“Short answer? Baldr Hyland is possessed by a crazy Ryuko developer who’s on a crazed, self-righteous mission to save Archemi by cleansing it of ‘squalor’, whatever the fuck that is,” I said. “In the process, he’s trying to unleash the world bosses of the game on us. World bosses that have been corrupted by some kind of system virus, we think. We’re trying to find the weapons that defeated the Drachan the last time around. Perilous Symphony and the other Warsingers are those weapons.”
“Oh.” Gar tapped some ash off his cigarette. “So he’s just like you, then.”
“What did you just say?” Karalti whirled on him, fists clenched.
“What? You think I’m deaf? Hyland’s plan for Archemi is basically what Hector said you folks were doing while we were sitting down with the Avatar not even an hour ago.” Gar gestured airily toward the ceiling. “You’re going to break down these Dragon Gates, let the Drachan out, and try to kill’em before they wreck the place, which according to the Avatar, they will. Y’all couldn’t even solve a goddamned riddle. It ever occur to you to try listenin’ to one of the most learned men in the damn world?”
“It ever occur to you that you don’t know anything about what we’re doing or why?” I retorted. “You didn’t want to know anything about the crisis in Ilia, so we didn’t tell you. Now you want to judge our goals based on one overheard conversation? You can’t have it both ways.”
“I don’t rightly recall anointing you as my leader,” Gar said.
“And I never took you on as one of my team. So unless you actually want to be a part of it, keep your patronizing bullshit to yourself.” I glared at him, then turned to the edge of a cracked and broken platform. “Come on, Karalti.”
Karalti tossed her hair over her shoulder, shooting Gar a scathing glance before turning to join me. Suri just shook her head, and she and Rin started for one of the nearby entryways.
“Guess I’ll go look in one of these rooms and see what I find by myself, then.” Gar scowled, jammed his hands in his pockets, and took the other door.
Karalti and I went to the edge of the cracked and broken floor, assessing our path forward. With the Bond in play, we were able to gauge a quick route forward.
“I say we take the first door to the right,” I said. “We can scooch along the ledge to the others from there.”
“It’s almost like you read my mind. Race you there!” Karalti tensed down, wiggled her butt like a cat, and leaped over to the first platform.
“Hey! It’s not a race if you just start without calling it!” I jumped after her as she ran for the next platform.
Karalti laughed, looking back over her shoulder at me. Her eyes were dark, her lips parted, and I felt something dark and playful rise in me as I lit after her. I caught up to her by jumping right over the first platform, catching onto the wall, and launching off from it. I landed just ahead of Karalti as she skidded to a stop in the doorway of our chosen room.
“Hmmph. Now you see why I just started without saying anything.” She stuck her bluish tongue at me. “You cheat.”
“All’s fair in love, war, and ninja racing.” I grinned back at her.
We sobered up as we pushed on the double doors. As they swung inward, soft blue lights sputtered to life, hissing and crackling as they tried to burn mana that had sat inside these mage globes for millennia. And what they shed light over stopped both of us in our tracks.
“What the hellll are THOSE?” I whispered.
Chapter 46
The ancients had used this room as a specimen lab, and the first thing we saw as we cautiously entered the room, was a row of small tanks with parts and pieces of creatures still contained within.
A heavy, unnatural silence hung over the room as I wandered toward one, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The creature looked like it was made of digital snow, and no matter what angle I observed it from, it refused to come into focus. I could almost make out horns, spines, barbed tentacles, mandibles… but every time I thought I’d pinned some memorable feature about it, I couldn’t find it a second time.
“What the…?” I tentatively laid a hand on the thick crystal sealing it off from the room, and strained to try and put a shape, a form, something to whatever I was staring at.
The thing lunged at the glass.
“FUCK!” I vanished, a panicked forty-foot teleport backward, and blundered into the opposite wall with the Spear clutched in my hands.
“What!?” Karalti dropped the pot she’d been examining. It smashed to the ground, and I froze, watching the tank for any sign of movement.
“Nothing. Just a stupid jumpscare.” Even so, my heart was pounding as I eased down, zooming in on the tank. The small creature inside was still blurred and out of focus, in the exact same place it had been before. I had no idea if it had even really moved. Staring at it for too long made my eyes ache. “What do you see when you look at this thing?”
Karalti meandered over to it. “Uhh… I dunno. I can’t see it properly, but it gives me the creeps.”
There were some etched plates on the tanks that looked like nameplates or identifiers written in Ancient Mau, but when I focused my HUD on them, it only bought up a paragraph of gibberish. Frowning, I mentally called the Screenshot Capture and took some pictures of the tank and the nameplate. I was about to send them to Rin to see if she could translate them, when my eyes snagged on something in the photo attachment thumbnails. I opened them, and felt my adrenaline start to tick up again.
The tank and the nameplate were both blacked out: a deep, sucking, vantablack-like darkness, from which no light entered or escaped. It was like they’d been snipped out of the screenshot. Without intending to, I searched the blackness for some kind of afterimage—and a dull throbbing pain shot through my head, chest, and left shoulder.
“Ach!” I winced, and closed the photo. “This place is fucked up, Karalti.”
“Yeahhh...” Karalti’s shoulders hunched. “Maybe we should go look over there?”
She pointed to the other end of the room. Past the tanks was a large steel table, pitted and rusted with age, and other devices that were so run down and crumbled as to be unrecognizable. Clay pots and other debris lay scattered. At the back of the room was something that reminded me of a primitive computer. It had a crank handle and various dials.
“I wonder if this was some kind of information storage?” I went to the terminal, trying to see if I could figure it out. My HUD came up with a blank tooltip when I tried to identify it. Highlighting the crank brought up an actual message. [This device cannot be repaired.]
“Huh.” I turned back. “Well, I don’t know what the fuck is going on in here, but I’m now sure this place wasn’t just a Chorus Vault. I think they had an entire military base here. They were researching these things.”
“That’d make sense,” Karalti replied, circling back around the tanks. “… Are these Drachan? Or parts of Drachan?”
“No idea. Whatever they are, I’m going to vote we don’t fuck with them right now.” I left the machine and went over to join her.
“We should take a sample with us if we can,” Karalti said. “We might be able to learn things from it.”
“Or it gets loose, possesses Cutthroat, and turns her into an Elder God or something.” I shuddered. “How about we see if we can fish something out of the console over there? We can’t repair it, but it might have something inside.”
“Sure.” Karalti looked over to it. “How do we get it open?”
I went over, searched the front of it, and found a patch of brittle black rust. I took a step back and drove my foot into it with a shout. Three solid front kicks and the panel caved in, revealing the guts of the machine.
“Let’s see…” I knelt down and let my eyes adjust. The guts of it were rotted, the stale air inside bitter with the smell of decayed mana. But as I scanned it, my HUD highlighted a small rack of dusty crystal plates: [Kyanine Tablets].
“Kyanine?” I carefully pulled them
out. The semi-translucent crystal tablets were delicate, but still intact after thousands of years. “No idea what that is.”
“Let’s take them to Rin, and see what she says.” Karalti wiggled, looking back anxiously toward the open door. “I dunno about you, but I really want to get out of this room.”
“Same.” I folded them into my inventory. “Let’s get out of here.”
The next room we stickybeaked into was a wreck: there was nothing useful or scannable in there. As we exited, Suri, Rin and Gar emerged from the other end of the round hall. Suri waved to us.
“Find anything?” I called.
“Bunch of interesting little artifacts!” Suri hollered back, her voice rebounding off the walls. “Can you help us set up a zipline? Neither me or Gar here are gonna be able to bounce over those platforms to reach the Warsinger’s silo door.”
We had climbing gear that Rin had made us for our last trip down into a Chorus Vault. With Jump and some ingenuity, we were able to set up a line across the chamber, bypassing the crumbling remains of the floor and the water beneath. One by one, our friends were able to cross. Karalti and I caught them at the end of the line, helped them down, and pulled the swing back to the next passenger. We left the zipline in case we had to cross back.
“I hope the whole damn ocean isn’t waiting for us behind those doors.” Gar swaggered over to the titanic doors, craning his head to look up along the seam down the middle. “See that water? Wanna bet how much these doors are holding back?”
He pointed to a thin trickle of sea water running out from around the seal.
“Better brace for a flood, then.” I rolled my shoulders and made a beeline for it. Like the Dragon Gates, this door opened with the Spear. It was not the blood-bound locks we’d seen in Withering Rose’s much younger Chorus Vault. “Alright: everyone to the side. Hang onto something if you can. And get ready for a fight.”
I set the blade into the door lock and twisted. A resonant CLUNK echoed through the chamber before the doors began to very slowly open into the walls. Gears squealed and ancient, salt-rusted springs crackled as the doors ground back just enough to let a person squeeze through. A slop of polluted water gushed from the darkened room, along with a familiar bitter almond and burned plastic reek mixed with the odor of old blood. The air that puffed out was bitterly cold.
“Phew. Smells like cancer in there.” I readjusted my grip on the Spear. “What do you guys think? Boss fight, or traps?”
“I don’t hear anything, so probably traps.” Suri took post on the other side of the door. “Ready?”
I signaled her: one, two, three, and then turned into the opening and Shadow Danced through, ready to attack if anything lashed out. But there was no cancer, and no boss, either. There was only Perilous Symphony—or what was left of it.
The machine’s headless torso was splayed open like the ribs of a carcass, host to a forest of thin rust-covered stalactites. It hung from a sturdy scaffold that was also covered in mineralized salt and lime and sand, dripping constantly to the uneven, wet ground. A mess of rusted cables spilled from its guts, the ends trailing off into pools of reddish waste water. Mage lights around the perimeter of the huge silo still sputtered and flickered, their pale light dulled by the seething vortex of black noise emanating from the heart of the Warsinger.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, dropping the point of my weapon as I looked around. “We’re clear! Kind of.”
The others squeezed through. When Rin saw what was left of Perilous Symphony, she let out a yelp of dismay.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Gar had his pistol drawn, scowling at the towering wreck. “The hell is that thing?”
“Perilous Symphony. The first fully-operational Warsinger constructed after the success of Nocturne Lament.” Rin absently pushed past me, gazing up at the rotting metal carcass. “And that is the Warsinger’s Heartstone.”
She pointed at the sucking black hole in its chest. As she did, it warped and fluxed, spitting static into the air.
“Looks like we got here just in time,” Karalti said. “Ugh… that stench.”
“Is it going to be safe to transport?” I asked, recoiling as my shoulder began to ache.
Rin let out a nervous laugh. “Umm… I don’t know if I’d want to sleep with it in my bed or anything, but as long as we don’t hang onto it for days, we should be okay?”
“Let’s grab it and whatever else you need, and let’s go,” Suri said. “This place gives me the fuckin’ creeps.”
I looked past her into the depths of the silo, searching for anything of interest. Even my darkvision couldn’t completely pierce the aura of gloom that hung over the silo. It looked and felt like a graveyard.
“Gar, could you help me?” Rin turned to him with a look of appeal. “If we have two mechanics working on this thing, we’ll get this done a lot faster. We have to get that crystal, and also see if we can identify and extract the sonic devices this Warsinger used to scream Drachan out of the sky.”
Gar looked up at the Heartstone. “Sonic weapons, eh? Like LRAD?”
“Kind of like a super-duper LRAD, yeah!” Rin waved her hands for emphasis.
“Super-duper is the technical term, right?” Karalti cocked her head from side to side, strutting around the base of the scaffolding.
“Right.” Gar rubbed his brow and the bridge of his nose. “Well, sure. How are we gonna get up there?”
“I figure we can rig up some kind of cable line and hoist you up,” Suri replied. “Kind of like a bosun’s chair.”
“Yeah! I’ll help! I’m the best at belaying!” Karalti puffed her chest out and thumped it with a fist. “But Suri’s still stronger than me, so she gets to belay Rin.”
“Right. Well, let’s get onto it,” Gar replied. “For once, I agree with Suri on something. This place gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I’m just about ready to see the end of it.”
***
With half an hour and a lot of effort, we were able to set up a kind of double Bosun’s Chair: a suspension that allowed Rin to hang in front of Perilous Symphony’s Heartstone, while Gar went up to the neck to tool around. Suri and Karalti had to lift them up and down using a belaying harness and improvised. While the four of them toiled on the Warsinger, I went to go and poke around the silo. It wasn’t long until I found something: another magitech console with a slot that was about the right size for the Spear of Nine Spheres, as well as a dial with slots that matched the keystones.
“If this place was built to construct Warsingers, they must have started working on the Caul back then, too.” I muttered to myself, scraping away dust and crumbs of stone off the front of the ‘screen’: a smooth slab of lambidium: a hard, magically conductive metal. “Let’s see what happens if we stick it in.”
I inserted the Spear’s blade into the slot. There was a ‘clunk’ as some kind of mechanism engaged, but nothing else happened.
Curious, I looked over and around the device, searching for switches, valves, cranks or buttons. I found a valve at the base of it, still topped by a rusted spigot, and carefully gave it a twist to the left. There was a soft hiss, and the console reluctantly flickered to life behind me. Success.
I dusted myself and strolled back around, trying to figure out what I was seeing. The device projected a scroll of purplish glyphs into the air, which resolved into a magical hologram as I reached my hand out. It showed a wheel with four highlighted circles: one for each Keystone in the Spear. There were brief paragraphs of ancient script underneath it, so fuzzed out that even if I could read the language, it would be indecipherable.
“Okay… what if we…?” I flicked my fingers over one of the highlighted spheres to see if I could swipe it across, and jumped when a man-sized projection of Nocturne Lament sprung to life. Line after line of text began to rapidly spool out beside it.
“Wait. Are these the schematics?” I tried manipulating the hologram the way I would have done with an augmented reality terminal. Touching the writing d
idn’t make it stop scrolling, but touching the image of Nocturne Lament did. When my fingers glanced over its shoulders, the feral-looking Warsinger vanished. It was replaced by a complicated, but blurry diagram of its heatsinks and other parts. A new text feed began to spool out beside it as individual parts and pieces were highlighted by glowing auras.
“Guys! I think I found the schematics!” I called out in excitement, leaning out to the side. “Rin? What do I do? It’s like a holographic A.R terminal, kind of?”
“What?! You activated it? Ack! Lemme down, lemme down!” Rin’s voice rang from the other side of the vault.
I tried cancelling out of the display, and with trial and effort, was able to get back to the wheel with the glowing circles. There, I tried selecting one of the un-lit circles. Nothing happened.
“The Schematics are tied to the Keystones,” I murmured. “One Warsinger per Keystone. Except for one, because there were ten Warsingers, but only nine stones.”
“Oh! I see it!” Rin scampered over, still trailing a long piece of rope. “Are these… Oh wow!”
“There’s diagrams for at least four Warsingers on this thing,” I said, swiping over one of the other lit circles. It took a few tries before the hologram actually opened and came into focus, revealing the tall, slim, noble figure of Radiant Eclipse. It was one of the more humanoid Warsingers, with a long spiraling lance, pointed feet, and a helmet styled like a unicorn’s head. “If this is like some kind of magitech computer… where is the data stored?”
“I don’t think ‘computer’ is the right term for what this is.” Rin bit her lip, chewing it as she excitedly scanned the text. “It’s more like a projector. The schematics are probably encoded onto some kind of storage item, like ruby mana or mana-forged lambidium. The box has a static rote—a spell that’s permanently woven into the machine—that activates when you feed the machine mana. You notice there’s no sound coming out of it?”
Spear of Destiny Page 42