Chương 117: 116. Dissecting a God's Artifact

Kelly cracked her charged knuckles, a sharp sound of snapping mana in the humming room. She looked from the pulsating cube to Ren.

"Pulling that out of my personal closet is a workout," Kelly said, flexing her fingers.

"My shadow did not want to give it up. Felt like convincing a black hole to spit out its lunch." She nodded at the cube, where the air was already warping.

"I have a good feeling about this run." Ren's machine shop kept blueprints for every conceivable thing. Schematics. Kelly scrolled through them on a flickering holoscreen, past molecular bonding schematics and plasma torch templates. Her finger stopped on a file labeled INDUSTRIAL DIAMOND SAWBLADE: CONTINUOUS RIM. The accompanying image showed a vicious-looking disc with a wire edge glittering with embedded particulate. It looked professionally offended by the concept of solid matter.

"A saw," she said, not really to Ren. He was across the room, doing something volatile with a gun the size of his arm.

"We're using a saw." The blueprint was a gift. She'd already thanked him. Gratitude was a given. Then, she downloaded the file to her transforming weapon with a few blunt mental commands and several button presses. The metal bracelet on her wrist shivered with heat, unfolded. Molecular bonds realigned with a sense of purpose. The sleek, rune-etched metal shed its elegant lines, expanding and flattening. It reconfigured, getting down to the serious business of becoming something else.

Her switch-blade finally settled into a disc slightly larger than a dinner plate, its outer edge a continuous, shimmering loop of monomolecular filament studded with synthetic diamond. It no longer resembled a weapon. It now resembled the specialized tool you'd use to slice a building in half. Which was, Kelly thought, probably for the best. Buildings, after all, rarely fought back.

They just stood there, in a state of profound architectural commitment, holding up roofs and housing pigeons with stoic resignation until someone like Kelly convinced one building, to become two buildings. The light-chainsaw mode would have been objectively more efficient, but Kelly needed her weapon intact. It was, technically, her most powerful weapon.

This day was new territory, and in her considerable experience, the next twelve to twenty-four hours were statistically likely to contain several events best described as ' catastrophically inconvenient.' The machines in Ren's hall could give the word 'tool' confidence issues; they were massive, multi-jointed robotic limbs ending in clamps and sensors and too many not-fingers. They moved with a smoothness that felt wrong for their size.

Kelly slid the newly-formed monomolecular industrial saw-blade into the primary clamp. The machine accepted it with a soft magnetic click. She pulled down a pair of heavy safety glasses with side shields. The world took on a tinted, sterile clarity.

"Alright, surgeon." She called to the halls AI.

"See that magic cube?" she muttered, both to the it and to herself.

"Cut it open." The robotic arms came to life. There was a dramatic whirring that felt entirely and theatrically appropriate for the moment. One moment they were still, the next they were moving with a speed and precision that made biology seem like a clumsy test run. The saw blade began to spin. It emitted a high, thin whine that left a satisfying vibration in Kelly's teeth. The AI, processing the cube's external scan, guided the blade down onto the first face. This was doing a lot more than cutting.

It was disintegration at an atomic level. The monomolecular edge, guided by unerring machines, didn't so much grind through the cube's material as it persuaded the bonds between its atoms to stop being bonds. A line of absolute blackness appeared in the cube's surface, a void of separated matter. Dust? There was no dust. The material just ceased to be where the blade passed. The cube was a nest of shifting, glowing runes. They swam under its surface like trapped eels.

Watching the AI work was its own kind of violence. The saw blade would dart forward, stop a micrometer from a glowing sigil, tilt at a impossible angle, and resume its cut, tracing a path that avoided every magical rune in real time. A human hand would have twitched, a human mind would have sneezed. An enhanced human eye would have caught the nanosecond tilt, but missed the picosecond shift of a rune. The machine had neither problem. It carved with cold, atomic patience.

Section by section, face by face, the cube was parted. Its sides broke away with a series of soft, precise cracks that shook cushioned platform. The process was methodical, clinical, and completely at odds with the magical object being dismantled. Finally, the last cut was made. The cube lay open, its interior exposed. It looked unfolded, like a very dangerous Christmas present, the layers spread out neatly like the petals of a metal flower. For a second, nothing happened.

The opened cube sat there, revealing a central cavity holding a crystalline core about the size of a person. It pulsed with a slow, internal light.

"Huh," Kelly said.

"Anti-climax." Then the crystal breathed. It expanded. One second it was man-sized, the next it was the size of a truck, then a small house, filling the cavity and then bursting past the open shells of the cube. It was a rapid, loud explosion of solidified space. Air screamed as it was violently displaced in every direction, rushing outward in a concussive whoomp. Dust from the floor and tables, previously uninvolved in the saw's perfect cuts, was dragged and blasted into a churning cloud.

Grit pinged against Kelly's safety glasses and Ren's workshop wide walls. The crystal didn't stop growing, its facets multiplying, rapidly expanding without end, reflecting the workshop lights into a thousand chaotic spears. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. The physical shockwave was just the opener. The real hit came next. A wave of pure mana erupted from the still-expanding crystal. It was pressure, density, a wall of pure power that rolled through the room.

Kelly felt it hit her chest first—a solid, jarring thump that shoved the air from her lungs. Her head swam, a sudden, dizzying vertigo as if the floor had tipped ninety degrees. She took an unsteady step backwards, her boot scraping loud on the floor. Across the room, Ren stiffened. His head came up. His eyebrows, previously locked in a permanent scowl, actually lifted in surprise. Even he felt the pressure push against him with that tsunami-like wave. Everyone in the room stilled.

Aside from Kelly, that was probably the first time a human had ever felt mana. It wasn't feeling the mana exactly, but the powerful rejection, like two opposing magnets pressed together. Kelly saw the slight strain in his posture, the way his shoulders tightened as he felt the invisible shove. The workshop swayed as if hit by a shockwave then went utterly still. The AI-controlled arms froze in place, then immediately moved. The ambient hum of machinery seemed to dampen, swallowed by the dense, thickening air.

Kelly shook her head, trying to clear the woozy feeling. Her body had just absorbed a triple dose of tequila-rum in the shape of charged mana, and her muscles twitched with excess power. She looked from the monstrous, still-growing crystal to Ren's alert, hardened face, and then back again. Kelly had seen that part before—the whole show with a bigger bang. She saw the numbers jump, felt the air get thick, and aimed the claws where the box would split. A magic box trying to squeeze a city into a pocket.

It was predictable. Expected, even. So the machines were ready, a well-engineered forest of metal claws and grapplers hovering around the metal box before it could ship its payload. Ren stood next to her, a mountain in his stealth suit. He'd taken his helmet off. They both had. His face was all scars and disapproval, which was his default setting. So when the crystal inside erupted, both Kelly and Ren observed as several claw-like machine appendages pulled the metal and magic box apart quickly.

They stabbed into the fractures, hooked under edges of magic-forged metal, and pulled as lines of silver light cracked across its surface like an egg in a microwave. This happned as the massive power crystal the size of a small house erupted into existence in the center, and whatever spatial compression that occurred inside? The one that made the bright blue crystal keep growing? Finally stopped. Dust and flakes of displaced matter pattered down. Magic charged the air with thick static and spent near visible motes.

Kelly brushed a glittering bit off her shoulder.

"Finally," she said, staring up at the crystal. A slow, focused smile spread on her face. It was probably hostile, and definitely hers to take apart. A slow breath hissed out through her teeth, part annoyance, part appreciation.

"And there's the neighborhood wake-up call." She tilted her head, listening for the first high-frequency whine only her augmented ears could catch.

"Right on schedule." It was time to get to work. A flat, synthesized voice announced its intent.

"Beginning structural and energetic mapping. Logging all identified symbols and their connective pathways."

"Sure, you do that," Kelly nodded and took a seat—on the ground, of course—not on a chair. Let those stuck-up ergonomic dictators feel what it was like to be outclassed by nature's natural seat: the floor, which had been perfecting the art of support since before chairs decided they knew better. Furniture, like most things designed to help people, had developed opinions about its own importance. The floor had no such delusions. It simply existed, and everything fell into place accordingly.

And then A swarm of thin red lasers shot out from the ceiling and walls, painting the crystal and every scattered piece of the cube shell in a tight grid, and the room's advanced AI began to scan all of the dense runes covering the crystal. Kelly watched the lights crawl. They weren't just looking at the surface. They were mapping each and every single rune; how deep the glowing symbols went, pattern of runes, the structure and chaining and how it all fit together, the overlaps, dimensions, cross-intersections.

Not just the crystal, but the cube that had encased it. Every piece. Its interior and exterior, every dissected fragment. It was eating the whole thing—the crystal heart, the busted-open box, every little shard—and turning it into a river of data that would drown any normal system. The AI didn't understand what it was looking at any more than a person reading a language they'd never seen could claim comprehension. But understanding wasn't the point. Recording was.

The machine was a perfect, tireless clerk cataloging an argument Kelly was going to win.

"Symbols linking to other symbols. Layers on layers. Connections across connections," Kelly muttered, watching the grid tighten, paraphrasing the bits of dry scan reports flashing across the screen at speeds to fast to view fully. Her voice bright with energy that came from knowing she was about to learn something that would either solve everything or blow up in her face spectacularly.

"Fascinating. Put it on a postcard."

"Scan complete. All symbolic formations and structural Runic designs archived." It took the machine 30 minutes, which for an AI as powerful as the one Ren had delivered, was a lifetime. Kelly was at the main console before the voice finished. She slapped her palm on the interface. In her head, she opened up the fortified mental vault, the one that survived the resets, and started the dump.

A flood of raw data poured in—glowing schematics, spinning symbol-shapes, cascading patterns of light that were someone else's math. She didn't get it. Not a single chain of logic. The machine didn't get it either. A message flashed on a screen: ANALYSIS FAILURE. PARAMETERS UNKNOWN.

"Welcome to my world," Kelly said. She kept shoveling the data in anyway. A greedy magpie stuffing its nest with shiny, dangerous trash. Every symbol, every pattern, every weird squiggle that might be a comma or a command to turn your blood to gas—she took it. She crammed it all into the vault in her skull. Anything could happen. The hall could collapse into a rift. A reset could blink the local universe out of existence.

Any single thing not stored in the one place that followed her between loops—her own head—would be gone for good. Wasted. Kelly wasn't taking that chance. She took the whole deluge, watching the final data stream crash into her memory with something close to excitement. Thirty minutes to catalog the impossible. Not bad. When the transfer finished, she leaned on the console. A thick, hot headache was building behind her eyes. Perfect. It meant the data had weight.

"You can't read that," Ren said. His voice was dry.

"The machine can't read it. They're just... pictures."

"I'm not reading it. I'm taking it." Kelly studied the whole blueprint in her own head. It was a waterfall of shapes. Kelly didn't care if she understood. Not yet. She just swallowed and recorded, the way a stomach processed food without ever knowing what it's digesting or why the meal mattered, which made her smarter than almost everyone trying to kill her. All of them were absolutely certain about things they'd never actually tasted. She closed her eyes and flicked through the mental files.

Not reading, just feeling the size of it. Thousands of symbols. Not hundreds. Thousands.