Chương 275

A moment after the bulkheads slammed shut, the circular vents dotting the ceiling hissed open, vomiting a pale-yellow fog into the enclosed space. Despite the bracelet doing its job and protecting his lungs from inhaling the Silence, Orion tasted copper in his mouth. The ambient mana in the room weakened, leaving a suffocating void all around them.

His CC flashed a rapid series of warnings as it lost all external connections, once again forcing him to manually reroute his processing algorithms to parse through the fog and keep drawing more in. He'd already taken enough to cast several spells, but the situation was far too dire to be parsimonious. As soon as their sight was obscured, a section of the far concrete wall ground inward, sliding aside to reveal a hidden staging room.

Metallic footsteps echoed over the blaring alarms as a dozen figures stepped into the chamber. Eleven were augmented soldiers, their limbs replaced with pneumatic constructs and their faces obscured by rebreathers. The one leading them was something else entirely. It stood nearly seven feet tall, a monstrous fusion of flesh and brass. Thick glass tubes pulsed with glowing green fluid, running from a heavy tank on his back straight into his spine and skull.

It was a figure Orion recognized all too well, though it was slightly less intimidating than the one he'd faced in the Maw. Iron State Praetorian — Ever-Present Guardian Class: Alchemical Assassin [B-rank] Level: 134 Mind: 210 Attunement: 217 Body: 875 Traits: Arcane Void [B-rank]; Bio-Mechanical Supremacy [B-rank]; [Silence Plating] [B-rank]; [Pain Suppression] [B-rank]"Watch the vats!" Garrick roared, drawing his greatsword and dropping into a wide stance.

"Be careful not to break the glass, or the acid will flood the floor!" Erethemor hissed in frustration as he lunged, forcibly pulling the fire from his claws to avoid shattering the fragile cylinders around them. He slammed into the nearest augmented soldier with pure physical power, grabbing the man's mechanical arm and wrenching it out of its socket with a sickening crunch of tearing flesh and metal. Esmeralda darted through the fog, seeking the joints in the soldiers' armor with her blood rapier.

She moved incredibly fast, but the thick brass plating offered formidable resistance, and the sealed rebreathers denied her access to their flesh. She cursed, forced to parry a hammer blow that sparked off her blade. Despite being the second-youngest in the group, Jordan seemed to have the least trouble handling his own enemy. His sword glowed with inner light, but the aura clung to the steel, refusing to project into the dead air.

He deflected a rifle butt, stepped inside the guard, and drove his blade up into the soldier's armpit. The broken armor released more Silence, which weakened his enhancement spells, forcing him to pull back instead of going for the kill, as he clearly wanted to. Orion felt the air pressure shift. Verner stood beside him, tracing a complex arcane symbol. Once complete, he pushed the spell forward, aiming to destabilize the Praetorian's shield.

It traveled half the distance before the Silence tore its structure apart, and the blue light fizzed out into harmless sparks. The Praetorian unleashed a gout of alchemical fire at Garrick, who took refuge behind his own sword, only to jump back when the enemy began advancing.

If this had been a contest of raw power and skill, the adventurer would have had little trouble winning, but it was clear that the sheer concentration of Silence in the air was hampering his enhancement skills, and the Praetorian seemed to be making the most of every chance it got.

"The environment is too hostile for complex spells!" Orion growled over the alarm, adjusting an algorithm to track the cyborg's movements. If he'd been capable of tier-three spells, now would have been a good time to cast them, but Verner seemed to be struggling to draw enough mana in the hostile environment.

"Forget subtlety. We need volume. Barrage doctrine!" Verner grimaced but nodded, showing more sense than the others, who simply kept doing what they had been doing despite the lack of results. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Orion drew heavily on the internal reserve he'd built up.

For a moment, he considered using gravity magic to power his attack, but he dismissed the idea, knowing the Praetorian was too resilient to be harmed by such a thing without extenuating circumstances. That job would fall to Garrick. Instead, he compiled the simplest kinetic vectors his Knowledge could sustain, and within a moment, the CC had two dozen ready to fire. Verner mirrored the approach, forming stone darts. None of the spells was enough to do serious damage, but that wasn't their goal.

At the same time, they unleashed the first wave. The air cracked. Orion's bullets struck the Praetorian's chest plate with the force of a swinging sledgehammer. Verner's darts hit a fraction of a second later, staggering the towering cyborg and throwing off his aim. A cloud of highly corrosive acid sprayed harmlessly into the ceiling, melting through the metal grating above. The Praetorian braced its legs, its mechanical systems whining as it tried to advance through the onslaught.

Orion tightened his focus, ignoring everything else. The Silence continuously ate at the edges of his projectiles, forcing him to expend twice the normal mana just to keep the structures intact until impact. But the barrage doctrine was designed for exactly this kind of attrition. Crack. Crack. Crack. The second wave struck as a staccato of hammer blows hit the cyborg. The coating on the Praetorian's armor began to splinter, unable to absorb the sheer volume of consecutive impacts.

A violent tremor shook through the soles of Orion's boots, and a muffled screech of tearing metal echoed from the exterior bulkhead behind them. It seemed Daus was engaged outside, fighting his own battle against whatever reinforcements the alarm had drawn. Orion pushed the distraction aside. He couldn't help the druid right now. He aimed his next volley at the Praetorian's right knee joint, where Verner had been focusing. Under the combined onslaught, the brass cracked, revealing the synthetic tendons beneath.

"The shield is down!" Verner called out, his breathing ragged. As a tier-three caster, he should have had much more stamina than Orion, but he seemed far less accustomed to fighting under the stifling cover of the Silence. Garrick didn't need to be told twice. He stepped into the opening they had created and brought his sword up in a two-handed blow.

Powered by a Body stat exceeding a thousand, the blade sheared through the Praetorian's damaged knee, biting deep into the torso and severing the tubes connected to the cyborg's spine. Green fluid sprayed across the floor, hissing violently as it reacted with the air, but the Praetorian collapsed into a heap of sparking wires and ruined flesh. As had happened many times before, the remaining guards lost their tactical cohesion when their commander was killed.

Erethemor crushed the skull of one against the concrete wall, while Jordan cleanly decapitated the last. The room became quiet, interrupted only by the loud siren and the constant bubbling of the vats. System Notification Participated in the defeat of [Iron State Praetorian] [Lv. 134] Participated in the defeat of [Iron State Cyborg] [Lv. 79-91] x2 +237, 700 Exp Orion exhaled sharply, feeling the deep ache of overwork in his chest.

He waved the notification away and hurried past the smoking wreckage of the Praetorian toward the main control terminal set into the wall. Silence had fallen outside the facility, and he could only hope Daus had come out on top. His fingers flew across the brass dials and switches. Unlike the one he'd found in the mountains, this system was entirely mechanical, with no magical encryption. They've been adapting to us just as much as we've been adapting to them.

Any regular mage, even one very well-versed in complex enchantment, would be stumped by this. Fortunately for him, this made things easier, and he found the manual override for the vents first, throwing a lever that reversed the airflow after tapping in the proper code he deduced by noticing the minute amount of wear on some keys. The yellow gas began to cycle out of the room, drawing the claustrophobic pressure with it. He found the bulkhead controls a moment later and unlocked the steel doors.

Before opening them, Orion pulled a sheaf of papers from a clipboard hanging beside the terminal. He scanned the cramped handwriting, and his eyes narrowed behind his adamantine lenses as he processed the cipher, eventually breaking it with the aid of his prior experience.

"There's no Alchemist here," Orion announced, lowering the clipboard.

"The last entry is from eight days ago, so we've likely found only a side-project lab at most." Garrick grunted in acknowledgment as he wiped a smear of green fluid from his blade, then sheathed the greatsword with a metallic click. He walked up to Orion, then turned toward the six glass cylinders in the center of the room. The druids suspended within looked worse than before.

The sudden influx of Silence gas seemed to have accelerated the rot, and the necrotic patches on their skin were visibly spreading, consuming the last remnants of healthy tissue. Their chests rose and fell in shallow, erratic spasms. Jordan walked up to the nearest vat, resting a gauntleted hand against the glass. His expression was unreadable, but he couldn't have liked what he found.

"They are too far gone," Verner murmured, stepping back from his own examination.

"The Silence has bonded to their bodies. Even if we pull them out, the atmospheric mana shock will kill them instantly. If we leave them in…"

"They will continue to suffer," Garrick finished for him. He didn't look pleased, despite the victory coming without serious injuries on their part, and knowing what was coming next made it taste bitter in Orion's mouth as well. Not everyone shared the same thoughts. Esmeralda was poking the soldiers with her rapier. Erethemor stood by the far wall, radiating a desire to find another enemy to smash apart. Jordan stared silently at the dying man in the tank. Garrick turned his gaze toward Orion. His eyes were cold.

"Put them to rest, kid," he finally said. Stiffening, Orion looked to the older man for an explanation. He wasn't opposed to such a solution, but having him do the deed seemed out of left field.

"The rest of us have already gotten to the third tier," Garrick explained, his tone perfectly level.

"I can tell you are close. The System might not give you much experience, given their conditions, but it will be something. If we are going to hit more bases, I need every member of this team as strong as possible, and none of us would get much from it, given our level. Do it." It was a callous, deeply utilitarian demand. His tone left no room for grief or hesitation. Garrick was treating the dying prisoners not as people to be saved but as resources to be harvested for the war effort.

I thought much the same when we first found them, so why is this so difficult? Despite his struggles and the urgent need to go outside to check on their last team members, the others waited in silence, giving him the time he needed. Finally, Orion stepped up to the nearest vat. The druid's eyes were closed, his face locked in a permanent grimace of agony. With a sad sigh, he raised his hand, pointing his index finger at the glass.

He didn't need to cast anything complex for this, given the total lack of resistance, so he simply gathered a dense point of gravity, aiming it directly at the druid's head and calculating the exact pressure needed to ensure an instantaneous, painless death.

"May you find peace in your next life," Orion whispered and released the spell.