[Can't Opt Out]

Arc 9 | Chapter 523: One Error-Ridden Function is Enough, thx

Emilia shifted to the side, a projectile skewering through the spot she had just been standing.This time, the projectile had come from behind her: much like the front of the tunnel she’d just crawled through, which had been opened by her solving of the puzzle, when the tunnel closed up behind her, a projectile shot out of the centre as well. In her opinion, the most interesting thing about this was that—having, you know, been crawling through the tunnel—it weren’t as though she had actually noticed any place where the skewers could be hiding.

Sure, there had been rivets and screws—and a glance down at herself showed multiple holes in both her clothing and skin, blood smeared over her legs and seeping into fabric—but she also wouldn’t say it felt like there was a place holding skewers.

It was all a little odd, she thought as she used a few skills to remove the blood from her outfit and seal up the cuts and scrapes. A few were deep—deep enough that she risked using a med skill that she definitely wasn’t adept with to push a layer of fake skin over them. The sealing was… questionable at best; mostly, she just wanted an extra layer of protection. An attempt to keep something else from catching on the deep gouges—it would be truly terrible to rip her leg apart when another screw caught a hole in her thigh and she moved and yikes was that a terrible image.

Head cocking as she imagined the sorts of horrible things that could befall her, from these simple tears in her skin—mostly, she was imagining her skin like a zipper, something catching and tugging her skin and muscle apart until the bone itself was visible—Emilia let her recon skills echo out of her again.

, plural.

A skill to look at aether density. The flawed but impossibly necessary echolocation skill. A more regular skill that had her spinning in a circle and taking in as much of the world with her eyes as she could. Several more recon skills, all highly specialized because she’d realized that, as much as the strain was pushing her Load Levels to collapse, the individual skills were much more effective than any of the more collective-recon skills she had.

It wasn’t a pretty thing, running so many skills—and really, the only reasons she was able to do it this way was a combination of several Perfect Categories and the fact that while she didn’t want to linger down here, neither was she in so much of a risk that she couldn’t spend about double the time a single recon skill would take time standing around running half a dozen each time she wanted to get another look at the area.

Many of the skills also worked far better while she was moving, compared to the state of stillness that all of her collective-recon skills required.

Clemence, for as much as she had very little idea what Emilia was talking about, had been able to relay her observations to Halen—and the rest of their group chat members, as Emilia didn’t think it worth it to make the girl try to read Baalphorian names and words in an attempt to switch group chats. Her main observation was that whoever had designed many of the available collective-recon skills probably hadn’t known exactly what they were doing; rather, they had taken a bunch of individual skills and stuck them together. Most of those collective-recon skills were, annoyingly, encrypted—and the sort of encrypted that neither she nor Halen nor even an army of Black Knot hackers from years gone by had been able to get through.

Was this helpful information? Not really—it wasn’t like they’d had any better luck in creating their own collective-recon skills from scratch. In the back of her mind, Emilia was thinking up a few designs to try once they were back in Baalphoria—or just plain old near a Virtuosi Rig—however, and keeping Halen and everyone else up to date…

Well, for one thing, someone else might be able to make use of the fact that running individual skills could be more effective in some situations. Was it a nuisance to match the maps up, something that required her active attention and brain power because she was manually combining not just the maps of information she created as each skill ran, but also aligning that new information with all the other information she’d gathered? Yes, it was a nuisance and really wouldn’t have been effective—may have even been impossible—if she were running about.

Still, it was good for them to know.

Perhaps even more useful was the information about the not-glass substance that was virtually impossible to detect with any skill other than the echolocation one—and Simeon had finally had a moment to check his xphern and confirmed that he had only ever used that skill to go through their man-made cave.

Unfortunately, it might have been better if Simeon had stayed quiet because apparently he still went through that cave occasionally, as did Alaric and Cyan. This was all fine and great, except Halen—who had been quiet for a while as he , whatever that meant—had actually updated the skill for his cousin and Cyan a few months back, when their Censors were first installed.

That would have been great to know, had she been onaether! As it was, Halen had a much better version of the echolocation skill and she had no way to get it!

Other things they needed, on top of the thousand and a million other functions and skills that needed creating and updating? Some way to broadcast information over huge areas. How this would work, Emilia had no idea—and really, there was a good chance that any form of long-range, non-typical communication protocol they came up with wouldn’t have been able to get through the playground’s defences anyways, but—

Another skewer came shooting out of the tunnel behind Emilia just as she was finally beginning to take a better look at the next section of the murderous playground. This one came from the same place as the last, and while it was the first time two projectiles had come out of the same place, somehow, Emilia had already been expecting it.

It wasn’t something she could explain, but the fact that there was no obvious place where the projectiles could be stored was weird—the other side of the tunnel had, when she went back through her logs of the tunnel, had two hooks where the skewer had obviously sat before the tunnel opened up.

—two voices, overlapping, and Emilia couldn’t really say she appreciated her friends contemplating aloud that eventually, her luck might run out. Time, she supposed, to work on ignoring them! It was a little harder when she was running so many skills and organizing her maps, but now, she could return managing what they were saying to [[Blissful Silence]]!

The odd situation with the tunnel’s projectiles did, however, add yet another data point to her previously thought that this thing felt like a game she was meant to be able to win. It wouldn’t be an easy win, but a win was possible. These were things that were meant to be noticeable, slight as many of the things were. Of course, this did add on the extra pressure that a single missed clue could end in her skewered—although, another point on her theory’s side was that few of the murderous traps in this place would actually kill her.

Instead, most of the traps were meant to maim. Would they hurt like a bitch to be hit by? Definitely. Would the weird not-glass possibly slice off her fingers if she accidentally grabbed something, not realizing it was a trap? Absolutely. Would a number of the traps leave her virtually unable to move? Yes, but they wouldn’t actually kill her.

It was insane, but Emilia was almost positive that when people were injured in this thing, it was supposed to be possible for someone to remove them. That could be another trap in itself, of course—a tug on the heartstrings of anyone else to come rescue them, and therefore seal their own fate. There was also the possibility that, if she were critically injured, some mechanism might trigger to allow someone to come retrieve her and get her out of there.

Shooting a glance at the camera that may or may not be watching her, its black eye and blinking red light following her movements through the playground, Emilia considered the other option: that someone was watching, and if someone who had set foot in the playground were injured, they would send someone to deal with it.

Maybe it would be a good —a dragging of her body out of that entire terrible place. Maybe it would be a horrible —a promise of death to anyone not killed by the playground. Impossible to know, especially as she had no intention of being so injured by this thing that she would need anyone to come get her.

Emilia turned back to the next portion of the playground—although not before giving the camera a winning grin. Was it a good idea to potentially antagonize whoever was watching? Probably not; wouldn’t stop her. Plus, it could just as easily be humanizing her to anyone watching! They’d have seen her, cute and smiling, and be less inclined to kill her… maybe.

Apparently… [[Blissful Silence]] wasn't working quite right? That was unfortunate—whatever this conversation was between Clemence and Vern, it wasn’t helpful to Emilia’s concentration. A quick glance at the state of her Censor revealed that, in her attempts to get her mapping of the area working—while she had to match a bunch of it manually, she had still rigged together several sketchy functions to help with various things. Unfortunately, in her creation of the function, she’d accidentally hacked a glitch into her Censor, resulting in various processes not fucking off and releasing their resources once she was done with them.

It was an annoying glitch, and not one she knew the exact cause of—too many sketchy lines of code, mashed out within her mind to create spur-of-the-moment functions to manage everything. Going through all those lines was an option, but…

But, it would take time, and as much as Rayleen had told her that she would let her know if she felt anyone coming for them—which would effectively result in Emilia having to attempt to brute force her way out of there—she wasn’t willing to spend time troubleshooting an error that, while annoying, could temporarily be fixed by setting a reminder within her Censor for her to manually go through the processes and shoo away the ones that weren’t properly releasing.

Could she have programmed a function to do this for her? Yes; it wouldn’t even have taken much time. Emilia, however, didn’t want to risk such a function accidentally shuttering something important. One error-ridden function was enough for the moment, thanks.

Pushing the processes away, Emilia let the sounds of Jerrial trying to talk Vern down—mostly, Jerrial seemed to be attempting to argue that calling Emilia crazy wasn’t nice. While Emilia would generally agree with that sentiment, as her hand wrapped around a long, vertical ladder that would take her up ten metres to the ceiling, Emilia thought that yeah, she was crazy, and anyone stupid enough to love her was just as insane.