Chương 46: Book 8 - Chapter 42 - Into darkness

"We've gathered all shells together, Lord Keith." The knight said, giving a quick salute.

"Lady To'Wrathh is carrying over the final shell. Portal has been confirmed disconnected from power, a clean cut that should be easy to repair when we are ready to leave." The moment we'd finished dealing with the Feathers, it had been a quick flurry of activity. We needed to move, and move fast. Getting them all fixed back up for possession, hunting down the last running one, and also finding a way to cut reinforcements from piling through the portal. Because they had swarmed out of there like angry bees.

Relinquished knew we were here, left unsupervised in the same room as whatever weapon she'd sealed. She'd probably expected the nine to hold anyone off for some time. Long enough to get reinforcements. A few of these Feathers, if not all of them, had escaped through the Unity fractal. Which meant Relinquished was now well aware the nine she'd left behind here had been wiped out in under a minute.

So I expected her to do exactly what she did: Order anyone in the area to charge through the portal here and start the fight. And while that happened, she'd probably pull some deals with the mites and open that same portal up to her stronger Feathers. More than nine. Which means we needed that portal controlled and sealed. When the first machines sprinted through the portal to attack, we had already put a chokehold around it, rifles eating away anything passing out.

A good twenty passed by, charging into gunfire and unbeatable blades. They were buying time, while a knight traced back the power connections down to a few larger wires, and stabbed his blade through the ground down into them. The portal cut off midway, slicing the last machine to come leaping through. A sort of insectlike multi-armed walking turret emplacement. Which was cut to pieces before it could fire anything at us.

"Scout maps from Lady To'Wrathh show the rest of this biome had the exits sealed." The knight said.

"We are alone here now." Her paranoia and chokepoint here had backfired. No way for Relinquished to get anyone to stop us in time.

"Good work." I said, returning a quick salute as the knight turned back to help with the repairs on the stolen shells. The machine network remained down, which meant no signals being sent to self-detonate these shells. By the time the original owners found out what were planning and got mad about it, we'd have modified all nine of these shells way out of their control scope.

I wasn't certain if To'Avalis had revealed to everyone else that we were crazy enough to hijack Feather bodies for our own cause, or if he was trying to keep it under wraps. Whatever the case, these Feathers hadn't even considered pulling the detonation switches when they'd evacuated. That's their problem. We're Winterscars. And the process started with removing all the unity fractals from each, rebuilding a brand new soul fractal for a knight to take command over.

Already some were starting to stand back up, slowly adjusting to their new body while Sagrius remained nearby, ready to recover the errant soul if it had a problem. Nine more Feathers along with Father. That made ten immortal Feather shells manned by the best sorcerer knights in the world running around freely. And unlike protofeathers, slicing their soul fractal would not end the fight. They'd be like father, simply jumping to the next reserve soul fractal they'd made.

Even if Relinquished beat down humanity, these ten were going to be a thorn in her side for a very very long time. But that left me with another problem the goddess had put down in front of us: The cube. I tapped the miteseeker with a soul tendril, coming to ask my favorite locksmith for some advice. It's going to be a little anticlimactic here Prime, but I don't need to pick any locks for this one. We just need to work with what we've got right here. Wait, it's already opened? No, Superior gave a wry smile back.

I mean we already have the key, we need to find where the lock is and unlock it there. There's only one thing I could think of as a potential key. The miteseeker? I pulled it off my belt, looking it over. How's this the key? That's the part I have no idea about. The seeker here was made as a bargain. Part of that bargain is to let the user know they already have the key, and they let me know only after I asked directly. Would make the bargain cheaper to not include how to operate the key.

Tsuya probably took a gamble that knowing we have it is already enough to get us to hunt for the rest. I could see the logic. It would be a poor idea to lead an expedition team all the way here, only to leave them with no way to open the cube after. The cube itself looked like a dark cathedral. Made of the same type of material a mite blast doorway would be. There were geometric patterns in glowing gold, the same kind I remembered seeing on the orb that Atius had recovered.

But Journey quickly outlined a possible entryway. One of the geometric patterns wasn't just glowing lights, but rather a depression and separation. A set of hexagonal shapes, connected together a little chaotically, but the material edges weren't perfectly flush to the cube itself. Like they'd been slotted inwards. But for all our scanning, we found nothing. No sign of opening it. Wrath flew above it, looking for anything on the upper edges, but I did realize there was one section of the cube we hadn't scanned.

The cube was just too big for the bridge here to support that amount of metal, unless the mites had embedded more of their occult ratshit within it. This cube looked like it had been dropped onto the bridge here, and barely held together by it. But what if it was the other way around? The bridge was built under or through the cube, and then lifted it upwards? In which case the real support under the cube didn't come from the bridge, but instead from all those hexagonal pillars under?

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"Wrath, check under the bridge. We might find more info there." She did, taking a loop, and flying directly down into the hexagonal forest under the bridge. Her camera feed showed up on my HUD, scanning. And I'd been right on the money. A few hundred differently sized hexagonal pillars had sprouted upwards, carrying the cube with all of them. The lower edge of the cube stuck out under the bridge, and Wrath flew over to investigate, landing on an empty pillar, looking up at the underside of the cube.

There, at the very bottom, just five feet upwards from the lower edge, right to the height a human would slot a key, was a depression.

"Suprised it's not a riddle or some kind of trap." I said, looking over the feed.

"Knock on metal." The knights all around me all tapped their chest three times in the middle of their work.

"Size and depth of this depression seems to match with the dimensions of your miteseeker perfectly." Wrath said, running the calculations.

"I assume we will need to slot the mitespeaker through here?"

"Looks that way to me, worth a try. Come pick me up?" I asked, already walking over to the edge of the bridge.

"You are perfectly able to fly here yourself now."

"Consider this for old time's sake. The good old days." I had intended this as a bit, but oddly enough Wrath agreed, flew back up and held a hand out. I wasn't one to say no to free rides, so I grabbed back and she pulled me off the bridge and down under. The only thing I feared was not being able to pull Superior back out in case this cube sucked up the miteseeker and then refused to let go. Should be fine. He sent. Mites aren't giving me any sign that this is an exchange or trade. The seeker really is just a key.

He paused. But keep a hand on the handle anyhow, just in case. Can't ever be too safe, right? Wrath dropped me on one of the larger pillars, and I jumped a few more to get to the cube's final resting spot. The keyslot tilted downwards slightly, following the angle of the entire cube. Scream in pure panic if you run into anything. I sent to Superior, tapping my armored forearm three times. Good luck in there. He just laughed back, but was reasonably confident nothing bad would happen. He was correct about that.

Very anti-climatic. The miteseeker slotted in, sunk into the depression, and the show started. Light flashed from the corners and I heard a rumbling above us. Camera feeds from the knights popped over my HUD as they sent footage. The cube had opened up. It hadn't been a wall at all. Instead, there had been a number of black hexagonal pillars shoved into the entrance and held in place, all stacked up together one over the other. Whatever was binding them all together ended.

The entire thing started sliding down, like a landslide, following the tilt of the cube. The lower ones hit the bridge and remained stuck there. The ones above slid fully downwards, making a crystal-shaped geometric bridge. There was a small opening at the very top, where the pillars had fully slid out of the way. Mist was flowing downwards. Not the vaporized water kind however. Just pure pitch blackness. That's when all the armors started going haywire.

Subsystems that had been inactive powered back on and began desperately tracking something.

"Uh, Cathida. What's going on? I don't recognize half of these log messages." Wrath grabbed me by the scruff and pulled me out, with the miteseeker firmly in my hand equally slid back out of the mite cube and hooked on my belt. With the doorway that strange, I doubt it would slide back together after it had been unsealed like this.

"Picking up a distress signal coming from within the cube." Cathida said.

"Not unusual, armors call out for help to each other all the time when their user is under threat. This one's different."

"How so?"

"It's got root administrator commands within the signal. That's why Journey's automatically running all the subroutines for tracking down the distress location. Basically imagine another user with higher permissions than yourself is turning all of this on."

"What's the distress signal? Any identifier?"

"None." Cathida said, "Standard S. O. S. Just higher priority. It's oscillating every 10 seconds, repeating. Not sure why that signal is able to pass through the mist here, but nothing Journey or the other armors is sending." As we landed back on the bridge and got our own sight on the objective, Journey was running triangulation software. Orange lines blinked all over as it tried to narrow down the signal location and visually display that to the user.

The words 'Override' showed up in just about every log message. The rest of the knights here were also in their own issue. All of them running some kind of shared software working to identify the source of the distress call. All of it obviously pointed right back to the cube's entrance at the top of the landslide of pillars. But beyond that, there wasn't more inside. Just pitch darkness. Sensors being sent inwards were not returning data back. Only the distress call was being broadcast out of it.

Wrath dusted off and flew outwards to the pillar forest below, looking around to help carry back the downed Feather that tried to run. Multi-tasking, since Father and I could handle whatever this was. Probably.

"What's this doing to Journey and the other armors?" I asked, a little worried I'd need to jettison out of my armor. I was in good shape here, but outside the armor I'd be a lot weaker again. Had tricks this time in case that happened, still would rather not be outside of Journey anytime soon.

"The commands are triggering search and rescue protocols, but they're only a software demand to render assistance. The armors themselves aren't doing anything more than passing the message up to the user, and automatically running all the non-physical tasks. Like figuring out where the signal is coming from within that cube. Which is pointless, because nothing being sent into that cube is coming out. Not going to stop Journey from constantly running the attempt every ten seconds."

There were a lot of orange tiny question marks showing up all over the HUD right over the entryway. Flickering in an out over different programs being run and rerun, aiming to dig into that mist. None of it was working. Captain Sagrius looked to be the most affected by it.

"It is an old signal." He said, coming to a stop next to me.

"It is triggering parts of myself that are dormant. Parts that have always existed deep within the armor. I do not know what is on the other end of this, and neither does the other side of my memories. Only that it was born with these inner directives."

"Are you compromised?" Father asked, walking to Sagrius's side.

"I am not." Sagrius said.

"My humanity is stronger than the directives my armor runs." Father hummed. Wrath chimed in, making it back with the recovered body of the runaway Feather.

"Software doesn't detect any lies within Sagrius's voice. It may be that his unique state offers him further resistance to any administration overrides compared to the other armors." She landed with a thump onto the ground, then handed off the limp body to a pair of waiting Winterscars, where they brought her over to the rest. She'd be the last shell brought up to speed now. Everyone else was already learning how to move in their stolen gear.

As for the cube, the darkness inside was actually starting to slowly flood out the entrance, looking like a black river, pooling down the hexagonal trail left behind until it hit the bridge ground where it spread out in a very shallow pool. To say it looked ominous would be an understatement.

"Is that even safe?"

"Sensors don't detect anything." Cathida said.

"Whatever it is, too dense to allow anything back out." Father walked right over to that black pool, then knelt down and reached a hand into it. Nothing happened to him when he pulled the hand out, other than mists of darkness fading away.

"Occult." He said.

"A miasma. I sense the concepts of despair, dissolution of identity, bindings. It will not affect mechanical beings, it will target the soul. To'Wrathh should remain away."

"How dangerous is it?" I asked.

"Because it looked like the entire cube is flooded with this." The entrance was pitch black and just vomiting out this mist in slow motion. It didn't look like it would end anytime soon either. Father stood up. Then marched straight into the moving river traveling down the entrance over our ramp up. He got to the top, half of his body now covered with the mist.

"Resistable." He said.

"A slow persistent effect, built to destroy hope over time rather than immediately. We should not spend more than a few hours within." He pulsed out occult. The shockwave fractal as I recognized it. It oddly worked well against the mist, throwing it off of himself in a large sphere of open air. It remained stuck in an open sphere like that, almost as if suspended in liquid. The edges squirmed, and I could see it slowly start sinking back inwards.

Maybe in five minutes it would have fully re-engulfed the sphere of space Father had made around himself. He held a hand out into the entrance, and pulsed again. A stronger shockwave. More directed. More mist was squashed out of the sides, flowing fast out as the rest of the shockwave pushed inwards, and then froze in place again, as if taking on a new shape and staying like that.

"It doesn't move as mist would." Father said, looking over at the sides.

"There is an aspect of territory to it. We can clear a path, we cannot clear a path forever. We'll need to make haste traveling through." Journey turned on the helmet headlights.