?

  The moment I made my selection, the paralysis ended. Without a second thought, I put my ‘plan’ into motion.

  “If you speak to these attendants, I am sure they will allow you out into the cafe or the library to pass the time until you can be fully processed and introduced to your new life…oh right, you won’t be able to understand them. Let me get that fixed for you.”

  Appeared in the lower portion of my vision, but obviously, I had no intention of listening to the spirit or its continued illusions.

  Lashing out, I grasped the forearm holding the dagger and pulled the tall man off balance with a basic wrestling move that required no Qi. Once his head dropped below where his shoulders had been, I launched a knee up into his masked jaw. The other two began to scream in a gibberish language I couldn’t understand. It was clear these were not warriors, but that didn’t stop me.

  ?Dropping the now limp man, I snatched his dagger out of his hand before it had struck the ground and flung it at the face of the second man. Briefly, I was concerned that his mask might protect him from such a flimsy weapon, but it sank deep into the flesh just below his eye.

  I was slightly annoyed at myself for missing his eye like that, but he was still injured, and the woman seemed far more concerned with helping her companion than stopping me, so it would do. Ignoring the unconscious man and the screaming pair, I strode across the nursery towards the door I had identified earlier.

  ?Reaching the point where the two metal doors met, I slid my fingers around the square box sitting between them. As the palm of my hand touched the raised glyphs adorning it, they each let out a sound that I can only describe as like a flute trying to imitate a bird.

  “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!” It went; I assumed it was some sort of alarm that the nursery lock was being tampered with. Perhaps the spirits or celestials or whoever dwelled in this place had abnormally excellent hearing? As if it were an alarm it was an abysmally quiet one. I do not believe I have ever touched a material quite like that lock. It wasn’t metal, or wood, nor was it stone or bone. The closest comparison I could make was to a seashell or a pearl, but even that failed to capture what this was.

  Well, it might have been a hard substance, but it was weaker than most metals. So when I pulled hard against the little glyph box-lock, it beeped more aggressively, but gave way before my significantly reduced might. After a few heartbeats of straining, I had torn the lock off its door.

  The mystical alarm might have been pathetic, but the final defensive measure it had inbuilt was, if nothing else, surprising. As soon as I tore the lock from the door I was struck with an attack made of bound lightning. It surged out from a hole left where the lock had been, crackling and sparking as the energy scorched my hand and sent a powerful shock up my arm.

  Swearing, I shook my burned hand and set about prying the pair of metal doors apart so I could finally take my leave of this strange spirit-run nursery.

  “The magnetic backup locks will have kicked in, your Might Stat won’t be high enough yet to get those open, let me bring up your statistics page, and I will generate you some examples of what you are capable of.”

  Understanding maybe one word in three that the spirit spoke into my mind or displayed before my eyes, I chose to simply ignore it.

  The burn on my hand was a more annoying pain than a debilitating one, and was easily ignored. So I placed a hand on each of the metal doors and began to force them apart. There was some sort of invisible force that tried to pull the pair of doors back together. Tried, my strength, as was almost always the case, was the greater power. While I did need to strain after, about ten seconds I was out of the metal doors and into a hallway of those same too bright white walls.

  “You aren’t standing by,” The spirit said in a tone that I took to be nervousness.

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  “I am not,” I confirmed with a little smile.

  I knew immediately I was inside a fortress of some sort. The hallway I was in branched off into forks in both directions. The various doors dotting it were all identical, and there wasn’t a window in sight. Honestly, I had to commend the builders of this place, if the rest of the structure was as labyrinthine and nondescript as this hallway, any invader would find the structure a confusing mess to assault.

  One direction seemed as good as the other, so I turned to my left and took off at a sprint. The hallway was empty for now, but I suspected whatever celestial beings this spirit served would be on hand soon. I am Lu Bu, I conquer wherever I travel, and I was confident that would hold true in this new realm as well. That didn’t mean I wanted to wait and see what manner of warriors this strange and bright fortress held. I needed to escape, get my bearings, and some context on this new world, and then I could begin to dominate.

  The words flashed in front of my vision, I would have taken a moment to read and try to digest them, but I was already mid-flight, my legs pumping furiously as I passed what seemed like an unending number of doors identical to the one I had broken out of. Perhaps I should have slowed down and made more of an effort to understand the information before me, as after that moment, the way I saw the world changed entirely.

  Little boxes full of words I could understand began to fill my vision. While the boxes seemed almost like drawings on a piece of paper, each one had a line running from it to something I was looking at. They were obviously there to tell me what things were, but the effort was being made with a frustrating degree of overzealousness. By the heavens above, it was marking each and every door with a box that said

  Along the ground a series of colored lines appeared, they began as a bunch near my feet and quickly split off to run down different hallways each. These too were marked with boxes explaining where the lines lead, perhaps?

  “I know what a door and a wall are, you idiot spirit, get these boxes out of my face!”

  “Apologies, master Lu Bu, allow me to see if I can calibrate it a little bit for you. One moment, I am presently trying to do a lot at once.….Oh! As a Paradox Incursion, it is legal for me to access your memories, what a relief. Let me do some initial probing, and I will be able to change the settings on your modules to fit you better.” Replied the disembodied voice.

  It goes without saying that I was not relieved that this spirit was allowed to look into my mind. Though I filed the fact that it was bound by a heavenly mandate or some such thing away for later. It may be helpful information if I could not get this thing out of my head in the near future.

  More words appeared at the bottom of my vision, though now I noticed it made a little more sense. I had always been able to read the characters, but now the word choices had changed in a way that I could more easily comprehend them. So, from what the spirit had said, and the writing I could see I assumed the spirit was rooting around in my memories for an understanding of my culture.

  Why the thing felt the need to create an illusion of text explaining this, or felt the need to show me any of the strange boxes I really did not understand. Perhaps related to the laws the being had inferred it was bound by. It didn’t matter, as I have my entire life, when running into a situation I don’t understand. I simply picked the direction that seemed to make the most sense at the time and trusted my strength and skill to carry me through whatever came of such a choice.

  In this case, that meant following the green line along the floor marked with a box that declared it the path to the [Staff Room]. Initially, I thought it was perhaps a place where the soldiery of this fortress might store their practice weapons, but the words shifted and I understood it to be a room that the local servants took their rest in. In my current state of undress I thought that might actually be a more useful destination, as likely the servants had spare changes of clothing stored there. Alternatively, it might provide me a private location to attack one and take his clothes should I need to.

  I should have paid more attention to the orange line marked [Waiting Room] that ran alongside the green line I was following. As moments later I burst into a dome topped room that was full to the brim with people. And shockingly, a conglomerate of Impossible visions, like moving artworks, littered the dome above the crowd. They displayed beautiful people with oddly smooth skin engaged in all manner of activities I had no way to explain.

  Below these moving pictures waited perhaps a hundred people. They were scattered about on hard-looking beige benches that had been carved in such a way as to give each person their own chair but remain connected to the whole. These people were dressed in a rainbow of colours, from dark leathers to robes that somehow glowed or even displayed shifting images of their own.

  Alien as their dress was, I thought I could spot little family and friend groups in the way the people split. Perhaps this fortress was under siege and I was looking at the hunkered down locals awaiting the fighting to stop?

  They might be dressed like the fever dreams of a drug and drink-addled opera dancer, but at least they were actually wearing clothes. A difference between them and me that became abundantly obvious when almost the entire room turned to stare in my direction.

  Lu Bu isn't very nice to his A.I....it doesn't get better soon.

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