LIGHTNOVELONLINE Arc 3 | Chapter 98: The Judgment of a Child
Emilia stuffed a piece of food into her mouth as she circled the room. It wasn’t the best thing she’d eaten inside the raid, but it was also far from the worst. The tiny pastry was burnt, the butter not actually butter and probably not working quite right within its chemistry of recipe transplanted from her world, but it was close enough to the pastry she had been imagining that it was acceptable… mostly. It also contained tiny bits of dried aloonm, which, if she didn’t think too hard about their weird, shrivelled skin, she could almost pretend actually were chocolate.
Abruptly, Emilia reached out a hand to catch Benny’s, just inches from smacking into the heating array. “Careful,” she sighed at him, not for the first time and probably not for the last either.
The boy looked apologetic, but he was energetic and unobservant, things that didn’t exactly mix in the kitchen that was the stage for their third challenge. What exactly the point of the challenge was, none of them had any idea—not that that was new—but the kitchen and the supply of ingredients they had found inside it had allowed them all to eat, something that had been an increasingly worrisome topic as their time in the labyrinth went on.
They’d been inside this challenge far longer than the others, assuming you didn’t count the time they had spent asleep at the base of the water slides, or the time it had taken for her, Gale and Miira, along with a previously despondent boy named Kelly, to herd the rest of the group to this challenge. There had been a long hallway involved, and the trek had required a number of trips due to how tired the smallest members of their group were.
The four of them had been forced to walk the long, rough path several times in order to move everyone. By the time they were done, Emilia wasn’t sure they weren’t just as tired as the children they’d been carrying. Thankfully, behind the door that had refused to open until every member of their group was before it, they had found the kitchen. Say what you will about homeless children—and Emilia had heard enough aimed at orphans in general to guess what kind of shit people said about homeless kids—but one thing they do know is food.
Emilia was sure that when she was a child, and even more so Rafe and his siblings and nearly everyone else she knew who had led a more privileged life, she wouldn’t have had a clue about what food could be eaten raw and what was liable to kill you. These kids knew, the ones who Sawyer had previously pointed out as having no stable housing easily picking out food they could safely eat.
A few had even had a vague idea of what ingredients went into a few more complicated dishes and how they were cooked. When faced with the prospect of actually cooking anything, however, they had balked. There was a difference between knowing and doing, and while a few had fearlessly stepped up to attempt to cook some of the more nutritious and satiating foods, most had watched them with mildly terrified eyes.
When one of them had blown up their station a few minutes later, Emilia understood why: the cooking equipment of this world didn’t use—as far as she knew non-existent—electricity, but magic. Magic all but a few of the children weren’t old enough to know how to use, even at the most basic levels.
Zach’s words on the state of magic in this world had rattled back through her as she pulled the child away from their sparking station. As he had explained it, locals were connected to the different branches of magic through their birthing location—and to a lesser extent, their genealogy—but the Risen Guard and Enclave had been closing and hoarding the most powerful of those homes for decades.
For all she knew, most of these children may never be capable of learning the magic that, based on the way they talked of watching their parents and relatives activating the magics of their kitchens, was required for life. Gale and Sawyer had magic, but without anything to judge them against, Emilia had no idea if they were skilled or inept, ahead or behind of where they should have been. Within Baalphoria, children their age wouldn't even have Censors yet, and while some children certainly learned the fundamentals of skills—especially in the years since the war—before their Censors were installed… Well, she couldn’t even compare their knowledge to children in her own world.
What she did know? Children in this world were just as mean and judgmental as those in her own world—just as she had been in her own youth.
⸂You can’t activate your gems?⸃ Gale had asked, hand planted on her slim hips. She had levelled a truly scathing look at Emilia, one that had left her wishing she had the ability to speak to the girl, just so she could bite back. It really wasn’t fair that she was being blamed for not being capable of speaking their language when it was the system—the veritable god of this world’s—fault!
Actually, as far as she’d seen, there didn’t appear to be any religion in this world. Between losing Key and the others, meeting Zach, and heading to the library, Emilia had spent quite a long time wandering that city. While it was true that being unable to read meant she wouldn’t be able to read any signs that said, “Come Worship the Great System Here,” in her experience, there were usually signs of organized religion to be found everywhere, no matter how subtle.
Religious garments. People with perpetual smiles—or, occasionally, perpetual scowls. Ardent followers out spreading the words of this god or that. Even though religion wasn’t the biggest in Baalphoria, she still saw those people on the street, and they were even more common in the Free Colonies—at least, in those that didn’t have government mandated religions. In those countries, religion was screamed across the world. Symbols and motifs designed into every building and life—it was inescapable, and even when she had been young and naive, not knowing even the vaguest of details about the religion of a given place, she had been able to see those signs written over the world.
There had been nothing of the sort here, and as she had idly let Gale and Miira try to figure out how to activate the water magic gem on her {Blood Armour} so they could put out the fire slowly taking over the station—luckily, only the station—her mind wound back through the cities, back through the people and their actions, and… Nope. There hadn’t been a single thing that reminded her of religion. Even in the moments before she had been forced to climb, Rin had shown no sign of praying—a nearly universal show of faith in her own world’s religions.
Emilia might have assumed she’d missed something–that transplanting her perspective of religion into this world was useless and presumptuous–but from what she had heard of raid platforms that knew they were part of a game, some system and its administers watching over them, almost all had some sort of religion, and usually an obnoxiously visible one at that. Unfortunately, until she saw more cities, she couldn’t say whether the cities she’d been to so far were outliers or if it was the norm, but it seemed unlikely that she’d wind up in only outlier, religion-less cities. She couldn’t ask the children, either, questions like “Do you worship the system?” much too complicated for their broken attempts at reading her signs. She couldn’t even ask V what he thought, or a member of the Stringer family, and it was frustrating.
She should just let it go. Such a mundane detail about the world shouldn’t be important—shouldn’t be bothering her so much.
It was bothering her, however. Something about the lack of any sort of religion, even Zach’s descriptions of the world’s magic—and oh how she wished she had thought to ask him about all this!—bland and instructional. There had been no indication that magic was seen as a gift from god, something that it ostensibly was: a gift bestowed on this world by the system. The system created the world, its magic, its blessings and curses. It should have been easy to worship or fear the system, or even just refer to it as the stupid ass thing that fucks with our world so people can come play a game.
Nothing—there was nothing of the sort, and that—
Emilia’s thoughts had cut off as Astra popped up beside them and tapped the sea green gem that the older girls had been trying to activate. Water magic had surged out of her, the blast shattering the station, but putting out the fire.
Everyone had stilled. Gale and Miira, the child who had started the fire in the first place, as well as the ones yelling at them for being so reckless.
“Uh…” Emilia had breathed out, once she managed to figure out how to stop the flow. The gem glowed faintly against the black of her armour, although she assumed it would fade eventually, just as the light gem activated by Key had eventually faded into inactivity. “Thanks?” she added, quickly signing a less confused, “Thank you!” at the child.
Astra had blinked large red eyes up at her, head cocking, before she turned towards the nearest, not-burnt-to-the-ground station and began activating its magic arrays with ease—with too much ease. The girl turned to the next station, and the next and the next, activating each until the eleven stations were lit up with perfectly flowing magic, aether running through the room like a calm and cooling stream of life.
The little redhead was too short to do any of the cooking herself, and had instead wandered over to sit against the wall with the other young children and those who were still too stressed and upset to be of much use in… whatever this challenge was. As those of them who faced the challenge of the kitchen worked to try and both feed everyone and get the door to the next area to open, Emilia’s mind kept wandering back to the little girl.
Astra. The little girl hadn’t spoken a word since Emilia had picked her and Benny up off the street, not even her name. One of the older boys—one of Sawyer’s friends who had disappeared during the last challenge—had been the one to give her name.
⸂Astra’s always quiet,⸃ was all he had said before racing off after Sawyer and the boys who had gathered around him following his conflict with Gale and the revelation that they were inside a labyrinth.
⸂Astra?⸃ one of the children V was holding had asked, smiling at the girl curled into Emilia’s shoulder. They were about the same age, but hadn’t known each other—no one, except that one boy, had. Half the children didn't know each other, though. The city was large, and they had been in the central shopping area when the stampede began, children from all through the city accompanying their parents to shop or work, while those who were homeless scurried the streets, hoping to find scrapes to eat.
The children who had families, especially those who knew few, if any, of the others had definitely fared the worst, keeping quietly to themselves. Astra was no different, and when spoken to, had simply nodded in confirmation, before turning further into Emilia’s arms. Thankfully, children at that age are less likely to be offended by such things, and the other little girl had turned back to chatting nonsensically with the other child in V’s arms, the two telling stories about some giant sky monster that ate naughty children for dinner, if they didn’t go to sleep before the monster appeared in the sky.
Apparently, no matter what culture you came from, there were always going to be parents who used myths and monsters to scare their children into following the rules. The fact that the silly fable was the closest anyone had come to referencing a god was not lost on Emilia, but she rather hoped the locals weren’t going around worshipping or fearing some child eating monster.
Then again, given her earlier worries about the Enclave potentially being onboard with murdering children to make more blood weapons…
Emilia shook herself out of those thoughts, and not for the first time since it had first floated through her head. She didn’t want to think about it, but the fact was that the more powerful the source—the more terrible the source—the more devastating the forged weapon would be. Her eyes lingered on Astra as she stirred the food she was trying to make, following Caro’s less-than-helpful instructions.
Astra was so young, yet so powerful, and Emilia couldn’t help but worry that when they made it out of here, if anyone found out just how powerful she was, it would leave her a target for both the Risen Guard—hoarders of power that they were—and the Enclave alike.
