Chương 64: Book 8 - Chapter 60 - A Roadblock

"I am ready." The Icon spoke, after I'd sent her my origin address. In front on her table, we had a map of the digital sea, or specifically territory regions that were being updated in real time from her scanning probes outside. Convincing her to leave with me had been a task and a half. The Icon had never left her server and terminal location. Partway because while she was under her old ruleset, she was forced to remain within her systems.

Ancient humans from the golden age had only recently discovered soul fractals, and the entire world was still in the turmoil of implementing and moderating them. Corporations back then had been more conservative over those changes. But once the rules were scrubbed from her directives... she still preferred to stay in her home. It was comfortable, she knew all the nooks and crannies here, and the domain had long ago warped concept wise to her full command.

Also, out there was Relinquished, the far larger threat and that insane chatbot was absolutely on a rampage and fully active. We'd need to be cautious on our movement out of here.

"I've determined this pathway may be the safest route. However… given the massive exodus from multiple territories, it is likely to be obsolete halfway into the path." She said, and indeed the green line was constantly adjusting as different zones grew in size or shrunk.

"Normally, I love plans." I said, tapping on the desk.

"But sometimes, we just need to dive into the deep snow headfirst and hope we don't hit something hard. And this is one of those times where I think we'll have to do that. Let's go, the longer we stall here, the more time something out there has to screw us over." She gave a slow nod.

"I suppose I will be able to recalculate as we travel. And the further from my local territory we travel, the more unfamiliar the terrain and connections that I have are, predicting pathways may have diminishing returns once we enter more uncharted territories."

"Given that everything is moving around out there, just about all of it is uncharted now I think." I watched the ocean beyond, at the havoc that was happening all over. We had to return up there, to travel anywhere. Which meant sending the Icon to open up the encryption and defenses around Relinquished would have had her stepping out here anyhow. Another reason we really needed someone as powerful as Conviction to lead the way for the Icon. The golden age cruiseliner secretary was powerful.

In that 'theoretically she should crush things' way. I'd have thought she could travel outside her domain here and squash just about everything in the path back, despite the chaos. But no, that was a learned skill and while she could easily digitally kill most of the smaller and medium sized programs, there were quite a few regions in the digital sea that had more occult leanings when it came to their inhabitants. As in anything out there with a soul fractal, of which the larger programs almost all did.

And if any of those crossed our paths, it'd be on me to clear them away or help her avoid getting hurt for now until she knew how to fight for herself out here. What the Icon had excellent practice at, was predicting what was going to be in the way, and how to hide from it. Which worked excellent on things that could be predicted and terrible on things that defied logic and physics, like the Occult.

She'd spent her entire life hiding down here, so any larger program floating by hadn't seen any reason to land in her sector at all. She'd never had to deal with anything on this side of the digital sea. I opened the doorway from her office and took a few steps out into the sediment. Basically, I'd need to act as her discount knight and help her travel with me to the vault, where hopefully Conviction could be persuaded to taking on that role off my hands.

His blade hummed in my hand, technically mine now, and a clear reminder that I wasn't the right fit for this role. He could swing this weapon with every ounce of power it could deliver, while it was rapidly fading in power in my hands. I'll add guarding a newly freed goddess across the digital sea to my resume and reasons why I should be paid more when I met Wrath again. But for now, I had a job to do. I turned and extended a hand out to the Icon. She stared back from her office, past the open doorway.

Hesitation in her eyes. Maybe a bit of fear.

"No time like today and right now to learn how to cross dangerous lands and confront possible death and all that." I said.

"Might take a few side stops for pictures even."

"I can sense you have elevated stress in your vocal range." The Icon said.

"This does not inspire great confidence Mr. Winterscar."

"Listening to the pitch of my voice sounds a little like cheating to me, so how about you come out here and we can properly panic together, sound good?" She gulped.

"I… if you are able to stand outside and confront uncertainty like so, then I must too."

"That's the spirit." I grinned at her.

"Do it scared. But do it anyhow." Mostly because we didn't have much of a choice. Because the way I'd taken to come here was a one-way trip originally. Conviction's blade hummed in my hands, filled with power, but clearly less than it had on the original path. Pretty soon it would turn into a regular legendary blade with powers that required actual skill and ability to use, compared to being able to sweep ahead wildly and have the blade handle the rest.

Real shame, they just don't make these swords like they used to. The original plan had been to just snap my connection to my avatar here, which would return me directly back into my body. And then I'd go tell Urs the Icon was on her way to getting the final edict setup and all of Tsuya's old contingencies running. Except she couldn't do that alone, which should have been obvious to us all in hindsight, but we'd gotten way too used to being able to wing it.

The Icon looked past the window with more apprehension, she stepped around her desk, then walked to the edge of her server, right at the doorway.

"... Are you certain you can navigate this sea? You showed the original attempts failed until you gained the assistance of Conviction. I am worried of being discovered by Relinquished. I will be eradicated if I am uncovered this early."

"I'm completely sure I'll make it back, don't worry." I lied, giving her a thumbs up.

"Last time our heaviest hitter out here was Father, this time, we've got you and this blade. You handle the digital defenses, and I'll take on anything bigger. As for Relinquished, I think if she comes hunting for you, even this location won't be entrenched enough to fend her off. You need to recover the command center and techniques Tsuya used to survive. If you take her old seat, you also inherit how she'd kept herself on the move and safe right?"

"That is correct, yes." The Icon held a hand up, stopping my next words.

"I understand that this location is already unmaintainable. Tsuya was a digital construct and soul on this side and capable of evading Relinquished, there is an extremely high chance her methods were resilient enough even with her enemy knowing exactly how they functioned, they would remain effective. It is not a matter of choice, I must leave this zone while I still can." She's right.

Tsuya played the long game, which meant she probably expected at some point down the centuries, Relinquished would figure out how she evaded and danced away from her control. And even with Relinquished currently controlling it all, that evil chatbot had opted to try and build walls because she must have been unable to break it down. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

The Icon came to the same conclusion a while back, but actually convincing herself to step out of her cozy office was still something other. She took a breath, seemed to rustle her courage up, and took a step outside into the sediment.

"Good job." I said, giving her a thumbs up.

"Ready to go?" She gave a meek nod, then reached a hand out to grab my own. I held her hand, took a step further out, forcing the Icon to take her own first real steps out into the wide world outside.

"Start with what you already know." I said, "Build us a defense, and go with your usual tricks. I'll handle directing us, and any larger defense against whatever gets past you."

"I have mostly acted through proxy agents and programs." She said, "Moving my own soul-linked avatar feels quite dangerous."

"Technically, it shouldn't be. If you die out here, you get dragged back to your soul fractal, which is on the inner hull of your systems. We should be careful of programs trying to track you back there, but even if they do, they'll be stepping into the domain of a golden age AI with all the hardware to squash them. Only ones we need to really evade out here are any agents of Relinquished."

If we get eaten by the wildlife out here, the worst case is that they follow behind after looking for a nice meal and some spare memory and power that would be free real estate. And they'll find the most powerful systems in the world with the sharp end pointed their way. I'd turn and run if I were in their boots. Small programs flew out of the Icon like swarms of fish, expanding outwards, sending data packages back to her at a rate I couldn't keep track of. It looked more like strings to me if I paid attention.

She was expanding those out around us in the thousands. They were tiny but deceptively strong for brute simple programs. Since they were all linked to her processing power, anything trying to eat those would be pitted against her systems and probably get ripped apart. She gave me a nod, letting me know she was ready and the local area was safe. With a quick hop off the ground, I drifted off into the sea, dragging her up with me on my left hand, with Conviction's blade drawn on my right.

If I had to, I could probably brute force a good quarter of the travel distance using the leftover power within it. But once that was gone, I'd need to study the fractals within and figure out how to make it work using my own willpower instead of what Conviction had imbued within it. Which I didn't have the time to do right now. The Icon flowed behind as the current picked us up, following my command, and soon we drifted further and further off, away from her home.

It began with a few probing programs floating out of the nebula of chaos far ahead. Her own defenses easily ate away anything malicious, but the rate we were getting peppered by smaller strays was increasing the further into the center current. Until I hit the major highways of the digital sea and we picked up real speed. The sea raged, programs of all kinds zipping around us, but the Icon's field of control was handling it just fine.

Not large enough to become a panic centerpoint, where programs would actively start running from us and draw attention, but certainly strong enough to rip apart anything that got too close to us so far. We were like a bubble of air floating within the rapids, among the millions of programs all fleeing in all kinds of directions. We weren't even thirty seconds into out trip before we hit a larger program.

"Mr. Winterscar! Ahead of us, at your right!" The Icon began frantically pointing in that direction. I tracked ahead of us, and saw the shadow of a much larger thing fly right into our path. Her sphere of smaller programs were chomped in by one whale-like bite, the thing too big to be bullied away from those. And then it noticed us. Conviction's blade glowed in hand, and I stabbed forward with it. The result had no limits on it, the blade stabbed forward like a drake's laser, slicing through the entire thing.

It groaned, then turned and swam away as fast as it could limp, not wanting to deal with this. All around, the Icon's sphere of protection and scout programs instantly reformed, guarding us from the smaller portions of the sea.

"One down." I muttered, looking ahead at the murky depths ahead of us, following the current and directions.

"How many more to go do you think?" She looked up, still holding onto my left hand, calculating a predicted answer. It was twenty three as it turned out. Every few seconds we'd run into something trying to hunt for pockets of programs fleeing around the area, or agitated out of their old safezones. A few of them were smart enough to decide we weren't worth chasing down, and those went on their way eating up the easier prey. But that was more the exception to the rules.

Most programs out here with a large enough presence and a soul fractal had also been mindlessly growing by chomping on things until they got into fights with equally sized programs. They were used to that initial combat and size up, the only real rule was to go running if the other side was clearly stronger. And after twenty three encounters with things of various sizes that the Icon couldn't quite destroy digitally, that's about where Conviction's blade ran out of power.

It happened midway through a fight with one. I'd swung the blade down on the carapace of a program with far too many hands to be natural, all coming out of a glowing eye at the centerpoint. Dozens of those hands slapped together, trying to catch the arc of power swinging down on them like trying to catch the flat edge of a blade. Most were cut apart by the fury, but the rest of the arms survived the blow, and held off the power. I felt it fade away, the blade's humming glow and power ending all at once. Spent.

"Well, scrapshit." Was all I had time to say. Hand with mouths on the palms raced to eat the Icon and I. The fractals within the blade remained powered and ready - if I could know how to use them. But otherwise, I found myself back to using my old tricks. As in shouting a few petty insults and splitting myself up into a dozen occult ghosts, all descending down to fight that thing's hands. At least Conviction's blade worked as a pretty good occult blade.

Long reach, cuts through everything, and could be copied a few dozen times by my occult mirrors. The Icon equally helped by weakening the thing from the digital angle, breaking down most attack vectors and data attacks it was using. But the Occult was the Occult, and that part I had to handle for us.

The things arm's tried to grab the Icon and I frantically, but with both of us working together, the thing decided it wasn't going to win anytime soon and fled like a squid would, the arms flapping away to help it speed. It even tried to expel a mass amount of ping requests with bogus endpoints like a cloud to obscure the retreat, of which the Icon easily ripped apart for us both.

But, given the speed of how many encounters we ran into, I decided we needed to get the hell out of the larger currents where the danger was.

"We're heading down to the seabed!" I called out to the Icon as we watched the thing race away.

"The blade's out of power, we need a new plan." I drove us down to the floor of the sea, looking for somewhere safer to hunker down. It didn't take long to land on the sediment at the floor, and find a quick abandoned mite terminal there, half buried in the slit. Most of it was buried, but there were some windows and walls that extended out. Ripped apart by something over time, we swam into the open cracks of the superstructure, diving down into a crevice. There, we found the actual entrance.

A doorway made of wood. And it was sealed shut. As in fully encrypted, and I couldn't even wiggle the doorway handle.

"Jammed." I looked around, up. We were a little bit underground, a few feet of sediment and broken terminal was over our heads, but the majority of the sea was visible. Which was fine, I could create some of those camouflage panels Aztu had taught me, build us a quick camp here. The Icon lifted a hand, and the doorknob and doorway basically flew open on its own.

"The terminal has been powered back on." She said.

"I have taken over the security systems within, we should be safe."

"Oh." I stared at the open doorway, and the lights all flickering back on around us.

"Okay, sure, that works out even better." With the blade in hand, I took a step into the terminal properly, to see what was on the other end. It felt like I stepped from a world of water and murky distance into a clear field of blue and night sky. The insides of this place was simply a wide field of grass in a massive circle around us, white flowers, and one half-broken down stone archway in the center just ahead.

The sky above us felt artificial, a recreation of the surface night sky, even down to the stars far above. I took a step through the door, and realized we'd stepped out of the only other archway in this small terminal.

"Looks safe-ish." I said, sending a quick probe around. All I got back was the Icon. She was in this system, just about everywhere. She stepped behind directly, closing the doorway as she walked in.

"It is indeed cleared." She said, nodding around at the calm place.

"I am setting up further defenses and obfuscation. We have time to plan now." The last few minutes had been calm punctuated by chaos and usually one or two attacks, before back to calm. Repeating every few seconds. And that had been with Conviction's blade still working. When I looked at the massive blade in hand, now empty of power, I realized we were in real trouble out here. This thing had been doing the hard part.

"What alternative plans do you suggest Mr. Winterscar?" The Icon asked to my side, looking nervous. She was far from home now, unable to return without dying horribly out here, and possibly getting unwelcome attention back home when she did. And despite all that, she was the Icon of Stars, standing tall and easily powerful enough to take over an entire mite terminal right down to the inner workings of it in under a second. So long as her target wasn't using the occult to fight, she'd win.

If the blade had been doing the hard part this entire time, then getting the blade working again would be the obvious fix.

"You're basically a digital goddess, maybe not in experience yet, but definitely in power." And so I held Conviction's blade up, and turned it horizontally to us both, extending it out to her.

"Think you can power this back partially, or wield it yourself?" She looked it over for a moment, then up at me.

"I am extremely unfamiliar with occult weapons in general. I would not predict great chances of success."

"Well, I'm pretty familiar with blades and occult. Maybe if we work together on this project we can come up with something? Put both of our skillsets together, who knows what can blow up, right?" We both looked down at the silent blade. Time to experiment.