One Last System

"What the hell is going on?" Mia muttered to herself, stuck in a weird limbo of nothingness.

Her point of view was in a suspended state, allowing the girl to see only the stuff directly ahead.

'Well, it's not like there is anything to see out here,' Mia thought, taking stock of the situation.

She then shook her head and attempted to close her eyes, only to realize that neither did her point of view shake nor did it disappear.

'Huh?' Mia shrugged, a cold chill running down her spine.

​ 'Where exactly am I?' Mia asked herself, digesting the visual feed she was forced to ingest.

The world around her was... weird, to say the least.

Instead of ground, buildings, nature, or even animals, it all consisted of clouds of spiritual energy.

The color of those clouds would vary.

'It's like every color meant a different density of the energy,' Mia thought, running her hand through the clouds both close and far away.

'Huh?'

The girl shrugged when she realized what she had just done.

'How in all hells could I reach clouds so far away?' she asked, her eyes widening.

Even though she had no eyes in her current state of being.

On its own, being stuck in this strange place didn't seem so bad. Or rather, Mia wouldn't mind living in this place at all.

It was calm. There weren't any enemies there. Just the spiritual energy all around, free for grabs. All Mia had to do was to reach out...

'No,' Mia shouted in her mind, shaking off this strange feeling of fulfillment and easiness.

There was one fault that this world couldn't overcome, no matter how comfortable and soothing it was.

This world was devoid of Arthur.

'And it doesn't make any sense for me to stay here if he's not here with me,' Mia thought, not even a shred of hesitation appearing in her soul before this kind of statement.

'Huh?' Mia suddenly realized the weight of what she thought about. 'I know I'm charmed by him and that I likely love him...' she thought, gritting down her imaginary teeth in this imaginary world, unable to figure out the weird feeling that she had.

It was as if her love for Arthur... Was greatly bigger than what could be normally explained.

To a degree, in this world of pure energy and no lies, Mia couldn't come to terms with her unexplainable obsession with her man.

'It feels as if...' Mia swallowed down hard, 'as if those feelings were implanted?'

The second this thought appeared, the world around Mia changed. The clouds turned chaotic, moving from one place to another and crashing into each other in the process.

Soon, the clouds started to converge into just a group of just a few, each growing more intense by the second.

'Was it all a lie?' Mia thought, the storm in the world of spiritual energy she was stuck in increasing.

'Wait, what even are those doubts?' Mia asked herself, forcefully putting a mental stop to her wild accusations. 'Where do they come from?' Mia continued to pry into her own business, unable to understand a thing about her current mental state.

And then she froze. Because a very simple question appeared in her mind.

A question that was both simple and complicated. Both obvious but also incredibly minute.

'Where do I come from?'

On the surface, this question was simple.

Just what kind of events made Mia appear in this strange spiritual world? Only by finding an answer to this question could she at least try to figure out what was actually going on.

But then came the other meaning of this question.

'Where do I come from?'

This question was strictly bound to the feeling of unease Mia had. It connected to her inability to explain her own feelings directed at Arthur.

'Now that I think about it, it felt as if something slowly clicked in me,' Mia thought, somehow capable of perfectly recalling even the smallest bits from her memory. 'It didn't happen overnight... But as I grew used to him... No, there wasn't a single point when I fell for him,' Mia stated in her mind.

This was the only thing that she could be sure about.

Rather than suddenly getting struck by a powerful arrow of love... She somehow grew into Arthur's company, only to soon be unable to bear its lack.

'Sometime back at the Skyladder sect, I just started to love him,' Mia thought, unable to tear her thoughts away from the deeper question she stated.

Yet, no matter how confused she was, she refused to just let go of this one feeling that defined her.

'The question is... are my feelings real?' Mia asked herself, the spiritual world around only appearing to enhance those destructive thoughts.

"No!" Mia screamed out, refusing to let her inner state be swayed by whatever governed this place.

'Ever since I woke up in here, I thought of nothing but doubts,' she realized, spelling this assumption out in her mind as if to make it more rooted in reality. 'But there is one topic that I would get sidetracked away whenever trying to think about it,' she added in her thoughts as she finally got closer to figuring out her situation.

And Mia didn't need to think for long to find out just what kind of topic steered clear from her attention.

'How did I get here in the first place?' Mia asked herself.

Now that she knew which direction this place wanted to take her, she would do her best to go in the opposite one!

'No, what's the last thing that I can remember?' Mia quickly changed her question, her brain sweating under pressure.

And soon enough, the answer appeared before her eyes.

Arthur's naked torso. The taste of his dick plastered all over the depths of her throat. The gentle sways of his hips mixed with the twitches of his thing in her mouth.

And then the unstoppable wave of energy mixed with Arthur's face changing.

'Huh?' Mia shrugged, clawing at the memory, desperate to stop it from going away.

Mia couldn't know this. But she could somehow feel that Arthur's expression was the biggest clue to explaining her situation.

'He was... distressed?' Mia thought, raising her mental arm to her imaginary lips.

For some reason, she felt as if that moment from her memory had never passed.

'It's as if I'm... stuck,' Mia thought.

This sentence came from her deepest insides, way below the level of her consciousness.

It was as if...

As if those words came from the same source that made her anxious before.

"Stepbrother, I'm stuck."

In a spur of a moment, Mia's mind wavered. And something from its depths lurked outside for a brief moment.

'Huh?!' Mia freaked out, the momentary daze fading away in but an instant.

"Just what was that?" she muttered under her imaginary nose.

But one thing was obvious at this point.

Those strange words and even stranger meanings hidden behind them... They felt perfectly comfortable in Mia's mouth.

It was as if she was used to saying it.

Yet, there was one more effect to Mia's weird moment. The second she recovered from her daze, the vibrant world of energy suddenly pulsed. And once the wave of energy reflected in the sway of the clouds of mana faded away...

The entire world around her suddenly turned transparent.

Mia could still see its details, but they were now but a mask over the world around her.

"Huh?" Mia squealed, faced with the sudden sight.

Her head was resting on Arthur's shoulder. Her arms were wrapped around his neck while his arms supported her thighs.

Only a few blankets secured Mia's body to Arthur's back, giving her a minimal amount of decency.

'What's going on?' Mia thought, bewildered by the sudden sight.

She could see herself... as if she was looking over her own right shoulder.

And then Mia felt it.

Her naked body was glued to Arthur's naked back. The droplets of Arthur's and Mia's sweat mixed on their skin, helping to transmit the warmth between the two.

Mia was still stuck in this strange world of energy. And the second she noticed all of those things, Mia's senses got overloaded.

It was as if her brain replicated every tiniest pleasure of sticking to Arthur a thousandfold.

'I need to get out,' Mia thought, unable to resist the wave of feelings that flooded her brain.

To a degree, she could still feel the warmth of what they did before she lost herself. She could still feel the strain on her muscles after they went at it for the entire night.

And now, faced with an overwhelming experience of Arthur's closeness, Mia was about to lose her mind.

'I need to figure it out,' Mia thought, clasping her imaginary teeth together. 'Just why am I stuck here?' She asked, refusing to let herself be sidetracked anymore. 'What could make Arty so worried?'

Question after question, Mia homed in on the crux of the matter.

And it didn't take her long to reach the answer.

'Even if it's only a guess of mine,' Mia thought, raising her eyes at the picture of herself strapped to Arthur's back.

He was exhausted, injured, and really needed some time to rest. It was something that she didn't realize before. Faced with his overwhelming and nearly godlike power, she failed to see the cost it brought upon her lover.

The weight of the burden he was carrying went unnoticed. And now, she was lazing away in this strange world, getting excited and frustrated over the simplest touch...

'Let's see if I'm right,' Mia thought, her imaginary lips turning into a mocking smile.

If it was about getting back to Arthur, she wouldn't mind challenging the mystery of this strange world!