Chương 80: Book 2: Chapter 15 - Guardian of the Galaxy

Following the failures of the past year, I have begun a second build, unrequisitioned, in the rock beneath a headland where there is presently nothing but wind and gulls and a great deal of excellent stone. When it is complete, I will have one thing in this universe that answers to me and only me. That will be enough. - S. Solara, Personal Record, Date: Redacted MASON The alert blaring at our back felt like a rising tide, red lights chasing through glass-lined corridors.

We moved through the subbasement with urgency, the resonance continuing to build as whatever guardian protected this place came alive. I could feel a shift happening inside the facility, a deep throb in my boots, a rattling in my teeth and neck, something waking up. Dario ran beside me, pulled along by the urgency and smart enough not to ask questions he knew I couldn't, or wouldn't, answer.

His pack bounced with the weight of the archive data panels, the entire reason for this trip, though their contents had proven far more valuable than the price I'd been offered to retrieve them. We reached the stairs and took them three at a time, the layers of the building passed in a blur until we were back in the dim temple archive of the upper floors, entering the atrium at a full sprint.

Two hundred feet away, the great ash doors stood open once again, the facility still responding to my mother's credentials despite the initiated lockdown.

"We have to reach that door!" I yelled at Dario, straining to be heard over the piercing sound of the alarm. He nodded, channeling a Dexterity buff that I took in without breaking stride. A hundred feet, eighty... the floor ahead of us turned to liquid, an oil slick rising from the polished stone. The guardian made no sound as it assembled, a mass of seamless darkness rising and gathering into a flowing mass of limbs.

It was vaguely humanoid in shape, though its upper body tapered into a point where a head should have been. We were cut off from the door, the creature's huge body and fluid limbs preventing any further advance. [Architect's Vision] and [Deep Structure] showed me the truth of its form. Pale fractures cut through the dark mass like frost on a windowpane, whole regions were chalky and stiff as if the guardian's material composition had calcified like the rest of the dungeon.

Its left side noticeably dragged, something in its limbs on that side locking and releasing in a pulsing shudder that rippled across the liquid surface.

"Caden-""I see it." < PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE, A REPRESENTATIVE WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY FOR PROCESSING > It spoke in High Exaltian. Beside me, Dario was visibly shaken to hear the holy language of the gods coming out of a faceless blob. It raised one of its limbs and the air changed, a field of pressure sweeping through the atrium from one wall to the other. My admin overlay flashed once and then disappeared, a searing pain cresting behind my eyes.

I fell onto my knees, holding my head and resisting the urge to scream.

"Caden, what's wrong?" came a question from beside me, but the voice felt distant and weak. Through the pain I felt the ring on my finger go quiet, the constant hum of my mother's construct cutting off with a snap like a door slamming shut in my mind. My System Mark flared hot, then cold, then hot again, each wave a crest and fall that left me increasingly disoriented. The UI in my head glitched and flickered, lines of code appearing and then flitting away, error messages blinking in and out of existence.

The connection I had to Liarra disappeared, the wards I'd constructed no longer feeding me data. I could still feel my mana through the disorientation, still call on the System and hear it answer, but it was as if the Exaltian part of me, the part that relied on admin tools and alien tech, had been shut off. I tried to stand but stumbled back to one knee, Dario pulling me to my feet with the force of a very strong hand.

"How are you standing?" I managed to squeeze out through gritted teeth, eyes feeling heavy, sweat pouring down my face.

"I feel nothing," Dario said, his voice showing no signs of strain.

"Whatever is happening, you seem to be the target." I was slow to register the implication... this guardian was not intended to prevent mortal incursion, no mortal could even enter this facility, this was a weapon created to prevent those already inside from leaving. To trap other Exaltians. I reached for [Sovereign's Will] and it answered, the System-fueled transcendent Wisdom skill unaffected by the crippling containment field.

My mana influence launched out around me, thirty feet in every direction, bending my attention like a thousand blades of grass. The headache stopped, my System interface reappearing in a rapid reboot sequence. I was Exaltian, but I was more than that.

"Dario," I said, finding my footing again.

"You have to leave, now."

"You mean without you?"

"There's no time to explain. Liarra needs you... my wards, they may have stopped working, she'll be undefended." That at least seemed to stir him.

"This... thing, won't attack you. Take the archive tablets, get Liarra out of here. If I don't make it back, bring them to The Drift, she'll know who."

"Caden, I can't just-""Please, Dario. I'll be fine, I know how to fight this." I didn't, but I was about to learn.

"I'll find her and we'll come back to get you."

"I know you will." The fight would be decided one way or another by then. He made it thirty feet before turning back to look at me.

"Go!" I yelled. He went, the guardian not even turning to register his passing. The great ash doors closed behind him, a command I hadn't given. I backed up toward the shelter of the pillars that rimmed the room, [Sovereign Will] keeping the guardian's constant pressure from crushing me. I ran the numbers and waited for the thing to attack as it moved toward me with its slow, grinding gait. I ran [Deep Structure] again, the skill now functioning inside the bubble of my mana canopy.

I hoped to trace the source of the creature's malformation, decades of neglect and damage from the facilities poison had left it full of compounding fractures, the overlay resolving into ripples of dysfunction. Beneath the damaged shell, it held a dense aether-stone seated inside a network of shifting liquid that itself held mana-charged silicate suspended inside it.

Its channels were hyper-refined crystal, though the material was losing its conductivity at a decay rate far faster than would have occurred naturally. If I'd waited another five hundred years, it might not have functioned at all.

The damn thing contained half the items I needed to restore my mother's laboratory - highly specific, extremely rare materials that led to one obvious conclusion: my mother had built this, or at the very least employed techniques in her laboratory that were nearly identical to how it had been made. Her signature was in more than just the materials.

I'd spent weeks in that laboratory; pulling panels off walls, charting the wiring, learning the recurring patterns and preferences that were the fingerprint of any crafter. The bones of the guardian were constructed with the same elegant design language. I wished desperately that I could retreat to the Athenaeum where I knew I would find a trail of clues leading me to the answers of this being's creation. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The creature took another step and the heavy mass in its left side locked and then broke free with the sound of a jaw cracking. I stepped out from behind the column and stood to face it. [Structural Cascade] ran through the mana field, finding the solidified weak points inside the guardian's left shoulder. Its upper limb hardened and cracked, falling away in chalk-white fragments that hit the floor and shattered like pottery.

Liquid mass rolled in to fill the gap, dark fluid climbing over the wound to reform its shape. The monster moved forward without slowing. < RESISTANCE WILL BE MET WITH DEADLY FORCE, PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE AND AWAIT RETRIEVAL BY ONSITE PERSONNEL > The systems in this place were still functional, if anyone was monitoring it, they might actually show up and would be asking some very hard questions.

That was assuming the dungeon forming around it hadn't cut it off from the world, but I wasn't about to wait around to find out. I unsheathed my sword, letting [Vector Authority] provide my answer. The directed force curved out from the blade with a slice of air so intense a sonic boom flattened half the shelves in the archive.

The blow tore a wagon-sized section of the guardian's torso into the wall behind it, flinging black fluid across the atrium in a sweeping arc where it landed with a splat and immediately began to flow back toward the central mass in a thousand rivers of black. I hit it with every skill I could think to try, every advantage the System had ever given me.

I tried admin overrides, using Exaltian source code to turn its programming against itself, but whoever had written its code was far more skilled or knowledgeable than I was - probably both. I lifted every inhibitor I had, holding nothing back. [Kami's Hand], a Gold-Rank Strength skill that produced the force of a megaton detonation, managed to tear three columns out of the wall, driving them through its torso like giant harpoons. It walked right through them, reforming on the other side.

I collapsed the mezzanine on its head, but it simply slithered its way through the rubble, all the while repeating that same message on a loop. < RESISTANCE WILL BE MET WITH DEADLY FORCE, PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE AND AWAIT RETREIVAL BY ONSITE PERSONNEL > I was doing tremendous damage - a human-made building would have collapsed a dozen times over - but this place was seemingly indestructible. [Sovereign Will] continued to protect me from its containment field which showed no signs of weakening.

Keeping the high-level skill active was burning mana at a rate that I was now struggling to maintain after nearly ten minutes of constant attacks. The guardian itself showed little urgency - either its directive was containment only, or whatever programming told it to kill had been damaged in all the years of neglect. At the rate I was losing mana, it wouldn't need to actually fight me, soon the shield would come down and I'd be incapacitated by its intense overpressure.

What I'd wake up to from there I feared to contemplate, more than like I'd never wake up at all. I was getting sloppy, exhaustion giving way to mistakes. I stepped into its reach to attempt a second [Structural Cascade] but my dodge back was slow, my reactions a tick late. The dark liquid curled up my leg, grabbing onto my knee like a boa constrictor. It flowed up my calf, rooting me in place as I tried everything I could to extract from its grip.

I waited for the tightening crush that would break me, but it never came. As it rose up my leg, the leather armor appeared to peel and then disintegrate, the expensive protection enchantments putting up no resistance - it was as if they were being unmade. Beneath the armor, my skin felt numb, the tissue turning gray and lifeless. I could see in the golden code of its programming that this thing was recycling me the way a dungeon recycled monster parts.

Desperate, I covered myself in a thin shield of mana, detonating both my infused bracers at the same time. The shockwave blasted back the liquid around my legs and sent it flying twenty feet in every direction. The blowback from the explosion sent me flying head over heels. I landed hard on my back forty feet away, a row of fallen shelves breaking my fall. My right calf was a mess of grey flesh, the skin wrinkled up like an old fruit, muscle and fat eaten away to the bone.

My health bar dipped into the orange and I rushed to heal the damage, ignoring the intense pain of [Bio-Reconstruction] as it reformed the missing tissue inside my leg before the mana channels were destroyed for good. This strategy wasn't working and I was running out of ideas. I watched the guardian reassemble itself for the tenth time, pulling to a single point.

The mana inside the damaged regions of the fluid was dead, nothing flowed through them at all, the suspended silicate moving around these dead zones like a river routes around a sandbar. I used [Deep Structure] for what I knew would be the last time, my mana reserves dwindling dangerously low now. I stopped looking for weaknesses and started looking for patterns, her patterns.

I knew how she built, I understood the way her crafting mind worked, had seen it for hundreds of years inside the Athenaeum, weeks inside her laboratory. She always had redundancies, stacked deep, seating the primaries low, hard to reach. I'd cracked her puzzle in the construct, what was this compared to that? I stopped looking where I expected to find the monster's core - the aether-stone where all the liquid flowed - and expanded the search. Into the building itself, the walls, the ceiling... the floor.

It was subtle, easy to miss even if you were looking for it, a spot where the arrangement of the marble kinked. Something was buried there, something siphoning mana straight into the floor. The guardian wasn't the machine, it never had been, even in its weakened state the mass would have reformed forever, feeding from a bottomless pit. The facility itself was the trap, and its heart was buried under the floor.

If not for the degradation of the poison, I probably would have never seen it, the faintest crack in the softening marble was enough to give away the game. The marble was eight feet thick and dense even where it had softened. Cutting deep enough to extract the siphon would take everything I had left in me. I would have to drop [Sovereign's Will] and hope I could sustain the psychic damage long enough to break the floor.

I took one last reading of the location and burned it into my head; thirty-one feet from the base of the eastern wall, four feet left of the central seam. I drank a mana potion, feeling the small tick up in my reserves, before releasing the protective shell. The pressure nearly crushed me. It felt like the weight of an ocean was dropped on my shoulders, every bone of my Gold-Rank body on the edge of crumbling. My knees buckled and I dropped, something in my chest breaking, a wet crack under my sternum.

Blood filled my mouth, hot and coppery. My admin class skills were gone, [Deep Structure] once again a flickering error message. The world was reduced to a grey pressure, my heart barely able to move the blood through my body against the strain of the guardian's containment field. The fluid mass started to move again, rolling toward me as unhurried as ever, still repeating its endless command. I couldn't see the target, couldn't see much of anything, but I didn't have to.

I put a bloody hand flat against the marble and poured every last point of mana I had into an instant pulse of [Structural Cascade]. I felt it travel through the marble floor, chunks breaking off in its path, threads of matter pulling apart and losing their coherence. Thirty-one feet from the east wall, four feet left of the central seam. It moved down into the ground, one foot, two...

the mana-infused material of the siphon fought back against the intrusion, but it was a losing battle, the molecular bonds of the rapidly decohering floor gave way in a cone that propagated out from the center. The whole eastern quadrant of the beautiful, polished floor dropped four feet and shattered. The current stopped and with it the guardian, the liquid losing its structure all at once as it spilled across the floor in a lake of sludge that covered me up to my nose.

It turned gray, then white, finally hardening into a semi-transparent gelatin that smelled like burning metal. The pressure that had pressed me into the floor vanished and my ring hummed back to life, the admin overlays rebooting in my HUD. My System Mark flared hot and settled, returning to its original neutral state.

Completely mana depleted and still in the early stages of potion toxicity, I could do nothing but lay there in a pile of white muck and let my Gold-Rank self-healing bring my health shield back out of the flashing red. Everything hurt, my body in a state I hadn't been in since the Clockwork Tomb, but there was no Liarra here to carry me out of the tunnel. When I'd recovered enough to move, I harvested what I could from the remains of the guardian's core.

The body and materials had not been recycled; still laying in a heap spread out across the floor where the creature had collapsed. The aether-stone came out of the gel with a sucking sound, heavy as a cannonball and hot enough to hurt. I didn't care. I put it in my inventory along with four hyper-refined crystals and a large sample of the slime that I hoped would give me some insight into how it had disabled my Exaltian tech.

I limped over to the giant hole in the floor, looking down into the box that had housed the mana siphon. Several conduits ran east to west through the floor, disappearing into the bedrock in both directions. Curiosity pushed me to follow where it led, but exhaustion and pain won out. I left it there and made my way to the door. The doors swung open, the facility's defenses now broken. The Commission would soon find this place, the shield that kept them out no longer active.

The information inside would be a monumental discovery, even if nobody alive knew how to read it, and I knew that what happened here would reach the ears of people who Zachias had warned me brought the wrong kind of attention. Samara was dead and someone had her access codes - how long before they put two and two together? I stepped down into the water that still filled the dungeon's second stratum, legs almost as heavy as the day I'd crawled out of the ocean and dragged myself up that cliff.

I felt an urge to walk straight out of the dungeon, to leave Liarra and Dario to their confusion and resentment. I could let them think me dead, felled by the guardian. In many ways it would be a kindness, the truth would be far more dangerous for them than the pain of my death. And yet... my secrets, for all the good I told myself they did, had nearly gotten us all killed. I couldn't do this alone, not if I hoped to survive all that would be coming now. Maybe, I hated to admit to myself, I also didn't want to.