Edge Cases

163 - Book 3: Chapter 28: M - Fifth Choice

Five.

She was probably Five. The fifth and last simulated iteration, judging by the strange impulse she had to choose the rightmost tunnel. There was every chance she wasn't, of course, and so she proceeded into the path with all due caution; there was no reason to risk herself unnecessarily.

Something felt wrong, though. An unpleasant buzz trickled under her skin from the moment she stepped into the tunnel. Five glanced back and felt her heart skip a beat; instead of a tunnel behind her, leading back where she'd come, there was only a blank wall.

No turning back. The message was pretty clear. She wondered if her other iterations had faced the same, or if she was the only one that had to face what was starting to feel more and more like a trap.

She ventured down the tunnel anyway. The Roads weren't giving her much of a choice otherwise; the best she could do was try to be careful. She tried blocking, just in case there was some sort of invisible spell being used on her but if there was, the skill didn't qualify it as an attack.

So much for that. Endless Echoes was pretty flexible, but the only things it blocked were things that violated personal autonomy in some way those were what it qualified as 'attacks'.

And so all she could do was walk.

And walk.

And walk.

Her time was limited, if she was an echo she'd only managed to push the skill to about ten minutes, and she was well aware that the time she had to find something was running out. Misa's walk quickly accelerated into a run. Even if the only thing that happened was her running into a trap, that was information that her prime self could use.

There was the barest flicker of a notification before her time was up.

[ Path of the Endless ERROR ]

Misa, waiting back at the start of the fork, winced as the memories of five different iterations of her slammed into mind. "Right," she muttered to herself. "Maybe using that skill five times at once is a bit much."

She turned her attention to the memories.

It was a little troubling that all five of her iterations had managed to conclude that they were iterations at all that they were applications of Endless Echoes. She hadn't really had to confront the idea that her other selves might be fully cognizant of their natures, and she wasn't sure she wanted to.

Now wasn't the time to dwell on that, anyway. At least her other selves hadn't shown any inclination towards having an existential meltdown, or otherwise planning to take over the 'prime' timeline. She'd assumed she wouldn't be like that, of course, but she was more aware than most when push came to shove, when faced with a situation that was real as opposed to a simple thought experiment...

It was sometimes a lot harder to do what you needed to do.

Misa discarded those thoughts, and focused on the important thing.

Paths. That was new, and the way the system displayed them to her was new, too; the problem was the announcement that this was a deprecated feature. Why were the Roads showing them to her? How did the Roads even know that making contact with those weapons would be significant to the system in any way?

The system was supposed to be more isolated than ever, here; it didn't exist in this echo except for where it was attached to her and her friends. Derivan had more or less already ascertained that it was her own anchor that was keeping their connection to the system intact.

It was her anchor that the four of them were now connected to, separate from the system that everyone else labored under.

Did that make a difference? There was every chance that it did. Dungeons were molded by their environments, and those dungeons fed into the anchors that they held. Maybe that made her anchor special, now that she was the one hosting and feeding it. Maybe her anchor was on their side now.

Misa's lips twisted a little at that thought, and she chuckled to herself. Too much speculation, she decided. She needed to decide what to do.

Even if her anchor was letting her look at this Path system, that system was still locked away from her. She was curious about it it seemed like a way she could grow beyond the class she had been assigned even if there was a message tagged on about the Path being locked.

That made the last tunnel all the more notable. She hadn't seen a message about the Path feature being locked or deprecated. All she'd seen was the barest flicker of a name before the memory caught up to her and cut out.

Why?

There was nothing about the last tunnel that should have made it significant. Misa glared at it suspiciously, as if a powerful enough glare could force it to reveal its secrets to her, but nothing changed. It was, as far as she could tell, completely identical to the other tunnels.

There was a part of her that was attracted to the idea of the Path of the Empty Archer; Reaper and Sunshield were both too close to what she could already do, Phoenix seemed too focused on herself and was an even worse choice than Sunshield, unless she could keep blocking, dying, coming back to life, and blocking again, which...

...which was maybe a possibility? That was what [Reborn in the Ashes] implied. But that could also have been a skill that would only bring her back to life if she burned to death, or if she died of old age. It was a huge risk to take for a small upgrade to her existing kit, especially when she had Sev to heal her.

She wasn't going to touch Aberrant Berserker at all.

Empty Archer was most compelling. It was the option that would allow her the most flexibility, and it added to her kit rather than fleshing out what she could already do. There was a benefit in specializing even more, she supposed, but she was about as specialized as she could be already. The only thing she really needed in that department was a way to deal with rapid attacks or too many attacks at once, and Empty Archer seemed like it might have a solution for her there, too, depending on what concepts she could load the arrows up with.

There were only two problems. One, it was locked; she wasn't particularly concerned about that part, though, since she was relatively certain Derivan's Patch stat would easily unlock it. There was every chance that she was wrong, but if that were the case then the choice in front of her was no real choice at all, and it seemed strange that the Roads purported to lead her where she needed to go would lead her to a completely pointless upgrade.

The second problem was the Path of the Endless the one that, she realized, matched the name of her skill. [Misa's Endless Echoes].

She still grimaced every time she thought of the full skill name.

She could wait another ten minutes and then use the skill again, sending that copy of her as deep into the Path as she could. That was her plan, even, except she looked a little closer, and realized the tunnels in front of her were closing. Not the paths within just the entrances. The rock was folding in on itself.

It wants me to hurry up.

Misa half-growled under her breath. She hated being forced into decisions.

And then she thought of an idea.

[An Anchor of Heart and Home] allowed her to summon a copy of those villagers that lived in J'rokksur, her original home and village not just a copy, but a full simulacrum. The person summoned would control two bodies at once, and there was one possibility she hadn't ever tried before, mostly because she'd just never considered it.

But she was a part of her village, too. She was a part of J'rokksur. That was the reason the skill functioned the way it did.

So what if she summoned herself?

It might have been a stupid idea... but she tried it anyway.

The skill resisted her. There were futures she couldn't sacrifice because they were too far away; here, in this tunnel, her future was restricted to five choices. Five roads. Five paths.

An easy enough choice to make.

First went the Path of the Aberrant Berserker. That future was just as fraught as she thought it would be, full of blood and fighting; her friends held her back and kept her from becoming anything truly evil, but there was no reason they should have had to.

It wasn't enough. The skill was resisting; this wasn't its purpose, it seemed to say.

Next went the Path of the Reaper. That path was too much like her own already. She saw herself teleporting through the shadows, defending against powerful blows by pulling out the raw essence of the soul. None of that was her.

The skill began to give. She felt something wrap itself around her, raw Reality touching upon her core.

Last went the Path of the Phoenix. It was a good option, and she was sad to see it go, but this particular trick would only let her choose two.

Even then, there was no guarantee that the Path her doppelganger gained would transfer over to her. She suspected it would, though; experience points transferred correctly when she'd last tested it, although damagae to health and status effects did not.

The skill gave. She felt something drain from her, and then her vision was suddenly split in two. She winced a bit at the split vision, a headache quickly manifesting, but she didn't care.

It worked.

"Mom was right," both of her selves muttered. "This is weird."

It took a little bit of maneuvering to stop both of her bodies from moving in the same direction every time she tried to operate one of them. She had no idea how her mother had been able to adapt to it so quickly. Some factor from her intuition skill, perhaps. But she got herself sorted, and made her way down the two paths, her original self going down the third tunnel and her other self going down the fifth.

Misa almost expected the Roads to try to stop her, for one of the paths to slam closed. She expected something to go wrong.

Instead, the rock that had begun to close over each path pulled back slightly, as if encouraging her.

Somewhat perturbed but nevertheless willing to take it at face value, Misa made her way down the tunnels, keeping a close mental eye on what was happening in the Endless tunnel. She found the bow in one of them, grabbed a hold of it, and watched as the notifications poured out.

But that wasn't what she was interested in. She kept her mental focus on her other self, even as her surroundings faded and she found one of her selves back on the Roads.

The Path of the Endless was not nearly so easy. The notification popped up about ten minutes in, just as before.

[ Path of the Endless ERROR ]

[ Attempting to assign Path... ERROR ]

[ You are on the Path of the Endless. Good luck. ]