[Can’t Opt Out]

“Is it just me or does this labyrinth seem… easier than the last one?” Emilia asked V, although her eyes didn’t leave the children giggling as they stripped out of their clothing and pulled on swimsuits. There were booths that the children could change in as well, but other than a few of the older ones, most had been content to strip down in front of their friends. Apparently, despite how anti-sex talk and covered up the locals were, children were just as free here as they were in their own world—or, at least they were without any local adults watching over them.

Several of the children had already grabbed the tubes that were hung against the walls of the second challenge area and were heading for the racing slides. Despite the fact that they couldn’t communicate normally, between her and V’s combination of sign language and charades, and several of the kids offering their own well reasoned suggestions as to what the challenge could be, they’d managed to tell the children what the challenge was: a race. A race against whom? None of them had any idea. When children popped out the bottom, the winner didn’t appear to win anything other than glory, as far as any of them could tell.

“Yeah…” V agreed, eyes tracking two boys who were preparing to launch themselves down the twisting waterslides. “These challenges definitely seem easier. It’s almost like the labyrinth is just filling its challenge rooms for the sake of it, and giving the kids fun things to do?”

Even after she’d beaten the first challenge, a number of the children had insisted they wanted to play more. The room had even allowed them to, shifting the machines back to their first configurations for the children to play with for a while.

Now, the kids flew down the slides, giggles and happiness rupturing through the aethernet. It was sweet, and Emilia was glad that the challenges were serving as a distraction from the carnage above them for at least some of their party. The problem was the ones who weren’t distracted. While every moment more and more children were being coaxed from their despondent moods by the energy around them, by the tugs of friendship and easy competition, there were a number of children who wouldn’t budge.

Several of the children wouldn’t move more than a few feet from her or V. When she’d be competing in the first challenge, it had been difficult to keep a few from getting in her way, even with V and some of the other children stepping in to give them support.

Emilia readjusted two such children in her arms, another tucked against her leg. Other than the one girl, Astra, who had been one of the two children she first grabbed off the street, she had no idea why these particular children had become so attached to her. V certainly didn’t have this problem, the children who were sticking close to him being perfectly content to be transferred between their care, while the three attached to her only seemed to want her.

These kids would be problem enough to get down the slide, given that was the only way forward. Then, there were the other problem children, those who had tucked themselves against the wall, knees pulled close as they cried into their arms or stared absently into space. They might be able to take the kids who were attached to them down, holding them while they slid or using their descent as leverage for them to slide on their own.

The second group of kids, though? It had taken Emilia, V and a half a dozen of the older kids to get them moving after the last challenge. Once they sat down, they hadn’t seemed to want to move again—seemed content to die in the labyrinth, as far as Emilia could tell.

She got that. Practically every soldier had carried people off the battlefield, civilian and soldier alike. The things that broke someone were wide and varied, and these kids had just seen their home destroyed in a matter of minutes—had likely seen people they knew and trusted be trampled to death, or worse, abandon them in favour of saving themselves.

Getting those kids down the waterslide safely was going to be… something else. They could force them down, of course. Lift them up and dump them down the slide, hope they came out the other side alive and talking.

That seemed like a terrible idea, but when she and V bounced ideas between them, they couldn’t think of any better ideas, and their time to figure out another option was quickly disappearing. Around them, the children were quickly thinning out, more and more pairs racing down the slide. As far as they could tell, there were no negative repercussions for those who lost the race, which was odd, but also not. It wasn’t like the kids who hadn’t won—or even participated—in the graviplex game had suffered anything, after all.

“So…” V asked, trying to sound nonchalant as they began stripping off their own clothes, as well as that of the children who were glued to them, “waterslide races?”

Emilia grumbled as she tugged a pair of shorts onto a boy who was only two or three, one of the youngest children they’d acquired. Out of all the children, there were a few she was worried wouldn’t be able to safely go down the slide. Not only was the course potentially too intense for such small children—especially given thrilling games seemed lacking from local culture—but also unsafe. The last thing they needed was someone dry drowning in a few hours because they’d swallowed too much water. As much as they could watch out for the signs of dry drowning—coughing, laboured breathing, vomiting, fatigue—they couldn’t tell anyone else to watch out for those symptoms.

Plus, did locals even cough? Would they be able to hear laboured breathing? They hadn’t been in the labyrinth long, but with such little legs and hearts and minds and the stress of everything, half their group was already looking drowsy.

“We’re going to need to rest soon,” she said, rather than address her friend’s question about why the labyrinth had decided this was a reasonable challenge.

“Yes,” he agreed, watching her with a smirk as he handed her a swimsuit for herself. “Waterslide races?”

Emilia contemplated popping behind the screen to finish changing, if only to get away from V and take a moment to scream. She didn’t, instead stripping off her remaining clothes and tossing them into the shoot that would take their clothes and other belongings to the other end of the slides. V was polite enough to not let his eyes wander over her in front of the kids, most on the younger side now, save a few who had hung back in case they needed help getting the unmoving ones along. Not that looking her over would have been scandalous or anything, given she hadn’t removed her {Blood Armour}. She probably didn’t need the swimsuit, but wandering around without one seemed too close to walking around in her undies.

⸂Hey~!⸃ a voice called from below, barely reaching them over the screams of the current race or the water splashing down the slide. ⸂I think we found a way back up!⸃

Emilia tugged on her swimsuit—a bright pink one piece, which seemed a choice on V’s part—and skipped over to the edge of the platform.

Far below, most of the kids had gathered around an elevator that certainly hadn’t been there the last time Emilia looked over the edge. Unlike the elevators that she had travelled with her Risen Guard babysitter, this one appeared to be powered by magic. Arrays were etched over the outside of it, which appeared to be made of glass—or whatever this world’s equivalent was—although it was difficult to tell from so far way.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” V said, trying to convey his thoughts to one of the older children who had remained above—Miira, the girl who had told Sawyer that Gale had told her she was lost.

The girl was nice, if quiet and sad since her friend was no longer talking to her. She was also rather quick to catch onto V’s words, her aethervoice reaching for the children below to tell them they shouldn’t use the elevator only a second too late.

Four? Five? of the older boys had already stuffed themselves into the small box, which reminded Emilia far too much of death traps she had seen in horror movies. Elevators going up, up, up, until programs crashed, cables snapped or skills gave out and the box was plummeting down towards an unstoppable crash.

V’s breath stilled beside her as they watched the elevator rise, both of them waiting for it to fall—for the tiny lives inside it to be snuffed out because a bunch of kids had decided they wanted to race again, because some psycho had decided to kill in their city and panic had overridden common sense.

There was no ding when the doors opened, no screams because it was falling. There were only smiles and laughs, an ⸂I told you it’d be fine⸃ from one of the boys as they grabbed new tubes and went shooting back down the slides.

⸂I’ll beat you this time!⸃ Emilia thought she heard one of them yell, but her brain was too burned over with stress to fully believe that’s what she had heard.

“Maybe… things will be fine?” V asked, his own voice hoarse with the strain of reconciling reality with the horror that had consumed their minds.

“Maybe we watch too many horror movies,” Emilia suggested. She’d been a fan when she was younger, although the war had turned the genre into a traumatic trigger she didn’t need up until recently. Sometimes she watched horror movies with her friends now, but only on the good days.

“I don’t watch horror movies,” V said mildly, cruel smile tugging at his lips when she gave him a disbelieving look. “I only play horror games. Much more terrifying,” he laughed, ignoring her eye roll in favour of stepping forward to examine the elevator. His fingers skimmed over the controls within it, a gemstone similar to the ones Zach had given her—the ones now melded into her {Blood Armour}—hovered over them.

“Powered by external magic…?” Emilia pondered, squinting at the purplish stone. Unlike hers, it didn’t have any obvious engravings on it, and when she held up her arm to compare colours, none of hers were the same shade as it, although Zach had briefly explained to her that clarity, colour and size were what affected the types of magic that could be engraved into them.

⸂One of the few places where colours other than red are still expected in this world,⸃ he had told her, holding up two pale green stones that contained similar magic. ⸂That said, these sorts of things are rare. I doubt most people would actually agree other colours are to be expected in them.⸃

“Everything has been a normal colour…” Emilia noted absently, looking around the area. The water was a pale red, the slides a dark, reddish black. All the swimsuits were in tones she would have expected to find in the red world outside the labyrinth. Inside the library labyrinth, however, there had been more colour, even if just occasionally.

“So?” V asked, eyes glued to the magic stone.

He reminded Emilia of a grave robber, from the old action movies that her father loved and her mother hated. He wanted to take it, or to at least examine it. Maybe if she hadn’t been there, he would have. Gamer instinct: take everything you can, learn every secret offered to you.

Emilia shrugged, watching as the boys who had ascended on the elevator began to congregate around the bottom of the shaft again—not that it was a shaft, per se. Two bars that appeared to be made of pure aether had appeared as it rose, connecting the outside corners of the box to a slightly discoloured platform back where it had appeared.

⸂Send it back down!⸃ one of the boys yelled, another boy—possibly Sawyer, but Emilia wasn’t completely sure—appearing to smack him on the back of the head.

⸂Ask nicely,⸃ the boy—definitely Sawyer, based on the way his voice cracked—hissed.

Emilia blinked away from them as they began to squabble about what was polite and what wasn’t. “Do you think we should send some kids down?” she asked V. She still wasn’t particularly confident about the integrity of the elevator, but when it came to the children who barely wanted to move…

V followed her gaze to the kids leaning blank eyed against the wall. “Worth the risk?”

A long sigh leaked out of Emilia. “Yeah, I think so. We could send them down the slide, but it could make things worse. This thing might not be safe, but…”

The other visitor nodded, slim hands encouraging the children surrounding him to go to her instead, before he disappeared to gather up several of the kids. They barely blinked when he appeared, hauling them upright and dragging them along to the elevator. “We can send two or three at a time,” he noted when each of the kids immediately collapsed onto the floor of it.

Nearby, Miira was watching, and although she, Gale and Sawyer were on the outs with each other, she seemed to realize they would need to cooperate. Her voice flew through the aether, reaching everyone but focusing on the other two as she told them what was happening. Words and plans echoed between them, barely registered by Emilia as she watched with bated breath for something to go wrong as V hit the elevator’s down button.

It could fall.

It could descend so quickly that V’s arm was ripped off.

How powerful was the healing magic here? Would the system reattach his limb? Stitch up the torn skin? Leave him to bleed to death? The system hadn’t saved Cade, with his exploded head, nor Taoran with the hole ripped through his chest, nor the countless people who had died between the city of the collapsed library and the one screaming above their heads.

V snatched his arm out of the elevator, each of them watching as the elevator… did nothing. “Huh.”

“Huh indeed…” Emilia sighed, glaring at the thing. “Maybe it only goes up once? But, why have down buttons then?”

The world rumbled, and Emilia shuddered with it. Two more bars of aether appeared several feet from the elevator, stretching from floor to ceiling, and far below another elevator rippled into existence.

“Well, that can’t be good,” V noted, all the children remaining above huddling closer to them as the aethernet rioted with whatever was happening.

Above the elevators, where Emilia would have expected a floor indicator to have been in the real world, symbols appeared. The one at the top had three lines scratched through it, while at the bottom…

⸂It says zero,⸃ Gale called up to them.

Discussion broke out between the children, Gale, Sawyer and Miira taking the lead, although occasionally another child broke in with an opinion. It didn’t take long for everyone to land at the same opinion: for every person who came down via the elevator, the same number had to go up.

⸂That’s stupid, though!⸃ one of the younger boys who had gone twice grumbled. ⸂We want to go back up, so what kind of stupid requirement is this?⸃

“What kind indeed…” V muttered to himself, eyes flying over the area.

As far as Emilia could see, nothing else had changed, but the aether felt heavy—expectant. “Feels like the war…” she breathed out, fighting down the urge to reach for her non-existent willbrand.

“I was just thinking that,” V agreed, his expression pulled into one more serious than she usually saw on him. In the moments where they’d met Sk’lar he had looked that way, same as when he’d been pissed at her sense of direction, and when he’d killed Taoran. “It feels like something is hiding.”

Behind them, the elevator began to move, three boys having chosen to ascend, so the other children could descend. The group had decided that risking something else happening once they were at the top again was worth it. Everyone realized sending their practically catatonic friends down the slides wasn’t a good idea.

The boys stepped out. Far below, several stepped forward to drag their friends from the elevator. Above the elevators, each of the symbols returned to reading zero.

The world burned and shifted—a consequence come to life, literally.

Figures stepped out of the aether, slim and black, their faces blank and formless. Children screamed, the boys tried to force their way back into the elevator, but without three people in its twin, it would not move.

Behind the figures, boxes rose above the opening to the slide. One black box, one white, zeroes etched into each. A figure stepped toward the black box, back muscles flexing as it began to stretch.

“Well,” V sighed, hands pressed protectively against the heads of the children around him, “I’m gonna guess this ain’t just a friendly game anymore.”