Chương 103: CHAPTER 101 – Frigid Bit*h

"Another military base? Yet the location is far too secluded." Lance laid the skeleton on the ground, gently placing the bones back. He took one last look at the ruined plaque before walking down the corridor. His senses had grown accustomed to the nauseating smell, but not to the constant wet squelching beneath the soles of his shoes. With every step, the algae under his feet released a sticky greenish liquid, making that environment ever more inhospitable.

A whitish sphere appeared on his fingers, illuminating that dark, grim world. The metal walls of the corridor were ruined, but still capable of withstanding the pressure of the seabed.

"The Frequency in this place… is completely distorted." With every step, he felt shivers caress his arms and legs, hisses in his ears, and strange sounds behind him. Reluctantly, he put on his glasses and immediately felt his stomach clench. The stale smell was replaced by that of blood, and the silence by horrible screams. In the darkness flowed red, sticky filaments, streaks of ethereal fluid. Without thinking, he found one of the crosses directly in his hand, while something stirred in the shadows.

"Something coming!" Lance prepared for the slash, but the only thing he saw before his eyes was a perfectly ordinary human, his face shattered by terror. He was running, clutching his belly, dripping red. Transparent innards sloshed from the gash as he ran. For some reason, his features could not be identified or even remembered. It was a face so common as to be forgettable. Without opening his mouth, Lance reached out his hand toward him. The entity vanished, crashing against him and becoming a reddish mist.

In the distance, only the echo of desperate screams. He looked behind him, seeing only darkness.

"Now I even believe in ghosts…" Lance murmured, resuming his march into the facility's interior. Every ten metres, the light of the orb revealed a new body abandoned to the algae over time. The wounds were all similar: large holes perfectly carved into the chest and skull, but the absence of some bones left room for imagination. With every step, the temperature dropped, while his skin slowly began to dry.

"That card wasn't a relic. It wasn't so different from Lucas's ability, and yet it had no trace of anything real." He let the orb float before him while he felt his back. The explosion had torn off the logo, but the skin had already completely healed. He glanced at the watch on his wrist, flashing red. On the screen, coordinates and a warning in capital letters kept appearing.

"Dielmon is unreachable from here. Am I on the seabed of the Master Ocean and near Heimenwick? But isn't that almost on the border with the Empire? I should have bought that atlas when I had the chance! I know nothing about geography…" He caught his reflection in the little that remained clean on the corridor walls, now wider. He had passed several doors, closed by heavy red steel wheels.

"In any case, I'm farther from the singularity than expected. I know Termìe developed a transport system fast enough to cover such distances in seconds, but I doubt that's the case here. Heimenwick is an authorised trade route. It wouldn't make sense to place an entrance here." He noticed all the doors were sealed, and fearing a collapse, he decided to ignore them. The corridor kept stretching, while strange vibrations shook the structure. Now numerous marks appeared on the iron, identical to scratches.

"This place gives me the creeps…" His grip on the cross tightened as he finally found an open door. The corridor had collapsed, leaving that door, smashed at his feet, as the only way. He swallowed, increasing the orb's light intensity. As soon as Lance's presence chased away the darkness, he had to cover his lips.

"What the hell happened here?" The place was perhaps a canteen, or what remained of it. Something had torn the entire room open, leaving clean, neat furrows. Dozens of skeletons, with missing bones and strange holes, were scattered among the remains of the tables. With every step, he felt something crunch beneath him, relentless and unbearable. He materialised the glasses, squeezing them between his fingers. He tried to put them on, trying to ignore the screams behind him.

With a grimace, he made them disappear, navigating the sea of bodies to the exit.

"This time I feel some air move?" The corridor was wider, with some walls of reinforced glass curved by black iron. The outside was totally dark, empty, and grim. Strange cylindrical molluscs obstructed some, and rarely a little eye lit up as he passed." I'm used to the dark by now, but somehow this is decidedly more comfortable." His steps echoed in the half-light, while his memory vividly replayed the screams. The corridor continued to widen until it stopped, blocked by a heavy metal bulkhead.

Lance stopped near the sides, feeling them and following them with his fingers.

"That doesn't seem to be a load-bearing element…" The orb in his hand suddenly stirred, wrapping his arm and increasing in heat and brightness. He touched the iron, which immediately began to melt. With a long circular motion, he carved his way toward the horror. With a dull thud, the iron disc fell to the floor, revealing a gigantic space. Lance stepped through the hole, immediately feeling a horrible sensation of cold. The light on his arm failed to illuminate what was a few steps away from him.

He stumbled in the dark, unable to shake that spectral cold from his skin. He felt a constant presence to his right, even though his steps echoed in the dark for several minutes. The Frequency of the place was completely distorted, almost making his stomach twist and his vision tunnel. His knee struck something metallic, but not solid and compact. He strained his light to the maximum, illuminating a panel with various buttons.

The writings were washed away, and the mechanism beneath had been exposed, revealing rubber tubes encrusted with Taumite.

"Maybe this can work…" The sphere slid through the tubes, illuminating them violet. The terminal began to vibrate, lighting up. Lance pressed the button in the centre with force, then pulled the lever associated with it. The entire base trembled as luminous columns rose from the seabed. The Lambdite contaminating the water began to be sucked in and digested by the machines. A dense white light illuminated the entire seabed, finally revealing its shape to Lance.

"Is it always night at the bottom of the sea?" He wondered as he watched the beams of light emitted by the dome being swallowed by the darkness. The complex of glass and iron stretched out immensely and was now also crossed by a strangely cold wind. Lance continued to observe the void above him until he felt a horrifying presence before him. Words fled into his chest as his mind tried to explain why he hadn't been able to notice it or even sense it.

He wanted to shift his gaze, yet he suffered every time he tried to move his neck.

"HELP US… HELP US… HELP US… HELP US!" A flood of prayers and screams spread through his mind, making him kneel amid groans. Now only his brain, pierced by pain, could comprehend the shape of that floating thing: a cross, similar to Elise's, but black as tar. Bones, limbs, faces, and mouths contorted by pain appeared on its surface, trying to cling to a greyish sphere pierced by numerous nails. He stood up, clutching his head as if to carve out space from those assaults.

"I… Can't." Lance arrived before the cross, suppressing the urge to vomit. The sphere revealed itself to be a lithopedion, torn and lacerated, its expression fossilised in weeping. They tried to dismember it as it came into the world, perhaps trying to end the ritual. Lance, who had known death, refused to look at it any longer. Only now, perhaps with his senses shaken by the vision, did he notice the scraps of paper resting on the control panel. They were yellowed, eaten away, but strangely legible.

He opened the page, slightly loosening the makeshift thread binding. The ink seemed faded, but some lines were still readable.

"RECREATION OF THE FIRST COMING, ANALYSIS FROM PRISONERS OF THE TERMÌE EMPIRE" Only the title remained legible, while the rest blended into worthless black lines.

"It seems handwritten… Maybe it was never delivered to the surface." The boy turned the page, finding a heap of words and dates, all coinciding with the final part of the conflict.

"Paranoia afflicted the subjects and visions after arriving at the base via experimental transport. They reported seeing a creature crying while devouring its own limbs. Apparently, it is not dissimilar to the paranoia arising from the Fortschritt event. The subjects complain of constant paranoia. I believe it is due to the transport and the ambush that led to their capture. We will try to extract as much information as possible regarding the Red Gold."

"This capture, I think, is before the troop retreat… Was this base an earlier version of the project that involved my family?" The rest of the pages were completely illegible, with various data and annotations erased by time. He was about to set it down when he noticed a footnote, written hastily with ink stains.

"STOP ALL RESEARCH ON THE COMING IMMEDIATELY." Lance stopped to look behind him, still feeling the chill of that infernal obelisk. Finally, he noticed scattered sheets fallen on the greyish rock floor. These seemed more recent, perhaps only a few decades old.

"They're all handwritten? So the base remained operational." He opened the notebook, immediately drawn to the name signed at the bottom: Omega. That unsettling appellation echoed in his head every time he read it.

"I am Alpha, as Malcolm called me. That means Omega was born after me. The last success of the Fortschritt project…" He began to read, searching for secrets in those thin lines of ink.

"Under the guidance of director Nyx Monoghan, we decided to set up the project of the First Coming. The objective is the recovery of the Avidocromo recipe and possible access to the dimension known as Hel." Lance snarled, massaging his head, hammered by a ringing. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Nyx Monoghan… The dates don't match. These roughly coincide with my birth. If Nyx was born before the war… How is it possible that he also worked here and then on my project? If he were a Meta, the association would have found him." Lance continued scanning the words, reading of continuous torture and machinations. The production process of the Red Gold was fully drafted, but numerous were the citations to various organs and strange grinding processes. Disgust kicked fear from Lance's face as he turned the pages.

"The Avidocromo is at the base of the ritual that provided enough energy for the creation of Termìe's generals and is what made their advance so absolute and unstoppable. It seems to create hybrids capable of drawing directly from Hel without undergoing disabling anatomical modifications. We extracted organic residues from bones in Sector II. We will try to replicate the ritual that caused contact with the entity."

"Everything is because of that thing? Did they fail? What arrived in this place that killed the entire base?" Lance turned, silently observing the obelisk behind him. It floated barely a metre above the ground, otherwise motionless, cold even to look at. The missing pages began to thin out, while his stomach began to clench.

"After collecting various test subjects, we managed to extract a modest dose of the compound, but the specifications for containing it and the extraction methods are truly inefficient. The objective of the First Coming narrated in the old reports must have been the key to creating a being capable of constantly producing Avidocromo. Even forcing proliferation, the results proved unsatisfactory."

Dozens of pages of injustice, more than thirty inhumane procedures, and hundreds of horrible lines were processed by his brain at every turn of paper. His heart seethed, gripped by disgust.

"So this is the history of Hel and Fortschritt. Nikola was the first to document it, at least as far as known facts. The cult of Ruther then evolved into the Institute, but many of them already worked in the military to do this? Abbondius was proof of it. That empire must be eradicated!" He moved to set down the notebook and turn around when he noticed the page streaked with black stains and written in dark red characters.

"That's not ink… The Frequency of the paper has been damaged!" Lance tried to read the few words remaining on the intact paper, but the more he understood them, the more his skin crawled.

"Bury the horrors committed here, but do not pray! In the name of all humanity, ignore the sky! There is no benevolence, only hatred and repentance."

"He's like Nikola. They saw what's inside Hel. When I met Grayson, I saw horrors disgusting enough to crack the mind. If I weren't a Meta, I think it would have been the end for me too. Whatever appeared here was certainly not of this world, nor a Meta." Suddenly the air grew colder and sharper. A single step echoed through the opposite gallery, and Lance had to dodge immediately. Two gigantic square blades, identical to northern playing cards, crashed a few palms from his face.

Their colouring was black and white, perfectly divided diagonally. The only difference between the two was the symbols in the top corners: one with a twisted 8 intertwined with thorns, the other with a weeping queen of grim visage.

"I couldn't perceive them until the last moment. They're artificial relics, and whoever is using them is competent." Gloriosus and Supplicium appeared in his hands almost instantly. The blades vanished, returning into the dark. The footsteps slowed, making way for a dark, distorted voice.

"Humanity has been too proud to admit its own problems, so it dumped them on what it cannot comprehend." A dark silhouette emerged from the half-light, its face hidden by a mask.

"Heaven or Hell… It matters little, waste products of a cowardly society." Lance immediately felt a violent pressure, heavy on his shoulders.

"What the hell is that thing? Is it at Grayson's level? No… It has far surpassed him." Lance tightened his trembling fingers on the sword's hilt and the revolver, breathing heavily. A shiver ran down his throat, and he ducked sharply as one of the gigantic cards sheared off a lock of hair. Lance aimed, detonating a single shot. It shattered the ground, impacting against the silhouette.

"I have to try to slow it down and land a single blow with Imago if I want to win!" A black and white lightning spread from his body, while his eyes lit gold. From the smoke emerged the figure, now clear in its forms: on its face it wore a mask of bronze metal, divided into two faces, one in mourning and the other ecstatic. The attire consisted of an elegant black suit with an ash-white shirt, buried under a large reddish jacket with various metallic pins and emblems along the shoulders and sleeves.

Red and blond hair fell around the neck, adorned with a black and gold tie. He set the relic on the ground: a heavy block of sharpened cards, bound together by golden chains with a white gear in one corner.

"ATTENTION! LAMBDA RADIATION LEAK DETECTED! PROTECTION SYSTEM ACTIVATED!" A robotic voice echoed through the dome before the glass began to be covered by a thick blanket of iron plates. The two sized each other up, each looking at the other's face. Lance pushed the weapon's stock, and the other grabbed its weapon again, lifting the pieces of floor wedged between the blades. Both vanished, meeting behind the monolith with a shower of sparks.

Lance's opponent's face was unreadable, covered in iron with an unnatural expression.

"I should be able to overpower him in pure physical strength!" Gloriosus sizzled as it pushed the blades back, raising even more sparks. Suddenly the deck of cards opened like a fan, reflecting Lance's blade.

"Shit!" Lance was struck with the flat of the blade, parrying with Supplicium. He flew high into the room, shattering the glass and planting his feet on the iron bulkheads. Without waiting a second, he aimed and detonated another bullet. The boom roared through the entire dome, shaking the ground. Just before contact could be made, the rival took the fan of cards and grazed the side of the munition, deflecting it to its right. The explosion raised dust and debris, leaving both unharmed.

"Speed, technique, strength… That thing is a Meta without a shadow of doubt." He smiled, aiming again while starting to move. The mask followed him silently, moving only its neck. The revolver clicked again, spitting out two more casings. The cards opened further, caressing the back and sides of the flying bullets. One crashed into the corridor behind him, the other exploded at his feet without damage. He cleared the smoke, finding himself before a mass of white and black jets.

"Got you." Lance drove his knuckles into the rival's abdomen, hurling the thing at full force against the wall. The mask impaled the ground with the cards, stopping the impact. It raised its gaze, finding the revolver pointed at him. Lance stared at the enemy, firing the shot directly at the relic. This time the bullet detonated on target, releasing a violet mist. Lance quickly reloaded the weapon, feeling energy being siphoned directly from his arm.

He cracked his fingers, still feeling the Frequency he had stolen with that last shot.

"A direct hit from Supplicium with Lachesi slowed even Malcolm. If it really hit the relic…" From the smoke emerged a metallic fist, wrapped in an incandescent glow. It opened suddenly, dropping violet powder that dissolved on contact with the ground.

"That weapon… Very interesting." The smoke dissipated, showing the figure completely unharmed, one sleeve of its suit reduced to shreds. The right arm was a black metal prosthetic, with the letter Q and an 8 drawn on it in red luminous paint. The mask tore off the charred fabric up to the shoulder and grabbed the cards again. Behind him, a greyish flame spread, divided into two tongues, each wrapping a 5.

"A pair of 5s? Is that its ability?" Lance had no time to think before the arm holding Supplicium fell to the ground. The boy lowered his gaze, noticing the sharpened card embedded in the ground, stained red. A red luminous thread bound it to the deck.

"Avoid it if you can, of course." Those distorted words reached his ears, and he immediately dodged to the side. Another card fell from above, shattering the ground. Now dozens of cards and crimson threads hung in the air. A rain of blows began to batter the dome, cleaving the air and the terminal. Despite the impacts and explosions, the black obelisk remained intact. Lance's figure appeared and vanished in the storm, leaving trails of lightning behind.

The mask continued directing the deck, leaving no direction free for escape. It took a step when suddenly its vision was obscured by Lance's severed arm." Karmesin!" The flesh expanded and exploded into a reddish mist. It was blinded while Lance appeared before him, fingers tight.

"You won't have time to redirect the blades, nor any way to create a guard!" The blow sent the thing flying. Immediately, Lance's arm regenerated, grabbing the red cords. His skin began to burn. The boy began to spin, slamming the mask into every part of the dome. With a violent yank, Lance pulled it close, striking violently with a kick. Lance grabbed the mask and dragged it along the iron, denting it. He pulled the strings again, kicking him into the centre of the dome.

The floor lifted from the impact, sending wreckage and papers everywhere.

"Using Eve's abilities leaves me somehow… Dirty." Lance landed, flexing his new fingers lightly.

"He'll have to use his ability to get back up. The moment he does, I'll have a window to strike with Vergehen." The man trembled for a moment before rising from the crater where he lay, dusting his shoulders. The robotic prosthetic rotated on its joints, resetting itself. New flames, this time with three 4s wrapped in sparks. Lance noticed symbols beside each number, similar to those on the cards in the relic. Now Lance was noticing a more human figure beneath the armor.

"It's a point system! But for what? It seems to make him stronger based on the sequence, although the Frequency seems to have decreased now." As he reflected, the flames went out, and all the cards returned to the deck. The mask grabbed it sharply, this time opening it in two. The gears turned, and a golden cylinder emerged from one of the cards. Lance ducked abruptly, seeing the iron behind him almost destroyed by the shot.

"It's like Jeanne's frame?! How many damn forms does it have?!" From that position, Lance lunged forward, pinning the weapon to the ground with a violent stomp. He rotated his hips, striking the face with the back of his hand. The air shifted from the impact, but his opponent remained impassive. He immediately pulled away, hearing a strange sound from the deck. Space opened between them again, the only difference being the devastation of the room and the new dust on the black obelisk.

"You remind me of my worst opponent… Memory is really a pain when you have nothing but blood to remember." The mask the cards on the ground, sitting on them. Lance made Supplicium and Gloriosus reappear directly from the black bracelet. His opponent tilted his head, perhaps curious.

"Who are you and what are you doing in an abandoned base?" Lance pointed the blade at the mask, tensing all the muscles in his arm.

"Who are you to ask me that? In my eyes, you are trespassing on private property." The figure stood, this time with the room's atmosphere completely changed. Lance could sense it: a flame of energy enveloping the entire complex, its origin the person before him.

"Besides fear, I'm now frustrated by your rudeness…" The glasses appeared on Lance's face, his eyes turned gold, and a blade hilt began to emerge from Lachesi.