“Well, how was I supposed to know he could hop between bodies?” I asked as I rounded a corner with my gun drawn, Makesi directly in front of me and Aisling covering my back.

  She was finally getting a chance to use her submachine gun today! I knew I could make it happen. I bet she was so excited once she got to use it. Even if I already stole the first kill, I had dibs on that guy.

  “You couldn't have, but there were hundreds of different things he could have been. We're dealing in scenarios where the very laws of reality itself are broken, and our job is to fix them. Sure, maybe he could have just been someone with an anomalous object at his side who thought himself above it all. But it was also possible that he was part of a hive mind, or that he had been consuming anomalous objects and had altered his physiology and soul to the point where bullets would do nothing to him, or that time fuckery was happening, god I fucking hate time fuckery.” Makesi ranted. But all that sounded to me like was that no matter what we did, it was the wrong move because there was no good move when your opponent could be ‘literally anything you could possibly think of and a lot of things you couldn't’.

  “So why retreat? What if that just made everything worse? I mean, what would fundamentally change between shooting him and not shooting him?” I asked, ignoring the very quiet bursts of gunfire coming from behind me. The weapons Aisling bought sounded like someone dropping a pebble into sand when fired.

  It made sense, given her aversion to loud noises.

  “Well, if we retreated, we wouldn't have immediately made Eightfold Solutions into our enemy. This is going to bite us in the ass later,” he replied, and a wall of blue liquid light formed in front of him as someone decided to try and pepper us with gunfire from the front. He waved me to the side, and I peeked around the light. The moment I was noticed by the people laying down suppressive fire, their spotlights lit up, and I grabbed their minds and turned them against each other.

  It was incredibly easy when they were already paranoid about mind control. You just had to stir the pot a little, and they'd start gunning each other down.

  Once the noises quieted down, Makesi pulled the blue light back in and ran forward across the street. I was really enjoying the point in Venust I obtained, I was barely out of breath at the moment.

  I was considering dropping a few more points in the Stat once I had the Dust to do so. It currently costs one thousand Dust for a single point past five, which meant we needed to head back out to the overlap and start clearing it as soon as possible.

  “What if we just wipe them out entirely? That was on the table before. We could just go back to doing that,” I asked, peeking over Makesi's shoulder. I could see we were almost out of town.

  “Because, for one, they already know we're here. We already cut the head off the snake, but it failed. Even if we killed every last soldier, there would be another group soon enough. Better to deal with the enemy you know than the one you don't. This is the anomalous division of the Tiānlǜ; the next group could entirely consist of specialists armed with anomalies,” he replied as we crossed the barrier out of the town. “Also, we have no idea what other capabilities they may have right now.”

  From somewhere behind us, there was a rippling crunch, and a shockwave blew past us. Dust and debris from destroyed buildings buffeted against the shield that Makesi threw up.

  “I feel like you're being overly cautious. Vivi could wreck these people in ten minutes. Just because you lost—” I was distracted when the dust cleared and I saw someone I recognized standing twenty feet away, cowering behind a half-destroyed wall. “Sorry, go on without me, I'll catch up,” I yelled as I ran towards her.

  What the fuck is Aurin doing here? Also, why is she wrapped in a silk gown that makes her look like an actor in one of those dramas taking place in the inner court?

  Makesi yelled something from behind me, but I was already sprinting towards her. Looking at her, I could see her mind; it was Aurin. This wasn't some kind of illusion. There was no plausible way to fake a mental conceptualization in an ability that was entirely unique to me.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I whisper shouted when I reached her. “We went looking for you.”

  “I'm sorry, it was the only way to make sure,” Aurin said, tears running down her face. “I was…here, just take this.”

  She held out a red envelope for me.

  “Sure, whatever, come on, we have to go!” I said as I grabbed it and went to take her hand as well. Only for me to pass right through her like she was made of smoke. Her body dissolved in front of me, and for the first time ever, I started to doubt my ability to differentiate between real and fake people based on my Aspect.

  I had never had this happen before, even when Atlas tried their best to make me second-guess myself, I could always tell.

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

  Looking back, where Makesi and Aisling should have been, all I saw was darkness. I turned my head around and realized the entire world had gone dark, except for myself. I was lit by some kind of unnatural light.

  With nothing else to do, I looked down at the red envelope the person I hoped was Aurin gave me. It was unlabeled and carried no distinct markings.

  Popping open the top, there was a single card sitting inside, which I removed.

  The card was labelled ‘two-way ticket, not eligible to make a purchase, pickup only,’ which meant nothing to me. Two-way ticket to where?

  Looking up from the card, I was standing in front of what appeared to be a run-down Asian antique shop. Red and gold paint was flaking off the building, revealing wood underneath. The front door was completely covered in those warding talismans you see in some Asian media, so thickly plastered on that I couldn't actually see the door itself.

  Oh, well, sure, why don't I just walk right into the cursed building? That sounds like a swell idea.

  …

  I walked up to the cursed building and opened the door. Inside was a dimly lit room absolutely filled with junk. Almost every object in the room was mentally active, some being very noisy, like a bowl that seemed to have an angry bull in its mind that kept slamming its feet into the corpse of a farmer that had already long since passed.

  One of those tacky cat sculptures caught my eye because this one seemed to actively want to make whoever owned it incredibly lucky in a financial sense. I could have used that a few times growing up.

  “There's no use loitering. You are currently unable to make a purchase at our establishment. Maybe next time you visit,” an older Chinese woman said in Mandarin from behind the counter. She hadn't existed a moment beforehand, and I caught her appearing out of thin air in the corner of my vision.

  Looking at her, she was the very meaning of everything has a price. Not her mind, her mind was empty like it had nothing going on in it. Conceptually, the woman herself standing in front of me was the definition of ‘Everything has a price’. It was somewhat startling to see a concept made flesh.

  “I'm here for a pickup, I think?” I said, glancing behind me, all that existed out there was a dark void, but I closed the door anyway to be polite.

  “Ticket, please,” she said, holding out her hand.

  Now that didn't feel right to me.

  “What'll ya trade me for it?” I asked as I walked up to the counter, leaned against it and propped my head up with my hand.

  A sly smile spread across her face, “I can give you the package that ticket is eligible to redeem.”

  “Sure, will that let me leave? I was kind of in the middle of something,” I said, placing the ticket on the table but keeping a finger on it.

  She glanced down at the ticket, “Why yes, it is a two-way ticket after all.”

  I frowned at her wordplay, “So we agree that when I receive the package I'm here to pick up, that I will be allowed to leave back to where I came from to a moment in time when it is the safest to do so, but not more than a week into the future, whenever I so will it. This is in exchange for the ticket and nothing else.”

  “The ticket says you can leave. Why raise such a fuss about it?” she replied.

  “That was not an agreement to the stated trade. You are literally the concept of ‘everything has a price’ and I'd like to make sure that I'm not being fucked on the price,” I replied, staring her directly into her dead eyes. It made my skin crawl, but I couldn't feel a spotlight from her, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. At least there wasn't a light staring back at me.

  I also felt like I knew how the fox worked now.

  Something I said made her eyebrows raise, “I see, that's why she made the deal she did. I agree to your demands, and I'll be right back with your package, sweetie.”

  She vanished for an instant before reappearing with a box. A box I was intimately familiar with. One that was wrapped in chains that I had placed there.

  “Aurin?” I squeaked out.

  “Said she didn't need her soul, and that you'd know what to do with the rest. Now get out of my shop,” she said, and the shop vanished around me, leaving me in that dark void. Aurin's mind lay floating in front of me, whole despite being removed from her body.

  I barely even processed that the last thing the woman said to me was in System Default, as the world seemed to narrow down on Aurin.

  Raising my hands out towards her, my emotional state felt deafeningly silent. Something was roaring in my ears, which might have been my heartbeat.

  I wiped tears out of my eyes that were streaming down my face. Then I finally touched her with both my mind and body.

  Weight: 1/5

  Her box appeared on my stage, and bending over for the first time within the theatre in my mind, I undid her chains one by one.

  “Fucking asshole, you should have said something before you went and did this,” I muttered under my breath, then opened the chest.

  Aurin stood before me and on my stage, somehow co-existing in both spaces at once.

  “Sorry, I was just handed a red envelope and didn't think I could pass up on an opportunity to come with you,” she said as she bent over and hugged me in both real life and on the stage. “Now we can be together forever. That's what we wanted, right? Now there's no problem, I'm here and you can’t get rid of me.”

  I wondered if this was my fault, and came to the conclusion that, yeah, it probably was. Aurin, as in the Aurin I knew, was dead. Her soul… I wasn't even sure what was going to happen to it. Maybe it would be made into an item in the antique shop?

  Not that the soul even was Aurin anymore, since her entire mind was with me right now. Which meant a new Aurin was now living in my head.

  My hands wrapped around her and pulled her in close as my mind went in circles, blaming itself, then trying to assert that everything was fine, then going back to blaming itself. Aurin ran her fingers through my hair, somehow materially affecting me and whispered sweet nothings into my ear while my mental state collapsed in on itself.

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