Chương 65: Chapter 58 - Horned, not horny

Gilgamesh didn't look up. I held myself by the pod, mightily unstable on my feet. With one hand braced on its edge, because my legs had strong opinions about load-bearing work, I stared at one of the five rulers of the Secret Societies, who kept signing documents like I was a delivery he'd already tipped. Of his four monitors, one carried the feed from the tower, another graphs of six different stock markets. I couldn't see the other two. Sarah's sword still hung at my waist, feeling strangely calm.

I guessed swords liked being used to cut people, even in the spiritual sense. I scanned the office. No guards inside. No restraints on the pod or elsewhere. No pale man in a blue helmet holding an extradition folder. Just gold, statues, more gold, a nurse manning a solo medical station, and a king doing paperwork. The nurse gave me one last professional once-over, decided her job description ended here, and sat down at her station, doing her best to appear invisible.

"Well," Gilgamesh said, still signing.

"You might want to sit down. The new medicine for recovery after getting zeroed out is still mostly experimental." A chair waited in front of the desk, upholstered but practical in design. I crossed the room on legs made of overcooked pasta. Something pushed at the pants behind my ass. I reached in, and pulled out my tail. Ah, great. That was exactly what I needed. I left it snaking behind me and sat.

"So," I said, looking for better words than the ones that came to mind.

"Am I under arrest?" Gilgamesh set down the pen and finally looked at me. Amber eyes, golden hair, a beard trimmed to the millimeter, and a face that hadn't produced a wrinkle in five thousand years.

"Why would you expect that?" I frowned.

"Because of the floor 25… incident."

"Oh, that. Nobody cares." He smiled.

"The tower is a spiritual dimension. Not even the Church bothers to pretend to care about spiritual beings having any rights, because then they would need to open the discussion of undead, demons, and other spiritual horrors having rights. They did mention they might file a formal complaint, but they never quite got around to it." That lying bitch. Heat flushed into my face. In retrospect, all my negative expectations came from my own head, and from what Cassandra told me.

I'd trusted her, partly because it fit my expectations so well.

"I'm noticing that Cassandra tends to not be terribly truthful."

"That is an accurate observation. I have known her through all of her lives, for almost five thousand years, and to this day, I cannot tell when she lies and when she tells the truth." My eyes widened.

"Five thousand years?"

"I used to be younger." He turned to the monitor, moved the mouse, and clicked away a notification.

"High vampires are reborn into a new body and identity upon their death. This is Cassandra's fifth life, so if she told you she's your age, she told the truth. Well, mostly, because vampire bodies don't age, so they start with an adult body and the mind of a teenager, and reach mental adulthood within five years of being created. She keeps some memories of her past lives, though I cannot tell how many. I'm still on my first life, so I likely remember her past better than she does." I sighed.

The list of things she'd told me the truth about was probably a lot shorter than the chronicle of her lies.

"Is she the one selecting the floors for us?" A mightily ironic smile formed on his face.

"I don't know. She has been one of my closest associates for the vast majority of my life, as we had practically founded the Golden Sands together back in Babylon, and yet, I can't read her. She might be. She might not. What do you think?" Well, what did I think? I wasn't sure. Everything that had happened was consistent with her being the one who manipulated us. But it was all incredibly indirect. The thing she lacked was motive. She'd had motive to lie to me about the crime charges.

That pinned me in the tower, where she could freely access me for private time, which she did do. Admittedly, it had also made me try way harder during sex than I normally would, which she certainly hadn't minded.

"I'll need to talk to her." He glanced out of the window. The sun was setting above the sea, bathing it all in orange light.

"You will soon have the opportunity." Yeah, and I was going to take it. My body would hopefully serve just fine. From how I understood the pod now, they'd moved me here, stuck an IV into my arm to nourish my body, and attached electric pads to my muscles to exercise them while I didn't move. Someone knocked on the door with quick insistence. Gilgamesh didn't look away from the screen.

"Enter." The door opened. A guard leaned in, suit immaculate, expression neutral.

"Your Majesty. There are climbers at the door, named Henrik Voss and Liu Wei, I believe. They refuse to leave. Insistently."

"Let them in." The guard bowed slightly, and opened the door fully. Henrik and Liu stumbled in. Liu still had crimson stains on his robe, by the placement, from vomiting blood on himself after getting zeroed out. Henrik barely walked, using the wizardly staff for a crutch. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. I couldn't help but smile. Gilgamesh motioned them toward a sofa.

"Take your seats." The guard left, closing the door. They stumbled to the sofa. Liu crashed onto it, panting. Henrik stood before it, looking at Gilgamesh.

"So, how secure is this room from… you know who." Power pulsed from Gilgamesh. A quick pulse, which shut down the monitors and knocked out the nurse. She collapsed on the floor. Well, that solved it.

"Reasonably well," Gilgamesh said.

"What do you have there?" Henrik turned toward me with a glare.

"Do you have the thumb drive?" Gilgamesh raised an eyebrow at me. Yushi. From a puff of mist, she materialized sitting on the closed lid of my pod, legs crossed, fan already open, as if she'd been waiting in the wings for her cue since morning.

"Ku ku ku… lowly Yushi is getting summoned for an audience. Astarielle surely won't be jealous." I motioned toward Henrik.

"Give him the thumb drive." Yushi floated to him.

"He looks like it might topple him over." She spun around him, raised her hand, and the drive floated above her palm. She blew at it. Chill wind touched Henrik. He stumbled back, and crashed onto the sofa. With a giggle, Yushi floated over him, and materialized the thumb drive into his lap.

"It spent over six hours in the server underneath the floor 32 command center. If it does anything, it had ample opportunity to do so. If it holds nothing, then Yushi bears no blame." She vanished in a misty breeze. Gilgamesh laughed.

"Seems you boys are good at playing games. I saw nothing of this on the footage."

"As intended." Henrik pulled a tablet from underneath his coat, spun the drive to the USB side, and plugged it in.

"For what it's worth, it took quite the effort…" His voice faded, mind too focused on what he saw on the screen. I smiled. Yeah. That was a good play. If Cassandra, or whoever might have been spying on us through the pod system, saw we'd gotten into their servers, they would change their plans. So we played a little ruse, where Henrik pretended he couldn't hack into anything, knowing the pod recorded him. As far as anyone watching could tell, we'd gotten absolutely no information during our last climb.

What they didn't see was the thumb drive handoff in the elevator, because it was too crowded and the sensors only worked visually. I'd made sure to never take the drive out of my pocket, and did the Yushi handoff while the jade cube blocked the stream. The rest was done by Yushi, whom the pods didn't follow. With a wave of my hand, I unsummoned her. She would get her reward later. Henrik cleared his throat.

"Paradise is trying to create an artificial goddess, and has everything except one ingredient, called the blood of the slayer." Hmph.

"They got the blood from me before I despawned." Liu leaned forward, regaining his composure.

"What makes you believe your qi is the correct one?"

"Peace rubbed it in my face, extensively." Henrik nodded.

"The files also have you marked as the only viable source, so that checks out. That simplifies things. They will drain the energy of the four suns to power a ritual that will infuse the shard of Mephistopheles, the residue of about four billion burnt souls, and the faith of the devout into Sarah, using the blood of the slayer as the embodiment of dominance over the tower. In simplified terms." Into Sarah. Something cold slid down my spine and settled in my gut, right about where the shotgun wound would have been.

They were going to hollow her out and pour an artificial god into the empty space, and my blood was the funnel. I breathed out, slow, and kept my voice level.

"Where do they keep the shard?" Maybe we could steal it quickly somehow.

"It's the crystal that floats around Peace." Or maybe not.

"How much time will the ritual take?" Gilgamesh asked.

"From what I see, the biggest obstacle is the time it takes to drain the energy from the suns. That should take ninety-one hours by their own analysis, at the most optimistic estimate. We can safely assume they started immediately. That gives us three and a half days to stop them."

"We will do it in three days, in a single move," Gilgamesh said, "after they have drained too much energy from the suns to attempt the ritual a second time. Tell no one. I will handle the arrangements." Liu and Henrik bowed. I realized I should bow too, so I did. Not much, as my pride didn't allow for that, but I managed a touch deeper nod. Henrik put the tablet, together with the thumb drive, down on the sofa.

"I will forget this here." Gilgamesh restarted his computer. It started booting up.

"The meeting is adjourned. You are free to go."

"Before we do," Liu said.

"Fellow anti-daoist, your qi seems highly disrupted. I may offer assistance in stabilizing it." I flicked my horn with a finger. It hurt a bit as it resonated into my head, so I wasn't doing that again.

"Would it help with this?"

"Yes. Those are manifestations of unstable qi." He got up, and sat cross-legged in front of the sofa. I walked over and mirrored his position. With a roll of his eyes and one more bow, Henrik left.

"More cultivation drivel…" he muttered as he walked out of the room.

"Now," Liu said.

"Close your eyes, steady your breath, and place yourself atop the highest peak." I closed my eyes, and imagined myself sitting on top of a mountain. He guided me through the meditation, with mantras to recite in my mind and all that jazz. I didn't feel anything. It didn't do anything either, as far as I could tell. We went from sitting atop a mountain through lying on a beach to standing in the middle of a forest. It took forever, too. I didn't yawn in the process, but I wasn't far from it.

"Reopen your eyes," Liu finally said.

"And exhale." I did, exhaling. What a waste of time. Gilgamesh and the nurse were gone. Someone had at least carried her out. Or she'd woken up, read the room, and resigned on the spot. Liu got up, still slightly wobbly.

"You can practice this meditation on your own. It is excellent for stabilizing one's inner self. Be warned, however, as your disruption runs deep. The manifestations will return whenever your spirit is strained. Only the source can remove them for good." Wonderful. A subscription-based tail. I rose.

"Thanks." For nothing. We headed for the door. When I opened it, my right hand looked normal. Oh. No horn on my forehead either, and the tail was gone. Well, never fucking mind then, this was an awesome meditation. The sun had long since set, so I headed for the main pod room. I really needed to talk to Cassandra. She had a lot of explaining to do. The dome felt almost nostalgic. My body had technically spent the entire climb here, but walking its hallways on my own two legs was another matter.

And I already missed the tower, the corridors, and the cloak of the wanderer that had stayed behind with it. The weight felt lacking from my shoulders. I entered the main chamber. Moonlight filled the room through the windows. A man stood behind Cassandra's desk, looking over the embedded screens. Decently tall, with a great jawline and messy hair, wearing an unbuttoned shirt and a brown leather jacket, more than worn, stretched over a massive chest.

"Hey." I waved a bit as I walked straight toward him, frowning.

"I don't think we've met."

"We haven't indeed. I am Hutriel." He formed a broad smile, and motioned toward one of the pods. Cassandra peeked out from behind it, eyes shooting wide.

"She's over there, if you've come looking for my wife."