Knives & Levels - Chapter 121

Seth had no choice but to continue the expedition with the people who'd dragged him back this far. His eyes were always locked on the sky above, remembering his fugue-state-driven flight. It seemed a cruel comedy that he’d been forced to return the exact way he’d come, only this time on foot.

No, Seth didn’t have a choice. Not when Captain Blaze and his armada of flame-based soldiers, all in their weird samurai-esque attire, made it very clear that if he tried to flee or escape in any method or manner, there would be repercussions for the act.

He would flee, given the chance. But there wasn’t one. They kept him under watch night and day, and kept him tied to one of them at all times—even during the fighting, which happened often in the hell-like landscape around Atlanta. They knew full well if given the chance, he'd take to the air and be gone before they stood a single chance to catch up.

He gave up after the first day and obeyed their instructions. Maybe this was penance for what he’d done. He spent the next couple of days coming to terms with the eventual reunion he’d have with New Nashville.

Day by day, they forded the wasteland outside the cities. The fires created a hostile environment that led to many encounters with monsters. All the while, they would tell Seth that it wasn't his responsibility to fight but theirs. They protected him and treated him with caution, but not with cruelty. He was a prisoner, but not someone who had to be punished.

It was different from his status as a guest while in the Dojo of Warlord Crimson, but given the certainty that he would run like a coward if given the chance, Seth supposed he deserved it.

So, he spent his time reflecting, taking steps down a long road once they cleared the hellscape—it was odd to walk a major highway and not see moving cars. Every so often, they came across crashes. Old steel wrecks that happened as people who’d been in them vanished away to the tutorial dungeons while speeding away at 70 miles per hour or more.

It was a horrid sight.

A reminder that this was no longer the world in which Seth had lived for so long. The people here, who had now bound him and dragged him further and further towards the city that he had fled from, weren't his friends. There were no allies for Seth. There was no one to tell him that things would be okay or take care of him. Even the kindness shown by Warlord Crimson had been to cultivate him as a tool and hold him in reserve.

Seth had been alone for so long. When the world was taken from him, he'd tried to find a friend, but now he knew the folly of that. Look how Denny ended—using him in a different way than Crimson, but the result was still the same.

"Y'okay, Seth? Been awfully quiet most of the trip," Captain Blaze asked one night.

All Seth did was give him a grunt.

For all this, he wasn’t a cruel man. Blaze made sure that Seth had three meals a day. He made sure that he got stretching in at the end of the day to keep himself in fine health. He was overall polite. Not as polite as the Warlord who had treated him to fine dinners in his very own hall and entertained him with guests and conversations, but it was a sort of politeness one wouldn’t expect when traveling cross country with a prisoner.

Still, Seth didn’t want to talk much with his captors. He wasn't to be trusted. And day by day, that confirmation only grew, and Seth settled into his role. He hung his head, knowing that the inevitable confrontation was coming and that the people he had run from and had worked with again had no real reason to forgive him.

Seth kept moving forward, surrendering to the inevitable march of time. Despite this, he owned up to his mistakes and realized that no matter what the punishment may bring, he had earned it through his behavior and his fear.

And so, when they eventually came across Nashville, reaching the far outskirts and seeing the fact that the mist was still more present than ever, hanging over the entire city like a shroud, Captain Blaze only had a whistle and a shake of his head.

"Wow, that is a hell of a dungeon leak if I've ever seen one," he said, looking at his crew. "Do you think they have it under wraps yet?"

"Not a shot," one muttered, then shook his head. "If it were under wraps, it would be more localized, like ours. They have a complete overrun, you called it with that.”

"So we should be careful," Blaze said, his sword glowing crimson as flames licked down the blade.

“More careful?” One of the men asked, their shaggy hair and squinty eyes taking in the mass of mist ahead.

"As careful as we always are, and maybe even more than that. We don't know what level this dungeon is, and if they can't close it, maybe there's a good reason for it, if it's leaking out all this mist. Alright, you, Wind Mage, behind my back, between my men, I will lead the way forward. If we get into a fight, and I find that you try to fly off, we will not hesitate to end you. As far as I'm aware, based on what you said, bringing your head back, even decapitated, might get us a little further than nothing at all. But I think you should make it to the gate.” Blaze commanded and held his katana steady; it came to life above his head, like a torch, scaring off the closest of the mist.

Seth shivered at that. It was the first implication from the captain that he would be better off dead than alive. He'd suspected as much based on their behavior, but the threat…

Call Seth a coward, but he’d rather live in a cell than die.

Their eyes hardened, their weapons grew stronger in their grip, and they forded into the mist. It was thicker than Seth remembered. An almost ever-present force pressing in against every side.

Every now and again, as they began to walk into the city streets, he swore that he saw the shapes of people in it. Ghosts from his past. Denny—his head off in his hand, pointing at Seth and mocking him. Telling him that he was next. Others, those soldiers they’d sent out into the mist and died before… But no one reacted to the shapes he saw. Telling Seth it must be his tired mind playing tricks.

Despite the abundance of caution they took, they met no monsters, carefully working their way through the streets, and then using Seth to navigate them where they were going. For this, Seth was fine enough to comply. He didn't have any choice, and he figured that if he were to try to withhold information or lead them in the wrong direction in hopes of encountering a monster, things would only get worse. Captain Blaze seemed to have an almost unnatural penchant for telling what people were thinking, 

Seth helped navigate them through the city until they eventually arrived at the only place that could be described as Nashville. It was different than before, with some buildings hanging on outside. They looked to be under new construction, and people weren't living in them yet, but it had expanded. They were preparing to move outside their walls, even with this thick, ever-present mist that filled the air around them.

The group approached cautiously but without trying to hide themselves, which quickly attracted the attention of the guards at the wall.

In minutes, they had a crowd asking about their business.

Then, Captain Blaze brought Seth forward and placed a hand on his shoulder.

"We are from the camp of Warlord Crimson in Atlanta, and we're here to offer an alliance between our two factions. Looking around at what I'm seeing, I believe you all are at the start of building your faction out and haven't progressed all that far. From this guy’s words, whom you might be familiar with, we’ve heard that your group had trouble."

At this, he patted Seth’s shoulder again, sending a scared tingle up his spine.

“Consider this a gift to you all. May you distribute whatever justice you wish; if you can communicate to your leaders that he’s been rather docile and helpful, please consider that in your sentencing.” Captain Blaze tucked his sword away and gave a deep bow, leaving the guards scratching their heads.

"Uh," one of them said, looking around at the blank faces of the rest of the guards. "Well, uh, shit, Nate's gone, isn't he? We'll, um, find someone to deal with this. For now, you can come on the walls. We'll give you an accommodation.”

“We would be most grateful,” Blaze confirmed. 

With that, he began leading Blaze and his crew into the city. One of them grabbed Seth, and then he got a last look at the warlord's army.

"It was a pleasure traveling with you, Wind Mage. May your future skies be free if you pay your penance for them." With that, he bowed deeply, and the two were separated. Seth was led up above to some cells. And then he waited, unsure of just how his fate would end. Hoping against all else that they would see him and offer mercy.

###

Rio was conducting tests outside the labyrinth. It was an unstructured part of reality, with a white void around them everywhere as they walked, and only a manifested dark pathway from their presence. Parts of it were like this when one breached reality and stepped outside of the known worlds. For most people, such a thing was impossible. But with the presence of two Captains and their overwhelming abilities to manipulate the Edicts around them, forcing your way into the void was just another day.

Though it always disturbed him how color vanished out here. Everything was in shades of gray, white, and black. And the white was blinding if one looked upon it for too long.

Out here, one gained a much broader perspective on the complicated and ever-changing network that is the Labyrinth. It was also a very useful place to gather data as a whole since reality was thinner out here, less laden with Edicts and natural laws.

Another benefit was that there were very few monsters. Not many could cross over into the void. It made navigation a bit easier, considering that the labyrinth was always twisting and changing. He could see it in the distance. Many orbs were floating, connected through long ethereal strands.

The only issue with being in the void was that one could only subsist out here for so long. In the absence of mana and the laws of reality itself, one had to enforce their will upon the void to remain stable and living.

Still, as Rio ran his equipment, a large test kit provided by the techs of Squad 8, he was getting interesting results.

"We can't pinpoint where exactly it is," Rio said as his captain watched over the void. The man held his sword out, but the tip was down. Ash gave a small nod, not surprised. Save for some odd celestial abnormality, trying to locate a realm not connected to the void was like grasping your hand into a sea full of marbles and hoping you grabbed the right one.

The other Captain, Kon, and his lieutenants were circling around, keeping an eye out. While there weren't very many monsters out here, the type of monsters that did make their way into the void weren't anything to scoff at, even for people at this level of power.

"Anything useful then?" his Captain asked.

"Well, it's showing us significant deviations from regular results when the Labyrinth is functioning," Rio said. "We can see that certain worlds are disappearing and coming unconnected, only to connect again, which is to be expected of any single labyrinth point. But there’s a slight shift from normal readings, as if several worlds are still stuck in the phase of tutorial and trying to get out."

"So they're still alive?" Captain Ash asked.

"As far as these readings tell and the difference from normal background data in this place, it appears that maybe," Rio looked over the piece of paperwork and slipped into his Edict: Focus. His eyes honed in on every statistic as his mind traveled at the speed of light, parsing the data and narrowing in on a conclusion, making his hypotheses, testing them, and analyzing the different results he had before him. Then he would compare the results and check them for confidence intervals until eventually he arrived at the same conclusion that he'd arrived at two minutes previously, looking over the same data, only about a slightly different detail. He wanted another two days to look over it to confirm for sure, but based on a field analysis… “Yes, it seems that way."

Captain Kon let out a whistle as he stared out into the white void. "What's our longest recorded survival rate for a world going through the tutorial?"

"About a year," Captain Ash responded, letting him pore over the data once more. "After about a year, mostly the guardian monster that comes out of the chaos manages to find a way to open it up further, bringing havoc on the world, not to mention all the loose dungeons that they would have to seal to survive that long."

"So for them to survive this long, they'd have to be really badass, right? Or something is making them stay open. Captain Kon said, scratching the back of his head.

Ash responded, "Theorize with me for a minute that there's a being in each of these worlds who has a determinate interest in keeping the tutorial open for as long as possible. It lets the chaos spill into the world and fester without inviting the rest of the forces of order into such a place by connecting it to the Labyrinth. Theoretically, if one could do that and then manipulate it as a training environment, they could rule the world, let their forces grow stronger, and keep themselves undetectable by us.”

Kon’s jaw dropped. "So you're saying they're training a super army to come and fuck us up."

"I'm suggesting that that's one possible reason why this could happen," Ash replied. Another statistic we can look at to determine if that's happening is this: Rio, can you tell me if you can spot any worlds that had a recent reconnection with the Labyrinth? And then compare that to statistical norms?" He gestured in the white void back to Rio, who was still looking over the data. 

Rio ran through the information again, this time focusing on what the captain was highlighting rather than trying to find the statistics for the surviving rope. The problem with focus as an Edict is that one must be very honed into specific ideas when looking at and parsing data. Otherwise, one could miss other things right beneath their nose, which is why he liked to spend days poring over results, focusing on as many different fields and aspects as he could on a particular set of information to maximize the usefulness of his talents.

Many worlds had reconnected to the Labyrinth in the last couple of months. If Chaos ruled a world, it could break off into the void for hours to ages before shifting and reconnecting somewhere else. It grew stagnant if disconnected for too long, so there was constant churn.

This time, obeying the captain's words, he carefully examined the data with the specific analysis he had provided.

"It's not that far from normal," Rio confirmed as he pored over the data. "Maybe a slight uptick?"

Ash nodded. "If we expected several worlds to go through an active tutorial session, we would see slightly higher than normal results. Higher than that. And that would result in more reconnection to the Labyrinth with pocket worlds.. Given that it's only barely above background noise, we can assume that there may be slightly more than one.”

"There are so many worlds out there, how can you be so sure? Maybe they're all out there fighting, getting strong, and have closed their dungeons," Captain Kon argued again. 

Rio shook his head. "We can only be so certain of the data. And like I said, there is only a slight statistical difference from the background. The given background includes the churn of pocket worlds already, and the addition of a new tutorial world every year. Until we’ve collected more, it’s hard to draw conclusive results.”

"You're talking about hundreds of thousands of worlds. Doesn't this place reconnect to so many multiverses so often? What is statistically significant?" Captain Kon continued, getting heated.

He’d been like this for ages. Not a fan of the numbers or explanations that didn’t lay things out without 100% certainty. They didn’t have that kind of data to support anything like that, yet.

Rio gave a helpless look to his Captain, and Ash smiled, then got between them.

"We are talking about a small statistical difference. It's why data observations like this should be taken over the years before we draw any true, conclusive results. Given that this is the first preliminary expedition into the void to gather this data, I foresee many years of this going on. We appreciate you escorting us out here, and will appreciate it in the coming years we perform this same expedition." Ash said.

Rio’s eyes ran over the report he’d collected from the hulking machine next to him… And then gasped. He saw it now, as he was focusing on the data, thinking through different conditions that might hint at something useful being seen. He saw a world that had recently reconnected. One that was flooding out with the dying power of a divinity.

For something like this to appear and reconnect with the Labyrinth was surprising. As far as he knew, there weren't any squads going out killing divine beings. He called for Captain Ash to come over and take a look.

Captain Ash scanned it with an equal shock as he looked over the news. "Well, it seems like someone killed a Celestial Seed."

"What?" Captain Kon asked, surprised. "What is the labyrinth doing connecting a Celestial Seed to a tutorial world? I don't think any of our guys reported killing one of those things."

"Neither do I," Captain Ash said. The slaying of the Celestial Seed was a rather momentous event and required reporting to the court guards. To do so meant that they had made a very strong blow against the force of Chaos, and they would have to navigate the shifting tides that arrived by disrupting the careful balance. It was a far cry from killing a demi-deity or a god, but it still had repercussions.

Kon stretched out his fingers on his sword and gave a crooked smile. "Well, we’ll go investigate it, right? We're out here anyway. Navigate us, Captain."

Ash sighed but complied. He asked Rio for the report, who gladly gave it to him, but his eyes went white.

Rio could see the stars themselves in those eyes and the wide expanse of space between them as the Captain activated one of his most powerful Edicts: navigation.

In a place like the Labyrinth, the ability to find the most efficient route from one place to another was a matter of life and death, and none did it better than Captain Ash. After a few seconds, he opened a portal, and they stepped through. Then he tore open another—flashing through the complicated maze of the Labyrinth in steps. They walked through a world of complete fire—one in which they walked on clouds—and another with a roaring dragon circling a mountain not far away.

Until they walked through the last portal, and found themselves in a barren outpost that had once been theirs in a pocket world. Now it was leaking a dead divinity's essence all over the place.

Rio looked around at the frozen wasteland, a giant slope filled with thousands of ice spires leading down to a blackened Academy that had disappeared from them for who knew how long.

Somewhere in here, they had managed to kill a celestial being. This meant that before they arrived, this world had been connected to a tutorial world and then conquered. Only then could it have been disconnected from the Labyrinth. Maybe there was some data to gather here. It was the most promising lead they'd come across so far. Especially since by the feel in the air, and the fact that they’d traced it… The kill had to be recent.