[Can't Opt Out]

Arc 5 | Chapter 182: This Shouldn’t Be Here

Emilia glared down at the paper, which she had found tucked between the pages of a book on marriage customs in the age of Buta Aru Emperor. Her ability to read Dionese script, flowing and beautiful and nearly indecipherable as it often was—especially in flowery court documents—wasn’t great. This wasn’t even modern Dionese, instead some ancient dialect that she definitely wasn’t translating correctly in places.

was probably meant to be translated as something less direct—something beautiful and wordy, as was the Dionese fashion—while and were definitely too literal, and while could refer to the Northern Tribes, she’d never heard them referred to as such—although they did have a gathering of the hy that she supposed could be considered a tribunal of sorts—nor had she ever heard the land where the Moonlit City stood referred to as the . actually read as , but the mention of the Dread Coliseum confirmed for her that it was either a very rude way of referring to Norvel—or whatever had existed in its place at the time—or the actual Dionese world for them… which, if their official word had literally translated as that was pretty harsh.

Translation issues aside, this document was pretty clearly a message to the emperor about the same incident Conrad’s story had been about. —Emilia wasn’t sure when that had been, her knowledge of the specific dynasties of the Dion Empire limited to only the last thousand years, but if she had to guess… based on the current head of the Divine Council being the one-hundred and seventy-seventh … it was at least a seven or eight thousand years ago. So, long before so much of the world’s knowledge had been lost during the Colonial Wars.

Emilia blinked around the room, wondering if it still existed—wondering if it had ever existed like this. Considering how much the raid and its maintainer had been fucking with her and the others, was there anything to say this document was even real? That this entire place wasn’t an amalgamation of memories from every Dionese hero who had come through this raid and a thousand others?

It wasn’t exactly a secret that the platform took bits of information from heroes heads. In theory, what it took was only supposed to be accessible to the system itself, which would then censor and sanitize what it found. No classified secrets could make it into the hands of raid designers or platform maintainers—at least, that’s how it had been when they’d designed the training system, and Emilia knew Helix had been adamant that they would not be using that particular part of the system to siphon information out of hero minds.

That didn’t mean Hail hadn’t snuck in the ability to do so, and it certainly didn’t mean that the raid maintainer couldn’t tell the platform to fuck with her, just a little more. The platform would search her mind, find ways to mess with her. What better way to do that than to drop her into the oldest-known library on the planet and set her on a trail to find a document that confirmed that Conrad’s story had actually occurred?

There were a thousand reasons why the underlying system have let this library exist within the raid. The biggest reason was simply that anyone monitoring the raid would now know exactly where the hidden library was, something that in itself was considered a secret worth killing over to many members of the royal family. The other reason was that if this document was real, it was obviously secret. She shouldn't have been able to see it, not under normal system rules.

So either the rules had changed, something—or someone—had fucked up the privacy limits of the system, or something strange was going on.

Emilia’s mind slid back through all the strange things that had happened in the raid, part of her wishing she raided more, simply so she could know whether some of those things actually were weird or not.

Mostly, she could only compare it to the years she had spent inside the training system—her training system—long ago as that was. Something about the raid now… Emilia stopped, letting her eyes close and breathing in the system, the dream and nightmare, both within and without. Data and information, facts and lies. Once, she had breathed life into this system, sacrificing blood and sleep and her mental health to give it life.

In many ways, it was her child—a child she had abandoned, leaving it to be picked over and mutilated by Hail and the government.

“⸂I’m sorry,⸃” she whispered, and for the briefest moment, she thought she heard it whisper back. Not in words or anything she could actually hear or feel, but it felt like there was… something.

Then it was gone, and when Emilia opened her eyes, she was staring at the wall of the stairwell, now devoid of blood. Her back ached, and while she couldn’t turn and look at it, she would have been more surprised if it didn’t have a new {Blood Tattoo} etched into it.

Her attempts to push herself up stalled when a dialog popped up, asking if she’d like to merge, store or erase her old and new {Blood Tattoos}. That… she hadn’t really expected for that to be an option. Maybe she should have. She probably should have.

Emilia glared at the dialog, willing it to tell her more about what each option offered her. No more information about what would happen—or if she could change her mind later—appeared, and instead she pushed the dialog box to the corner of her vision. She had no intention of trying to use the {Blood Tattoo} at the moment, so answering that question could wait.

Unfortunately, Tobias’ lower body was still sprawled over the floor, bloodless as it now was, and Emilia wrinkled her nose and turned away from it, instead pulling her overflowing group message up and groaning.

She’d been out for a while, apparently, and shit had gone down—literally.

What a lovely situation to wake up to.