Chương 63: The Controlroom

The blade clattered against the iron bar. The metal vibrated heavily, but that was all that happened. Oliver ground his teeth.

"Not even a scratch. I need to—""If you do that a few more times, you'll shatter your sword," Catriona interrupted him sharply.

"Do you want to face the professor bare-handed?" Unlike Luca, the pretty archer girl got through to Oliver. He reluctantly put his sword back in the sheath.

"Evan, you try. Make your sword hot again. Maybe you can melt the metal."

"Not a bad idea," Catriona said.

"Try that." Evan channeled his mana into the runes on his blade. He was starting to get some control over the process and withing a fee seconds, the blade was glowing bright red. He pushed it against the metal bars. Sizzling steam rose where the sword touched the gate, but the metal didn't melt. Evan inspected the iron bars and noticed the barely visible shimmer they gave off. When he stood close, he could feel mana radiating off the gate.

"No damage," he reported.

"And I don't think this is an ordinary metal gate. I think it has some kind of magical defense or shield layered on top."

"Agreed," Catriona said.

"Let's try a magical attack."

"Do Super Nova," Oliver suggested. Evan sheathed his sword.

"Maybe I'll start with Comet Shot first. This is a pretty small room. I don't want to hurt you guys or the people behind the gate." [Comet Shot] failed. The gate just shimmered more intensely, but his magical projectile exploded without doing any damage. They tried every skill in their repertoire. Oliver used [Petrifying Strike] in the hopes of making the bars brittle enough to shatter them, but that didn't work.

Luca attempted [Current Pull], wrapping his water streams around the bars, but that wasn't strong enough either. In the end, Evan told his friends to step back as far as possible, yelled at Felix to do the same, and unleashed [Super Nova]. It flipped the large wooden table over and flung the burned out glow orb at Luca's head, but the gate looked just like new. Oliver kicked the iron bars with a frustrated shout. He looked like a kettle about to boil over. Evan understood his feelings.

He was just a few steps away from his brother, so close to saving him and the other survivors, but if they couldn't get past the gate, there was nothing they could do for them.

"This is not yielding results," Catriona said.

"The gate was probably built to withstand magical attacks. If we want to open it, we'll need to find the magical array that controls it and deactivate it. We need to find the control room."

"Array?" Evan asked, puzzled.

"Control room?"

"Sorry, I forgot you're new to this world and magic," Catriona said.

"You see, this building, the entire estate, is like a complex network of interconnected magical items. These interconnected systems are called arrays. From the lights down to the magical defenses, it's all controlled in the same way as your glow ball or Oliver's lighter. With gems, crystals, and runes. Somewhere in this building must be a control room. That's where the mana batteries that are supplying all those systems are, but also the runes that monitor and control them."

Evan tried to wrap his mind around the concept Catriona was describing. Maybe it wasn't that different from how large buildings on Earth functioned. His hospital had control rooms, too, where the IT and tech guys maintained the computer systems, climate control, or electricity.

"So if we find this control room, we can shut off all defenses, including this gate?"

"I believe so, yes."

"Then we should do that," Luca said.

"Everything is better than standing here and hammering against the gate." Oliver looked toward the corridor leading away and the gate separating him from his brother.

"Felix, I... we... we have to leave for a bit, okay?"

"What? No!" Felix sounded panicked.

"No, no. Don't leave again."

"We're just going to go to the control room and open this gate. We'll be back as fast as possible."

"You promise? You promise you'll come back and get me?" Felix asked, close to tears. The muscles in Oliver's jaw tensed. Walking away from his brother was just as hard for him as it was for Felix.

"Yes, I promise. I'll be right back." A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Evan had to pull Oliver away from the gate by the back of his armor.

"Are you good?" he asked, keeping his voice low enough so only Olly could hear him.

"Is your head clear enough to fight?" Oliver rubbed a hand over his face, but nodded.

"I'm okay. This sucks, but I'm good."

"Are you certain? I need your head in the game. We can't head into a fight while you're distracted. We can leave you here and go look for the control room without you."

"No, I'm coming with you. I'll just imagine Maya smacking me in the head and telling me to get a grip. That'll do the job." Luca looked back over his shoulder with a half-grin.

"If what you need is a smack in the head, I can play Maya's part." The comment earned Luca an angry glare from Oliver and an eye roll from Catriona, but it did ease the tension somewhat as they entered the middle hallway and descended the stairs. Evan had expected another door leading to another monster-defended hallway, but the staircase ended in another ordinary corridor. No sign of monsters or other magical defenses. Despite the lack of enemies, the atmosphere down here felt strangely oppressive.

It took Evan a moment to figure out why, because the hallway looked exactly like all the others they'd passed through since climbing down the hatch.

"The mana levels are really high down here, aren't they?" Catriona nodded.

"I feel it too. We must be getting close to the control room and the mana batteries." They followed the corridor around several curves and bends until they reached a crossroad. One tunnel led to the left, one to the right.

"Any thoughts?" Evan asked. Both hallways looked more or less identical, and unfortunately no signs indicated the way to the control room. Both Luca and Oliver shrugged.

"Should we split up?" Luca asked. The question was met with a resounding "No!" from the rest of the team. Even the little fox yipped in disapproval.

"Fifty-fifty chance," Evan said.

"Let's just pick one and see where it leads us. We can always backtrack." They chose the corridor leading to the left and followed it. After more twists and turns, they ended up in front of another door. It was entirely made of metal, and several heavy bolts could be closed to secure it, but right now, all of them were unlatched. Evan put his palm against the door but hesitated to push it open. He could feel the mana radiating through the metal.

"I think we might be in the right spot." Oliver gave him an encouraging nod.

"Only one way to find out for sure." After a deep breath, Evan pushed his weight against the heavy metal door. It opened slowly with a metallic screech, and then suddenly it gave way, swinging open all the way. Evan stumbled forward from the sudden lack of resistance. When he regained his balance, he found himself in a large, round room the size of a high school gymnasium. The ceiling was arched in the same way it was in the hallways and guard rooms, but it was much higher.

About a dozen eight-sided stone pillars stood in a circle, and Evan could tell immediately these pillars weren't there for structural reasons. Some sides of the pillars had something that looked like holographic TV screens. Other sides had openings carved into the stone. They had different shapes: some round, some triangular, some with more complex shapes. Some were empty, while others held gemstones or crystals of different colors.

Evan assumed they were skill gems and affinity crystal shards, but he'd never seen them like that. Carved into shapes with runes etched into the surface. The pillars were also home to a number of buttons, levers, and switches, all made from polished stone or gemstones. In the middle of the room, encircled by the pillars, stood another round structure. It was cylindrical, 15 feet wide and 30 feet high. It seemed to be made of metal, but the surface was covered with hundreds, if not thousands, of holes.

In many of these holes, Evan spotted the rainbow shimmering of mana stones. The mana batteries, he realized. Metallic lines in the ground led away from the mana battery cylinder and connected the octagonal pillars. More lines, but thinner, emerged from the pillars, ran toward the edge of the room, and disappeared into the walls. Everything combined, the control room looked like Evan would imagine a starship engineering bay, but instead of sci-fi technology, everything had a fantasy flavor.

Evan walked through the room slowly, taking it all in, trying to make sense of how it might work. His friends were close behind, but all of them seemed in awe of the complicated network of runes, mana stones, crystals, and gems. Luca leaned close to one of the pillars and inspected the image projected on the surface.

"Hey guys, I think this is the last hallway before the guardroom. Look, you can see the withered squid corpse in the corner of the image." They gathered around Luca to take a look themselves. Evan was intrigued. He wandered further into the room to check out more screens. One showed another hallway they'd passed through, the ice-covered one with the lizards. Others seemed to show rooms from the building above. He found a screen that projected an image of the garden surrounding the estate and noticed a flickering.

Squinting his eyes, he stepped closer. Yes, there was definitely something moving on that projected image. It looked like one of the Nightterror Hounds, but smaller, flitting between the bushes. Maybe a pup of some kind? The little monster moving across the image made him realize what those projections were.

"Surveillance cameras," he mumbled. Oliver joined his side.

"Huh?"

"These images. I think they show these locations in real time. That way, whoever is down here in the control room can monitor the entire estate at any time." Catriona and Luca came over to watch the Nightterror pup run around on the screen. Next to Evan, Catriona gasped.

"Do you realize what this means?" Evan looked at her.

"What?"

"Whoever runs this control room saw us coming in. They could watch every step of ours." She whirled around, expression alarmed, body tense as if she was expecting someone to attack them right that second. Luca furrowed his brows. Catriona's words had clearly worried him.

"I don't like that thought at all, but right now nobody is here. If someone had seen us coming, surely they wouldn't just leave the room so we could wander in. I mean… the door was unlocked." Evan's stomach dropped. Finding and entering the control room had been too easy. This was the heart of the entire estate, so why was the door unlocked? There was only one explanation. Evan slowly drew his sword from the sheath, avoiding sudden movements. Oliver looked at his sword, then into Evan's eyes.

At first he looked puzzled, but then realization dawned on his face.

"Prepare yourself. I think we walked into a trap." His friend had no time to follow his advice. The moment the words had left Evan's lips, a human figure emerged from the shadows across the room.

"I really wish you hadn't come here," the man said.

"Now I have to fight with you."