Unit twelve perplexedly stared at Trauma as the group followed the strange being’s footsteps, supposedly in the direction Eminence had headed towards weeks or months earlier. Emilia had informed her of Pyria’s theories regarding Trauma’s creation and purpose in the fortress, which had quieted the custodian for a good while. Her initial reaction had been that of barely contained, absolute fury, far beyond the baseline anger that seemed to motivate anything The Wrath Core did. The priestess had worried that she would lash out, but the fire raging inside the custodian never made it outside. However, thanks to her experience with a certain necromancer, she knew that when someone who had no filter whatsoever actually fell quiet, things tended to only get worse.

“Want to talk about it?” Emilia asked worriedly, trying to uphold her duties as a priestess despite her current title.

“No.” Unit twelve answered without hesitation or even breaking eye contact with Trauma for a moment.

It would have been fairly simple to force the custodian’s hand again and make her tell, but the priestess wanted to do things by the book this time, instead of slowly making her way up the list of people unit twelve might stab out of spite as soon as they’re not needed. She kept walking in pace with the custodian, looking for openings, opportunities for any kind of conversation or anything of the like.

They walked for hours, but the sun in the illusionary sky never moved towards either horizon, the weald of grass and flowers continued forever and for every animal they left behind, a new one would pop out of somewhere when no one was looking. It was questionable if they were even moving, but there was nothing much anyone else could do about it, they simply had to believe Trauma would lead them at least closer to Eminence – eventually.

Being only one in the group that could and needed to drink, unit twelve was provided with ample opportunities to refill a small flask she carried from narrow streams of clear water the group crossed by hopping across a few conveniently placed flat stones. Every time they wanted to rest, a table similar to the one they had met by was provided, including all the treats and tea there had been. The weather remained absolutely perfect for traveling as well; sunny, but not scorching, breezy, but not too windy. It really seemed like inside the illusion Trauma unwittingly created, there was a perfect world where nothing seemed to go wrong.

“Riddle me this, Bringer of Joy.” Unit twelve suddenly spoke up after hours of silence. “If someone was using you for their own ends, would you want to know? Even if it meant sacrificing your happiness.”

The priestess pondered for a while before answering. “Me personally, yes. I would rather take the highs and lows of life rather than happiness based on deceit. How so?”

“If what you’re saying is true, and someone out there is trying to replicate the process used to create us, doing anything based on it or is even looking for similar results from some other fucked up method, it’s the duty of every single one of us to put an end to it, no matter the cost. It’s the topmost priority and no other operation, including this one, is more important – and to that end, that thing is an asset.” The custodian explained her dilemma and nodded towards Trauma. “So fine, I get that killing it is no longer in the cards, but we have a choice to make on how we go about this. I have to test a couple of things to see exactly how similar that thing is to us, and if what we have works in the first place, but after that, do we let it keep its illusion and carry on lying while turning the blade towards the fuckers that made it, or do we break the illusion and use its hatred towards its creators?”

“I can’t exactly recommend or approve either of those… but I guess it’s an improvement over just killing Trauma. Promise me that they will be treated as well as you can afford to, even after all of this is over, and I won’t get in your way.” Emilia agreed. She couldn’t quite call it a victory, but sparing an innocent being’s life was probably the most priestess-like thing she had done in days – and like Pyria had said, if Trauma shared any likeness to the custodians and officials, they were the ones most suitable to make decisions for this strange being’s future.

“Fine.” Unit twelve nodded and hastened her walk to slowly catch up to the front of the group. Before stopping Trauma, she gave a couple of hand signals to the knights, causing them to halt and the one equipped with a bow to ready it – interestingly, pointing it at the custodian herself.

With the contingency plan in place, the custodian put her hand on Trauma’s shoulder and stopped them.

“Is something wrong? Do you want to hold the rabbit too?” Trauma asked and held up the rabbit they had been carrying so that they could show it to Eminence.

Unit twelve said nothing, but instead got closer and placed her crystalline horn against the odd crystal mass on the side of Trauma’s head. Both the orange horn and the violet crystals began flashing in unison. Trauma went limp almost immediately, dropping the rabbit but still being held up by the custodian.

As the two connected, the scenery began to change rapidly. The sunny sky turned fiery red as clouds of smoke filled it. Constant lightning strikes darted among the clouds and caused a rain of embers that just barely fizzled out before reaching the ground. The sun itself turned into ball of smoldering coal that radiated unbearable heat and very little light. The trees and grass all withered and died in moments while the herd of animals around the group all suffered agonizing deaths as they fell down, twitched and shivered before screaming horribly with the last bits of life that quickly left them. The bodies rapidly decayed and turned into dust as violent winds began blowing away the dead grass and dry soil below it. Emilia and the knights had to brace themselves to not get knocked over when the storm peeled away the topmost layer of earth, revealing countless dead bodies, all very tall and donning the stone armor typical for the aureun. The landscape of corpses stretched from horizon to horizon, creating a rather daunting sight as the winds calmed down.

Emilia could hear a few amused chuckles from the back of her mind from the fiend, who no doubt found the scenery homely.

After five or so minutes, each of which felt considerably longer in the nightmarescape than they needed to, unit twelve gave a new signal and two of the knights rushed to get a hold of Trauma, who seemed to fall fully unconscious when the custodian separated from them.

The priestess made her way across the sea of bodies to unit twelve as fast as she could. She was about to ask about the new landscape in the illusion, but noticed a couple of tears rolling down the custodian’s otherwise emotionless face.

“They’re one of us…” Unit twelve stated somberly and watched the knights carefully lay Trauma down on one of the shields of the fallen aureun soldiers. “We thought we destroyed everything related to it, but somehow they’ve gotten their hands on a part of our creation process. What they’re missing is how to make a body to contain everything, I think. They’re bleeding all this energy that creates illusions because of that, our souls are fully contained and that makes us resilient to many things and ageless instead of… that…”

Nodding along, Emilia patiently listened to the explanation she didn’t really need for anything. What she was more concerned about was the well-being of both Trauma and unit twelve. “Are you okay?” She asked.

The custodian stared across the field of bodies for a few moments before saying anything. “That’s some nice scenery, isn’t it?” She sighed, dodging the question and kicked one of the bodies, clearly to let off a bit of steam. “It’ll be even nicer once we get a bit of purple on it.”

“Sure… I assume we’re in your mindscape – judging by the bodies.” The priestess went with the new subject to keep up the conversation.

“Hardly, this is only lightly influenced by me, but I’m sure it’ll return to normal by the time they wake up – unfortunately.” Unit twelve smirked, kicking the body again, now just getting the most out of the temporarily upset illusion.

Trauma was still unconscious and showed no signs of waking up when Emilia inspected them. They didn’t breathe, move or have a heartbeat, but the violet crystals on their head kept flickering faintly, so she took the custodian at her word and assumed Trauma would eventually wake up – unfortunately, until then they were without a guide and traveling would have likely been pointless.

The knights were completely uninterested in the bodies under their feet, instead forming an orderly line near King and stood in attention while he went over the equipment he carried and made sure he hadn’t lost anything important to Anastacia. Though they did their best to stay in formation, some of the items clearly caught their attention, particularly Anastacia’s spears and the goblin crown as well as Leggy’s cape. Noticing this, King handed over the spears and the cape for them to look at but for some reason only known to him, the crown was out of limits even to them. For a while they inspected the items, judging them by some metric that had no meaning to anyone besides them. A few times, they exchanged a few silent gestures with King, likely questioning him about his journey aboveground as well as the individuals the items he carried belonged to.

While this went on, unit twelve noticed the fairly sizeable stone cylinder among the things King carried that was one of the transilluminators she herself had given to the adventurers. “Wow, you dumbasses actually managed to not break or lose at least one of them, good job!” She snarked and snatched it from King. “We could actually use this right about now.”

“We have both of them, mind you, but what good will they do in here?” Asked the priestess and showed the one she had held on to.

“Well, you see, the point of a transilluminator is that it can emit a flash of energy that corresponds to certain parts of your soul spectrum and can momentarily create an apparition of you based solely on that part of your soul. For example, order or chaos are fairly common ones that can be useful as their own entities. Normally, they would fizzle out in a few seconds, but inside aureun strongholds they can be amplified and become just as real as the original one. They work just great on unaltered and complete souls, like on most surface dwellers and even the ones used in the first artificial children, but on ours – and more importantly Trauma’s, they will cause the soul itself to collapse. Because our creators were just complete fuckwagons full of shit, our souls are now rejected from the cycle and will just kind of stick around until they slowly reform over a couple of weeks.” The custodian explained in more detail now that she possessed a modicum of respect towards Emilia and thought she could maybe understand the details.

The priestess frowned. “Wouldn’t that just make you immortal? If your soul just reconvenes instead of joining the cycle and becoming a part of new souls?”

“Sure, but the thing with having your soul collapse in on itself, while it’s in you, is that it’s not good for you, like having-a-body wise. Explosively not good for you.” Unit twelve said, as if speaking to a child.

It only took a moment for Emilia to put the pieces together, and she even remembered that in the recording they had found in the elevator, Eminence had mentioned how the transilluminators outside of the fortress had done a number to his companion. “Because Trauma doesn’t have a body, it’ll just temporarily… I guess ‘evaporate’ them?”

“Look at you having a two brain cells tumble on each other by accident! That is exactly what I mean, I assume it will dispel this illusion as well, and we can just-“ Unit twelve was about to say but was interrupted by a lightning strike hitting the ground only a few meters away.

Suddenly, the scenery started rapidly changing once more, the rain of fire petered out, only to turn into a downpour falling down from an almost completely darkened sky, filled with storm clouds that sent down a lightning strike after lightning strike. The pouring rain quickly turned the ground into a slippery, muddy mess of corpses and made seeing further than five to ten meters away impossible. Though the knights remained well visible thanks to the lights on their armor, Emilia and unit twelve could only see each other and further into their surroundings whenever a lightning struck nearby.

“Well what the fuck is this now?!” The custodian yelled, her voice only barely making it to Emilia, despite being only a few meters away.

“It appears Trauma’s subconsciousness was… displeased with your suggestion to dispel the illusion it tries so viciously uphold. It has bolstered itself quite unnervingly and has become tricky to work with. Weather what storms it casts upon you and I will do what I can to tame it.” Pyria informed her scion about the turn of events they had managed to usher onto themselves, still sounding more humored than anything.

Emilia trudged in the mud over to the custodian and relayed the information to her. After more than a bit of cursing, they came up with a plan. Emilia would take the transilluminator to Trauma while unit twelve would take a couple of knights to help her get as far away from it as possible, and after waiting for a bit, the priestess would use the transilluminator to dispel the illusion by activating it next to Trauma.

They sprang into action and unit twelve disappeared into the darkness of the downpour. Emilia decided that she would wait until she couldn’t see the lights on the armors of the knights accompanying the custodian and then count to ten to be safe.

However, before she even got to begin the count, the ground suddenly shook and rapidly split open a massive chasm between her and Trauma. Taking only a second to widen over ten meters and spread towards the horizon in both directions, it immediately presented an unpassable obstacle that ruined the plan completely. When the sides of the chasm stopped collapsing into it, Emilia peeked over the edge and could see a bubbling mass of magma far down below them. Even by its reddish glow, she couldn’t see either end of the freshly formed gorge. The steam forming from the rain hitting the red-hot magma came back up in puffs off scalding steam and forced the priestess to back away from it.

“Of course, things were starting to get a bit too easy.” She sighed and turned to King and the remaining four knights she had with her. “Can a couple of you go and get unit twelve? We need to come up with something new.”

King quickly signaled the request to the knights, who weren’t about to take orders from Emilia just like that, and two of them darted into the direction unit twelve had disappeared into.

The priestess stared across the chasm at what she figured could have been Trauma, she tried to yell at them in the hopes of waking them up, but it yielded no results. As she was about to ask King if it would be possible to throw the transilluminator across before it activated, she suddenly felt a strong grip on her ankle.

One of the corpses in her feet had grabbed onto her and was now staring up at her through the visor of the stone helmet it wore while slowly trying to get up in the mud. “Yeah… This might as well happen too.” Emilia shrugged as King swiftly plunged the spear through the reanimated aureun’s neck.

A couple of seconds later, series of lightning strikes lit their surroundings and revealed the dark silhouettes of a few dozen aureun soldiers, either already on their feet and armed or levering themselves up from the ground. In that same moment, the archer knight released an arrow that missed Emilia’s shoulder by only a few inches but hit its mark some distance away, causing damage similar to a cannon ball as it hit one of the warriors and tore away most of their upper body. The priestess heard the creak of the metal bow being drawn again and promptly moved out of the line of fire, only a second before another soldier was thrown across the mud by an arrow with enough force to it to collapse a building.

After this, the knight seemed to decide it was time to conserve the rest of their arrows and let King and the other knight, armed with a simple sword to do their job. Emilia pulled out her mace as well in case anyone made it too close, but was more than happy to let the knights handle the fighting.

Though they were being slowly swarmed from every direction, the movements of their enemies were sluggish and not very coordinated. They all donned weapons and shields that had laid beside them on the ground, but seemed completely unfamiliar with them, at best swinging haphazardly or hiding behind the shield, but none of them acted like experienced or even trained soldiers. This meant that the knights, already presumably far more fearsome than most aureun, could cut down the ones controlled by Trauma’s subconsciousness with ease – and they seemed to do so gladly.

Emilia noticed that the rain was slowly starting to let up, which she attributed to Pyria’s efforts, and soon enough, she could see the other knights and unit twelve in the distance, latter one of whom was engaging in combat more than the simulacra themselves – all the while laughing manically. The priestess whistled to get their attention.

Like a child who had been called back home from playing with her friends, the custodian gave some final guidance to the knights and reluctantly dragged herself back over to Emilia, carrying a helmet under her arm. She noticed the massive gorge that cut the terrain in two and smirked. “Didn’t work out, did it?”

“And somehow you don’t seem to mind.” The priestess noted.

Unit twelve grinned mischievously. “I haven’t had this much fun in thousands of years.” She agreed. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. One of the comm patterns found your twerp and venator, they’re waiting for us in her post.”

Emilia let out a sigh of relief. Even if she was almost certain that Anastacia was far too tenacious to get into trouble she couldn’t get out of, there was always the looming feeling in the back of her head that she could be seriously hurt or even dead.

With that huge weight off her shoulders, the priestess could think just a bit more clearly and started to come up with a new plan. Apparently throwing the transilluminator was an option, but with a good chance of it simply plunging down into the magma, it was decided to be the last thing they would try – even if they had a spare one. Strapping one on an arrow and having the knight with a bow shoot it over the gorge was also considered, but wasn’t much better of an idea.

While the planning went on, the rain kept becoming lighter and lighter, but the number of opponents the knights were facing kept growing despite the ridiculous number they had already cut down. The frontline had been pushed a fair bit away from them, and the action was little more than a blur in the distance while six of the most dangerous simulacra ever made did what they were built to do.

“Hmm… What’s that?” Emilia asked and pointed at the helmet unit twelve had taken from somewhere. Unlike the stone ones used by the aureun, this one was made out of shiny steel.

“Oh, I was going to ask you about that. While we were out there having fun, a few of these weird-looking guys started to pop up here and there. They died all the same, so I don’t really care, but they aren’t aureun.” The custodian said and handed the helmet over. As she held it up, a severed head rolled out and fell into the mud.

The amount of blood and viscera she had dealt with thanks to Pyria had completely desensitized Emilia to severed body parts, but what she noticed immediately, was that the head was without a doubt from a human, and even more strangely, seemed somehow familiar. Things started to make simultaneously more and less sense when she took a look at the helmet itself. Made out of steel, well-polished and with plenty of engraved decorations, she instantly knew where it was from. The helmet belonged to a paladin from the massacred Church of Sylvia.

Unit twelve must have noticed the confusion on Emilia’s face. “You know these ones, don’t you?” She asked.

“I do. You could say that they made me, in a less literal manner than the aureun made you, but still. They’re no better.” The priestess explained and started to demand an explanation from the only being who could have possibly known, the fiend herself.

“Command all you care for to run and activate the transilluminator, NOW!” Pyria screamed in what seemed genuine panic. Her words were almost unbearably loud and caused piercing pain in Emilia’s head with every syllable.

Only about a second later, a severed knight’s arm landed on the ground next to them, having flown a fair distance from the scuffle in the direction opposite to the unpassable crevice. This was followed by a mechanical screech from the same direction that caused the other knights to pull back from their skirmishes to see what was going on.

A giant skeletal arm, molded entirely from mulched corpses that littered the illusionary world, held one of unit twelve’s knights in its grip, slowly squeezing it harder and harder. The metal and stone of the knight put up a fair fight, but were starting to bend and crumble under the immense force.

Next to this stood a man, clothed in white robes that were covered in fresh bloodstains and with long, white hair equally tarnished by several blood splatters as well. His hands, shoes, face and armor under the robes were all severely drenched in blood, but on his head was a crown of white, so spotless that it appeared to almost glow.

“Now, scion!” Pyria demanded frantically.