Chapter 266: Citadel

    September 15th, 626

    “Yeah, that’s it. Just a little more. Almost there...”

    I muttered under my breath while adjusting the machines on my workbench, tuning the Psyka around an extra SEER Knife.

    It was modified by Umara and jury rigged to accept a hardline connection from a similarly modified portable database that I cut off of an extra undershirt. I slotted the Neural Gem onto that database, created some seals, limiters, and physical kill switches before connecting it to the SEER Knife and running tests.

    I allowed the Neural gem a few Orb’s worth of storage space, which it quickly filled, before working on using its codebreaking abilities for my purposes.

    The Neural Gem was limited in sentience but not function. It didn’t know that I was trying to manipulate it for my means, just that it had a single job to do, which was spread and grow itself. After talking to Kwon, I now knew that the Death Shrine was a descendant of the Despair line even though it was bioengineered by the Brood. That meant its affinity for Psyka was the best there was, and Psykic systems like the Aerial and SEER Knives were no exception.

    The Neural Gem was a living Psykic intelligence system. While I couldn’t reprogram it, I could take advantage of it.

    The SEER Knife before me was now the medium by which I did so. I had built it to be a universal interfacing system, which meant I could simply route the Neural Gem’s processing ability through it. Then, all I had to do was develop a new software platform that would allow me to both manipulate the Neural Gem’s ravenous deciphering and infiltration abilities as well as interpret everything that came back.

    This software was effectively gaslighting the Neural Gem into doing what I wanted. I achieved this by both letting it run amok into the systems I connected it to while also blinding it. It was a balance between sealing the Neural Gem’s biased desires and preserving its abilities while also protecting the systems it was connected to so it didn’t completely take them over and wipe everything original.

    Under normal circumstances it was an extraordinarily difficult task. Thankfully, my specialty in the way of illusions and mental coercion was perfect for it. Like with the Adaptive Camouflage, I applied my specialty and spent some time grinding out the finer details with the software.

    What I was currently doing was a part of that, and while I had already achieved success with this new SEER Knife in every task I required of it, the adjustments I was making would bring its abilities to greatness. At least until I found the time to improve upon it further.

    The blade of the SEER Knife, previously a light blue manifestation of Psyka, was now dark purple as a result of the Neural Gem’s corruption and influence. The blade was also slightly longer and given a sharper form, courtesy of the Neural Gem’s natural acuity.

    As for the adjustment I was making, it was in regard to the Eradication portion of the knife’s function. Specifically, how and in what quantity the Psyka was dumped into the blade. It was finicky with the amount and frequency, and I was establishing a software curve that would change the tuning frequency along with the amount of power output for peak sharpness, data clarity, and throughput.

    I smiled as the blade took on form, going from scattered and blurry to clear and honed. A few measurement devices kept track of its current status, finding its peak efficiency for me as I made the changes.

    Soon they found the general curve, and after I gave the equations some detailing, I was given a few graphs by which I decided on the final curve. Then I programmed it into the Knife, did a few tests, and detached it from the workbench.

    Umara was sitting on a chair next to the workbench, the other Desert Eagles scattered about the lab. Most had their eyes on me, Psyka formations that bloomed around the knife and gadgets winking out of existence.

    “Finished?”

    “Indeed.”

    I pulled up my sleeve, grabbing the database. It was mounted on some hard leather, initially a part of an undershirt, now cut out to be placed elsewhere.

    That elsewhere was my forearm. The Knife could be detached from the database and function as a Psykic weapon, as I had used it against the Death Shrine. However, if I wanted to connect it to the Neural Gem, they had to be hardwired together. The database had layers of seals and physical switches on it to prevent the bioware from jumping to other devices otherwise. I certainly wouldn’t connect it wirelessly to the Nodenet or TACNET.

    After strapping down the database under my sleeve, I connected the Knife and tested it independently on the console nearby. Within seconds I gained full access to every corner, some I hadn’t been able to detect previously. They were fragmented corners full of corrupted or broken data packets, but it was certainly better to know about them than not. It also confirmed my guesses that the Mantle of Wisdom had advanced their IoT technology significantly. I was still understanding the architecture of their systems.

    But now, I had the perfect tool for both learning and cracking. Not to mention, when the Neural Gem was connected, the Knife’s efficacy as a weapon increased drastically.

    I had poked Blackblood to test it, just touching the tip of the knife to the skin on his shoulder. With his consent, of course. I wasn’t a mad scientist.

    I had never heard the man scream so loud. Or any man I knew personally for that matter. The pain response was incredible. On top of that, he told me that the skin in that area, as well as some of the muscle underneath, was numb even after a few days and healing treatments. He couldn’t feel it at all, eventually ended up carving out the area with a knife so it could regrow and give him his feeling back.

    This was to say that if I had touched it to his neck and broke past the perpetual layer of Vigor knights had, I could’ve either paralyzed him from the neck down at worst or outright killed him at best. Since the knife wasn’t tangible either, there would’ve been no damage to the tissues. Just permanently fried nerves.

    Such things made me wonder about the nature of Psyka and its interactions with the physical world. I didn’t know if the Psyka was affecting the nerves directly or if it was affecting some kind of inherent Psyka within the nerves that thereby affected the nerves. Perhaps Mana, Vigor, and Psyka were inherent to certain things, present within everything, even if just in small amounts. Perhaps, after breaking past the protections passively created by the body of a Magus, they were just the same as ordinary people, the magic within them able to be affected.

    I noticed when pressing the knife against Blackblood’s shoulder that the Psyka within the tip of the knife was scattered and disrupted by Blackblood’s Vigor. It resisted the change even though they were two different magics. I’ve seen similar phenomena with the Superheavy Tanks, the mana within the enchantments so dense that spells would detonate inches away from the armor, affected by what was being radiated, a byproduct of an imperfect enchanting system and no magical insulation.

    Nevertheless, all of these things were clarifying my view on magic as a whole as well as Psyka’s place in the world. Unfortunately, I was pioneering much of this stuff, so I had to continue learning before I could make more complex systems.

    But with this improved SEER Knife, I was on my way to achieving such vast complexity that I’d soon be making systems whose capability of violence would scale with that complexity. Already I had a Knife that was turning out to be the perfect tool for assassination, able to kill without any damage to normal tissues.

    I was already planning on arming Sector 4’s Pale Horsemen with weapons that would allow them to start carrying out covert operations for the sake of information control. Sometimes that demanded certain people die, but I had to be extremely careful about such things in this world. One wrong move and I’d have a Marshal coming to kill me personally.

    This tool was half the answer to that dilemma.

    After the SEER Knife was finished and in its place, I gave the command to pack and move out. I was sick of the sight of the dark lab and the corpses within, and I wanted to get off the mountain. The only thing that made me want to stay was the massive Earth Crystal core just through the window of the lab, floating there without end.

    As we had discovered, the walls of the tunnel that surrounded the Crystal core were also lined with pure Earth Crystals, like the Fire Crystals back at the village. Another massively rich find that was already cementing Sawn Industries’ future status as the richest and most powerful company in this world.

    If the other Stabilizers also sported such vast veins of Crystals? There would be no contest.

    After everything was packed we left the lab and descended the mountain. Once beyond the range of the altered gravity, I dropped a transmitter and established contact with our bird.

    I sent newfound information as well as a new list of directions for Sawn and Polly to follow in my absence. I wanted troops and a few teams of researchers and enchanters to be ready for relocation to this island as soon as I returned, so I had him begin preparing for that inevitability.

    As for Polly, she was also briefed on the level of secrecy I was demanding in reward to this island. There would be over a thousand people being moved, and although it would be difficult to hide that amount of relocation from prying eyes, I at least demanded that the location itself remain secret. That meant we had to lock down the land below and around the flight routes and ensure that there were no lingering scouts from other parties that could watch a plane fly out to the ocean. I didn’t want anybody to even conceive of the fact that I may have found something out in the ocean, let alone that I had found an island.

    If anybody got wind of just how much I had found here, I doubted it would be long before a Sovereign made a move. Then I’d be royally fucked, depending on where the Sovereign came from.

    Until then, I needed to move things along with this island expedition.

    Our next stop was the city itself. Based on scans I knew where one of the other Stabilizers was, and that was another village on the opposite end of the island from where the first village was, in the east. That meant the last Stabilizer was somewhere in the south. But since visiting either of those places was now unnecessary, I decided that it was time to get to the meat of this trip.

    We boarded our Vipercraft, which were no longer inhibited by the mountain, and rode our way to the city.

    We arrived by the end of the day, stopping a few miles from it on a nearby hill. From there I was able to get a good view of the massive walls around the place.

    I could already tell how different it was from the scans. Some of the walls were razed, which the scans didn’t show, and there were entire fields of corpses, skeletons, blood thorn, and lingering Shades. That was just on the outside of the walls. I couldn’t see much within the city itself.

    I sighed, and we moved to circle around the city. Eventually we found an area with fewer Shades we could traverse without getting into a desperate battle. Still, as we made our approach, I could feel the prickling sense of danger start to pierce through my brain.

    Not only was the poisonous fog getting disgustingly thick, but I was pretty sure there was at least one Death Shrine within the city.

    The mental affliction pissed me off, but my mood was boosted by the thought of my improved Knife. Song and Kwon were also there to ensure that I could kill any Death Shrine I came across without much difficulty, so long as I didn’t try to burn down another forest single handedly.

    My vision was limited to just 300 meters around when we arrived at an intact portion of the wall. With our jetpacks we were able to boost ourselves up and scale it despite it being around 50 meters tall. After crossing 10 meters we jumped down, officially within the city.

    My gun was drawn as we took up a defensive formation, clustered relatively close. Most of our enchanted systems were dark to attract less attention, but we still had to kill some Shades that happened to be nearby.

    I focused on observation as the others fought off the enemies, trying to ignore the paranoia that screamed at me every time a Shade tried to slip by the others and kill me.

    The city was devastated. There were literal piles of skeletons and intact corpses. There were both Scourge and human, as well as plenty of corrupted. We also saw the remains of automatons, the first sign of combat automatons we’ve come across.

    Nearly every building was brought down to its first story or outright leveled. There were plants overgrowing the brick paths, most of them dangerous in some way. There was no wildlife to speak of, not even a bug. It was deathly quiet.

    Curiously, there was no sign of the red biomat that we often saw on the frontlines of the Kingdom’s battle against the Scourge. Perhaps it required a nest or a Nexus that grew the gargantuan intestines.

    For the most part, the devastation was similar to what was shown on the scans, just worse. There wasn’t anything immediately noticeable that significantly deviated from the scans, but I was still curious about the discrepancy.

    I wondered if what the scans showed was a past image of the island from many years ago, before things had been so ravaged by the Scourge’s remnants. But that made me curious about what was maintaining the illusion. Perhaps it was just a natural consequence of the fog or the Death Shrines. We’d have to kill those Shrines to find out.

    Our first objective within the city was to find the citadel at the center where all of the most important data would likely be stored. Once we found it we’d hide out nearby for a time in order to both do recon and potentially kill a Death Shrine.

    To that end, we moved quickly. Every second out in the open was another Shade that locked onto us. After getting a feel for the environment, everyone was soon running, no longer holding back magic or enchanted items.

    We crossed over a mile before finally finding the outskirts of the citadel and its surrounding buildings. It was a massive construction as shown by the scans, but unlike the scans, there were roots growing all across the remaining structure, burrowing into it like a parasite.

    I could sense the Death Shrine attached to those roots. There was one nearby, and it was trying to dig out the data within the citadel.

    Didn’t surprise me. Whatever needed to be stabilized by an island-wide system was bound to be attractive to the Scourge. They knew it was there, especially if they could extract knowledge even in death. That was likely an ability of the Death Shrine.

    But it obviously hadn’t succeeded. That meant the defensive systems in place were even more dangerous than the Death Shrine.

    Still, I knew that there was bound to be a way in. There was no way they didn’t leave a backdoor. An item as important as what was guarded within there was important enough to ensure that it could be retrieved by others from the Mantle when the time came. I highly doubted that the summoners inside were willing to seal themselves and the item permanently.

    I was willing to bet that in their hubris, they left something. Something that they were confident the Scourge couldn’t crack in all its sadistic creativity. Something they thought only they could resolve.

    Even if they prepared for the downfall of the Mantle, I was willing to bet at least one person created a gap in the absolute worst case. All I needed to do was find it.

    If not, I’d just airdrop a tank and make myself a door. One way or another.

    “John?”

    “That building.”

    I pointed to a large stone building that was gated and relatively intact. It looked like a monastery and was not far beyond the citadel, avoiding the worse of the corpse fields.

    When we entered we found what looked like furniture, indicating that this was either a mansion or an inn. The inside was too destroyed to tell, but there were plenty of rooms that we had to clear of Shades, filling it with denser fog.

    We settled in after killing anything that was ballsy enough to attack. There were Shades outside that were lingering, that knew we were there, but we could only leave them be. The more we killed, the more we attracted. We couldn’t branch out too far because then we’d get the whole city on us.

    We just let them linger and stalk while we tried to get some rest.

    That turned out to be our most difficult task.