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You take the injector in your right hand, watching your foe through the screen in your left. One chance to strike--your finger hovers on the inject button. You aim for the center of mass, any muscle will do. There’s no time to hesitate--you strike!

You can’t see your target, but you feel the impact. As soon as your ears detect the hiss of the pressurized injection, you see her turn around on your screen and you feel her arm strike you. In this gravity, the force pushes you halfway back across the walkway.

Your eyes start to resolve the person previously hidden to your brain--half-shrouded in the æthereal fog, you make out a white outline. She grasps the optical cable trailing behind you and jerks you to a stop, ripping the speaker from your ear. Below you, the LEDs in your boots flash red and their magnets activate at full strength, pulling you down to the floor.

Her movements are off-balance--she braces herself on the handles on the cabinets beside her. Her lavender eyes appear, with the rest of her face as her illusory echo collapses. Whether you disrupted it or she’s dropped it herself you can’t tell.

“Did you think you could disarm me by sending me closer to the æther?” As her body sways unsteady, you feel a chill run through your nerves and wires--a flash of pain, a spark inside your head.

ERROR: Neurodissociative Device offline

Your implant, she reached right in and shut it down.

“If I’m going down there...you’re staying right up here...and I’ll take...what I need...myself...” Admin Vanitas closes her eyes, suspended in place on her magnetic boots, with her hands grasping the cabinets tight. You can’t lift your feet--the magnets are locked at full strength.

“Aydan!” Zeta runs up to you on the walkway. You see Akiko just behind it.

You try to unfasten your boots, but the magnets on their straps are locked to their full strength too--nothing your Lunatic femboy strength can do.

“I’m stuck!” you say.

Without your ND-device, you can’t see beyond the near-æther. But you can feel the fluctuations around you materialize into avatars in your mind’s eye.

“Good thinking, Aydan, trying to sedate her.” The avatar of Admin Crypta hovers above you, radiating a red aura. “But this is no ordinary technopath. She’s æthertripped on dissociatives you’ve never heard of. Her ketamine tolerance is a bit higher than most.”

“So it was you who dispelled my illusion...” The voice of Admin Vanitas reverberates from the walls of the room.

“Show yourself, Vanitas!” Crypta says.

“Cult Hunter Crypta. I hoped you of all technopaths would understand the importance of what I must do.”

“Hunting gods and priests is one thing,” Admin Crypta says. “Becoming one yourself is quite another! Using our students as incubators for your experiments...your own daughter even! You’re no different than any cult leader I’ve taken down, and you’ll die no differently!”

“What?!” You watch the limp body of Vanitas swaying with the colony’s spin. “But the leader of Sector NULL is--”

“Right in front of you, Aydan!” Crypta manifests a spear in her many-fingered hands--its shaft wrapped in gold foil and its head glowing like the Sun. She throws it down at her fellow Admin, and it flies like a ray of light.

A red fog gathers from the edges of your vision, forming into the glass avatar of Unas, hovering over Vanitas--their crystalline hand catches Crypta’s spear.

“No technopath on this colony has the skill to do what she’s done, except its Admins. And I know my colleague all too well--she would never serve a master above herself!” Crypta reaches out and her spear reforms in her hand, vanishing from Unas’s grasp.

As your near-æther sight focuses, you see what Admin Crypta could--tendrils of red fog connecting the red aura of Unas to the æthereally empty body of Vanitas. Another thread of the crimson web reaches from her system directly to yours. You feel it reaching its way into your mind. You push back, focusing all your defenses around your encryption keys.

Above, Unas changes form--the shape of Admin Vanitas, Sun-white skin with black diagrams of the TLA server crawling over her and shifting as she moves, wrapped in a crystal dress radiating pale purple light, like the many eyes that orbit her head. Four crystal wings float above her back, flowing with shades of grey that blend into the crimson aura surrounding her.

“You will be a worthy opponent, Crypta, but if you will not see reason, then I will make you see!” The avatar of Admin Vanitas glows bright in your mind, her red aura surges, and a swarm of crystalline satellites manifest in her orbit.

“She’s not alone!” Zeta says, shouting in the air and in the æther, poking its head out next to you.

“You and Crypta may be evenly matched, but you’re outnumbered!” Akiko signs, from your other side, and the concepts of her words reverberate all the same in the fog.

“Indeed,” Vanitas says. “I’d better even the numbers a bit.”

Next to you, Akiko screams, clutching her head.

“Akiko! What is she doing to you?!” You try to see through the technopathy overtaking her, but releasing your focus even a little allows Vanitas to take a step deeper into your file storage.

She suddenly goes silent, and opens her silver eyes, with her LEDs off.

“Watch out, Aydan!” Zeta maneuvers between you and Akiko. It forces her a step away behind you. You turn your head to see Zeta standing defensively between you and her.

Her hands make a strange stim, coiling tight into fists several times. She takes a deep breath in and out, while she feels herself over, running her hands down to the ends of her dress.

“Welcome to the surface, Anko,” Vanitas says across the æther. “As your Admin, I order you to kill Aydan of Luna.”

Anko shrugs his shoulders and signs, “Such a waste of a cute boy. But an Admin’s orders are absolute!”

“No way in space and Earth I let that happen!” Zeta’s pixelated shield solidified, facing Anko. He manifests a cable in his hands ætherside and raises his own shield.

“What have you done?!” you say.

“Are you surprised, Aydan?” Vanitas says. “It was you who let me into her head!”

“Enough of this!” Admin Crypta says. “Synthesis, incapacitate the second year.”

Synth’s avatar materializes from the fog, still crawling with a glitchy aura all around, turning each edge into a fractal pattern. With Synthesis-05 glowing on their forehead, they throw two orbs of fire in Anko’s direction, and he deflects them with his shield, recoiling from the force.

“How troublesome your little pet has been for me,” Admin Vanitas says. Something passes from her to Synth’s system in the near-æther, a spark of data. “Zero Six! Activate!”

“No!” Synthesis-05 stops its attack, trying to push back on something internal. Their avatar changes as a red glow passes over it--even more covered in spiked metal plates and wrapped in wires, Synth raises their head again, now labeled Synthesis-06.

In the last of their thrashing against the switch, they tear something off of their avatar, throwing it down into yours--you lose track of the package, it opens itself somewhere in your system.

“Synthesis, attack Admin Crypta,” Vanitas says.

“Yes, Admin!” Synthesis-06 says, immediately manifesting their æthereal rifle and firing on their Admin.

Crypta’s shield--its golden mirror surface--deflects the attack. “The authorization code! How did you get it?!”

“Nothing is brought onto my colony without me knowing everything there is to know about it,” Admin Vanitas says.

Crypta evades Synth’s next attack, leading them away from the others.

“I should thank you, Crypta!” Vanitas says. “Your report on the cult you pulled this kid out of was an inspiration to me. Exogenesis! Abhorrent, that cult, but technically impressive work, nonetheless. The remnants I could find of their data formed the core of the NULL project.”

You struggle to push Vanitas out of your head--you can’t even see her movements when she’s so far below you in the æther. With your implant disabled, you can’t dissociate any deeper. Behind you, Zeta clashes with Anko, and Synth with Admin Crypta above. Where Luka and Deianira are, you can’t tell.

You hazard a glance down at the injector still clutched in your hand: ketamine - 1 charge remaining

Another dose might fully anæsthetize Admin Vanitas, even with her high tolerance, or it might still not be enough--if you could even reach her. The injection could also dissociate you, send you deep inside, the only conceivable way you could fully enter the æther and possibly be able to stop Vanitas from reaching ÆON’s encryption code.