[Can’t Opt Out]

“Down, down, down~ We go down, down, down! Down to the depths and then further still! Down we go, into the hell below. Hot and red and burning bright, we go down into the light!”

Emilia jumped down a step as she sang. No one was sure where the song had come from, it having existed since before the Colonial Wars. A mining song, everyone assumed, from the days when that had been handled by people and not robots. Even thousands of years on, people still sang it, as well as other songs set to the same tune.

“Dream, dream, dream~” she sang, lyrics shifting into something newer, something more hopeful. “We shall dream, dream, dream! Dream of a world that won’t bend or break! Dream we will, we will never stop. Free and true and love so strong, we shall dream ‘till the end of days!”

As far as songs went, it wasn’t the catchiest thing she’d ever heard, the words sounding somewhat forced into the tune. She could remember it being sung to her when she was young, though. Songs of hope for children whose lives were hopeless. Then, they’d sung it during the war. Dream of a better day, dream of a world without war, die trying to achieve it.

Kinda morbid, if you asked her. Just like this damn world.

She hopped down onto the next landing, spinning to head down the next set of stairs and starting when her eyes met wall. Had she really, finally, after having spent so much time going down these bloody stairs, reached the bottom!?

She turned back towards the door that would lead out of the stairwell, pushing on the heavy red metal. A mechanism to ease its weight hissed, grinding against itself as it opened slightly before sticking. She gave it another push. Another. Nothing.

Well, fuck.

Emilia poked her head out the small gap, wishing she’d reduced the size of her ass when she’d adjusted her appearance. She could probably get the majority of her body through the gap, but not her hips and ass—not without potentially damaging her outfit, anyways. Considering she had no money, and no idea where she was or what this world was like, potentially ripping her clothes, so the entire world could see her butt, wasn’t high on her list of things to do.

The hallway outside the door was much more barren than the ones above, which she had taken cursory looks at. Most of them, anyways. Occasionally, she’d ventured further down one, digging through the rooms for clues. Every hallway, until this one, had been identical to her own—almost. Each had rooms in various states of being torn apart, but it was impossibly to tell if they were constructs of the platform, or had been used during a previous raid. Eventually, several floors below the one she had spawned on, everything had been coated in a thin sheen of dust.

The deeper she went, the dustier everything became, and once Emilia had gone far enough down, she could see footprints in the dust, sometimes with a layer of dust already beginning to cover them as well. She had followed several of those prints, but they had led her nowhere, just back to a kitchen and another missing fork.

She’d grabbed another fork for herself, from the adjacent room. Just to be safe.

This—presumably the ground floor—was the first without any potential spawn rooms. It also appeared to be dust free, something or someone keeping it clean but not maintaining the damn door.

“Hello?” she called out. She was 50-50 on whether she wanted anyone to answer her, to show up to help her—or kill her—but she had yet to see anyone else in the building, and if someone was on this floor, they were liable to notice her eventually anyways.

Emilia waited a moment, listening and—

Nope. Nothing. She hadn’t even seen any more of the creature that had startled her when she’d first spawned, and the few times she’d looked out a window, she hadn’t seen anything either. Even the bridges, which had seemed filling with movement earlier, had been empty every other time she looked. No one walked the streets. Nothing existed.

She sighed, leaning back and glaring up the stairs. She really, really didn’t want to have to climb back up. Just climbing down had been hard enough, her level 300 body not made for this amount of physical activity. Her legs and feet ached. Her lungs burned. Even the idea of climbing up a single flight, searching the floor above for another stairwell or clue, was exhausting, and she slid to the floor beside the door.

It was a dark stairwell, light only filtering in through slim windows set high on the walls. She assumed they were windows, anyways, given how red the light was. They could be artificial lights, she supposed. She hadn’t actually seen any obvious artificial lights on her search, though, bright as the world seemed to be without them. Nor had she seen any control panels for anything electronic. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t an elevator either.

She let her eyes flicker shut, listening for any sounds. Something from the world outside the building, from the floors high above.

Anything.

There was nothing. Only silence and emptiness. No sounds echoed downwards. No sounds snuck through the walls or windows.

Only silence to keep her company.

She didn’t particularly like silence. Too much noise could be overwhelming, sure, but as long as it didn’t remind her of skills exploding across the world, of enemy claws clacking across tile and bones and blood—

Silence let the monsters in. Let her dreams become nightmares, let her thoughts become waking terror.

Emilia tapped her nails idly against the floor, the sound a dull drumming through the air. She needed to move. She needed to not sit here and sulk and let people get even further ahead in a game she didn’t even know how to access. She needed to fight the sleep chasing her, the nightmares within snapping at her memories.

Emilia was tired, was the problem. Not just physically. She had dealt with physical exhaustion during the war. She could deal with the burn of physical pain, push through it until her muscles were tearing themselves apart. No, the real problem was her mind. She really should have given it a moment to rest, before joining the contest. There was only so much you could do to fight off your brain’s need to shut itself off. Now, sleep deprivation pulled her down, and without her Censor—without her genetics and skills or any boosters—she couldn’t resist that pull.

✮ ✮ ✮

The world was black, which was infinitely better than red. When had it stopped being red? Maybe it had never been red. It wouldn’t be the first time Emilia had hallucinated blood where there was none.

Yeah, that was probably it.

She pushed herself up, sighing as she stared up into the depths of the staircase. So much walking. So much climbing. Her hand wrapped around the railing, and she moved, half-stepping, half-pulling herself upwards. Up. Up. Right, left, right.

She huffed, from amusement and exhaustion. They’d never had to do anything as ridiculous as climb stairs in the military—even in basic training, fast and fierce as it was. There was never enough time to train the newbies who needed the extra lessons, let alone those who didn’t.

They were sub-30s! They needed no physical training! They had needed the strength and skill to slice through their enemies, not the strength to climb stairs they could slide, and later spark, up without a second thought.

She reached the first landing, hand already reaching for the door, blood-red nails glittering in the starlight filtering in from above. Her eyes shot up into the black sky. No sound. No nothing. Emptiness and she needed to go up.

Emilia nodded decisively to herself. Up, she had to go up. The stars were waiting for her. She’d been so silly to go down before and—

✮ ✮ ✮

Emilia started awake, blinking rapidly into the stairwell.

The red stairwell.

The ground floor of the stairwell.

“Fucking dreams,” she muttered, scratching at her forearm and hissing when more than the phantom burn of Payton altering her knotwork shot through her. “Fucking stars.”

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out for—a thoroughly disconcerting feeling, the inability to tell time or ask her Censor how well she had slept or to replay that dream, already fading back into the abyss—but she’d scratched through her skin in her sleep. Blood dribbled down her arm, clots already beginning to form over the long lines her black nails had left. She’d styled them long and sharp earlier, and now she was regretting that. She probably wouldn’t be regretting it if she happened to need to fight someone off, given they were currently her only weapon, but she would regret them for the moment, thank you.

Her wound, though… Granted, it hadn’t been deep, but the speed at which it was healing was most definitely not what she would expect for a level 300—no, fuck that. This was medic skill level healing speed. Why create a system with no rules, with a high starting level, and then give people super healing?

She watched as the wound finished sewing itself shut, the blood that had leaked out of it slipping back inside her—even the blood on her nails shimmered through the air and returned where it had come from.

That was weird.

That was the kind of thing that made her gut clench and scream and demand she investigate.

Emilia’s nails clattered over the floor, as much as nails could clatter over gross, sticky tile. Then, she was digging through the pockets of her cloak for one of her forks. She examined it, just as she had before. The only thing that was different about it, compared to anything else in those rooms—compared even to all the other forks that each room had had—was one broken prong.

One prong sharper than all the rest—sharper than anything else she had found. Sharp enough that she certainly wouldn’t be putting it in her mouth.

She twirled it between her fingers, before unceremoniously slashing it across her arm. The mark she left wasn’t deep enough, the slice barely bleeding before it sealed itself closed.

Again. Harder—the blade of the fork dug through her skin, deep enough this time to make her gasp at the pain, even as she dropped the fork and grabbed her arm. Emilia leaned forward, squeezing her arm to get more blood out.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Blood oozed out of her, thick and syrupy as the building’s water, onto the floor in front of her.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The puddle of blood shimmered, wobbled, tried to reach back towards her arm. Its combined weight was too much, however. Every new drop pressed the puddle back to the ground as her wound grew smaller along with the blood’s chance to return home.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

She watched her arm heal itself, skin slowly stitching itself perfectly back together. There would be no scar from this, not even in this world. No evidence of what she had done.

Her puddle of blood rippled as another droplet fell into it. Another. It vibrated. Another. Shuddered. Another.

By the time the wound had fully sealed, one last drop sliding out of her to the floor, her puddle was no longer contained by gravity—no longer trying to return to her. It was practically a hurricane. A tiny one, but a hurricane no less. It ripped through the air, menacing and sharp, as though being sliced from its home had driven it to madness.

Blood skills were rare, outside of medic skills. {Blood Rain} was one of the only exceptions she had ever come across, and terrifying for how powerful it was. Even her own altered version was terrifying. The full version? The version not meant for fighting echos and monsters but other humans?

That version was truly a thing of nightmares that she hoped was never let loose on the world again.

The final drop of her blood joined the frenzy, and she wondered if it would be enough for whatever was happening. It didn’t appear to be losing momentum or form, at any rate, so she contented herself to lean back and watch it spin, her fingers taping out a beat of time. A couple minutes—ten at the most—and she’d add more blood.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Minutes passed and nothing changed.

Nothing changed.

Nothing changed.

Emilia sliced her arm open again, added more blood. Waited and watched and still.

Nothing changed.

Nothing changed.

Over and over, she repeated their dance. She waited longer. An hour. Two. Added more blood than all the times she had before.

Nothing changed.

The hurricane grew bigger, bigger.

Her body tired. Her mind bent as she sacrificed her blood for the gut feeling that there was some meaning—some purpose—behind the strange phenomenon.

Then, the hurricane grew darker and Emilia leaned back, her arms falling limply to her sides. She’d given it so much blood, her body feeling impossibly light for how little she had left—impossibly heavy for how tired she felt.

Hopefully, she hadn’t just massively fucked up and killed herself.

Anything goes meant the platform could fuck with you too. Could throw in lies and tricks that would make heroes abandon a standard raid. This wasn’t a standard raid. This was a raid of red silence—of death, for all she knew—but her gut was seldom wrong.

“My beautiful silver girl,” her ex’s voice called, and Emilia looked up towards it.

The world was turning black again. Again? When had it been black to begin with?

She blinked into his redness. He was barely there—he definitely wasn’t there. Just a hallucination from the blood loss.

He smiled, red lips slicing across his face the only detail she could make out under that mop of red.

“Em—”

She tilted her head, unable to make out his words as her blood shattered the world around them. The door blew open, the stair rail rattled and screws flew loose. The metal of the stairs bent and curled. When had it become this violent? Blood splattered across the blackness converging around them, too. Pushing it back. Claiming this place for the red.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, letting her eyes flutter shut. “Can’t read lips right now. Try again later.”

Her hallucination might have said more, or maybe it was her blood talking to her. Screaming at her, “More, more, more.” More what? If it wanted more blood, she had none left to give.

Emilia’s head lolled, and the fork was in her hand again, her blood guiding it—although she couldn’t tell if it was inside or out. Maybe both. Maybe all her blood wanted to be one again, was dancing with her, forcing her hand so it could return to togetherness.

What a thing that would be—to feel like she was whole again. To feel like she had her life together.

The blade of the fork slashed across her throat and everything burned red.