.

  She looked around.

  Yes, she knew this place.

  It didn't exist.

  It was the school she never attended. The blackboards were devoid of writings. Notices and announcements on the board were printed in nonsensical figures and squiggles to offer the pretense of detail to the unobservant eye.

  The world was faded and dry, the color leeched from every surface. The leaves outside did not rustle in the hollow wind. There was no sound of distant cars or ambient city life.

  The door opened with a muted rattle, as if the noise came from another room. Erina stepped out into the hall. She was the only person that existed, but she didn't feel alone. She was a mouse scampering along the corners and cracks, knowing she was hunted but ignorant to her predator's location.

  She touched the lockers by the entrance. She touched the walls and the door. They all had the same smooth, sterile texture. Plaster, wood, metal, glass—they were all the same to the touch.

  There was no sun in the sky when she set foot outside, in blatant defiance of the daytime school courtyard before her eyes. The clouds didn't move. Tiny silhouettes of birds hovered high above, frozen in this world that knew nothing of the concept of time.

  She retraced her steps. Somehow, she knew the buildings were correct. The convenience store was where she remembered it. The plaza was where she remembered it. This was the street she always walked on the way home. Everything was right, but it was also completely and utterly wrong.

  Erina shivered. It wasn't hot. It wasn't cold either. It simply was. This memory of a happiness she never had was a disgusting perversion. It was nothing but a paper-thin mask.

  Her hand closed around the doorknob. Erina hesitated on the threshold of her house. Her mind raced with possibilities. She didn't know what lay beyond. It could be an empty house. It could be a mockery of what she thought she knew. It could tear off the thin veneer. Her head filled with imaginings, each worse than the last.

  Erina shook the thoughts away and threw the door open, at the ready to shoot whatever came out.

  Nothing did. The door gave way to a long laboratory corridor, its depths concealed by an unnatural white fog.

  Every fiber of Erina's body told her she was already trespassing—as if she had broken into some secret government building, as if any second she'd be shot from behind and her brains painted on the floor in front of her. This corridor was all the worse.

  Erina slowly shut the door and walked away. She barely made it around the corner down the road before she was forced to stop again.

  There was no more road… or rather, there was no more city. The road continued, stretching endlessly into infinity. The houses and cars and streetlights did not. The slightly uneven terrain gave way to an endless flat expanse.

  Erina looked around again. She finally put her finger on it; beyond her immediate surroundings, the scenery was exactly the same as at school. There were only barely enough houses and details to make her walk home look convincing. The buildings in the distance, the hills, the skyscrapers, nothing had moved or changed angle. No matter where she went, what lay in the distance remained in the distance.

  The door to her house slammed shut behind her. Erina threw her back against it as she panted for breath. She didn't know why she ran like her life depended on it. She only knew she couldn't bear to stay there for a single second longer than she needed to.

  The corridor had no lights, but it wasn't dark. The fog quickly swallowed up the door behind her, leaving her walking the same seemingly endless stretch of corridor with no beginning or end in sight. Erina crept cautiously at first, but after what felt like hours of sneaking with no changes, she settled into plain walking. For all she knew, Erina could've been walking the same ten feet a thousand times over.

  But it did come to an end. The fog ahead receded. Erina stepped into a motionless field. The grass refused to bend under the quiet moaning wind. She seemed to be in a large clearing in the middle of a forest. Nature greeted her eye at every turn.

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  The landscape was the farthest thing from natural. It bent at sharp, harsh angles, canopies suddenly changing direction from spreading out flat to a face some sixty degrees up from the ground and back down again. The warped space paid gravity no heed. Hills stretched and contorted up, if it could be called "up" at all. Erina could see the tops of trees much higher than her, mindlessly growing near sideways.

  Something else was wrong with it. Erina had to stare for minutes on end to figure out what unsettled her so much about the forest. It wasn't the total stillness of the countless branches and leaves. It wasn't the dead silence of a scenery that should've been teeming with life. It was the trees themselves. There was only one tree, with one pattern on its trunk, in one rotation with one style of branches reaching up from it. Every single tree was identical to the rest.

  When Erina turned around, she had to rub her eyes and look again. The entrance to the laboratory corridor existed… and only the entrance. There were no walls or ceiling on the outside, only thin air and more grass. There wasn't even a frame. It was a lazily transplanted paper-thin portal of an entrance. When Erina walked around to the back side, there was no back side. Erina hesitantly walked through where she knew the entrance was supposed to be. When she turned around, there it was.

  No paths led to or from this part of the forest. Erina was in the middle of nowhere. There was only one other point of interest. At the center of the field was a small hill covered in still blue flowers, with one tree, modest and simple. It seemed unique from the rest, a touch larger, with different branches. Erina moved closer to get a better look at the thing resting in the shade below.

  It was a straight sword, its tip embedded in the earth. Grass didn't grow within several feet of it. The sword was both simple and ornate. A plain metal blade, detailed only by the golden weavings around its base. The guard and pommel were finely crafted into elegant curves and patterns, ridged and textured with meticulous attention. A dark stain covered half the blade along with droplets and a large splatter around where the sword rested. Two more large stains soaked the exposed dirt, wide sprays of blood like wings on either side.

  Erina snapped to attention. Her hand jolted away from the handle as if shocked. When had she moved this close? Touching it was the last thing she wanted to do.

  The grass rustled as her shoes moved through it. The wind moaned as Erina gingerly stepped into the tree line. There had to be a path somewhere, right? All she had to do was find it. With that in mind, Erina went on a walk along the perimeter of the field, ducking under low branches and squeezing through foliage—

  The grass rustled again.

  It wasn't her.

  A surge of air and a sound like a thousand footsteps. It wasn't an army's march or the sound of inhumanly fast running. It was the sound of a thousand regular, normal footsteps all taken nearly at once, disturbing the grass and stirring the air.

  Erina turned. She could just see the grass falling still again on a faint trail from the hill in the center of the field to a different edge, nearly opposite to her. A light flickered through the foliage.

  No, a reflection of a light.

  !

  Erina's eyes fluttered open with a quiet groan. She was lying on her side in the dirt on a big ugly splatter of bright green ether. Her head pounded like someone was kicking it from the inside. Her face felt like she'd taken an elbow right between the eyes.

  She looked around blearily. How long had she been out? What was that? She found her answer in the soil with her, fishing it out of the foliage and then dropping it as it scalded her fingers. It was a huge bullet, squished and banged up. It was far larger than could fit in any handgun. If anything, it looked like it belonged to a sniper rifle.

  …A sniper rifle?!

  Erina jolted to full awareness as a cold wave of terror swept through her. She almost bolted to her feet before her brain caught up with her body and forced her to eat dirt again. She was not standing up right now.

  A flash of green light as Erina tossed up an orb, swiping with her hand to multiply it—

  The orb didn't respond. It hovered in place, ignorant to its master's command.

  What? That wasn't supposed to happen. Erina didn't make duds. She also didn't have time for this! She left the orb behind and hurried deeper into the forest, away from her current position. Staying there would get her shot again.

  Erina flourished with her hands, drawing a few small spell circles and then activating the spell. An invisible eye peered through the forest for her. The scan spell returned a result! One reading at her two 'o clock—

  The spell shut down. The scan came to an abrupt end.

  That wasn't her. Why did her spell turn off its own?

  A great rush of air and a thousand footsteps. Branches snapped and leaves shook loose all at once.

  Her blood turned to ice. Erina had all the time in the world crammed into a single instant to mentally kick herself for that scan. Was she out of her mind? She might as well have advertised her own location with a glowing neon sign! Erina drew her fall protection platform not to stand on, but as an emergency shield—

  It shattered. Erina was flung onto her back by the impact, a loud gunshot ringing out over the forest as she curled up in pain. Vibrant ether stained the front of her blazer.

  Cracking one eye open, she forced her hand to move and cast a seal in front of herself. The trees warped, branches and roots redirecting themselves to weave a tight dense wall before her—

  They stopped. The branches swerved and then swayed back. Roots broke the surface of the dirt and receded. Her Affinity didn't work!

  Why?! She didn't have time to think of anything else. Clutching her chest, Erina got up and ran deeper into the forest.