undone, only buried and forgotten by all but those who were allowed to know the barest of secrets of the place.

This place was a new horror, in terms of time between the last drop of blood spattering over the stone, the last tear sliding down a cheek. It was fresh and horrible, and how could anyone not lose their mind in this place?

Fuck—how could the Dyads who lived in the few floors above not lose their sanity?

Another attack slashed over her barrier, a shudder racketing through her as it began to crack under the assault. It had only taken three hits, and their assailant was already figuring out how to get through her defences—through not just one barrier, but two different ones, no less. Great. Awesome.

Time to fight, she supposed.

“Stay here,” she told the rest of her group, everyone save Rayleen immediately beginning to voice their opinions that she couldn’t go alone, she needed backup, she wasn’t strong enough.

“She will be fine,” Rayleen said, and in hindsight, despite how much all of them had seemed inclined to believe the woman’s words until that moment, Emilia really shouldn’t have been surprised when her heading into battle alone turned out to the incident that shattered that belief.

Of course, that shattering of trust was preemptive, coming far before it really should have—assuming it ever should have. Let the aether burn and blister before people actually be sensible… says the person who never fessed up to being a non-dev.

In hindsight, that little parcel of information might have saved Emilia a massive pain in the butt.