How was it that no matter what world a god came from, they were always jerks? Arrogant jerks.

  Emilia wouldn’t say she was the most familiar with gods, but she had seen them in various media and heard her more raid-inclined friends rant about the gods of various raids from time to time—while a few Free Colonies had religions that worshipped gods, they were pretty private about all that around Baalphorians, due to Baalphorians being, well, assholes. Still, as far as she knew, god, without fail, were always jerks, something about having so much power inevitably giving them, well, a god complex.

  This god was no different: where a regular person would have just killed her—and stars knew this god had more than enough power to wipe her out of this world’s existence, just as they had Hetexia—this god was perfectly happy chasing her around, trying to torture her.

  Awesome. Great. Emilia was losing a lot of blood, though, thanks to several swiping blows of pure aether and a nice crash into—and then through—a wall. Unfortunately, the system seemed to have forsaken her, and neither was the blood returning to her nor was it forming into a blood weapon. Not so great. Not so awesome.

  So, she needed a plan. Preferably, a plan that didn’t involve her running around this place for the next… several years. Seriously, the god’s time skew ability—although Emilia supposed it was actually Yuka’s ability—was insane. According to the clock on her HUD, only a few seconds had passed in the last few hours of running from the god. Eventually, the Virtuosi System would kick her out… probably. Maybe. Honestly, she had no idea how the system would behave if it noticed some sort of inconsistency with how fast her brain was moving—or if it even would.

  Fuck. Fucking fucks. This was so bad, especially since eventually the god would grow bored with just chasing her and decide to kick things up a notch. Emilia was imagining torture, slow and painful and probably involving the loss of a few limbs. Just how she wanted to end her time inside this stupid raid.

  Here she’d been doing so well, letting go of so much of her wartime trauma. Now, she was going to be tortured and end up traumatized in a whole new way. On top of that, this creature was so pissy that it was pretty much a given it would go after everyone she’d met inside the raid, just out of spite. Who knew how long their consciousness would continue to exist in this world. Until Yuka died? Until their brain burned out under the stress of having a god forced into it? Forever, the ancestors of any friends who managed to escape its wrath chased down for eternity?

  Emilia had no idea, and if the thing was still kicking when she left this world, it was unlikely she’d ever find out, and she really didn’t want to leave this world to deal with a psychotic, vengeful god.

  Hence, she needed a plan.

  Technically, she’d had a plan for a few of the hours she’d been bolting down halls, trying to avoid the god and see if anything could get through its defences. Now, she was out of the majority of her single use blood weapons. {Blood Needles}? Hadn’t made it close enough for the explosion to do more than ruffle the god’s hair. {Blood Stickers}? While seeing the god covered in glitter had been amusing, they had mostly just been pissed—that was when she’d been thrown through a wall. A few times, she’d gotten close enough to use other, close-range weapons on the thing. Those were the times she’d been sliced up the worst, and—big surprise!—her blades had only managed to slash through clothing. The {Blood Sword} she’d taken from Zyrex had straight up shattered!

  So. Fucking. Bad.

  There was no way Emilia could leave this thing to destroy the world—and what a twist that would be! Rather than save this world from being shuttered for being a truly miserable place to live and raid, she’d instead cause the entire thing to be destroyed internally!

  So, plan. Plan that currently wasn’t going too great.

  Basically, after realizing that blood items were useless against the god, Emilia had hit it with a few core attacks. Those had been slightly more effective, but mostly just seemed to annoy the god. The only other weapon she had, unfortunately, was magic—magic, which she had only successfully used while pissed or desperate.

  These were, unfortunately, not emotions that she could magically manifest—and oh, how she tried.

  Emilia tried thinking of Astra’s body exploding, Hetexia’s neck snapping. She tried to summon rage for the locals—for her friends—who would die if this god were allowed to continue working in this world. Stars, she even tried to summon up residual anger at the shitholes who had raised her, those first few years of her life, for her ex, for the best friend who had grown to hate her for things that weren’t her fault.

  Nothing.

  It was a little ironic, given how much strange anger had suffused her in the moments before she came across Hetexia’s group that first time. Now, she had none. All she really had was a bone deep sadness, and rather than running on rage, every step was a struggle, her body and mind screaming at her to lay down and cry—curl into a ball and sob for the people she couldn’t save, for the years she had wasted, for the friends she had lost and abandoned and should have done better by.

  Everything… really sucked, and mostly, Emilia was just frustrated with herself because she couldn’t figure out the stupid magic system!

  She had imagination. She could see the magic she wanted to create—the ways in which she wanted to change this world—and yet, nothing happened. Emilia had even pulled out the Risen Guard water bottle, hoping to activate the broken array and summon some water.

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  Nothing.

  She was so useless she couldn’t even activate a stupid array, or the magic gems attached to her {Blood Armour}. What was the point of having them—of being here and having gained the friendship and trust of so many people—if she couldn’t even figure out this little thing.

  Forget about protecting this world, she couldn’t even do a party trick.

  At some point, she’d given up, if only partially. Her legs still moved, her mind still spun, looking for other plans, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was treading water, waiting to drown, her mind floating back to Conrad—to the way he had pulled beautiful magic out of the aether, when they’d been half-heartedly fleeing from Boundary. His magic had been beautiful, flawless. If he had been there, he could have done better—so, so much better.

  Emilia missed him, a large part of her thankful that they had agreed to meet up. Had they not… were he another Astra—another person she would be unable to reach out to once she was free of this terrible world…

  Pain split through her heart at the thought of Astra, and Emilia skidded around a corner, setting up one of her last {Blood Stickers} to hit the god, not because she was under any illusions it would do more than annoy it, but because one of the few things she’d been able to figure out about the creature was it didn’t have a map or any way to track her.

  While it had used some ability to lock her onto this level, the rooms quickly being torn apart during their hide and seek, but if she managed to get out of range of its senses, it would have to look for her.

  A good portion of the last hour had been spent testing its senses, learning its patterns, and figuring out how to get away from it long enough that she could hide and figure out… something.

  So, yeah, that was the current plan: hide from the crazy ass god long enough to figure out an actual plan.

  Emilia did not have much faith in this plan, but unless the platform maintainer or raid designer suddenly decided to bestow her with the ability to use magic or real-world skills, it was the best she had.

  {Blood Sticker} smacked to the wall, Emilia bolted, forcing her heavy, exhausted limbs to move, move, move. Around a corner. Another. Through a room. The aether behind her shook, the god letting a growl of frustration, an oft yelled, ?You’ll regret that!? chase her and then—

  Fortunately, arrogant and annoyed, even gods could be predictable.

  Emilia hit the distance where the god would lose track of her, and then a seeking, shuddering whisper of, ?Where did you go~?? reached for her, reminding her far too much of what a stalker would say, were they inclined to be predictable and cringy—seriously, the way the god said it made her think they half expected her to actually respond!

  She would not, in fact, be responding, and instead, Emilia contented herself to racing down the path she had devised while running and mapping the floor over the last few hours. Fortunately, it was a level built out of several large rooms and hundreds of smaller ones, most connected in the strange, maze-like way so many of the levels in this building had been.

  As a result, when Emilia disappeared into a room and raced through several doors, shutting many of them as quietly as she could behind her, throwing open and closing doors at random as she went, it wasn’t long before she was relatively confident that she could shift to walking and sneaking through the level, especially since she still had a map.

  A quarter of the building away, the god’s silver mist travelled the level, searching for her. For whatever reason, the god wasn’t a single dot, but a large blob of power. It was odd, mostly because there seemed to be no particular reason for it. The god’s senses reached far beyond that mist, as did the space in which it could attack.

  It also hadn’t always been like that, neither when they had been Yuka, nor when she and Hetexia had first come across them. Emilia wasn’t even sure when it had changed, but now, it wasn’t solid, only mist, sparkling against her mind as she watched it move and moved further away from it in turn.

  Chances were she’d have to keep moving, but at least there was time to breathe and plan and—

  Emilia’s brain halted as another dot—or were those two dots—slipped onto the map. Fortunately, they were on the opposite side of the level, so the god shouldn’t have noticed they weren’t alone through their senses, but… but who were they? Why had they come back?

  The god didn’t stop on its trek in the general direction she had run off, so apparently they hadn’t noticed someone slipping onto the level in another way—like a notification that someone had penetrated their barrier—either. Still, Emilia didn’t want to leave whoever it was alone, unprepared to run into a fucking god of this world, especially since who would it even be? Of the visitors, only V and the other northern teen had been alive. Not knowing the girl, Emilia couldn’t say there was no way the northern teen might have come with V, but she figured it was highly unlikely.

  So, who? Key was the most likely, and Emilia hated that—hated that Key might have just walked into his death for no reason other than her and… and…

  And, wait. If time wasn’t really moving under the time skew, then how had they even come down here? Emilia supposed that the time skew could actually be reaching out of this floor, but when she’d examined the stairwells, while trying to get off the level, it had definitely felt like the time skew was at least part of what was keeping her inside—like she had no ability to leave the time skew because her body and mind couldn’t transition between the two states of time.

  So either something had changed—and a quick glance at her HUD clock told her it wasn’t the time skew she was experiencing—or… or what?

  Or one of the people had been travelling with had forgotten to mention they had some obscure ability to disable a time skew? Or an ability to extend a time skew onto themself? Emilia wasn’t really sure how it would work, and while she knew from her own mystery gifts and inability to remember what things she could and couldn’t do in this world that it was perfectly possible someone had forgotten to mention such an ability, or only learned about it just now, something about that just didn’t seem right.

  Realistically, as she raced through the halls, seeking out the dots that were heading her way a little too perfectly, Emilia knew these were pointless things to think about—she’d find out eventually what had happened—but it was easier to think of these things than the reality that she had no plan, no way to keep whoever had just entered the level safe.

  She felt so very helpless, and when she turned the corner and saw Hyr and Caro heading her way, Emilia was split between bone wrenching fear for the local child, and exhaustion. Glancing at her map to confirm the god was still a ways off, she slowed her steps. Hyr gazed down at her, taking in her blood covered body, and quietly opened an arm for her to fall into them, their tall frame keeping her safe, letting her feel for a few brief minutes like the child she wanted to be as she cried softly into them.