A metallic white floor littered with dirt greeted Ellowyn's vision as she opened her eyes. Looking around, she found herself in a damp and dark tunnel with small flashing blue lights hanging on a string to each side. The tunnel was at least as wide as a subway tunnel. Water droplets dripped around her forming puddles, many of which she stepped on as she walked.

A distinct sobbing sound echoed from the distance, beckoning her to follow. She could feel the mysterious weight tugging at her heart getting heavier by the second.

Various broken pieces of what used to be small metallic spheres laid on the ground. She crouched and took a closer look, the electronic components inside were very familiar but she couldn't recall why. She shook her head, trying to clear the persistent mind fog to no avail. She gave up and continued towards the end of the cave to investigate the source of the crying noises.

"Ellowyn, wake up. Wake up! I'm begging you, please wake up." It was Alice's voice.

Ellowyn quickened her pace. The tunnel widened to show Alice sitting on the ground, a bloodied body laid on her lap. She was hugging and and nudging its bloodied face but the figure gave no response.

Then a shred of memory came to Ellowyn. That is me? She wanted to open her mouth and call Alice's name, but nothing came out.

Desperate, she started to run towards Alice. But every step made the distinct humming in the background louder. The humming became loud enough to muffle out the sound of her footsteps. Then darkness.

Ellowyn opened her eyes wide and sat up. "Crap." Another nightmare huh, that makes it what, 6 times so far?

The distinctive nightmares that haunted her from night to night were getting vibrant and creative. They were the reason why she trained so hard every morning, to make sure that she was ready to grab onto any silver lining that would appear.

She wanted to survive, not for her own sake for she was already satisfied with a life well lived back on Earth. She wanted to survive because the look on Alice's face holding her tattered body was too painful for her heart to bare.

Before launching herself into the familiar combat simulation, she pulled out a box from under her bed and admired at its content. She spent the entirety of last night making a workable thruster harness. It wasn't as good as the one she had in her simulation, but in an emergency it could perform to around 80% of her virtual design, enough to help her fight on par with a small pack of wolves.

After doing another integrity and battery check, she watched as the box glowed and disappeared into the system subspace.

Entering soul room

First, I need a bee. She pulled up the creation panel and materialized a small bee from the standard library. She then enlarged the size until it was as big as a backpack. Because size increased linearly while weight cubically, the large bee had a lower movement speed than before, but still fast to the human eye.

It was only after she gave it a hostile AI and let it attack a human dummy that she realized how deadly it can be. One bee could kill a grown human with its stinger alone. And while the bee would lose its main weapon after stinging, a swarm of hundreds of thousands of them could potentially kill just as many people. She could also see ways in which the stinger be genetically altered to pierce through metallic armor.

The only weakness was that the bee was generally useless against forcefields and nonliving targets such as drones and turrets. Though through sheer number they could disable anything in their path by colliding with them.

Full body force fields would keep them off, but one usually couldn't keep such a power hungry field up for a long period of time, especially with their extreme heat output.

She racked her mind for a solution. Simply packing herself with armor would do nothing as these things could attack through the crevices of her suit. And the system analysis proved useless under such immense numbers, she simply didn't have the speed to dodge them all.

Then a thought came to her, another weakness lay in its poisonous stinger which was one use only. If she could figure out a way to let them attack her with their stingers and deflect them away.

"Got it!" She grinned broadly.

Carbon nanotubes was the answer. They were available everywhere, with the top quality ones designed for either extreme tensile or shear strength.

She materialized several shear resistant carbon nanotubes weaved into wire forms along with small mount heads that could retract and release them. She then attached the wired mounts onto the strap suit. With the wires outstretched in front of each of her arms and legs, she began testing them by turning on the small mounts and let them vibrate at a fast frequency, effectively making them wired saw blades.

She had to shorten the wire on her left arm to make space for the shield strap, but still left enough to receive and deal attacks with the upper part of her arm.

Spoiler :

Illustration:

She wanted to use the outstretched wires to receive and deflect or cut off the bee's stinger by swinging them at the bee as it attacked her. Its a little tricky, but lets see if I can do it. There was an extreme need to be careful for she could easily cut herself. I'll need to keep my hair under a cap or something.

She launched the combat simulation and faced a bee.

Upon seeing her, the bee with its simplistic AI began to fly straight at her while holding out its stinger.

It was crucial to get the timing right since slipping by half a second and she would have the stinger buried deeply in her flesh. Thank to countless practice hours, she flung her arm up in time as the bee's stinger headed for her head.

The wire blade sawed through the part holding the bee's stinger and flicked it away, leaving the bee disoriented. She had to lean back to avoid the bee as it flew past where her head had been.

She swung her rifle's blade upward and sliced the bee in half an instant later.

While the bee's agile movement speed and compact build should have given her trouble hitting it, the system assist was able to predict its movement pattern perfectly.

Spawning enemies, interval: 10 seconds

Imitating yesterday's failure, she set the spawn timer to repeat at a faster interval as she survive more waves of bees.

Three bees materialized and attacked.

She leaned forward and used the momentum to slash the bee in front and dodge the second bee while bashing her shield on the third one. The stunned bee died shortly after she fired her rifle.

They're too dumb. Simply attacking in a straight line was not likely something a well engineered bee would do. She set their AI to swarm behavior shortly before another wave of five spawned.

The bees gathered together into a chaotic swarm before charging her altogether,stingers raised.

She frowned, it was only a small swarm and yet the system assist had almost reached its limit, not from the lack of processing power but from her limited speed and fragile body.

She ran forward, firing on her rifle while raising her shield to bash the nearest bee. Her bullets killed one bee and stripped the wings of another as she sliced the third one in half. The last two were taken care off within seconds.

Another wave of bees appeared, seven in total.

Warning, insufficient resources for optimal avoidance. Prepare to receive damage

The mass of bees hit her like a storm, she managed to cut one down and shot another, but one of the stingers grazed her thigh, making a deep cut.

She grit her teeth then slammed the shield into a bee. The wire on her right arm was used to slice off a stinger of another. Then she fired her rifle at the third one.

She cut the stunned bee with the wire saw and bent her head to duck but still got grazed on the shoulder.

The last bee decided to fly around and attack from her blind spot but got slashed half way there.

Another wave materialized, not leaving her any time to take a breath.

Ellowyn fell asleep shortly after she got on the limo to school. The training exhausted her both mentally and physically.

At least I learned a few things. She added two more wire blades to her virtual suit, each running from the back of her thigh to the top of her shoulders.

The biggest problem was she had no body armor aside from a shield strap. It was a blessing that the system could remove any poison entering her body. But it could not heal injuries and close her open, bleeding wounds. The best thing she could do was to fight and evade until too many thrusters got destroyed or she lost too much blood. Thinking back at the image of her bloodied body leaning on the giant gates, she concluded that the her in that clairvoyance video died of the same reason.

I need to survive somehow.

"Guys, guess what?" Sophie usual cheery mood was more excited than usual.

"What, besides the cancellation of that cursed policy?" Alice said.

"So you know already. Can't you at least wait until I finish telling you with exhilaration?" She humphed.

"Wait, if the policy is cancelled, we are we still going here?" Ellowyn said.

"Because of numerous attacks received on many schools, the policy was taken down from emergency. However, the application of the cancellation won't apply until next semester." Alice said.

"Yup! I would be surprised if they didn't take it down. At least 12 people had been kidnapped so far, 70 if you include the lower area schools, 10 injured, and 2 deaths."

It seemed the school's gloomy atmosphere had died down, she concluded, judging by the lively debate between Alice and Alina the moment they stepped in class.

Having taken an online philosophy class out of boredom, she could see well who was in charge of the debate. Alina had a stronger tone and used a more direct way of speaking, but her arguments were only fallacies. Alice was more composed, only responding when she needed to and her face remained emotionless the entire time.

The other classes were less active, but Ellowyn also noticed everyone's expressions getting lighter.

Because of Jake and Alice's lively talk, Ellowyn and Sophie had to sit at different tables to give them space. It was due to Jake's absence that day that everyone got to sit together again.

"Aren't you glad this nightmare is almost over? Its too bad we won't get to see each other every day anymore, not after this" Sophie said.

"Of course." Ellowyn said.

"If I'm not bogged down by work, I would have seen you everyday, Sophie." Alice smiled.

"I think we should be more cautious rather than glad. For whoever wanted the policy in place would be taking more desperate actions now that it had been reverted." Alexis said.

"Don't ruin our mood, you thickheaded guard!" Sophie pouted and nudged him with her elbow.

"I'm just doing my job." He grinned.

"Don't you guys get tired from standing all the time?" Ellowyn said, she had seen Alexis, Rexis and Bob standing throughout all of her lunch periods.

"There's no need to worry, our suits are designed to stimulate blood flow to our legs to prevent the lack of oxygen." Rexis said with a soldierly voice.

"We only need to stand during lunch because its the most vulnerable time. Everyone tend to relax when they're enjoying the meal." Bob added.

Ellowyn stared intently at Rexis. It was only then that she realized how easy it was to ignore the girl. Rexis was only around Ellowyn's age and yet her demeanor and expression were that of a soldier's. Because of such stiff posture and quietness, She often found herself forgetting that Rexis was there at all.

"Is there any problem, Miss Ellowyn?"

"I'm a little curious. May I know how old you are?" Ellowyn asked.

"I will be 17 years old next month."

Ellowyn opened her eyes wide. How can someone so young work as a trained guard? She wanted to ask more but restrained herself. I don't want to make her uncomfortable.

Robotics class was livelier than usual. Everyone talked about the removal of the policy and expressed their excitement that the VIP students will leave the school soon.

"Hey rabbit girl." Tommy took his seat next to her.

"Where have you been yesterday?" Ellowyn said, unaffected by the jest.

She actually took a liking to the boy for his resemblance to her childhood friend, Alex. She was disappointed that the grown up Alex lost his playfulness. Not that he's in this world anyway.

"School was boring as hell, so I sneaked to a RBA to have some fun." He gave a smug smile.

"Let me guess, you got your butt spanked and forced to go to school today?" Ellowyn smiled back. If she recalled correctly, RBA stood for Robotics Battle Arena.

"Nah, they just removed all the cars from their garage so I can't hack myself into them anymore."

"Living on the edge much?" It was her turn to laugh. The top model cars had autopilot function, but it was still illegal for minors to drive and there were many emergency situations that required manual piloting.

"Mind you, I can drive better than most folks out there."

"So you say." She still kept her grin.

They proceeded to ignore the professor's lecture and started discussing various ideas she had.

"You're way more crazy than me, to try and put thrusters on yourself just to move around? Heck even I wouldn't do something that loony." He chuckled, earning the professor's glare.

"I never said that I've done it myself." She pouted.

"But from the things you said, I can only conclude that either you have access to an incredibly precise simulation with the help of a professional human physics animator, or that you have tried them on yourself."

"Alright, I'll admit it. But please don't do what I did. Crap, I shouldn't have asked you in the first place." She frowned. Now I bet he's going to try it. What if he is injured because of me?

"Don't worry, I do want to live you know." He said, "I can't believe that someone like you would try such a thing."

"I have my circumstances."

"To see such a cute rabbit as yourself hurt is against my wishes. Thats all."

She couldn't hold her laughter.

After an angry scolding from Damion, they switched to texting. Tommy gave her various tips on power management, weight balancing, and some tinkering to improve performance. He also taught her a special method to maintain communication with the drones against various signal jamming techniques.

At the end of class, she went to his office and bought some carbon nano wires to make her wire saws.

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Decrypting messages...done

Retrieving message log, time period - 2 weeks

//Showing messages from March 25th, 2512

I got some nice tips from Tommy today. He doesn't know why I'm doing this so don't worry.

There, I've sent you my combat training log. I've also equipped the suit with wire blades. At least its good to know I'm ready to face some bees. Good night.

//Showing messages from March 28th, 2512

It seemed the policy's cancellation is moved to three month. I hope nothing goes wrong until then.

Crap. I raised a flag, didn't I.

Are you there? I haven't heard anything from you in the past few days. Anyway, combat logs sent.

//Showing messages from April 1st, 2512

Help, I'm dying!

Just kidding. Happy April fools day. Oh wait its a different day in this world huh. Nevermind.

Still no response, I hope you're alright.

Combat logs sent.

//Showing messages from April 2nd, 2512

Tommy told me of some new combat moves inspired by a movie he watched. They seemed pretty useful so I added them to the database.

I also had more time to practice since its the weekend. I managed to port a simple pacman game to the system too. Maybe I can make a game engine and sell it to you for millions?

I'm off for today. Good luck, whatever you're doing.

//Showing messages from April 3nd, 2512

I bought two heavy boxes of components today. Looks like my dream of having an army of reconnaissance drones will come true.

//Showing messages from April 4th, 2512

Okay, I'm getting worried that you're not coming back. At least find sometime to respond, please?

Not much progress today. Missile strike managed to scour a part of the wall clean. I had to stay on alert until classes ended. Too tired now to do much. Alice is considering to take tomorrow off. Sophie wanted to skip school altogether but we'd get into too much legal trouble.

//No message for today, April 8th, 2512

Hey Elllowyn, sorry for responding so late. I got buried in work and couldn't find the time to sneak on

We're under attack!

What is the situation?

Alice is dying

I’m sorry but I suck at making character developments. So I decided to end the school arc a little early. >.

GDoc link Please, please comment in any errors you see. Its not that I’m lazy, but I’m too busy to proofread my chappies. >.<