[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia’s willbrand screamed through the air, sudden and harsh, and she blinked through the world. Around her, monsters screamed, and her allies screamed louder, anger giving way to pain and death.

“How…”

The sound of nails clattering over blood slick rocks raced towards her, and she dodged to the right, shoulder slamming into the sharp edge of a cliff—perhaps the most obvious sign that this wasn’t real: her relaxes and instincts had been infinitely better during the war, when she had worn her D-Levels like the shield and responsibility they were.

Life was easier without all that responsibility, and as much as her parents had tried to shield her from it, her teachers and the laws of their world had chased her. So when given the chance, she had run. She didn’t generally regret running, hiding her D-Levels away and living the normal life she had craved for so long.

She regretted it now—regretted the echo and the way her body and personality were shifting hour by hour as Payton unknotted her. She liked being herself, whatever that meant, when she had no idea who she was anymore. This strange, in between place, however, certainly wasn’t her—not for more than fleeting moments that felt much too short and impossibly long.

“V?” she called, rubbing her shoulder as she tried to find him in the battlefield of nameless faces and trying not to panic—a wholly unwanted and unnecessary emotion. She was good at staying calm in confusion and crisis, even within the real world, where her life may suddenly grind to a stop with one flick of aethernet. This wasn’t the real world, no matter how real it felt. Her life wasn’t in danger, and there was no need to panic.

Her heart still raced.

Her throat still dried as she spun and spun, looking through too wide eyes at the blurry faces of everyone around her. Someone—she just needed to find someone. One single person she knew. Then things would be okay. Things were always okay when someone she knew was there.

She needed someone.

There was no one.

No one—she didn’t know a single person, had no idea how she had ended up here, when just moments before she had been watching V open a door.

Talk about her instincts being right, that something horrible had been hiding behind those doors. This was worse than she had imagined—this was nightmares brought back to life, not just through memories or trauma, but through pure image and malice. The only thing saving her from breaking down was that this wasn’t a specific memory of the war, just an amalgamation of pain.

It was still terrible.

She still wanted out.

Out.

Out.

Out.

“Emilia?”

Emilia spun, searching for V among the mess of bodies and monster, black and red blurs rushing through the crowd, snapping and clawing at anyone who got too close. Purple scales shimmered in the fading sunlight. Who had approved this battle? Fighting these things at night had never ended well for them—some of her unit’s most powerful members had been torn down in fights like these. Darkness dancing across the world. Night black creatures creeping out of shadows to snap jaws of death around their throats. Life drained out of them. Aether feeding their enemies. Their skills twisted and mutilated until they were weapons that ripped soldiers apart and—

Emilia sucked in a harsh breath, a rock stabbing into her back. She shouldn’t be this close to the rocks, one of her potential escape routes blocked off, blocked off, blocked off, how often had she lectured people on keeping their exits open?

Don’t back yourself into a corner.

Don’t separate from your team, your supports.

Run when you have to.

Don’t leave anyone behind. Leave everyone behind. Save yourself—there was never a good answer on that front. Groups were exterminated because they were trying to save a single member. A single member ran and everyone else died because they had broken formation.

There was never a good answer, but everyone had their opinions. Emilia had always tried to keep hers to herself, fluid and shifting with each situation as they were. Others had been louder—others had purposefully teamed up with people they deemed to have made the wrong decision and driven them into corners to die.

Abandoned them on the field to be monster feed. Bodies torn to shreds, because personal opinion and rage overpowered orders and—

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. “Fuck,” Emilia spit out, forcing her sticky throat to swallow. She needed to chill. She knew this wasn’t real, and yet—and yet. It was too much. It wasn’t war or battle or real. No one she knew was dying, and yet.

Inside her, her heart pounded, loud and cracking, and she was breaking apart because something was wrong. The platform, the moment, her stupid fucking knots.

And she knew—she knew—it wasn’t real, and she hated herself all the more for being unable to force herself back together.

“Get it together, Emilia!” she snapped at herself, sucking in a grounding breath. The only thing meditation had ever been helpful—at least until recently, when she had used those skills to work with her core—had been bringing herself down from panic attacks. “You can do this. Fucking breathe, you stupid bitch.”

She couldn’t—she couldn't breathe. All that practice. All those therapy sessions, learning to breathe through the panic. They did nothing. She couldn’t breathe.

Had her Censor been there, warnings would have been flashing across her increasingly blurry vision. Emilia had hated that features with a fierce passion. She already knew when she was unbalanced, her balance related genetics tangled up in so many traumatic knots that even therapists had been afraid to touch—to even talk to—her.

Too broken.

Too messed up.

Might as well be dead.

But you have to live.

“People died so you could live, so live.” A single note in an argument drawn out by pain and trauma; so much death they’d been buried in bodies and blood without enough crematoriums to burn all the bodies, not enough funeral parlours to help the living mourn for those they couldn’t save.

“Do not come!” Halen’s voice growled through the coms. “You don’t need to die too, you fucking idiots! There’s nothing you can do!”

They wouldn’t have been able to help, even if they had been able to make it. They never would have made it. It had taken Emilia years to accept that: they were out of range. Even if they’d been sober, not on a rare rest from the war.

They wouldn’t have made it. At most, they would have hit the edge of the explosion that had wiped out the base, caused earthquakes and tsunamis that even their environmental controls had barely been able to stop. They would have died. No one would have been around to fight that final battle.

Would Olivier have still joined, even with her dead? Would he have fought in that final strike, alongside Seven, their only member neither at base nor with their group, vacationing?

Seven. Seven, sweet and sad and missing. Just like her. Had he ever tried to find her, like she had tried to find him? Did he care that they worried for him, more than anyone worried for her? At least with her, Rafe—and the few others she still talked to on those rare occasions where they needed something from one another—had still told people she was alive.

It probably hurt them, that they weren’t worth her words, her energy—weren’t worth her dredging up trauma in an attempt to speak to them. Rafe was different, however. Rafe knew her in ways that no one else ever would. Rafe had been her friend for practically their entire lives, save that weird bit in the middle where he had forced violent distance between them. Rafe had killed for her, and would do it again, if she needed him to.

Would kill for her, if he deemed it necessary, even if she did not.

Rafe, who had even approached his older brother and demanded information from him, so Emilia could cope, way back when they were teenagers and those first, horrific panics had come. Before the war, before she had killed black knot stalkers or run away from all she knew.

“Here.” Rafe had practically forced the file into her. She hadn’t bothered to look at it, her brain foggy from lack of sleep. She hadn’t slept well in weeks, although she’d been sleeping better after Rafe had started sneaking into her room to hold her safe—to keep the nightmares at bay. No one but Rafe had noticed her slowly falling apart, but he was always good at that—at seeing the bits of her that no one had any right to.

“What is it?”

“Some techniques for calming yourself down.” He’d shrugged, like it meant nothing that he’d approached his brother searching for ways to help her. Maybe in another life, it wouldn’t have. In another life, Rafe would have followed in his brothers’ footsteps—would have joined the organization that everyone in his family, save Rafe and one of his cousins, did. He hadn’t, and even then, young as they were, his brother had known of Rafe’s intentions to work elsewhere. The fact that he had provided Rafe information… Emilia still wondered what her friend had promised, in exchange for it.

A thousand details of those techniques ratcheted through Emilia. They weren’t meant for long-term use. They were brutal and forced and meant for emergencies, for being tortured or for standing on a battlefield, panicking so hard that she couldn’t even see the world around her anymore. She couldn’t breathe—couldn’t use the better, more sustainable techniques she’d learned decades later to deal with entirely different trauma to chill the fuck out.

Almost immediately, the world began to come back to her, but she could feel the consequences of what she had done wearing on her. They had always worn on her, but now? Inside a game with fucked up knots and no aether stores or Censor?

Yeah, she needed to get out of here ASAP. Thankfully, despite the situation, the techniques had worked, even if she’d been forced to break a few fingers in the process.

Hopefully, this area was either completely separate from the one she’d come from, and she wouldn’t pop back into the heartcore labyrinth with a busted finger—or if she did, they would heal with the help of the system.

“V?” she yelled, trying and failing to raise her voice above the cacophony that was suddenly pounding around her again. Her voice stuck, sticky in her parched throat.

“Emilia?” he called again, as though she hadn’t disappeared into trauma for what felt like hours topped by millennia, as though her voice was actually audible. “Emilia?” V called once more, his voice distant and weak, like he was injured and needed her and—

Her feet were running before she thought better of it. She was exhausted, her body and mind screaming at her to rest.

She needed to keep going, even if she had no idea where she was going, V’s voice too weak to give her any indication of where to go. Instead, she reached out, feeling wholly wrong for using her core in the real-world—or a simulation of it, in any case. She had no aether stores, even here, however, and she needed to find him.

Her core was the key to finding him.

Reach out—find the person who feels different… maybe. The beings around her felt wrong, however, and Emilia had to hold on to the hope that V would feel right.

Emilia’s core ached as she sent spike after spike of energy out, searching for V before rushing back to tell her they found nothing. “V!?” she called again, hoping that perhaps he would try to yell once more, but nothing came back to her.

He was gone.

She’d run too far, escaped the echo of his voice.

He’d died, bled out of the field like so many others—like Olivier would have, if she hadn’t—

A spark of aether ruptured through her, wild and free and blasting everything—friend and woe—around her to bloody pieces. She hadn’t had aether stores a moment ago, and yet now she felt as free and powerful as ever. Wider and wider her aether spread—the connection she had forced into the aethernet during those moments of desperation vibrating as she forced monsters to yield to her, as she destroyed faceless, nameless allies in the hopes of saving the one person she did know.

The one person she couldn’t find, but needed to find.

Blood and gore painted the world. People screamed, not at the monsters but at her, and suddenly, it all came surging back into her, the pain of her shattered fingers bleeding away to shock and panic.

She should have done better.

She should have been able to stop it.

To stop Alliance Ridge.

To stop the battles that had slowly drained their hearts, loved ones exploding and eaten alive.

She should have been able to do that—she’d done it, eventually, ground the world and the war to a halt. Torn holes in herself and the aethernet to stop everything, at a cost of too much to bear. If she were going to tear everything apart, why did she wait so long?

Why?

She didn’t even know now.

“You should have done that sooner!”

“I didn’t—” The words had caught in her throat, dry from stress and crying and her core trying to rip her to shreds from the inside out.

How she had survived, forced her core to hold together, she’d never really understand. Pure force of will, most likely. She’d needed to know Olivier would live—needed to know she hadn’t killed him with her selfishness. She’d intended to stay, to sit quietly by his bedside while Tariq ignored and glared at her in equal turn, while Olivier’s family wandered in for mere moments before disappearing back into the halls. They hadn’t blamed her, at least. Olivier was a grown man, capable of making his own decisions, even when they didn’t agree with them.

Or, maybe they did blame her, and just didn’t think her worth their effort to even speak to. Honestly, she wasn’t even sure they’d known who she was. Olivier had always been so private, holding as much back from his controlling parents as he could.

Then again, perhaps she wouldn’t even have ranked high enough for him to have spoken of her. She was just a random client, after all. One who had begged for his help time and time again and almost killed him as a result. She’d like to think they were more—and even a decade on, in those too short moments she’d spent in his arms, they’d certainly seemed like more than lawyer and former client.

“You didn’t what!?” the man had snarled, so unlike the happy, carefree person who had once been one of her best friends. War and death had changed him—changed them both. Emilia had looked at him in that moment, seen the hatred written across his features, and what little bit of sanity and balance she had been managing to hold on to had snapped.

They had screamed and cried, and then she had run, his words and the vitriol they had contained echoing through her head for years, until she had finally managed to leave them behind—and leave them behind she did.

She did.

She did.

She did.

“Fuck you!” she snarled at the phantom memory of the man she had once told practically everything to, had nearly died for time and time again. “I couldn’t have done it sooner! And even if I had, that was not something to be used just because a few fucking people died. They were nothing compared to how many people I could have killed!”

Emilia’s aether, which had rioted and stilled in a wave of motion as panic overtook her, cracked through the world. Giant tears rent through the aethernet, ripping the simulation apart and for the barest of moments, she could see the code of this world. It shouldn’t be visible, and yet here it was: ones and zeros, etched into the fabric of the universe—of this specific, fabricated universe.

She sucked in a grounding breath as the world fell apart. “Yeah…” she thought, eyes fluttering shut as the end came, “this is how it could have ended.”