[Can't Opt Out]

Arc X.1 | Chapter 28: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 28

“I hope you don’t have anywhere to be tonight,” Codeth noted, his eyes skimming over the chaos that the raid had descended into in only… six minutes. Impressive, even for a raid that had so many members of their unit bopping around with it—not to mention that whole thing where he had explicitly asked whatever remnant of Halen existed within the system to make it ever more chaotic.It wasn’t the first time he—as well as a few other people who knew of their friend resided within Hail’s raid system—had asked it to give them a raid that was a little more interesting, a little more unique, than usual. It wasn’t an thing! More often than not, it seemed the system just had enough of Halen’s energy within it to enjoy messing with the people he had loved.

Ironically, that made the raids a painful pleasure for all of them. It was as much a reminder of their long-dead friend, as it was a reminder that, were he still living, Halen would have still been as playful as he had always been. Still, Codeth would rather be left sobbing after escaping every raid he had to go through, wishing his friend was still there with them—still there and able to live the life he have been allowed to have—than to not have this piece of him, small and tragic as it was. These raids were a gift, and these sorts—the ones where Halen’s phantom was churning up more chaos at the behest of idiots like himself—were the best.

All of them had enjoyed their prank war, both during the cruelty of youth and the teasing of adulthood, and being able to contribute even the smallest energy of to what was currently occurring in the raid was nice. It would never be enough—nothing, not even Emilia potentially returning with all her chaos, would ever be enough to replace the cheer and freedom of those years spent messing with one another in friendship rather than animosity—but it was a bit, and not just Codeth, but all of them—even Polianna, as much as she would deny until she was bones in the earth that she had enjoyed being an occasional participant in their prank war—would take what they could get.

In the six—now seven—minutes that the raid had been going, he and Polianna had continued their lounging between buildings, observing the puzzle-like mechanics of taking down invader groups in relative silence. While part of him wanted to chalk the difficultly of the raid up to people being stupid—or just not using their brains because usually public, real-world raids didn’t have anything that required much thought in them—he could tell that the difficulty of this raid was simple: there was more than a single thing making it a challenge.

First, there was the stupidity factor. As he had already spent a significant amount of the last handful of minutes of his life thinking about how stupid people were—there had been all those contemplations on how, in all the aether, people hadn’t connected so many of them back to all the chaos that had run through the continent over the last fifty-plus years—Codeth would be resisting thinking about that anymore. It was just too depressing.

The second issue, was that this was the end of the season, and while Piketown wasn’t home to more than a half-dozen heroes who ever regularly ranked in the Top 100 Heroes of the Season, it was a college town. Being in the Top 1000 Heroes of the Season might not be something that ever came up in newscasts about raids—not unless it was being mentioned in relation to a hero who had finally managed to make the Top 100 or 10—but it was still a good ranking, considering the millions of citizens who were forced to partake in raids. The Top 1000 also garnered more end-of-season rewards, and it was a significant jump from rewards the Top 10,000 got.

As a result, this last week of the season was when heroes pushed and pushed, trying to get a better ranking. Normally, this caused a bit of a problem. With invaders becoming more powerful, it was increasingly common for them to require more than a single hit to kill, even heroes with a low RaidLevel struggling to kill many of the bigger bosses. Due to multiple hits being needed, sniping up the kills of other heroes also became more common. Occasionally, fights broke out between heroes who were fighting for a spot in the Top 1000, resulting in them being banned from the rankings for the season.

In other words, people took it very seriously.

The result within this raid, which required a mixture of precision and strength and puzzle solving, was that was happening. No one wanted to let another hero defeat invaders and get the experience; so, they were sabotaging attempts to complete the puzzle of . Worse, those who solve the puzzles were hesitating to do so, knowing that once they hit the penultimate invader in a pattern, someone else might come in and snipe the kill.

While anyone who participated in defeating the invader swarms would receive experience, it was always something of an unknown of how the distribution would work—and while it was sensible, other times, it was completely random as to whether there would be a last-hit precedence or a total-damage precedence. If it was the former, the person who had spent so much time figuring out the puzzle would be pissed. If it was the latter, those who sniped would be upset, claiming that was more important than all the work that went into it.

Codeth had no idea if the people who argued such nonsense were serious or not. He had seen heroes come to blows before over a final hit on an invader that had only a single hit point remaining. There had been a huge argument, and not wanting to get involved, he had slunk away into the shadows—Hail and the government had set up the raids into the disasters that they were and it was his responsibility to get dragged into their mess. Mostly, Codeth just liked to hope that people were playing it up when they tried to argue that they should be the one getting the majority of the experience, even when they had only contributed a single hit on an invader who was one gust of wind away from death.

The third problem with the raid, and what was likely going to lead to it lasting all night, was that so many Division 30 members were inside it and they hadn’t gone unnoticed. Moriana had an army of interested parties chasing her—although that was at least partially due to her having purposefully outed the Richmond siblings as being children of Samantha Richmond. Meerik’za had so far gone unnoticed, but it was unlikely that would last long. While Mikhail had been invited to come raid with his girlfriend, Codeth didn’t think he’d made it because the message had needed to come through his girlfriend—and why were his relays down and not being fixed? The guy hadn’t even known about all his teammates being in the city, due to it being down. So weird—his Censor should have at least alerted Alaric and Emilia the moment his relays in particular went down. Helix had been handling his Censor issues, more often than not, in recent years, but as he was off in reality show land… maybe he had accidentally disabled the alerts for everyone and Mikhail being, well, hadn’t noticed?

Fuck. That wouldn’t be good if he had. Who knew what other skills and functions had given out on Mikhail without his notice.

Glancing over at the silent Polianna—was she going an answer of his questions tonight?—he had to wonder if the woman would be staying with him. While they weren’t exactly friends, they had both lived primarily in Norvel for a decade and could be friendly enough. With him a support and her more focused on offence, they could work together, although he doubted it would be pretty—he couldn’t even remember the last time they’d teamed up, just the two of them, against anything other than a horde of unruly children.

More than his friend, however, Polianna was simply his former classmate and current teammate—and really, even if, one day, Division 30 were officially decommissioned, they would always be , just as they had been since the moment they left Baalphoria together for Lüshan.

Their entire group was a team, brought together through childhoods spent together—some of it definitely spent torturing one another—just as much as through blood and tears and coups. They had taken down criminals and governments and slavers together before ending a fucking war, and that sort of shit bonded people, indelibly.

At least, Codeth used to think of that. Having glanced through all that Leerin in particular had done—in no way was Darrian off the hook for not getting away from his apparently quite purist family sooner, but it was pretty clear he had good, if stupid, intentions.

Leerin, he knew, had been a lost cause for a long time, and really, many of them were at fault, he thought, for not getting Darrian away from her sooner. They had let him down, by not sharing their opinions that his cousin couldn’t be saved from herself. There had been times, over the last forty years, where so many of them had thought —maybe she could become a better person; maybe she could find happiness.

In the end, that was a miserable thing, offering hope where now was to be found.

Really, they should have fully given up when she became friends with people from the regular military side of their unit. Leerin had fit with them in a way that she never had with her childhood friends, not even when she’d been younger and less miserable. They had lost her then, Codeth thought. Despite that side of the unit’s cruelty and their claiming of glory that belonged to the rest of them, Leerin had liked them—made excuses for every terrible thing they did. The most grotesque thing, Codeth knew, was that Leerin was the main reason Emilia had kept quiet about so much of her relationship with Colonel McIntyre: Leerin would have turned it against her—would have told Emilia that she must have done something to deserve her ex’s treatment.

Codeth could hear the potential voice of Leerin’s cruelty in his head, telling Emilia she needed someone to control her, to manage her, to force her to keep her legs shut. Maybe, she would have even told Emilia she deserved to be hit, that her consent during sex didn’t matter.

In the end, Codeth had written off Leerin a long time ago, knowing that whenever the truth of Colonel McIntyre’s treatment of Emilia came out—and it was inevitable that it would, one day, come to light—the woman would choose her dead over her living one. Emilia, after all, had never mourned properly, in Leerin’s estimation. Colonel McIntyre was dead and couldn’t defend himself, and therefore, Leerin would no doubt defend him until her dying breath, even from the memorialized evidence of the man’s abuse.

The problem, Codeth knew, was that wrapped up in herself as she was, Leerin was one of the few people the clones had never needed to visit. Within her mind, there wasn’t a single suspicion of any of their most well-kept secrets.

If Leerin had ever seen anything of Halen and Emilia’s love, in the decade between when they had first collided in Falmíer and when things between them fell apart and when they had been allowed those few, happy hours before Alliance Ridge burned, she had never said anything about it. Certainly, she was the only person who had never asked Julian if they were right to assume certain things about Halen’s actions, shortly before his death. Those assumptions came often from certain other people because that was the thing: those secrets weren’t difficult to figure out. Unfortunately for everyone, they couldn’t risk such facts becoming public. So, every time any of them figured anything out, they had to be told to call a clone before entering the Virtuosi System, so their knowledge could be tied back.

Most of them knew well enough that they couldn’t leave certain facts within their accessible mind. They all knew things that Hail and the government couldn’t get a hold of—and really, they were just lucky that Emilia and Halen had long ago figured out a way to keep their everyday thoughts away from the OIC. The real-world raids were safe, but virtual ones? Even the Virtuosi System itself, when isolated from everything but the aethernet for work and study and supposedly private? No—no, they couldn’t risk it.

Sometimes, their perpetual tying up of their memories was a funny thing. They all had this knowledge that their memories had been altered, and sometimes, they had an inkling of had been altered. No matter how many times Olivier’s knowledge of certain facts was pulled so far into the depths of his mind that he have been able to figure anything out, all so he could work within the Virtuosi System, he would almost always emerge and head straight to Norvel, demanding to know the truth as though it weren’t something he let be hidden from himself over and over and over again. The poor guy didn’t even give his mind enough time to realize that he have already figured out the truth, for how obvious it was, if people only cared to look. Instead, he just charged in as though he were suddenly having an epiphany and it was always a glorious thing to watch, his cheeks burning hot when smiling, silver-shot eyes met his.

Other things were just as obvious. None of them knew how Emilia had ended the war; yet, they also knew that they must have known. It was simply that none of them were allowed to know, every trace of their knowledge on the subject scrubbed away until their few Free Colonier members who had sacrificed their ability to ever enter the Virtuosi System in payment for keeping such memories were occasionally caught giving the rest of them odd looks, milliseconds long as those looks were.

knew what Emilia did, and sometimes the knowledge they had within their minds collided with some speculation about the nature of the aether, the war, the future that the rest of them were speaking of. So few people knew the truth, and it must be hard, Codeth thought, for so few people to remember the truth—for them to need to talk around it, potentially for the rest of their lives.

What an odd thing, that: for even Emilia, the person who had saved their entire fucking world, to likely have no memory of she had done it. Actually… maybe she didn’t even remember she ended it? It wasn’t like Hail didn’t already know that—the bitch who ran it had, unfortunately, been part of their final strike, something she made heavy use of in her claims of being a —so there would be no reason to have anyone erase that particular memory unless Emilia really didn’t want to remember how important and powerful she was?

Codeth was, momentarily, so horrified by the possibility that Emilia had forgotten her role in ending the war, nothing in his passing memories of her from the years since the war suggesting she or know, that he fumbled out a message to her, demanding to know if she knew.

A second later, he regretted it. Then, he started to wonder if she even had the ability to receive messages via p.xl, or if his message was just going to vanish into the abyss. These concerns flittered away when a message came back to him, completely garbled in the way Mikhail’s came back when p.xl started doing weird things for him and his Censor instead tried to send a normal message through the protocol. Helix had no idea Mikhail’s Censor was doing it, and as inconsistent as it was, he had little data to work with to try and find a fix.

Apparently, he was going to have at least one more data point. Another garbled message came through, and scratch that, two.

Also… who had this second message even come from? And given Emilia’s message had at least come through with her name and this person’s had come through with no contact information at all, how the fuck had they managed to do so seemingly without access to p.xl?

Well, that was odd. Luckily, Helix always liked odd. Even better? Pretty soon, Codeth would be able to tease him with the data points. Something for him to look forward to, once he was off that aether-cursed ship.