Chương 178: Remnants from a Forgotten Era

Nyxala had to cut her way through another wall to escape the short passage. The boxy little machines that sped along the rails had barely avoided taking their heads. Well, the miniature trolleys were closer to being annihilated by her tail, but she'd held herself back. Wouldn't want to give the Worshippers any reason to come looking for a missing drone. They stepped out into a shrine. It was a small room, laden with all sorts of jewellery. Gems, gold, the occasional circuit entombed in crystal. Gifts.

Offerings like this were rare. Each had an exquisite appearance, shaped with expert craftsmanship, but they each paled in value compared to a single finger. Diamonds, gold, silver; they could all be produced from near nothing. Few otherworldly beings would care for these trinkets anywhere near as much as a life. Even that of a lamb or rat. And yet this room was embellished with nothing but shining uselessness. Still, it looked pretty. Nyxala approached the central altar.

The worthless jewels were piled up high enough to block her path, but they never rose so high that the room's focus was out of sight. A spotlight illuminated the altar while the rest of the room relied on sparkling reflections to stay lit. On the raised altar, the lifeless remains of a machine lay alone. Broken.

"This place must be ancient," Lysyra said in awe as she picked up a necklace. Whatever had held it together decided it didn't like the sudden handling and disintegrated. Dozens of small gold beads clattered across the floor. Nyxala had to agree. It wasn't nearly as bad as what she'd seen in the shadows, but the steel of the centrepiece had patches where it grew thin from corrosion. What made the age even clearer was the design of the machine. It looked like an early model of the arachnoangels running around today.

A blocky metal container for a body, and four radial legs. It didn't look like it ever posed much of a threat.

"Seems there's nothing worth taking." Not even the odd sacrificial knife or ritual parchment. Nyxala left the piles of gold behind her, moving past the altar to the door across the room. There was a large lever embedded in the door, but no matter how much strength she put in — enhancement names included — it wouldn't budge. She would have dug her claws in again, or cratered the door with her tail… but they were in the Worshipper's Tributary now. The less noise, the better. So she spat on the door.

Her focus started where she thought the hinges and lock would be, but when that didn't give the door any motion, she lathered the acid all around the frame. With so much acid bubbling through metal, the room was starting to fill with smoke that had nowhere to go. Lysyra stood as far away from her as the small room would allow, holding a hand over mouth and nose.

"If your foul breath causes my reflection to disappear, so help me." Nyxala sniffed.

"It's not that bad."

"I can feel my eyes burning." She pulled her robe up to cover her face.

"It is bad."

"Stop smelling with your eyes then." Finally, the door gave way, and fell outward. Nyxala leapt forward to grab the heavy slab before it could crash into the ground, trumpeting their presence to anyone present. Not that it would have mattered; Nyxala found herself in an empty passage with nothing but a half-dozen doors welded shut. Nyxala hadn't noticed Lysyra had vanished until the girl reappeared at the end of the short hall.

"Looks like the place is sealed off." She took in an exaggerated breath.

"Have any other methods to get through this one?" Lysyra tapped the door most likely to take them deeper into the Tributary. Casually, Nyxala stepped into the hall after her. The doors lining the walls led to very similar looking shrines. At least, the edges of the altar and all those trinkets were the same. Not worth searching. She fell in besides Lysyra, but her eyes pierced the space beyond. From what she could tell, it was substantially larger than the hall they were currently in. She checked for teeth.

Finding none, she expanded her search for movement, or even the sharp tips of an arachnoangel's legs. They were in the clear, so Nyxala had her third eye begin to eat away at the welded edges of the doors. She glanced back. Now that she was looking, the welding was all on this hall's side of each door. How had the welder escaped? Had they escaped? If enough time passed for metal to deteriorate, then a human corpse was unlikely to be anything but dust. And there wasn't much dust.

The door groaned as the last of its frame was sucked into Nyxala's chest. Carefully, she let it teeter forward until there was enough space to peek through. Nothing reacted. Neither living nor machine was beyond. Nyxala squeezed through, then waited for Lysyra before she pushed it back in place. Some mould hair held it still.

"Why are they so obsessed with jewellery?" Lysyra asked.

"I didn't think they bothered to make anything that didn't help their machines." The room was significant. A few dozen metres wide, and extended further than her edge sight predicted. Thick pillars bordered a lush carpet that followed the length of the passage. Each rose to the high ceiling, yet it was impossible to tell what they were made of. No part of their surface remained visible through all the gems, jewels and carved ornaments. There was an immense amount of work put into this display.

Not so much in how they were laid out — besides being tied to the pillars, the trinkets were seemingly piled up against the walls wherever they would fit — but rather the craftsmanship of each. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Even with the number of Machine God Worshippers, this variance of each jewel in this hall alone would have taken years to craft. Lysyra made it to the carpet without seeming to disrupt any of the gems in her path.

Even when Nyxala let her tentacles carry her over, she still jostled a few baubles and made a clatter. Only the carpet itself was free of the mess. Every other part of the floor was drowning in the flood of gold.

"Maybe it once had a purpose?" Nyxala noticed another prototype machine on a shrine along the wall. A shell of a beetle with primitive, decayed wheels.

"Maybe it once had value. Or they once worshipped a different god. One with strange demands." Nyxala glanced to her right, where the edge of the Tributary's borders should be.

"Or not." At the far end of the passage, upon a raised platform, lay the remains of a Hallowed. The machine stretched from one wall to another, filling the space with its shattered shell. The cannon — both barrel and base — lay separated from the tank's core. Its tracks were separated from the machine as well, folded and set besides the barrel in a neat line. This was neither the cannon mechs of the Technocult, nor a micro-tank like Buddy, but a fully fledged Hallowed.

One of the divine weapons of the Machine God Worshippers. It may be destroyed and lifeless, but the Worshippers treated the ancient creations with nothing less than the utmost devotion. Despite having the label of a weapon, the cult would rather sacrifice their lives than bring one to the battlefield. Then why leave it unguarded? And the tributes… there was nothing amongst this pile of trash that a single Worshipper would consider worth gracing the ground beneath a Hallowed. Not a ritual. Not a sacrifice.

These gems weren't even endowed with blood or soul. They were all basic and mundane. A click pulled her attention away from ancient mechanical corpse. Lifting her badge, she found an LED flashing. The instance her perception landed on the modified identifier, a component popped loose and fell to the floor. It had ignored the soldering that held it in place and escaped its circuit. The light immediately settled to a solid glow before dimming once more. An identical click came from Lysyra only moments later.

Nyxala watched as similarly, a single component jumped free of its circuitry.

"We should get a move on," Nyxala said.

"We're already being detected, and I don't think these things will last too long."

"Well then, it's a good thing we don't have to guess where we need to go." Lysyra turned away from the Hallowed to follow where the carpet led.

"I'll scout ahead." Without another word, she disappeared. Nyxala jogged along behind her. She was here for a reason, but it was impossible to hold in her curiosity at her surroundings. It all seemed like such a strange choice. Why obsess over jewels to this degree? Looking for any explanation, she kept her eyes scanning as she moved towards the core of the Tributary. The shrines consistently cradled early prototypes, never anything more complex. Many were machines she'd never seen.

It painted a picture of just how old this hall was, and that in itself was proof just how much more ancient the Hallowed were than the rest. It was as if their design was fully iterated and functioning long before the Worshippers even knew how to crimp wires together. She found Lysyra standing below a massive set of ceremonial double doors. Nyxala would have joined her, but something caught her eye. Wading through piles of trinkets, Nyxala reached the altar.

It, unlike any other, was adorned by the runes of a ritual. But that wasn't what caught her eye. The exhibited machine had fleshy growths. Someone had gone through an immense effort to scald away every muscular fibre and bone possible, leaving the metal blackened and nothing left, but the shape of what wasn't there was undeniable. The socket of a ball-joint. Grooves of missing muscular fibres and tendons. Holes where veins once threaded it's mechanical shell. What happened here?

Did some creature infect the machine? But by the ritual scarred into both the altar and the steel of its frame, this had been intentional. Had they not understood what the ritual would do? There wasn't enough information to say exactly what happened, but this chamber made one thing clear: the Worshippers had not always been so capable with machines.

"You think there's any chance this ritual works against all machines?" she asked.

"Sure, if they stay still and let it happen," Lysyra said.

"And you can figure out the resource requirements. And learn the hymn for it… somehow."

"Alright, I get it."

"And you want to waste months or years to test out all the possible side effects of using an unknown ritual."

"I get it." Nyxala glared, but Lysyra paused for only a moment before she opened her mouth again, corner of her lips twitching. She brushed past her with a huff before the girl could start. Still, she sent a glance back over the ritual and etched it in her mind. Didn't hurt to collect the unobscured rituals she found. She may not be able to use them now, but who knew what sort of strange effects she might need sometime in the future.

"Well that's not something we can open," Nyxala said, gazing up at the towering doors. Even if she could work her way through the sealed edges like the doors behind her, these would attract too much attention upon opening.

"There are Worshippers on the other side. I can see their teeth."

"Their teeth, huh?" Lysyra murmured. The space beyond the doors felt massive. She traced half a dozen people and just as many machines as they made their way through the area. While it was large, it was anything but open. Just like the shrines she'd already passed, the chamber was almost engulfed in objects. She couldn't tell exactly what they were, but there were far fewer gems and jewels than she'd seen so far.

There was so much tribute that the Worshippers had to weave around it all to reach where they needed to go. Fortunately, this meant Nyxala could probably melt her way around the door, and never be noticed. Alternatively, she could go around. Ignore the relatively high traffic chamber entirely. It was anything but perfectly clear, but her edge sight gave her the impression that there were many other great halls radially surrounding the room ahead of her.

The one to her right led to the main entrance, so she figured carving burrows as she moved clockwise would lead them to their target. It would leave more damage behind to be discovered, but so long as they were out before then, it didn't matter if Nyxala set off a bomb in this place. Their badges beeped again. Another two components flung themselves from the circuitry. Probably best to take the direct path. They didn't have the time to wander.