🌒

You stay silent--no words, no thoughts, no emotions, nothing to betray. You give all your focus to defense and push back on Unas’s will. Their image grows more transparent as you resist the echo.

“Do you think you can resist me?” Unas says.

Their image glows brighter than before, and with it a visual wave cascades around the room, dissolving all the walls. It reaches your body. You push back. But the will of Unas slips right past your defenses, and dissolves your body with the world.

✴

The light flows around you, a vortex spiraling out from Unas and inward to the point of your consciousness.

”What makes you so sure that I am weaker than one of your admins?”

You try to hold your focus and understand. Somehow they activated your ND-device and took you ætherside. You try to gain some control and manifest your avatar. It takes on a faint, colorless form as your enemy suppresses your every action.

An illusionary gravity pulls on you, up from above. You feel you are falling upside down. You remind yourself movement is not real here. It changes nothing.

“You could not begin to know how to resist me. You can only know what your professors can teach you.” Their voice echoes from above and below, left and right, oscillating from outside your mind to inside.

“I will find the exopath. There is nothing that cannot be destroyed.”

You suppress everything--you must not think of it. Your mind is blank, though anything but calm.

🌒

Light. It burns your eyes. You fall back, slammed hard into your conscious state. The room spins around you. You cover your eyes even as you disable them.

You hear the door close. When you look again, only Admin Vanitas stands before you.

“Now, as for you...” she says. “Tell me what happened. Every detail. This is an order.”