Day 3(Everything Ergophobia)

***Day 3*** is a story chapter in the ***Everything Ergophobia Vol. 1*** anthology of stories appearing in *The Rage Knights: Red God* universe created by Khaliq Trevor X. This chapter succeeds ***Day 2: Dead Dads and Fears*** and precedes ***Depressing Women and Arrogant Dudes***.

## Summary

Draya Freeman was a highly influential student during her enrollment in South's End College. Despite her ideas, studies and GPA, she experiences a slow turn in her life. Struggling to pay rent, struggling to make it back and forth to work, Freeman becomes deflated mentally. However this doesn't stop her intelligence. Advanced in AI programming and infrastructure of robotics, Freeman spends her time building an android to help distract her mind from her daily struggles. During the construction and simulation of the android, a massive power surges throws Draya's apartment into darkness. Knocked unconscious, Draya begins to hallucinate and experience a manifestation of surging anger and rage, a living entity that has her appearance introduces itself as Draya Freeman. Hesitant and distrusting over the energy source, Freeman attempts to kill the entity several times but its outmatched by its cunning and power-matching. The entity at one point commands Freeman to locate Damon Bradley and kill him with the android's electric-grid based battle system but she refuses. Freeman bluffs off the entity's command by going to her bedroom where she believes the nightmare will cease.

Later, Freeman awakens back in a South's End College classroom. In attendance, she sees her friend Andrew Chan and Damon Bradley. Bradley snubs Freeman as indication that he was scorned by Freeman and disciplined according to Andrew. As the class begins, Freeman realizes there is no teacher and that the other students in attendance are in fact, *faceless.* She questions her sanity and the reality of this world, blaming it on *Perception Magic.* As Freeman stands, a man named Aaron Harold (one of the Rage Knights) appears with takeout food. This brings Bradley to stand up and join Harold however Freeman grows annoyed by the Rage Knight's sudden appearance. Believing the characters themselves had improperly invaded her dreams and planning on killing her. A confused Aaron tries to console Draya out of her anger and have her understand. Before long, Freeman's anger only inflates. Images of her mother and sister Felicia and Keisha (respectively) arise as electric apparitions and prepare an assault on Harold. Freeman, in her anger commands her "mother" and "sister" to attack Aaron and kill him. This forces Aaron to retaliate, leading to the two battling one another. When Aaron hurls a nearby wrench at Draya's head, he knocks her out once more where reality shifts and it becomes apparent this was an illusion induced by the entity's power. Back in reality, Aaron deals with the living entity of Draya's conscious and the power outage that was created from the android's intense surge of electricity. The entity continues using Draya's past against him, including old ex-boyfriends, roommates, adversaries and the images of Rage Knights (namely Damon Bradley, Midlore West-Stein and Spencer himself) to attack Harold and Freeman's emotions. Draya awakens just as Aaron struggles against Spencer and joins him. Freeman cuts the main power source and unscrews components attached to the android and its base thus *weakening* the entity's projection. Freeman finally clips the network that grants the entity its ominous voice, appearance and power structure. Before the entity can physically attack both Harold and Freeman, Aaron delivers the final shot to the entity's CPU, thus de-powering it and revealing its true form, a simple lone *Wraith* that crawls from the android's base.

The creature withers away into darkness. A confused Draya slumps into relief while questioning Aaron's appearance inside her residency and the whereabouts of Bradley whom Harold mentions never knew of the attack. As Aaron bids her farewell, he reveals to Freeman that he was only called to handle the outage but advises Freeman to continue doing good things and never allowing feelings to get in the way.

## **Disclaimer**

* A version of the Wrath God Slayers appear in this story.
* This story features an interaction between Aaron Harold and Draya Freeman.

**Disclaimer***: To whom this may concern, the characters in their entirety, while they borrow inspiration from events, ideas, themes and other sources from the original author's life, they are incredibly different and fictional entities inside the Rage Knights Red God and under no circumstance are they expressing a real person's actual views, ideologies, names and likeness to cause harm or defame them. Any names bearing similarities to any person(s) is unintentional unless stated otherwise and under special permission. The Rage Knights Red God is a work of fiction and solely for entertainment and educational purposes. Please note, the series does not represent events that have happened, events to come nor does it condone the very human evils the series itself is/was meant to advocate against.*