The delusion can’t possibly know that. Can zie?

Major Reyes stalks the front of the chamber. “These are full immersion units. Hook the helmet in and let it take over.”

She does. The system offers her a single glowing button to tap with her mind. Time to see what’s next. “Let’s fucking go.”

Darkness. Nothingness. A void with no beginning and no end. Not the blackness of sleep and closed eyes, but an all-consuming emptiness, free of the ghosts and sparks co-created by flesh and humor and optic nerve.

Something glistens in the middle of that nothing, and as Misery turns her attention that way, the speck expands at a terrifying pace. Is she in freefall? Is it charging at her? She can’t tell, and her mind reacts with animal terror. But she has no body to sustain it, no adrenal glands to pump out the panic juice. She recognizes that she’s scared, but she feels absolutely nothing. Terror without sensation.

Misery stands, floats, persists, in the presence of a seraph. Fully formed, gleaming holy labradorite cuts sharp lines that are also inexplicably organic. Space and time have no meaning, and this seraph is enormous, bigger than reefs and spaceports, a swollen behemoth that could crush cities with a flick of the arm. But it’s also tiny, a child’s toy, small enough to fit a hand, easy enough to knock over. Misery is disappointed to feel nothing, separated as she is from her body. Emotions are a disease of the flesh.

“This is mere simulation,” Ruin says. The delusion crosses her field of vision, trailing a phantom with eight limbs, similar to the seraph but different in phenotype. It’s Ruin’s true form, which echoes the shape of the seraph as though they are related. After all, it’s said that seraphim are made in the image of the Demiurge’s most holy creations, messengers and diviners of fate closest to Hir ineffable presence. Ruin is simply maintaining consistency. The nullvoid clearly has a stronger hold on her in this nothing neverwhere.

The system guides her. First she must learn the movesets of the seraph. There are twenty-four, a combination of punches and kicks, slashes and parries. Fighting moves. Later, after she’s mastered that, she’ll have to pick up combos and counter-combos, the basics of attacking and blocking. At some point she’ll spar with the others. And in some distant future she’ll be ready to see real combat. But today, her job is mastering the basics.