Sworded Affair

She was happy for the reprieve, as in the absence of enemies, she was able to return to the stairwell, and safely store Eternal Wind and her homunculus back in Eden\'s Echo, but that still didn\'t solve the overall problem. All the while, the countdown continued, now at the very edge of an ignominious end.

"Any advice?" Emma asked.

True, Edith tended to be quiet during battle, to avoid distracting her, but she felt that this warranted an exception, all things considered.

[I\'ve already accounted for this, in my prior instructions to you. Absorption is not destruction.]

"Prior instructions?"

Emma frowned, sifting through her memories as she tried to figure out what that meant. Despite the choice to activate emergency measures, there still hadn\'t been that much more communication than the norm. Eternal Wind was the biggest contribution by far; a direct application of Edith\'s power that Emma had never seen during a boss encounter before. There had been incidents before, yes, but mainly in safe areas, and more often than not for comic relief.

"Absorption is not destruction, so anything we sent through the portal still exists on the other side? Not helpful, for anything that I didn\'t personally do. The arrows I fired would have dissipated by now, assuming they didn\'t hit anything, and I have no direct control over them in any case. My summons…"

Emma paused at that, checking her status page in a moment of inspiration.

"I felt the link to my summons weaken, so I thought they were gone. Except, it\'s been well over ten minutes, so why are they still on cooldown?"

Then, Emma remembered that one of Edith\'s first instructions during this entire debacle was to throw her Duplicate into the portal. It had never been brought up since, and had no apparent effect, so she\'d put the matter aside, but everything was truly accounted for? Then that was her golden ticket to survival, and victory.

[Parallel Lives activated.]

The Duplicate reemerged in the boss chamber, and shattered to pieces, and as for Emma herself, she was nowhere to be found.

The author\'s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

—

Emma\'s prior experiences with teleportation had mostly been smooth sailing. Completely smooth, when using her own abilities, and with only mild turbulence in other instances involving third-party magic. This time was a bit different, and felt like the spin cycle of a washing machine, complete with immense nausea. Only when Emma disengaged both her sense of sight and touch did that stop; she could\'ve taken hearing as well for good measure, but as annoying as the loud screeching was, she needed some way of knowing when the transfer ended. The fact that Parallel Lives worked at all meant she was on the right track, and in all likelihood, the final enemy awaited beyond the portal. The screech stopped, and Emma switched herself back on.

[WARNING: This Dungeon is unstable, and will collapse if unbeaten in 5 minutes.]

"You!" Someone hissed. "How did you get in here?"
Emma\'s first impression of the room was that she\'d gotten lost and wandered into a server room in an office somewhere. Every wall was covered with hard drives, racks filled up from floor to ceiling, and more cables that she could ever hope to count, many of them hopelessly entangled with one another. The only hint that this was more than it appeared came in the form of sticky notes, placed randomly on individual hard drives with neither rhyme nor reason. On them, crude drawings could be found in pencil: the majority of which showed arrows, but a few bore other signs. A single disk had shorted out, near the bottom of one rack; the machinery was inoperable, but the sticky note remained, depicting a crude stick drawing of Emma\'s armour. Near it, Emma could see representations of an elemental of ice and fire, a massive leech, and several puffs of air to boot; the meanings of which were quickly obvious.

In the middle of the room, on the one workstation present, a small, anthropomorphic lizard stared at her in outrage. Behind him, coffee pooled on the table where he\'d overturned his mug, slowly making its way to the edge of the desk, and down to the floor from there. His six monitors were still on, showing the empty boss chamber where they\'d just been fighting, moments ago, in no less than eighteen different angles in real-time. He didn\'t look ready for a fight, indeed, a close examination showed that he looked barely able to stand; both legs had atrophied to the point of uselessness, more scale and bone than vital flesh. He didn\'t appear threatening in the least, something the System concurred with.

[Monitor Lizard - Level 4 Technician]

"No, no, this is all wrong!" The lizardman continued, throwing up his arms in agitation: those, Emma noted, were perfectly functional, and even had five fingers each to take advantage of human ergonomics. "You\'re supposed to be dead. I\'m supposed to be dead!"

"There are easier ways to commit suicide," Emma retorted, unimpressed with what she\'d seen thus far. "Ways that don\'t involve killing thousands of people, after they\'ve already lost almost everything to the apocalypse."

Emma had a few guesses as to how the Lizard would reply: threats and bluster, attempts to negotiate, or maybe even to beg for his life despite his claims, but as for what actually came?

"I have no choice," The Lizard hissed, slumping down in his chair. "Do you think I want to do this? To ruin a wondrous piece of technology like this gateway? To die, and as a mass murderer at that? No. But I have no choice. They have my family, my entire family. Do you know what those damned Entropy lovers would do to them, if I didn\'t obey their orders? The only way to save them is to play along; if I don\'t, they\'re all dead."

[Well, that\'s a heartrending problem.]

Emma was sorely tempted to just stick her blade in the lizard, sob story be damned, until she took a close look at his chest, prompted by Edith\'s comment. The Lizard didn\'t wear clothes, yet there, connected to his heart, was a thin black wire leading who knows where.

[A failsafe. Or rather, in this case, a fail-deadly.

WARNING: This Dungeon is unstable, and will collapse if unbeaten in 5 minutes.]